A Dam Nuisance

Five times in the last ten years, the Souris River has flooded its banks and sent many of the 35,000 citizens of Minot, N.Dakota, scurrying to higher land. The U.S. Government has poured funds into various flood control measures, but to little avail; and now Congress is considering construction of a $100 million dam that would flood some 30,000 acres of land upstream from the town.

A little more than half of that land belongs to the U.S.; but the rest belongs to some 50 farmers who raise wheat, oats, barley and livestock there, and they don't want to move. So they have taken one acre of the threatened land, subdivided it into 4,840 parcels of about one square yard each, and offered them for sale at $20 apiece. So far, they have sold about 1,000, thus complicating to a fare-thee-well the paper work that the Government must perform to gain control of the land. At the very least, said antidam Farmer Lynn Martin, the tactic "will give us a war chest." But how long or how effectively it will obstruct the dam, he can only guess. Perhaps only until the next flood.

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