- [Narrator] South Dakota has a road running through it.

A road made of water, called the Missouri.

This great river cuts the state in half and has served as a kind of road for centuries.

Its traffic has been central to South Dakota history.

American Indians built the first riverboats here, stretching bison hides over willow wood frames.

In the early 1800s, these people had no way of guessing that high fashion halfway around the globe would shortly create a Missouri River rush.

Fine felt hats became the thing for men in Europe to wear.

The best material for felt hats were beaver skins, called pelts.

Europeans and Americans living on the East coast didn't know much about rivers far to the West, but they did know one thing.

Lots of beavers lived there.

American, French, and British fur traders swarmed up and down the Missouri, hoping to make big money supplying the fashion industry.

These trappers and traders often traveled in long wooden crafts called keelboats, powered by paddles and sometimes by sails.

The river was always dangerous.

To survive, keelboaters had to understand its powerful motion.

They had to watch for tree branches called snags or sawyers, and surging waters they called boilers.

Keelboaters spoke of reading the river, studying the waters for danger.

They read the sky too, looking for killer lightening or deadly winds.

Old time river travelers called the Missouri, the Mighty Mo because of its power or Old Misery because it could be cruel.

The keelboaters had to understand something else to survive.

American Indian people watched Missouri River traffic closely.

These people usually helped outsiders traveling the river, especially if travelers traded useful goods, like sugar, tobacco, coffee, cooking pots, and clothing.

Some fur trappers became close friends with native people, and even married into their families.

North American tribes along the Missouri also helped the most famous Missouri River boaters of all time, Lewis and Clark.

In 1804, the pair led an expedition of 50 explorers up the river from St.

Louis, Missouri on a mission ordered by the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.

The United States was a country 28 years old then.

The previous year it had bought land from France, so that the young nation extended from the Atlantic Ocean, nearly to the Pacific.

These western lands were a mystery to Europeans and Americans, so Meriwether Lewis and William Clark jumped into a two year adventure of discovery.

About three months into their journey, Lewis and Clark reached what is now South Dakota.

They were impressed by the native people and amazed by the wildlife they found.

They kept written journals that described barking squirrels, we call them prairie dogs, and fast running goats, we know as pronghorns or antelopes.

Lewis and Clark also saw bison, bears, elk, and mule deer.

The mule deer were bigger than the deer they knew in the eastern United States.

The explorers made it all the way to the Pacific and then returned to St.Louis in 1806.

People read parts of their journals and wanted to go West too.

The journals gave credit to native people for helping Louis and Clark.

But the explorers and their American Indian friends had no way of knowing how tragic interest in the region would be for the Yankton, Teton, Mandan, and Arikara.

Outsiders traveling the river unknowingly brought new and terrible diseases.

Some American Indian villages were completely wiped out by sickness.

Trappers soon turned their attention from beaver pelts to bison hides and tongue.

Scientists also rode West from the river to the Badlands, and collected petrified bones of prehistoric animals.

And artists, like painters George Catlin and Karl Bodmer, helped the world understand American Indian life.

Another artist who traveled up the river, John Audubon, painted mostly wildlife.

The river also brought Pierre Chouteau.

He traveled up the Missouri in 1832 on a big steam powered boat called the Yellow Stone, and he built a trading post and fort for the American fur company.

Today we pronounce his first name, Pierre, differently than he did.

But Fort Pierre on the west side of the river and our state capital of Pierre on the east side are named for Chouteau.

Steamboats like the Yellow Stone were also called paddlewheelers because of the churning wheels that moved the boats.

The power came from steam created in red-hot tanks or boilers.

The boats had tremendous power and moved thousands of people into the region.

River towns like Fort Pierre, Pierre, Vermillion, Yankton, and many smaller places sprang up.

Springtime floods threatened the towns.

In March 1881, a torrent washed away hundreds of buildings.

The town of Vermillion was almost entirely destroyed, and many big boats sank.

The disaster signaled the end of the Missouri being the area's main road.

Towns were rebuilt, but some companies didn't have enough money to replace their boats.

By the 1880s, a new technology has arrived on the scene.

Trains.

For railroads, the Missouri River was a big headache.

Some people in the 1880s said no one could make railroad bridges across the Mighty Mo that would survive floods.

But bridge building crews went to work to prove those people wrong and they spanned the river with two train bridges and Mobridge and Pierre in 1907.

Cars were becoming popular by then, so South Dakotans asked, why not bridges for drivers?

In the early years, people got their automobiles from one side of the river to the other by ferry boats or they drove across on ice in winter.

Sometimes the ice wasn't as solid as it looked and cars broke through.

So, in 1919, Governor Peter Norbeck got the state legislature to put up more than $2,000,000 to build five Missouri River bridges.

In charge of construction was John Kirkham, a man from Indiana who came West to be a lawman and looked like a lawman as he led the bridge work, wearing a gun belt and six shooters.

The first of the five bridges to open was the one at Mobridge.

By then, William McMaster was governor.

At the bridge opening, McMaster called the moment a victory won over the treacherous river.

John Kirkham guessed his bridges would stand 500 years.

Instead, they lasted less than 40, but not because of floods.

In the 1950s and 1960s, South Dakota's piece of the Missouri changed completely.

Engineers built four flood control dams to make the river less treacherous and to use the Mighty Mo's power to create electricity.

- From the time I was eight years old, until I was twenty-five, I lived on the banks of the Missouri River.

At Pickstown, the site of the Fort Randall Dam, Yankton, Vermillion, South Dakota, where I went to university and then Omaha, my first job.

The most memorable days were those days in Pickstown and the Fort Randall Dam when I had a kind of Huck Finn/Tom Sawyer boyhood.

I collected arrowheads and other fossils along the river.

I fished in the river and learned to swim in the swift currents of the Missouri.

I remember something called the June Rise, when the river would flood.

I was always in awe of its restless quality.

And I liked to stand on the banks and think about Lewis and Clark making their way upward, or Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull with their followers, crossing the river to hunt the bison on the Great Plains.

At a time when grizzlies and elk were still roaming the northern prairies, the Great Plains of North America.

I always say that I will always have a little Missouri River water running through my veins wherever I live in the world.

- [Narrator] Behind each of the four dams, wide lakes formed.

That meant that new, longer bridges had to be built.

In 1962, almost 160 years after President Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the river, another president came to see for himself how the river had been changed.

President John F. Kennedy came to Pierre for the Oahe Dam dedication and he did so because a Pierre school girl invited him.

- The reason that I wrote to President Kennedy is I was in fourth grade at Lincoln school in Pierre and we were supposed to write a letter as an assignment in our English class and we had moved to Pierre so that my father could work on the dam, so I thought it would be nice to ask President Kennedy to come and see the dam that my dad built.

President Kennedy was going on a tour of western water projects and there was an article in the Pierre paper that I had written to the president and that he wasn't coming to Pierre and Pierre Salinger, who was his press secretary, had gotten a copy of that article and he told us that day at the dam that he went into the president's office and showed him the article and said, Look, Chief.

And President Kennedy said, Well, I would like to meet her.

So, we didn't find out that I was meeting him until three days before he actually came.

It is pretty remarkable to think that you can be nine years old and write a letter to a president and ask him to come and he shows up.

That's the neatest part of it.

- [Narrator] The dams not only controlled water flow and delivered electricity, but created some of the finest fishing havens in the United States.

The project also created controversy.

- I remember in my younger days along the river the tribes and tribal members lost a lot of land.

I mean, it was beautiful down in that area there.

As children we had an opportunity to walk the rivers, in the timbers, I remember in the late summer, you could go down there and the woods were full of chokecherries, plums, wild grapes.

There was an abundance of wildlife.

You know, we could hunt cottontails, squirrels, a number of different hunting outdoor activities that we would do.

And it was a perfect area that we ended up losing, the tribes and individuals, like I said, ended up losing hundreds of thousands of acres to the flooding part of it, you know.

- [Narrator] For South Dakotans, the Missouri is the dividing line between two halves of our state.

East river, the land of farms and many towns, and west river, the place of ranches and open spaces.

Nobel Prize winner author John Steinbeck went so far as to say, The Missouri River in the Dakotas divides all America.

One side of the river, he wrote, - [Reader] Is the eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America.

Across the Missouri, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops.

The two sides of the river might as well be a thousand miles apart.

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