Overcoming barriers: Milk River Irrigation Project, Montana, USA

The United States Reclamation Service (predecessor to the United States Bureau of Reclamation) developed the Milk River Irrigation Project in Montana a century ago. To supplement the waters of the Milk River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, reclamation engineers developed a storage reservoir on the St. Mary River, which flows into Canada and on to Hudson’s Bay. Although the reservoir’s dam is an earth embankment, which presented reclamation engineers with a rather modest challenge, the project required overcoming more substantial barriers, an international boundary and a North American continental divide (the divide separating the waters of Hudson’s Bay from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico). This article uses the storage project of the Milk River Irrigation Project to illustrate other facets of the irrigation movement’s ability to overcome barriers besides the construction of monumental dams, for which it is most widely known.