The new water wars: on the Missouri and rivers further east, dying industries control the flow and leave emerging businesses high and dry.

• Author: Lambrecht, Bill

Bob Shadwell, the proprietor of the Point of View Lodge in Pollock, S.D., and a professional fisherman, is in the habit of sending emails to the White House on Monday mornings. He is not sure if they are ever read, and, if they are, they have certainly not yet turned up much in the way of response, but they are remarkable for their singularity of focus. Shadwell's obsession matches that of his customers, and indeed that of folks I met throughout the drought-prone Dakotas. He wants the Army Corps of Engineers to let the Missouri rise higher on his stretch of the river, Lake Oahe, and give the local river recreation industry something it desperately needs: water. He believes that the Corps is unfairly keeping the river low in the Dakotas to appease a few connected farmers and barge operators in Missouri.

September 11, 2002

Dear President Bush:

I am writing this letter today on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. We feel like here in South Dakota we're under attack by bureaucracy and plain bad politics. We know of your promise to Missouri farmers during your campaign. Did you not know that South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana are part of the Union?

It's time to make changes in this system of GOOD OLD BOY POLITICS!!!! Start looking at the big picture. These states have as much right to Missouri River water as Missouri does. Remember what Mark Twain said: 'Men will vote over whisky and go to war over water.'

When I first visited Shadwell in the summer of 2002, he was emailing his Monday morning messages to the White House with an alluring offer: free lodging at Point of View Resort and a guided fishing trip for lunker walleyes. He hadn't heard back, and that's probably just as well. The president professes to be a sporting man, but sport is hard to find along Lake Oahe. Touring Shadwell's 60-acre property along Ritter Bay, I noted that the water was so low and had receded so Far from land that the cove fronting his Point of View restaurant was situated roughly a half-mile from water. "It seems like the country really doesn't know our plight out here. It seems that, regardless of the situation, downstream barge traffic takes precedence," Shadwell told me over a beer at his empty bar.

There are plenty of Bob Shadwells in the Dakotas, people whose Missouri River recreation businesses need water in the worst way from federally managed dams. The drought that engulfed the region in the first years of the new century was the immediate cause for distress. In August of 1999, the elevation on Lake Oahe, calculated in feet above sea level, was 1,617. When I first visited there, it had dropped by 29 feet to 1,588. Water was also low at Fort Peck and Garrison. Together with Oahe, lakes at those dams hold 85 percent of the storage in the Missouri River system.

This was a punishing drought. But rain or not, the problem along the Missouri River is chronic. Routinely, there is not enough water in a system that gives priority to navigation. The Army Corps of Engineers interprets its Master Manual to say there must be sufficient water in the 732-mile stretch of lower river to maintain navigation, a criterion which in recent years has helped to keep the upper Missouri mighty dry. Congress and the courts have refused to stipulate otherwise, so somebody has to suffer. Right now, that somebody is Bob Shadwell.

I talked to Shadwell many times over the next two years, as the water continued to drop. He felt more desperate all the time, like a fish flopping in a boat and gasping for air. Abandonment can take over in a hurry in a remote land. The Point of View is situated near South Dakota's border with North Dakota where the earth is an exotic blend of camelbacks, swales, and hillocks, some perfectly round, that fellows hereabouts have named after parts of the female anatomy. Otherwise, you see nothing but a few cows on the five-mile gravel road back to Shadwell's lodge.

South Dakota and North Dakota have been mapped in a fight with Missouri over the river's level since the 1950s when the Army Corps of Engineers first began putting dams and locks on the river to control its flow. For a half-century, they have mostly lost. But their fight has recently taken on a greater urgency, given the $85-million-per-year recreation business on the Missouri--fly-fishing in Montana, trophy walleye hunting in the Dakotas, and weekend boating for tired suburbanites from Denver and Sioux Falls. That may not sound like much, but it dwarfs the shriveled, $9-million-per-year barge business the dams were originally built to protect, but which can no longer compete with cheaper trading and other modes of freight.

The fight over the Missouri is usually understood in Washington--when it's understood at all--as little more than a ruckus between the bearded, blue-jeaned biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service (who want water levels in Missouri restored to some semblance of their natural flows to protect nesting birds and the pallid sturgeon) and military technocrats from the Corps, who are trying to keep their congressional paymasters and their allies along the river happy by keeping the river artificially controlled. But the dramatic decline in barge traffic between North Sioux City, S.D., and St. Louis, Mo., and the rise of the recreation industry further upstream, began to change that political calculus. By 2001, the legendarily intractable Corps suggested that it was ready to make some changes in river flows, handing a...