Fort Peck Dam, Margaret Bourke-White, 1936
Fortune magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White, shot LIFE’s premier story on the construction of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam. Bourke-White used pictures to give a human feel to an article on the world’s largest earth-filled dam. She did this by focusing not only on the technical challenges of the massive New Deal project in the Missouri River Basin but also on the Wild West vibe in “the whole ramshackle town,” a place “stuffed to the seams with construction men, engineers, welders, quack doctors, barmaids, fancy ladies.”