Lewis A. Pick
United States Army general (1890-1956)
Lieutenant General Lewis Andrew Pick (November 18, 1890 – December 2, 1956) was a United States Army officer who served as Chief of Engineers in the United States Army.
Early life
Pick was born in Brookneal, Virginia. He was part of the first graduating class of Rustburg High School in 1910 and attended VPI, graduating in 1914. Pick received his Regular Army commission in the United States Army Corps of Engineers on July 1, 1917.
Military career
During World War I, Pick served with the 23rd Engineers in France. He served in the Philippines from 1921 until 1923 and helped organize The 14th Engineer Regiment Philippine Scouts, largely composed of Filipino soldiers. He was the Corps of Engineers' District Engineer in New Orleans during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and he helped coordinate federal relief efforts. Pick was named Missouri River Division Engineer in 1942, and with William Glenn Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation he co-wrote the Pick-Sloan Plan for controlling the water resources of the Missouri River Basin.
Pick carefully wrote his plan to avoid flooding Bismarck and Williston, North Dakota, along with Pierre and Chamberlain, South Dakota, but intentionally flooded the entire productive acreage of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, some 155,000 acres, supporting 349 families of 1,544 individuals. United States Secretary of the Interior Julius Albert Krug ordered compensation in the form of an equal amount of acreage on lesser lands, at-cost hydroelectric power for irrigation, grazing and watering rights for tribal cattle, and $5,105,625 in payment for lost lands.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6536240. VIAF identifies the subject as 121209030. The Library of Congress control number is no2010076184. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1890, 1956, 1910 and 1914.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lewis A. Pick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.