Paradise Dam (Montana)
dam in Sanders County, near Paradise, Montana, United States
Paradise Dam was a proposed dam on the Clark Fork River in Montana. It was proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as an alternative to the construction of Glacier View Dam on the western boundary of Glacier National Park, to capture the flow of the Flathead River. The earth embankment dam was planned to be about 250 feet (76 m) high, impounding a reservoir of 4,080,000 acre-feet (5.03 km3). While it was viewed as a desirable power generation and water storage project by the Corps of Engineers, it was opposed by those it would displace from towns and productive agricultural lands, and was never built.
Proposal
The dam was proposed in the 1940s as an alternative to the controversial Glacier View Dam, which was strenuously opposed by the National Park Service and conservation organizations as an intrusion into national park lands. It would have inundated 9,000 acres (3,600 ha) of already-irrigated and farmed lands, with the reservoir extending 49 miles (79 km) up the Clark Fork and 72 miles (116 km) up the Flathead to the base of SKQ Dam. The project required the relocation of roads, rail lines and houses and businesses in several communities. The cost in 1950 was estimated at $265,569,000.
Alternative sites at The Plains, five miles downstream from Plains, Montana, and the Weeks site, three miles downstream from the Plains site, were examined but rejected on grounds of poor foundation conditions. Three other sites, Knowles (river mile 4), Perma (river mile 11) and Oxbow (river mile 41) were rejected on similar grounds.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Paradise Dam (Montana)” is dam in Sanders County, near Paradise, Montana, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Paradise, Montana and Sanders, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “dam in Sanders County, near Paradise, Montana, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Place names and jurisdictional language are key evidence: both can reveal earlier catalogue descriptions and overlooked record series. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12065268. Authority coordinates are 47.416, -114.833. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paradise Dam (Montana)” 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.