When the story of the La Farge dam controversy was broadcast
on the CBS Evening News on Friday,
October 13, 1978, a new chapter in the dam story seemed to unfold. Introduced as “The Great Kickapoo Loggerhead”
by news-anchor Roger Mudd, the video story as told by CBS newsman Bob Faw was
compelling and emotional. Seeing Ward
Rose, Lonnie Muller and Bernice Schroeder relate details of the heartbreaking
process of the dam project for many Kickapoogians affected most people who
watched it.
One of
those affected was another CBS newsman, Charles Osgood. Osgood, who hosted a radio show on CBS called
“The Osgood File” wrote a poem about the dam project on the Kickapoo and read
it over the air on his radio show later in October. It is a long piece, as Osgood’s poems tend to
be, but I want to include his ending here.
He wrote:
It’s been 43 years since the U.S.A.
Began to help Kickapoo out that
way.
They spent nineteen million dollars
and they built their road
And a great new bridge, as we
already showed.
And they let all that farmland go
to seed,
Where today there’s that acreage
and sundry weed.
Still, the folks there in Kickapoo
have the gall
To complain, showing little
gratitude at all.
Congress got impatient and cut off
the dough.
Building was stopped about three
years ago.
The valley is frustrated, the
people mad.
They’d settle now for what they one
time had.
Uncle Sam’s embarrassed and his
face is red.
And this week somebody in the White
House said,
“Tell you what we’ll do in this
Administration:
We’ll assign a task force in the
situation.”
Nice of those folks in the capital
city
To come right out like that and
appoint a committee.
And who knows what that committee
will find?
Whether to quit while they’re still
behind,
Or to finish the dam for several
million more
That they started out planning in
the days of yore.
Well, we should tell you that which
everyone in Kickapoo knows:
They still have the floods. Oh, they have lots of those.
Plenty of flood damage – my, oh,
my!
Fifty million dollars just this
past July.
“I’m angry,” says a citizen,
“indeed, I am!”
Now you know why they invented the
expression: DAMN!
Soon after the CBS News coverage of
the dam project by Bob Faw and Charles Osgood, President Jimmy Carter made the
official announcement of the first public meeting of the joint federal-state
task force to study options for flood control and economic development for the
Kickapoo Valley. Perhaps the features in
the nationally broadcast CBS pieces had hurried the process along, perhaps not.
Bob Faw finished his video report
on the La Farge dam project by saying, “a flood control project that controls
absolutely nothing”. Would the latest
task-force study provide some answers for the dam at La Farge to control
something?
Actually, many people in the
community of La Farge were sick and tired of all the studies done on the
Kickapoo Valley. President Carter’s call
for a new study elicited groans from many in the community, regardless of their
position on the dam project.
Kickapoogians were weary of studies.
The problem of flooding in the Kickapoo Valley had been studied to death
over a period that stretched back to the 1930’s.
President Carter’s Task Force on
Kickapoo River Flood Damage Reduction held its first public meeting On November
16, 1978. The meeting was held at the
high school gymnasium in Gays Mills with nearly 200 people in attendance. Colonel Ted Bishop of the Corps of Engineers
acted as moderator for the meeting which featured representatives from various
federal and state agencies. In addition,
Senator Gaylord Nelson also attended the meeting.
In his
prepared remarks, Senator Nelson told the gathering that the dam project at La
Farge was dead. “A dam is out of the
question,” Nelson said. “The project
that is currently authorized fails to meet the administration’s economic and
ecological tests. The task force must
develop a comprehensive, valley-wide plan that provides a higher degree of
flood protection for many more residents.”
Senator Nelson added, “The task force’s review is the valley’s best
chance. The battle over the dam is
finished. We must move forward if
anything is to be accomplished.”
Colonel
Bishop told the gathering that the Task Force was formed to find ways to
relieve flood damage in the Kickapoo Valley without using structures such as
dams or levees. During the proceedings,
Bishop continually asked people who were speaking to not discuss the dam
project at La Farge as a possible option.
However, Col. Bishop’s admonitions had little affect on those who
testified.
Many people
from La Farge spoke at the meeting.
Bernice Schroeder, speaking as a representative of KLOUT, spoke in favor
of completing the authorized project and completing the dam at La Farge. Schroeder said it was “a broken promise” to
the former landowners if the dam was not completed. She thought that if the dam was not completed
then the lands should be returned to the former owners.
Also speaking
from La Farge for completion of the dam project were Roger Andrew, Bernard and
Jeanne Smith, Palmer Munson, Olive Nelson and Esther Ziebell. Palmer Munson, speaking as town chairman of
the Town of Stark, spoke of the tax hardships for the people living in the
township due to the government buying so much land for the dam project. Munson also advocated for the completion of
the dam, as did people from other places in the Kickapoo Valley.
Jim Coxe from Wauzeka called for
the completion of a dry dam at La Farge, saying that such a structure would
benefit everyone in the Kickapoo Valley during floods. Carl Oppreicht of the Gays Mills Flood
Avoidance Committee spoke in favor of construction of small retention dams
along tributaries running into the Kickapoo River as well as completion of a
dry dam at La Farge.
Vernon County Board member George
Nettum admonished the members of the Task Force for the failure to complete the
dam at La Farge. He called the dam
project the “biggest fiasco ever” and encouraged the Task Force members to
include the completion of the dam at La Farge in future plans.
The Task Force recommendations did
call for an expanded flood insurance program for villages in the Kickapoo
Valley, crop insurance for farmers along the river, a valley-wide warning and
preparedness plan, evacuation/relocation plans for Soldiers Grove, flood
proofing and a levee system for Gays Mills and a federal/local effort to clear
the river and tributaries of snags and debris.
However, the preliminary recommendations
released by the Presidential Task Force in December included nothing about the
completion of the dam at La Farge. As
Senator Nelson had said repeatedly throughout 1978, the dam project at La Farge
was dead.
And so it went. For the next decade a variety of efforts were
made to do something with the partially completed dam at La Farge. Many politicians at the state and federal
level tried to move the dam project in some way towards some sort of conclusion. But it never happened. “A
flood control project that controls absolutely nothing.”
* * * *
To finish,
let me write that a completed Corps of Engineers’ flood control dam north of La
Farge that should have been completed in the mid-1970’s would have greatly lessoned
the devastation of the flood of 1978, then the massive destruction from the flood
of 2008, and now the misery of the flood of 2017. That is what the dam was designed to do.
The finished dam would not have
curtailed any flood waters on Otter or Bear Creeks nor saved anybody’s
washed-out driveway along those streams. The completed dam would not have saved
Ontario from the ravages of the recent flood in July of 2017. But we should also remember that five
retention dams for the Ontario area were to be built as part of the project at
La Farge. If built, those retention dams
would have lessoned the impact of the recent floodwaters on Ontario.
In the end, by not completing the
dam or any of the ancillary parts of the federal project like the retention
dams, the Kickapoo Valley was left to its own devises to cope with devastating
floods.
