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 Most of us grew up with Fort Peck Dam always being there. Behind the dam there has always been a big lake. Downstream from the dam flows Montana's beautiful Lower Missouri River. But it wasn't really so long ago that there was no Fort Peck Dam. Construction of the dam changed the lives of many thousands of people in Eastern Montana when it was built in the 1930s. It has changed lives ever since. Fort Peck Dam got its start when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized its construction in 1933. It was built during hard times for the people of the U.S., when many were jobless and hungry in Eastern Montana and elsewhere. Building a dam provided work and paychecks for them. It also provided flood protection for areas downstream which had always been threatened by high water at certain times of the year. The dam was named for Fort Peck, which was a trading post on the Missouri River built in 1867 by the firm of Durfee and Peck, which also operated other trading posts along the Missouri River at that time. The site of the old fort is about a mile west of the current dam and is currently under the waters of Fort Peck Lake. It had been abandoned in the late 1800s and eventually crumbled into the river.
In between, it provided work for an estimated 10,000 people and it was estimated that 10,000 more people came in to work other businesses in the area. In all, when men, women and children were counted, some say that 35,000 people lived within a few miles of the town of Fort Peck during the time of construction. While there was government housing in the town of Fort Peck, so-called "boomtowns" sprung up nearby to house other people. People lived in tarpaper-covered shacks, houses made of boxes and houses made of old boards covered with tin cans. These makeshift towns had names like New Deal and Delano Heights and Wheeler. At the time, the Fort Peck Dam project was the largest hydraulic fill earthen dam ever built. A steel wall runs down the middle of the dam which was driven 100 feet down into the shale below. The hydraulic fill was a watery mixture of sand, water and clay which was dredged out of the river and pumped through a 28-inch wide pipe to the damsite. What the builders wound up with was a four-mile long dam with 125.6 million cubic yards of hydraulic fill, 4 million cubic yards of gravel, half-a-million yards of quarry stone and a third-of-a-million cub yards of field stone - all of them giant numbers. The width of the base of the dam is 4,900 feet (almost a mile, which is 5,280 feet). The top of the dam is 50 feet wide and is 250 feet above the base.
The dam was officially closed on June 24, 1937, allowing Fort Peck Lake to begin to fill. Eight men lost their lives in 1938 when part of the dam collapsed and slid out into the lake. Six are still buried somewhere beneath the dam. Work on the dam wasn't done until 1940. Fort Peck Lake, formed behind the dam, is 134 miles long and has 1,520 miles of shoreline and a maximum depth of 220 feet. The lake is capable of storing 19 million acre-feet of water (an acre-foot is the same as one acre of area covered with water one foot deep). Even now, more than 60 years after the dam was completed, Fort Peck Dam is still the largest hydraulic fill dam in the United States. Its five big turbines generate a maximum of 185,250 kilowatts of power. Water in the lake still produces hydroelectric power and the water is managed to reduce flood damage, provide for downstream navigation on the Missouri, fish and wildlife, recreation, irrigation, public water supplies and good water quality. It certainly changed the lives of the people of Eastern Montana in the years it was being built. It continues to play a big part in changing people's lives today. |
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by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks and Walleyes Forever 
Montana PikeMasters Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks |