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T hroughout the twentieth century, farmers along the Kickapoo River found their situation both a blessing and a curse. Catastrophic floods marked the years 1907, 1912, and 1917.1 In 1935, after a respite of nearly twenty years, one of the most destructive floods on record raged the length of the Kickapoo Valley.2 At that time, stretches of riparian forest ran sporadically along the river’s edge, but for most of the way agricultural land—fields and pasture—spread outward on either side. The river passed by the village of La Farge in the township of Stark, just as it passed by half a dozen other villages. With 12½ inches of rain in a single night, the river swelled its banks. It swept away crops and animals and rushed through La Farge, damaging homes and businesses and submerging roads and bridges. “Waters of the Kickapoo . . . cut off La Farge, Vernon County, both by highway and railroad, from the outside world,” announced the caption to an aerial photo published in the Milwaukee Journal.3 “The residue left by the receeding [sic] water was slime and mud,” described Grace Hocking. “Tracks of the railroad bed were left suspended in mid air.”4 For a time the economic fabric of the area unraveled and families had to make do however they could until roads reopened, buildings were fixed, livestock and equipment replaced, and the next year’s crops safely harvested. A dreadful sense of anticipation seized Valley communities afterward. Everyone knew that the floods would return, but the maddening question became “when?” Soon after the 1935 flood, the Valley sent representatives to Washington, D.C., to secure federal help for flood control.5 The delegation arrived at a propitious moment, for they were not the only people clamoring for action. The nation was on the brink of a new era in flood control planning. As 129 6 A Dam for New Times of 1935, Congress had not formed comprehensive plans for the Mississippi River basin, the upper portion of which included the Kickapoo Valley.6 But Congress was enduring a flood of its own, inundated with proposals large and small for flood control projects throughout the Mississippi Valley .7 At the same time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was completing a study of all two hundred of the country’s major river basins. When the Kickapoo Valley delegation arrived, Congress was awaiting the last few reports from the Corps.8 In 1936, Congress pulled together all the studies and requests into one enormous national policy, the Flood Control Act of 1936.9 Under this act Congress agreed to finance flood control projects in most American communities. It also gave the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers responsibility for the majority of federal projects. The Corps had not been a passive bystander to the legislation. Corps supporters had in fact initiated it, to the intense frustration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.10 As the nation’s primary flood control agency, the Corps would now decide how local communities should carry out flood control, or more precisely, the Corps would now carry out flood control for them. The Flood Control Act of 1936 had extended the Corps’s reach into almost 130 negotiating the past and future landscape Tombstone on the terrace of the Rockton Bar: “In Memory of Those Who Sold Us down the Kickapoo River.” (Courtesy of Michael Barrett) every nook and cranny of the country. The Kickapoo Valley became one of those nooks when, in 1937, Congress authorized the Corps to make a preliminary survey of its river.11 In retrospect, the trip Valley residents made to Washington, D.C., marked a psychological turning point. It would give rise to a cultural origin story about private property (lost) and public property, about the federal government and local places, about land ownership and environmental protection. Stark takes us in a completely different historical and environmental direction from its companions on the landscape, Liberty and Clinton. In this chapter, Stark brings us closest to modern perceptions of property debates. In no small part its history is the history of grievances in the making—grievances that always shout out for attention in any discussion on public land policy. Later chapters will hush the din and listen for other voices, human and nonhuman, to challenge and enrich Stark’s A Dam for New Times 131 Wednesday, August 7, 1935, Milwaukee Journal article on the Kickapoo River flood that submerged much...

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