Sioux’s Mystic Puddle ‘Grows and Grows’ Into Substantial Devils Lake : North Dakota: Ice Age leftover is described as ‘a perpetual flood.’ Nearby town of Minnewaukan will move its treatment plant so it won’t be engulfed.

The Native Americans who lived near the shore of the lake for generations before the first white settlers reached here in the 19th Century called it Minnewaukan, or Mystic Lake. In their tradition, the lake--a leftover from the Ice Age--was said to have overflowed once and flooded the world.

But 30 years ago, during a long drought, the lake all but disappeared. It was then, Elmer White recalled, that his grandparents told him that the waters would return one day.

“Our people didn’t believe it,” said White, the tribal chairman of the Devils Lake Sioux Tribe. “Nobody believed it. White people never believed it. They laughed. Well, it’s here.”

Devils Lake--renamed by the settlers in apparent misunderstanding of the mystical qualities attributed to it--is now beginning a third year of what is described here as “a perpetual flood.”

Since 1993, when torrential rains in the Midwest set off the great flood that devastated communities along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the lake has risen 13 feet and expanded from about 42,000 acres to more than 70,000 acres.

Long after the water receded from the river towns to the south, the Devils Lake area remains threatened by water that has risen five feet in the last year.

“It’s more like a cancer; it grows and grows and grows,” said Vern Thompson, mayor of Minnewaukan, N.D.

Two years ago, Minnewaukan was about eight miles from the lake. Today, the town is preparing for a costly relocation of its waste-water treatment plant, which is in danger of being engulfed if the lake continues to rise. Although the damage has been far less dramatic than that caused downstream by the flood of 1993, the rising water has washed out roads, flooded homes and businesses and taken thousands of acres of farmland out of production.

The stubborn flood is the result of an almost unique feature that Devils Lake shares with the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Carved into the prairie by glaciers during the Ice Age, the low-lying land has no natural outlet for the water that drains into it from a 2.4-million-acre basin to the north. Several times during its 10,000-year history, geologists say, the lake reached such high levels--about 20 feet higher than it is today--that it overflowed the hills to the south.

Before that level is reached again, the towns of Devils Lake, Minnewaukan and other communities, as well as thousands more acres of farmland, would be inundated.

This most recent example of the lake’s vicissitudes is a graphic reminder of the harsh reality of life on the Great Plains. The people who live here have been fighting the elements--more often too little water rather than too much--for generations.

At his fishing resort, these days protected by makeshift dikes and electric pumps, Kyle Blanchfield has a brownish photograph of the Minnie H., a paddle-wheel boat that ferried cargo, mail and passengers across the lake in the late 19th Century. By about 1910, however, low water had put the Minnie H. out of business.

“It’s displaced a lot of people going up or down,” Blanchfield said of the lake.

In the town of Devils Lake, the spreading water threatens a prosperity built in part on changes in the Great Plains agricultural economy that have been costly to others. As farms have grown larger, employing bigger machines and fewer people to harvest wheat and other crops, dozens of small towns have withered and died.

The refugees from such places have often moved to regional centers like Devils Lake. Home to 7,500 people, the town is one of only 12 North Dakota communities with populations of more than 5,000.

The lake is also a key part of the region’s economy, providing fishing that is the foundation of a $30-million-a-year tourism industry. Highway 2 is lined with a Wal-Mart, motels, fast-food restaurants and gas stations, a jarring contrast to the sedate, three-block-long business district in the center of town.

“Despite the problems, we are growing,” said Randy Frost, executive vice president of the Devils Lake Area Chamber of Commerce. “But what’s at stake is that growth. We’re four or five feet from having a major disaster here.”

To avert that possibility and eventually curb the lake’s timeless, natural tendencies, local officials have proposed an ambitious plan to create an outlet that would drain excess water into the Sheyenne River and that could pump water back into the lake during times of drought. They argue that even though “stabilizing” the lake will be expensive--at least $70 million but almost certainly much more than that--it makes more sense than spending millions of dollars to repair roads, flooded state parks and other facilities every time the water rises, or waiting to suffer the economic costs of the next dry cycle.

Local officials presented their plan recently to a delegation that included a State Department official, because water drained into the Sheyenne River will flow into the Red River and then north into Canada, giving the flood-control plan potential international implications.

But that is only one of several factors complicating any long-term solution to a problem with roots in the Ice Age, said Roger Hollevoet, district director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A Devils Lake outlet, he said, could cause “tremendous water-quality problems downstream.”