William Glenn Sloan

Who was William Glenn Sloan?

William Glenn Sloan was an inventor and scientist who was co-author of Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program to dam the upper Missouri River.

Sloan was born in Paris, Illinois. His father, a Presbyterian minister moved to Helena, Montana in 1910. He graduated from Montana State College with a bachelor of science in civil engineering in 1910.

He joined the United States Department of Agriculture and a drainage engineer in Idaho in 1910. 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 United States Bureau of Reclamation first in the Rio Grande Valley.

In 1943 was named Regional Director of the Billings, Montana Reclamation office when he proposed using water from proposed dams on the Missouri River to be used for 3,700,000 acres of irrigation.

The plan was to be in conjunction with the United States Army Corps of Engineers proposed by Lewis A. Pick to build dams on the Missouri to alleviate flooding and improve navigation

The two plans which became known as the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program and was initially enacted in the Flood Control Act of 1944. It was to result 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.