TAMING A RIVER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22618, 5 January 1937, Page 5

TAMING A RIVER

GREAT MISSOURI DAM NEW VERSION OF WILD WEST [FROM OUR OWN" correspondent] SAN FRAXC'ISCO, Dec. 2 The Wild West has returned under the New Deal. The only difference is that Theodore Roosevelt's frontier was a phase of the migration to the Pacific; that of his kinsman, Franklin Roosevelt, is the result of expending limitless millions of dollars from the public treasury. To-day, it is not the lure of gold in the Forty-niners' rush, but the lure of work in huge projects, such as, for instance, the world's largest dam, planned to discipline the Missouri into becoming a commerce carrier. The town of New Deal is the modern prototype of Deadwood, in the eighties, whose gunmen and bushrangers have given way to raw-boned, husky workers, albeit their diversions proclaim it the most torrid spot of the new Wild West. Here, 10,000 war veterans, farmers and plain tramps are earning a lucrative living. There are six of_ these shanty towns —• New Deal, Square Deal, Delano (the President's second name), Wilson, Park Grove and Wheeler (called after Senator Wheeler, of Montana). They are "short" on law and sanitation, "lonjj" 011 bars and dancers. The latter dance all night, for a nickel a number. There are no long-horns or lariats, or two-gun men, although the saloons are as wide open as in the days of Buffalo Bill and Deadwood Dick. The habitues came in * second-hand cars since 1933; .when, after the banks of the country closed,, tho newcomer at the White House selected this as tho first of his mammoth schemes to put desperate, disillusioned people to work. Broken-down motor-cars supplanted the covered waggons of an earlier day. The United States Army, entrusted with the task of housing the endless, polyglot cavalcade, applied business rules too severely. It built a modern town, equipped with dormitories, hospitnl and sanitation, but provided quarters only for workers, overlooking their families. For such quarters it charged rents which left the married worker without enough margin to support a second home until lie (,'oukl send for his familv. Consequently the worker and his friends moved off tho reservation and built shanty towns. Grocer's boxes, tin cans and crazy doors formed the architectural motif; building paper topped it off. Here the new Wild West lived in weather that was 50 below zero one way, and 110 above, the other. The Army tried to compel tho newcomers to live in the barracks. They wrote to tho nearest Democratic politician and won the right to remain. By day tho menfolk are turning a mighty, restless river into four diversion tunnels, to carry it round tho dam. By night they frequent one or more night "whooperies." A woman who conducted a dance hall in the Klondike rush runs the most popular of them. She is the first accredited millionaire of this newest "stampede."