Most of the improvements carried out by Major Charles R. Suter concentrated on the lower reach of the river between Kansas City and St. Louis. He did devote some of his efforts to upstream projects, among them stabilization works opposite Nebraska City, Nebraska, and farther upstream to Sioux City and Vermillion in Dakota Territory. At several locations, the removal of snags was accomplished.
Suter learned a great deal about the Missouri during his tenure. He overestimated its length at “something over 3,000 miles” but understood the significance of his work. “The importance of the subject,” he wrote in his 1881 summary of his work on the river, “can hardly be overestimated as this river is the longest of any in the United States.”
Suter attributed the large discharge of the river to the vast area of the basin and the snows and ice near its headwaters. The river’s most salient features included “the remarkable impetuosity of its current” and its slope of about 1.5 feet per mile, which Suter thought considerable for so large a stream.
The rapid current – as fast as ten miles per hour – and unstable banks made the river unusually turbid and earned it the name of “Big Muddy.” “It is, in fact, the great silt-carrier in the country, and the enormous mass of sediment which it brings forward forms the great bulk of that received by the Mississippi from its tributaries,” Suter wrote.
According to Suter the river flooded twice annually. The April flood was “extremely violent and brief, lasting no more than seven to ten days and resulted from the snowmelt. The second flood, in June, rose higher and stayed longer. Local rains played a large role in it. “Both,” Suter noted, “had sufficient power to produce tremendous effects and bring about the most astonishing changes.”
He concluded that the difficulties of navigation resulted from the lack of sufficient scouring power at specific locations. As a remedy, he suggested a system of channel improvements to concentrate the flow of water at these places.
Although he thought his approach the most economical, he recognized the problems, among them the fluctuations of the river and particularly the floods which might render any construction useless. Nevertheless, he hoped to use the river to deepen and maintain its own channel while cleaning itself of snags. Through such a program, Suter expected to maintain a uniform navigation depth of twelve feet all the way to Sioux City.
Suter thought the program would cost about $10,000 per mile or eight million for the entire river to Sioux City. He wanted to start at the mouth of the river and work upstream, ideally with appropriations that covered at least fifty miles at a time. Above all, he wished to avoid a piecemeal approach: “If the money is to be frittered away at isolated points, and the improvement carried on in a disjointed and arbitrary manner, no estimate of the ultimate cost is possible.”
While Suter still worked on the river downstream of Sioux City, the Chief of Engineers sent Lieutenant Edward Maguire far upstream to Fort Benton. Starting in 1877, Maguire removed obstacles to navigation along a three-hundred mile stretch between the head of navigation and the mouth of the Yellowstone. A military escort was provided for protection.
Maguire and Suter were actively engaged in improving the navigation on the upper Missouri during the high-water year of 1881. The flood that year began with the early melt of snow in Montana and the Dakotas. The river opened up above Fort Buford, Montana, and the ice flowed downstream.
Below Yankton, Dakota Territory, no January thaw occurred. The ground remained frozen solid and the ice in the river became fifty inches thick. The melted snow accumulated behind ice dams in the reaches between Fort Pierre, Dakota Territory, and Sioux City. One such obstruction extended fifteen miles.
When the weather warmed on March 27, a massive ice gorge broke, and the worst of the flooding followed. High water rolled down the Missouri and poured over the town of Niobrara, Nebraska. At Omaha, the river went out of its banks when the gauge reached eighteen feet. The snow continued to melt, the rains came, and the river continued to rise. On April 26 the Omaha gage read 23.7 feet, the worst flood on record. The April 27, 1881 edition of the Press and Dakotaian contained this headline:
“The Vermillion Townsite Dissolving and Falling into the River.”
The whole river valley between Pierre and Sioux City was under water. In some places, the river dumped five feet of sand. The flood destroyed all of the Engineers’ work at Nebraska City. The sections of Brownville, Nebraska, built on the flood plain just washed away. The flood swept away the Engineers ill-conceived works, left their better efforts standing, and demonstrated the power of the river. The Engineers had concluded that privately built bank protection works failed because they were either poorly designed or too small to withstand the river’s forces.
The river had a navigable depth of three to nine feet and had eroded its banks as much as two-thousand feet a year in some places. “It was a prodigious silt carrier,” Suter said. The silt was the river’s essential problem. Suter estimated that eleven billion cubic feet of silt could have been carried past St. Charles, Missouri, during 1879. This would be enough to cover a square mile of ground to a depth of two-hundred feet.
Author Author Clarence Shoemaker, originally published in the Gregory Times-Advocate on June 11, 2025