At the end of the 1920’s America left an era of prosperity behind. The rain stopped falling and crops failed, the stock market plummeted, and more than 12.5 million Americans were out of work. In order to find work families moved “on to someplace else.” In the midst of this despair Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to the Presidency, and developed the Public Works Administration, creating millions of jobs. Many of those jobs reached Montana in the form of the Fort Peck Dam, five times bigger than any dam then in existence.