Qualla: Yellowtail Dam

Yellowtail Dam: Introduction

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Victoria Stauffenberg, Public domain. In 1917, Robert Yellowtail sat in a Washington, D.C., hotel room with Chief Plenty Coups and other Crow leaders. They opened a sacred bundle over the incense of buffalo chips brought from animals at the National Zoo and prayed for help. The next day, Congress rejected the proposed appropriation of their land. But Yellowtail knew the government would return. By the 1940s, federal engineers were back with new plans for a dam in Bighorn Canyon. Yellowtail became the loudest voice against it, warning that the canyon was sacred to his people. The Bureau of Reclamation built it anyway, then named the 525-foot structure after him.

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Image: Victoria Stauffenberg | Public domain

Yellowtail Dam: A Tribe Divided

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS staff, Public domain. The arguments over the dam split the Crow into factions. The Mountain Crows sided with Yellowtail in opposition. The River Crows saw potential in the electricity revenues the government promised. For a time, the tribe considered leasing the land for fifty years at one million dol...

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Image: NPS staff | Public domain

Yellowtail Dam: Engineering the Impossible

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. Morrison-Knudsen, the Boise-based contractor that had built Hoover and Grand Coulee dams, landed the contract in 1961. Workers first bored a diversion tunnel through solid rock, then raised a cofferdam to reroute the Bighorn while they poured concrete. Six years later, in Decembe...

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Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

Yellowtail Dam: Cold Water, New Life

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS staff, Public domain. Before the dam, the Bighorn was a warm-water river. After it, something unexpected happened. Water released from the depths of Bighorn Lake runs cold, and that temperature shift transformed the downstream ecosystem. Rainbow and brown trout now spawn where warm-water species once ...

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Image: NPS staff | Public domain

Yellowtail Dam: Two States, One Lake

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS staff, Public domain. Bighorn Lake extends upstream from the dam, crossing the Montana-Wyoming border. Nearly two-thirds of the reservoir's surface area lies in Wyoming, while the trout fishery downstream is entirely Montana's concern. This geography has created ongoing tension. Wyoming wants higher l...

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Image: NPS staff | Public domain

Yellowtail Dam: The Afterbay Solution

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS staff, Public domain. Because the power station operates on peaking demand, releases from Yellowtail Dam can vary dramatically throughout a single day. To smooth these fluctuations, engineers built a smaller dam downstream, the Yellowtail Afterbay. This secondary structure captures the irregular flows...

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Image: NPS staff | Public domain