Mary D. Ritchie was born on July 6, 1877 in Ontario, Canada. She attended the University of Michigan and taught school in North Dakota and Oregon before moving to Bozeman in 1932. She joined the staff of the Montana State College library after working for the local public library and serving as housemother for the Alpha Omicron Pi sorority. She died in Bozeman on July 1, 1959.
On February 15, 1945 United States Senator James E. Murray of Montana introduced S.555, legislation to establish a Missouri River Authority. The bill called for a board of three members to be appointed by the President to acquire, construct, and operate projects on the Missouri River for flood control and irrigation along the Missouri River and its tributaries. The controversial legislation was debated for years afterwards and never adopted. A great deal of newspaper and serial coverage on the proposal appeared from 1945 through 1948 and was carefully traced by Mary D. Richie on a series of bibliographic citation cards. The cards were arranged by the name of the periodical in which the articles appeared. The citation information includes the article title, date, volume number, issue number, and pagination. A second group of cards presents the names of individual dams arranged by the state in which they were built or proposed.
This collection is open for research.
Original handwritten bibliography cards created by librarian Mary D. Ritchie pertaining to the proposed Missouri Valley Authority legislation of the 1940s were transferred to Special Collections from the Montana State College Library records sometime after 1963.
This collection was processed 2017 August 16