Rivers that work: Environment, engineering, and policy change in the Kansas River Basin

Ideas about the nature of the Kansas River changed when the river transformed. In the past two hundred years, three ideas guided human-caused change in the Kansas River Basin: improvement, control, and more recently, management. The dynamic interaction between nature and society produced the major changes in the environmental history of the basin.; European-Americans learned about the Kansas River during exploration and settlement in the nineteenth century. Improvement for navigation, power, and water supply were important goals. When the great 1903 flood demonstrated the destructive power of the Kansas River, Kansans appealed to Congress to make the basin safe. Progress did not begin until President Roosevelt chose a strategy of river development to help revive the national economy. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration considered building a major dam on the Kansas River just west of Topeka, Kansas, but local opposition defeated this proposal. Controlling the nation's rivers was intended to make “rivers that work.”; The demand for flood control generated public support for a plan to construct dams on all the major tributaries of the Kansas River. These were included in the 1944 Pick- Sloan plan for flood control, navigation, and irrigation in the Missouri River Basin. Opposition to the Tuttle Creek Dam near Manhattan, Kansas delayed implementation of the plan in Kansas. In the postwar period, President Truman carried on the policy of making rivers work to sustain economic prosperity. After a “billion-dollar flood” devastated the Kansas River valley in July, 1951, Truman recommended funding for Tuttle Creek. Although President Eisenhower sympathized with the opponents, he eventually accepted this controversial dam.; Despite billions invested in flood control engineering, flood damage losses increased. Flood control encouraged development in the nation's floodplains, but could not guarantee protection. In the late twentieth century, the policy changed to emphasize damage prevention and floodplain management, but dams, reservoirs, and levees remained—a tangible legacy of the program to control nature. In the twenty-first century, the problem is to manage, not just rivers, but the human relationship with rivers.