W.G. Sloan papers, 1891-1957

William Glenn Sloan (1888-1987) was an American inventor and scientist who was co-author of Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program to dam the Upper Missouri River. Sloan was born in Illinois but later moved with his family to Helena, Montana. He graduated from Montana State College with a bachelor of science in civil engineering in 1910. He then joined the U.S. Department of Agriculture and became a drainage engineer in Idaho. During World War I, he was a lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers. After the war, he was a private consultant on irrigation engineering until 1936, when he joined U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the Rio Grande Valley. In 1943 he was named Regional Director of the Billings Montana Reclamation office when he proposed using water from proposed dams on the Missouri River for 3,700,000 acres of irrigation. The plan was to be in conjunction with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed by Lewis A. Pick to build dams on the Missouri to alleviate flooding and improve navigation (known as the "Pick Plan"). The two plans which became known as the Pick-Sloan were initially enacted in the Flood Control Act of 1944. It resulted in a series of dams on the Upper Missouri as well as its tributaries which among other things generate 2.5 million kilowatts of electricity. Among his other accomplishment is a patent on the airlift pump.