The Boomtowns of Fort Peck Dam

In his 1996 novel Bucking the Sun, author Ivan Doig relates through the eyes of the romantically-put-upon Duff family the saga of Fort Peck Dam’s rise from the Missouri River during the Great Depression. Doig uses multiple narrators to round out the story of the dam’s construction in Valley County, a massive New Deal project that employed up to 11,000 workers every year between 1933 and 1940. Imagine thousands of people flooding into an area that lacks the infrastructure to support a population several times its existing size…well, I guess we don’t have to imagine that.

Thousands of people need all sorts of stuff: they need houses to live in, roads to drive on, they need water and schools and electricity and trash collection and churches and places to eat and drink together. On the windswept plains of northeast Montana, all of it was in short supply. So what popped up to fill the void? The boomtown. Couched in myth and forever colored by nostalgia and preconceptions, the boomtown is emblematic of two diametrically opposed phenomena: the human tendency toward perennial transience, and the equally human tendency to root stubbornly wherever we land.

The “Government Town” versus the Boomtown

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers drew up plans for Fort Peck Dam in early 1933. Some Corps staffers rented homes in Glasgow. If they had families, their families lived with them. Most single staffers camped in tents or granaries near the dam site. Glasgow and the nearby town of Nashua were infinitely more comfortable, but the commute to work was long and treacherous: a dozen-plus miles on a dirt road that turned into gumbo for much of the year.

Plans for a government town closer to the dam also began in 1933, and housing for Corps personnel and their families started getting built in spring 1934. The town was christened “Fort Peck.” Most homes were one-bedroom and based on templates, much like mail-order catalog homes. The next step up were the houses designed for Corps members who had families. They were larger and had garages. The crème de la crème were the dozen high-style homes built for Corps officers.

Government and contracted workers had quite different options for housing in Fort Peck, depending on their marital status. Fort Peck had apartment buildings for married workers, dorms for single men and single women, and barracks for contractors who didn’t work directly for the government. From the start, there wasn’t enough housing for everyone who needed it.

Boomtowns started springing up along the dam site long before the Corps members moved into their own housing, and the shortage of worker housing in the government town ensured the survival of these boomtowns for the duration of the project. The Corps granted permission to workers to build temporary shacks along the dam site that first winter, no doubt after people had already started doing it on their own.

Local farmers platted their land for towns, and people moved in. Many workers built their houses on the spot, but just as many people simply trucked in small buildings, such as storage sheds and chicken coops, from their now-abandoned farms. The collective population of the area remains murky, but several dozen thousand people is probably a safe bet. The number of boomtowns that “popped,” “sprang,” and “mushroomed” up around the dam is also a matter of debate. Place names like Delano Heights, Free Deal, Square Deal, Martinville, Idlewild, Park Dale, and Park Grove pepper the history books. Some sources cite 18 total communities; others call out 21.

The most judicious conclusion is that it all depends on how historians are defining a “community,” and what kind of infrastructure had to be present for a gathering of people to constitute said community. Is Cactus Flat, for example, a clutch of brothels that housed the epicenter of the sex trade at Fort Peck Dam, considered a “community”? Amazingly, it depends on whom you ask.

Many men chose to live outside the barracks in Fort Peck because the barracks were expensive. They were either sending money home to their families, or more likely, their families were living with them. Hiring priority was given first to married men and unemployed veterans in Valley County; then, to all able-bodied men in Montana; then, to job seekers from out of state. Many workers were former dryland farmers from the area, whose land had been bought up by the Corps and was destined to be drowned by the dam. Dam jobs paid handsomely, 50 cents an hour for 34 hours a week, and they were cutthroat to get, too. People put up with a lot to hang onto their jobs.

Women worked, too. On top of raising families, many mothers provided laundry, seamstress, and barber services out of their homes. Married and unmarried women alike worked outside the home, either for the Corps or as (or for) business owners in the boomtowns. This is to say nothing of the many women who were sex workers.

In the winter of 1935, all single boomtown men (including married men whose families had not yet relocated to the damsite) were ordered to relocate to the government barracks in Fort Peck. If they didn’t comply, they risked losing their jobs.

Two thousand workers signed a petition protesting the order. The petition was sent to Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who wheeled and dealed in Washington to get the order rescinded. Married men, as well as men who shared a house with other male workers, were allowed to stay in the boomtowns.

Day in the Life of a Boomtown

Oral histories from the “New Deal in Montana/Fort Peck Dam Oral History Project,” recorded in the late 1980s by the Montana Historical Society, relay the texture of daily life in the boomtowns. Homes were of simple-frame construction and covered with plaster, stucco, tarpaper, or asphalt sheet. Floors were typically linoleum or plywood. In Bucking the Sun, three characters install a genuine wood floor inside the first bar in Wheeler, the biggest and most infamous boomtown. Inside walls were painted, whitewashed, calcimined, or covered in wallpaper, newspapers, or magazine pages. In Fifty Cents an Hour: The Builders and Boomtowns of the Fort Peck Dam, author Lori Lonnquist relates a particularly memorable account of an early house that was papered inside with blueprints of the dam. In a romantic kind of way, this detail also makes it into Bucking the Sun, as the Duff’s family home is wallpapered in blueprint. The oldest Duff son is a Corps engineer, while the father and two youngest sons are government laborers–a clever narrative mechanism by which Doig conveys the dramatic class disparity between the engineers designing the dam and the Montana workers who were building it.

In the boomtowns, roads were two ruts in the ground. It was dusty, it was muddy, it was usually a real pain trying to get around. There were sometimes boardwalks, but no streetlights; if there were lawns, they were few and far between. Everything was made out of wood, and electricity and running water were not part of the deal. People used open fires or coal-burning stoves to keep warm. Makeshift insulation worked about as well as it sounds it did, and inside temperatures matched whatever was happening outside.

The boomtowns had no shortage of bars, restaurants, and movie theaters to entertain workers and their families. Businesses on wheels were popular. Water wagons made deliveries for five cents a gallon; fresh produce was trucked in from nearby farms and towns. Coal got delivered daily as well. In the spring of 1935, the Montana Board of Health approved the first garbage routes in the boomtowns. A month later, Valley County passed an ordinance that specified required maintenance of outhouses, garbage storage, and garbage disposal (“stored in fly-tight containers and buried or burned once a week”).

Several communities had schools. Even though the feds at first insisted that the federally-funded school in Fort Peck had sufficient capacity for all children in the area, doubling down on this position by refusing to fund other schools, most government workers preferred their children attend school in the towns where they lived. It’s interesting that the federal government claimed to have sufficient resources for the education of workers’ families, when they clearly did not have the capacity to house all these families.

Parents, business owners, and social clubs were instrumental in raising funds for building schools in Wheeler, Midway, and Wilson. Valley County’s school superintendent and Montana’s state superintendent advocated for support of the boomtown schools, and the War Department eventually sold five government buildings to Valley County for use as schoolhouses. Valley County turned around and sold the buildings to Parkdale, Midway, New Deal, Wheeler, and Park Grove.

The Wild West or Pleasantville, America?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the history of Fort Peck boomtowns are the competing narratives about what life was really like in these communities. In 1936, famed photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White traveled to Fort Peck to document everyday scenes from the dam site; her story made the first cover of Life magazine that November. Bourke-White captured views of the dam itself, but also made her way into the boomtowns, where she photographed people going about their daily lives: going to work, doing house chores, hanging out at the bars. There were lots of photos of people in bars, including the infamous taxi dancers, women who rented out their time for dances and drinks.

The Glasgow Courier and Fort Peck Press published several editorials decrying the sensational nature of the article. Citizens criticized the photographer’s focus on bars, hotels, and drinking culture, aptly pointing out that Bourke-White had dedicated almost no space to portrayal of churches, schools, bridge clubs, and G-rated community dances. Bourke-White did not portray at all the communal support systems that developed in the boomtowns, especially when workers were laid off by the thousands each winter. People shared food with their neighbors when the latter couldn’t afford it, and churches stepped in to help as well.

The local papers dismissed Bourke-White’s article as an unfair and opportunistic exposé. Some written histories of Fort Peck Dam continue to propagate this interpretation of the Life article, overlooking the historical value of what Bourke-White did capture for the sake of upholding a moral position. The truth, of course, is that life in the boomtowns was a mix of the wholesome and of the risqué, of families building lives for themselves while criminals made their own luck happen just down the street. As an interviewee and former boomtown resident attests to in the Montana PBS documentary Fort Peck Dam (2012), “It was the Wild West reborn, if that’s what you were looking for.” This answer is of course both interesting and deeply unsatisfying.

The dam was finished by 1940, and with the end of construction came the end of the towns. Workers who still had farms picked up the most stolid buildings and trucked them home. Other buildings were scavenged for whatever was salvageable, and everything that was left was razed and burned by the Corps.

To learn more about Fort Peck Dam and the boomtowns, listen to the oral histories recorded by the Montana Historical Society, watch historic home video on YouTube, or Fort Peck Interpretive Center, hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Helena-born poet Sammy Sampson lived and worked at the dam as a teenager (he passed away at only twenty-five). Sampson wrote two poems about Wheeler and the boomtowns, which he included in The Saga of Fort Peck, an illustrated book of verse published by Portland-based Tumbleweed Magazine in 1941:

“Boom Town a la Moderne”
Tar-paper shacks and two-by-four huts,
Roads in profusion…..but only two ruts.
False fronts and board walks.
Open doors and no locks.
A tinkling piano and drinks on the bar.
How the West has progressed…to come this far!