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and of the risqué, of families building lives for themselves while
criminals made their own luck happen just down the street. As an
interviewee and former boomtown resident attests to in the Mon-
tana PBS documentary Fort Peck Dam (2012), "It was the Wild
West reborn, if that's what you were looking for." This answer is
of course both interesting and deeply unsatisfying.
The dam was finished by 1940, and with the end of construc-
tion came the end of the towns. Workers who still had farms
picked up the most stolid buildings and trucked them home.
Other buildings were scavenged for whatever was salvageable,
and everything that was left was razed and burned by the Corps.
To learn more about Fort Peck Dam and the boomtowns, listen
to the oral histories recorded by the Montana Historical Society,
watch historic home video on YouTube, or Fort Peck Interpretive
Center, hosted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service.
Helena-born poet Sammy Sampson lived and worked at the
dam as a teenager (he passed away at only twenty-five). Sampson
wrote two poems about Wheeler and the boomtowns, which he
included in The Saga of Fort Peck, an illustrated book of verse
published by Portland-based Tumbleweed Magazine in 1941:
"Boom Town a la Moderne"
Tar-paper shacks and two-by-four huts,
Roads in profusion…..but only two ruts.
False fronts and board walks.
Open doors and no locks.
A tinkling piano and drinks on the bar.
How the West has progressed…to come this far!
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