Historically, it is the land of the bison. But the land across which these powerful herds once thundered has been transformed. We know it today by such names as Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, western Iowa, and Nebraska--but it is really buffalo country, the land of the big sky rivers. This book is a tale of two rivers, a history of the majestic Missouri and how it was once wedded to the Yellowstone. Though quite different today--one dammed into reservoirs, the other unregulated with a semblance of wildness--they were once linked ecologically, geographically, and historically. Then in the twentieth century, Euro-Americans dismantled many of these connections and attempted to uncouple the streams. Viewing the rivers and their surrounding lands as a living system, Robert Kelley Schneiders focuses on four components within the Upper Missouri bioregion--the Missouri River valley, the Yellowstone River valley, Homo sapiens, and bison--to show the significance of their interaction over the past two hundred years. To frame his story, Schneiders goes back to the nineteenth-century journals of fur traders and settlers, and in the record of flora, fauna, floods, and human activity he finds evidence of rapid and disruptive change. Bison once had the greatest influence on the land, and Schneiders depicts an original bison and Indian trail network on which were overlaid the first forts and towns and then the railroads, highways, and reservoirs that reconfigured the region forever. Schneiders explains how these geographical constructs interacted with larger demographic and economic trends in the twentiety-century West, as dams and their resultant reservoirs enhanced the federal presence in the Dakotas andeastern Montana. He describes human encroachment on the rivers and tells why the Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri but spared the Yellowstone. The engineers and their backers have so completely engineered the Missouri that few people today think of it as anything other than water. But we can reestablish our bonds to the river if we decide to let it flow once again, argues Schneiders. Removing the dams on the Missouri is the first step toward reasserting localism and grassroots democracy. In what was once buffalo country, a dormant ecology awaits rebirth. A major work of environmental history, "Big Sky Rivers offers a challenging vision for the future of the Upper Missouri bioregion.

Over the course of two centuries, Americans have tried to tame the Missouri River. First explored by Lewis and Clark, this once-free-flowing river has in modern times been dammed, dredged, and channelized until it now barely resembles its former self. Yet, the Missouri remains beyond complete human control.

Writing in a new tradition of environmental history, Robert Kelley Schneiders takes a long historical view to reconstruct the Missouri Valley environment before Euro-American settlement and then trace the environmental transformations resulting from the development projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He tells how the Mighty Missouri has been transformed from a shallow, meandering stream to an engineered waterway with over a dozen dams, thousands of stone pile dikes, and seemingly endless miles of rock bank line--and how the river has reacted to the disruption of its original hydrologic and ecological processes.

Schneiders explores the reciprocal relationship between people and the natural world as he examines the political origins of Missouri River development plans. Bringing together much of the previously fragmented history of the river, he describes the environmental changes caused by the construction of a barge channel below Sioux City and by dam and reservoir construction in Montana and the Dakotas. Contrary to the conclusions of several other water historians, Schneiders argues that the development of the river was guided by neither federal elites nor local interest groups acting alone but by the two working in cooperation; while the Corps of Engineers built dams and channelization structures, private citizens cleared the lower Missouri Valley for agriculture, industry, and housing.

Although Schneiders claims that Missouri River development was undertaken primarily to benefit agriculture, he holds that in the long run the river has foiled these management attempts--and that despite the investment of technology and money, the public may have been better off if the Missouri had been left alone. Rich in geographical and topographical information and featuring both historic and contemporary photos, "Unruly River" shows that despite humanity's herculean efforts, the Missouri continues to be the principal actor in its own life story.