Fort Peck Dam Powerhouse Tours

A Fort Peck powerhouse tour begins at a front desk. Visitors sign in at the Fort Peck Interpretive Center at least fifteen minutes before the tour and show identification that meets REAL ID rules: a driver’s license with the gold star, a tribal ID, a passport, or a passport card. Digital IDs are not accepted. For the 2026 season the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, scheduled tours on Saturdays and Sundays at 9:30, 11:30, 1:30, and 3:30, through Labor Day.

The season ended early. Late on a Thursday evening at the start of September, a large grass fire burned outside the powerhouse facility. The Corps reported on September 4 that all on-duty personnel had been evacuated and accounted for, with no injuries, and that the generating units had returned to service. The incident went under investigation. All powerhouse tours were cancelled, and recreational visitors were asked to keep away from the powerhouse facilities through the holiday weekend. The next day the Corps posted: “Power House Tours are not available, but there are lots of other things to see and do.”

The Interpretive Center and Beaver Creek

The center stayed open Friday through Monday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and a Corps post of October 3 kept those days through October. The building opened in 2005, and the Montana History Portal records that it holds a reproduction of a Tyrannosaurus rex found near the dam. Summer weekends bring children’s programs: acting out the phases of the moon, toads and fish, scavenger hunts, films. In mid-August 2026 the staff set up “The Power of Water,” a water wheel on which visitors tested how flowing water turns real mechanisms, with the lesson carried out to the scale of the powerhouses. Geology Week came after the county fair, with demonstrations of how rivers form and how the Badlands are layered.

Behind the building, the Beaver Creek Nature Trail makes a half-mile loop. In summer it doubles as a Story Trail, with the pages of a children’s book set along the path. August’s book was “Bat Loves the Night” by Nicola Davies, illustrated by Sarah Fox-Davies. The last of 2026 was “Woodpecker Wham!” by April Pulley Sayre, illustrated by Steve Jenkins. The Corps, the Glasgow City-County Library, the Valley County Friends of the Library, the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge Complex, and volunteer Linda Jastrebski Parpart keep it stocked. On October 3, cross-country runners raced the loop. Early October is also salmon-snagging season on the water below the dam. The Corps asks anglers to stay clear of Fish, Wildlife & Parks crews collecting eggs and to pack out their fish remains.

Powerful afterthoughts

A Corps marker in front of the center carries the title “Powerful Afterthoughts.” Its inscription says Fort Peck Dam was not meant to produce hydroelectric power when it was designed in the early 1930s. The powerhouses were added after the dam was finished, to meet the nation’s growing demand for electricity. Water from Fort Peck Lake is diverted to them, and its pressure against the turbine forces it to spin “like a giant waterwheel.”

The marker dates the work. Construction on Powerhouse No. 1 began in 1941, and the unit first generated power in 1943. Because of wartime shortages of materials, the powerhouse was not finished until 1951. Powerhouse No. 2 was completed in 1961. The Montana History Portal has a different date: it says the dam became a major hydroelectric facility in 1943 “with the completion of the first powerhouse.”

The marker’s photographs show the work in progress. In April 1941, spiral scroll cases are being assembled in the powerhouse substructure. In May 1943, a Corps colonel inspects generator unit No. 1, with half-built air baffles of the cooling system around him. A third photograph shows the surge tanks at Powerhouse No. 2 going up. Each tank is 147 feet tall and 65 feet across and holds more than 3 million gallons of water. The marker credits the two powerhouses with about one billion kilowatt hours a year, enough for about 400,000 people in Montana. The Foundation for Water & Energy Education lists five turbines with a combined capacity of 185,250 kilowatts. The Omaha District adds that the same water passes through five more powerplants on its way to the ocean. The National Register nomination describes the powerhouse as concrete in “a modified art deco style,” set against a dam made of earth.

Dale Arthur Dascher worked on the second powerhouse. He was a Glasgow farmer born on New Year’s Day 1923, and he served as a form builder and rod man on the job. His obituary in the Glasgow Courier recalls that whenever a task needed someone small and willing to crawl into tight spaces, the crew would say, “Where’s Dale? He’ll do it!” After the powerhouse was built he worked part time at the Fort Peck water treatment plant while he kept farming.

A town built for a dam

The name is older than the dam. The Montana History Portal traces it to a trading post that the Leavenworth, Kansas, firm of Durfee and Peck built in 1867. On October 14, 1933, the Public Works Administration authorized the Corps of Engineers to build a dam and a town on the site. The Corps’ Missouri River Division office in Kansas City drew the town plans that winter. According to the National Register nomination, landscape architects laid out curved streets and varied the designs of buildings that served the same purpose, so the town would not look mass-produced. The municipal buildings went up in the Swiss chalet style. The twelve Original Residences on East Kansas Avenue were built in a style the nomination calls cottage picturesque. At one time more than 10,000 people lived at Fort Peck.

Accounts of the start and the size of the workforce differ. Sue Dalby of the Corps told KRTV, “They started building the dam in 1933 and completed it in 1940.” The Montana History Portal puts the start in 1934 and counts more than 10,000 workers. KRTV reports 10,500 men and eighteen boomtowns that grew up around the site. The National Register nomination and Montana PBS both give 50,000 workers in all. Dalby explained the boomtowns this way: the Corps had planned dormitories and mess halls, “but they hadn’t considered families.” Power for the job came over lines strung from Great Falls, about 280 miles away by her count.

Montana PBS describes three shifts working twenty-four hours a day, in winters that reached 54 below zero and summers that reached 115. Ivy Stebleton grew up in a tar-paper shack in one of the boomtowns: “When I woke up in the morning in the wintertime, the dipper would be frozen in the water pail, and the mattresses were frozen to the wall.” Erick Olson told Montana Historical Society interviewers that he “never knew what a tractor was till I got to Fort Peck.” One day a superintendent went from crew to crew asking for anyone who could drive a pickup, and nobody raised a hand. Olson learned to drive on the job. Kermit Baecker spent his days off in 1934 searching the fill piles for bison skulls. The last bison in the area had been shot around 1890: “That was only forty-four years and it really makes you think how new the country was.”

The dam was built by hydraulic fill. Floating dredges pumped slurry into place along six miles of embankment, and diversion tunnels carried the Missouri around the work. KRTV gives the tunnels as 25 feet in diameter. A caption in the Montana PBS gallery describes four tunnels thirty feet across. In 1936 Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph of the spillway appeared on the first cover of Life magazine. On June 24, 1937, the main channel was closed and the river turned into the tunnels, which let crews place fill faster.

The slide of September 22, 1938

By that morning the fill stood within twenty feet of the final crest. The Corps’ 1939 report records that inspectors found the pipeline sitting too low above the core pool. It measured 30 inches at one point where it should have been 4.5 feet. Then the upstream embankment near the right abutment began to settle. Project leader Clark Kittrell drove out in the early afternoon. His driver, Eugene Tourlotte, reached the spot about 1:15. Tourlotte saw the upstream shell start to move out beneath the car, slammed on the brakes, and reversed at high speed to outrun the slide.

One hundred eighty men were working in the area. Over the next ten minutes, railroad tracks, trains, boats, pipelines, and thirty-four men rode a mass of earth 1,700 feet wide. More than 5 million cubic yards broke loose, and five percent of the structure was destroyed. Twenty-six of the men on the slide came through it. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials notes that after Fort Peck, hydraulic fill was generally abandoned for embankment dams in the United States. Eight men died. Six were never found and are buried somewhere in the dam.