Alabama

As the Missouri River drops out of the Rocky Mountains and snakes across the plains toward St. Louis, it passes through some of the most barren land in the country. It was here, on an arid expanse of rolling hills in northeastern Montana, that the federal government relocated the Assiniboine and Sioux Indians in the late 1800s.

Although the tribes' Fort Peck Reservation fronted more than 100 miles of the Missouri, the river went largely unused and the tribes have struggled to eke a living from an area where rainfall totals can rival those of the deserts of the Southwest.

But now tribal leaders have a plan they say could help free their people of the poverty endemic to the reservation. By tapping billions of gallons of water from the Missouri, they want to irrigate up to half-a-million acres of sandy soil in the surrounding hills to grow potatoes, onions and other high-value crops.

That vision, if realized, could reshape eastern Montana and make the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes the regional arbiter of one of the West's most valued resources -- water.

"This is going to absolutely transform this entire region," proclaimed Thomas "Stoney" Anketell, a tribal council member leading the push to tap the Missouri.

He gestured at the reservation's brown, treeless landscape with a sweep of his hand, "This is some of the worst dry-land farming there is. That's why the tribes own so much of it. But take a bunch of sagebrush and sandy-type soils, put water on it and something magic happens ... This time, our people will be the wealthy ones."

So far, Anketell's dream amounts to little more than a tantalizing business plan, which he and other tribal leaders are shopping around to banks and state and federal officials in hopes of obtaining financial backing for an initial 15,000-acre irrigation project. With the region suffering from a prolonged drought, political opposition from downstream interests is inevitable if the tribe pushes ahead with its larger vision.

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