11/23/36 - Fort Peck Dam
Margaret Bourke-White

Volume One, Issue One of LIFE was a 96-page journalistic first, a magazine of information and entertainment which told its stories in photographs.  This proved a technique that held an unprecedented quality of immediacy for the reader, a sense of being there, in the midst of history as it happened.  For the next thirty-six years, LIFE was published every week with stories like this one, photographed by Margaret Bourke-White, of the $110,000,000 work-relief project in Fort Peck, Montana.  Nels Nelson and Art Coyne are the two construction supervisors cajoled by the photographer to be dwarfed by the dam, a mighty symbol of Roosevelt's New Deal, the nationwide campaign to provide jobs for the millions of unemployed.  The project was such a success that six "frontier towns" grew up around the site as thousands of men and women across the nation went West in search of jobs, in search of hope, in search of a future.   The dam at Fort Peck is still in operation.
