Paul VanDevelder: Mississippi Flooding: Let the River Run

Paul VanDevelder's book "Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory," won the 2011 Oregon Book Award.

On a frosty May morning in 1951, a young woman named Louise Holding Eagle jumped into the cab of her pickup truck, waved goodbye to her husband and two toddlers, and drove off to buy groceries in Beulah, N.D., the nearest town, about 35 miles from their farm. Louise decided to make a day of it when she ran into old friends at the store, and finally turned for home at twilight.

"None of us had phones back then, but my husband Matthew was an easygoin' man, and I knew he wouldn't mind if I was late."

When she reached her driveway in full darkness, she thought she had been daydreaming and made a wrong turn. "I don't know how long I sat there before I realized I was home," Louise recalled for me more than half a century later. "This was our farm, all right! But everything was gone! The house, the chicken coop, the barn, my husband and children!"

Without a word of warning, written or verbal, an Army Corps of Engineers crew had arrived at Louise's farm that afternoon and lifted all the buildings off their foundations, loaded them onto flatbed trucks and relocated them 20 miles away. Her house had to be moved to make way for the first of five massive dams that Congress approved with the passage of the Flood Control Act of 1944. Construction had already begun on the dam near Garrison, N.D., but lawmakers in Washington were still locked in legislative limbo over just what to do with the thousands of people these dams would displace. Finally tiring of bureaucratic delays, the Army Corps of Engineers, an agency with a reputation for being a government unto itself, took matters into its own hands and commenced evacuating the bottomlands....