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The Oahe Dam was officially completed in 1962. It was at the time the fourth largest man-made dam in the USA. In Peter Carrel's book Uphill against Water: the Great Dakota Water War, he explained the political battle that occurred in order to halt the construction of the Oahe Irrigation Project. This project would divert water out of the Missouri River (near the Oahe Dam) to canals that would in turn use the water to irrigate much of the fertile James River Valley to the east, which is at times is threatened by drought conditions. As the story goes the Bureau of Reclamation and many strong, local political figures pushed for federal assistance for the irrigation project, while many local farmers and the United Family Farmers strongly opposed this project, because they believed that the construction alone would destroy a large amount of farm land and wetlands that would need to be mitigated. In the end, President Carter in 1978 pulled the plug on the notion to provide federal funding to support the irrigation project and in turn killed the project. This book gave me a very different perspective of the Great Plains region. From what we learned about in class, we never got into the heated political battles that decided many ideas in plains history, and this book showed me one of those. I do feel however that this book did not focus in on the National Environmental Act (NEPA) of 1970 as much as it should of. I strongly believe that because of that act and the new laws that came about from NEPA that it certainly weighed heavily with influencing the President's decision. I believe that he should have credited NEPA with their assistance. Other than that this book was very good in illustrating how a single water project could draw so much attention at a local and a national environmental level; since it was one of the first national water projects to be so heavily influenced by the NEPA Act.