Writing in a new tradition of environmental history, Robert Kelley Schneiders takes a long historical view to reconstruct the Missouri Valley environment before Euro-American settlement and then trace the environmental transformations resulting from the development projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

He tells how the mighty Missouri has been transformed from a shallow, meandering stream to an engineered waterway with over a dozen dams, thousands of stone pile dikes, and seemingly endless miles of rock bank line - and how the river has reacted to the disruption of its original hydrologic and ecological processes.

Although Schneiders claims that Missouri River development was undertaken primarily to benefit agriculture, he holds that in the long run the river has foiled these management attempts - and that despite the investment of technology and money, the public may have been better off if the Missouri had been left alone.