Cadillac Desert (35 page)

The three tribes whom Lewis and Clark encountered along the Missouri River in North Dakota were the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and the Arikara. Perhaps because they were generally peaceful and had helped the explorers (Lewis and Clark spent their first winter with the Mandan, and their adopted Shoshone-Mandan interpreter, Sacajawea, probably saved their lives), the associated Three Tribes were later rewarded with some of the better reservation land in the West: miles of fertile bottoms along the serpentine Missouri, which they used mainly for raising cattle. These were the same lands that the Bureau of Reclamation considered the best winter cattle range in the state, and which it said ought never to be drowned by a reservoir. Under the Corps of Engineers plan, however, the Three Tribes’ reservation would sit directly under the reservoir behind Garrison Dam.

The Corps had, of course, taken extraordinary care not to inundate any of the white towns that were situated along the river. The reservoir behind Oahe Dam, which would be more than 150 miles long, would stop just shy of Bismarck, North Dakota. Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, would sit safely inside a small reservoir-free zone between the tail end of Lake Francis Case and the upper end of Lake Oahe; were it not for the town, the two reservoirs would have virtually touched, nose to tail. Chamberlain, South Dakota, nestled between the reservoirs formed by Big Bend and Fort Randall Dams, was similarly spared. The height of Garrison Dam was reduced by twenty feet so that the surface level of the reservoir would be 1,830 feet above sea level, not 1,850 feet as originally planned. It was a loss of several million acre-feet of storage exclusively for the benefit of Williston, North Dakota, a small part of which could have been subject to inundation during wet years.

For the sake of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where the Mandan and Arikara and Hidatsa lived, no such intricate gerrymandering of reservoir outlines was even tried. Garrison Dam, which the Corps justified largely because of its flood-control benefits downstream, was going to cause horrific local flood damage the moment its reservoir began to fill. Virtually every productive acre of bottom-land the tribes owned would go under.

Colonel Lewis Pick, the architect of the tribes’ inundation, was the embodiment of a no-nonsense military man. Pick liked to punctuate his conversation with Cagney-style “See? See?”s; these were not questions—they were commands. When first assigned to the Missouri River Division during the early part of the Second World War, he ordered all of his staff to work a series of continuous seven-day weeks. On the first Sunday after the order was given, Pick spied on all his top officers and summarily dismissed those who were not at their desks. Later, when he was in Burma, he fired a whole team of surveyors for laying out a technically perfect road which, in his opinion, would take too long to build. Instead, he designed a treacherous road that could be finished slightly sooner.

Since what Pick proposed to do to the Indians was the most calamitous thing that had happened to them in their history, he might have had the good grace to leave the proceedings through which the tribe would be compensated to someone else. But Pick was a take-charge type. He not only insisted on participating; he insisted on running them himself.

Initially, the Three Tribes pleaded with the government not to build Garrison Dam at all. “All of the bottom lands and all of the bench lands on this reservation will be flooded,” wrote the business council of the Three Tribes in an anguished resolution condemning the plan.

Most of it will be underwater to a depth of 100 feet or more. The homes and lands of 349 families, comprising 1,544 individuals, will be covered with deep water. The lands which will be flooded are practically all the lands which are of any use or value to produce feed for stock or winter shelter. We are stock-men and our living depends on our production of cattle.... All of our people have lived where we now are for more than 100 years. Our people have lived on and cultivated the bottom lands along the Missouri River for many hundreds of years. We were here before the first white men stepped foot on this land. We have always kept the peace. We have kept our side of all treaties. We have been, and now are, as nearly self-supporting as the average white community. We recognize the value to our white neighbors, and to the people down stream, of the plan to control the River and to make use of the great surplus of flood waters; but we cannot agree that we should be destroyed, drowned out, removed, and divided for the public benefit while all other white communities are protected and safe-guarded by the same River development plan which now threatens us with destruction....

However, when the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, threw itself behind the plan, the Three Tribes saw the futility of abject resistance. What they asked for as compensation, considering the agony they were about to be put through, was pitiful enough. First, they wanted at least an equivalent amount of compensatory land. Since it would inevitably be poorer land, they also wanted twenty thousand kilowatt-hours per year of electricity, mainly to run the pumps they would need to bring water, once freely available from the river, up from depths of three hundred feet or more on the arid plains. They asked for permission to graze and water their cattle along the margins of the reservoir, and for first rights to the timber which the reservoir would flood. They wanted a bridge built across a narrow reach of the reservoir so their people could maintain contact with one another (the reservoir would effectively split the reservation in half). Otherwise, they would have to spend hours driving around its endless shore or brave violent winds and waves trying to cross its surface by boat.

One small faction of the Three Tribes, led by a flamboyant young radical named Crow Flies High, remained opposed to any compromise at all. As negotiations were already underway between the Interior Department, the Corps, and the Tribal Business Council, a delegation from the dissident faction burst into the room in ceremonial dress and began disrupting the proceedings. The leader of the group, who was probably Crow Flies High, went up to Colonel Pick and made an obscene gesture. Pick turned the color of uncooked liver. It was an insult, he said lividly, that he would remember as long as he lived.

On the basis of that petty insult, Pick stormed out of the negotiations, never to return. As far as he was concerned, all of the points of agreement that had already been reached were null and void. When Arthur Morgan, the first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority—and the one person who kept the memory of the Indians’ tragedy alive—visited the Three Tribes some time later, however, he discovered a different sentiment as to why Pick had walked out. There was, he wrote, “a nearly unanimous opinion that the Corps welcomed the attack of the Crow Flies High group because it provided a semblance of justification for ignoring the clear terms of the law....”

Before the negotiations were interrupted, the Corps had offered the Indians some scattered property on the Missouri benchlands to replace the bottomlands they would lose. (“I want to show you where we are going to place you people,” a local Congregationalist minister quoted Pick as saying.) Under the law, all compensatory lands were to be “comparable in quality and sufficient in area to compensate the said tribes for the land on the Fort Berthold Reservation.” It was up to the Secretary of the Interior, Cap Krug, to decide whether the criteria had been met. As Krug well knew, there was no land in North Dakota that could adequately compensate the tribes for prime winter cattle range in a river valley. He had decided, therefore, to accede to the Indians’ other demands for water, at-cost hydroelectric power, and first timber and mineral rights. Since even this appeared to be too little, he also agreed to pay them $5,105,625 for the 155,000 acres they would lose. It was only $33 an acre, but it was better than nothing.

Colonel Pick, however, was still smoldering over the indignity he had suffered, and he had his good friends in Congress. A few months after Krug announced that he was prepared to meet most or all of the Indians’ terms, the disposition of their case was removed by Congress from Interior’s hands and given to the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. The committee soon tore up Interior’s version of the bill and wrote its own version exactly along the lines suggested by Pick. The Fort Berthold tribes would not even be permitted to fish in the reservoir. Their cattle would not be allowed to drink from it, or graze by it. The right to purchase hydroelectricity at cost was abrogated. The tribes were forbidden to use any compensatory money they received to hire attorneys. They were not even allowed to cut the trees that would be drowned by the reservoir, except in one case, and there, according to the new terms,
they were not permitted to haul them away.

On May 20, 1948, Secretary Krug ceremoniously signed the bill disposing of the Fort Berthold matter in his office in Washington. Despite some intervention by the Interior Department, most of the Corps’ vengeful provisions were still intact. Standing behind Krug, alongside a slouching Mike Straus of the Bureau of Reclamation and a scowling General Pick, was handsome George Gillette, the leader of the tribal business council, in a.pinstripe suit. “The members of the tribal council sign this contract with heavy hearts,” Gillette managed to say. “Right now the future does not look good to us.” Then, as Krug reached for a bundle of commemorative pens to sign the bill, and as the assembled politicians and bureaucrats looked on embarrassed or stony-faced, George Gillette cradled his face in one hand and began to cry.

To eliminate any possibility that Congress or the President might succumb to a tender conscience and eliminate Garrison Dam from the Pick-Sloan Plan, the Corps had already begun work on it in 1945, three years before the agreement with the Indians was signed. In fact, it would spend $60 million on ambiguously authorized “preliminary” work on the dam between 1945 and 1948. A number of members of Congress protested that such work was, if not outright illegal, then certainly a moral wrong. But the one party that might have gone to court for a ruling—the Fort Berthold tribes—had been forbidden to spend any of their compensatory money on attorneys.

The Fort Berthold Indians have never recovered from the trauma they underwent. Their whole sense of cohesiveness was lost, and they adjusted badly to life on the arid plains and in the white towns. But no humiliation could have been greater than for them to see the signs that were erected around the reservoir as it slowly filled, submerging the dying cottonwoods and drowning the land they had occupied for at least four hundred years. In what looked to the Indians like a stroke of malevolent inspiration, the Corps of Engineers had decided to call the giant, turbid pool of water Lake Sacajawea.

As is the case with most schemes that involve a dazzling transmogrification of nature, this is a story without an end, and a later chapter will say something about the likely consequences of trapping most of the Missouri’s silt behind six great dams. For now, it is worth looking briefly at what the Pick-Sloan plan has wrought.

The Corps’ six Missouri River reservoirs, which cost $1.2 billion to build even then, have undoubtedly lowered the flood crests all the way down to New Orleans—though they did not prevent a disastrous flood in the early 1970s, when the Mississippi widened by several miles and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage. Barge traffic hasn’t come close to the Corps’ projections; in 1984, traffic on the entire navigable stretch of the Missouri amounted to only 2.9 million tons, an infinitesimal percentage of the 590 million tons carried by the Mississippi system. The small port of Lorain, Ohio, handled nearly five times as much. The worst natural damage was the flooding of some of the best riparian waterfowl habitat in the world. A former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, John Gottschalk, remembers walking along the undammed middle Missouri for five miles and flushing countless flocks of pheasants and migrating ducks; today, one would be lucky to see anything at all. The birds thrived in the spacious, secluded bottomlands and oxbow pools and marshes, and those are almost entirely gone.

Had the Missouri been left to the Bureau of Reclamation exclusively, things wouldn’t necessarily have turned out much better. However, because the projects would, for the most part, have been well upriver, the Fort Berthold Reservation wouldn’t have been drowned, a lot of riparian waterfowl habitat in the heart of the Central Flyway wouldn’t have been inundated, and the dams, being high rather than wide, would likely have produced a lot more hydroelectricity for their size. The irrigation projects the Bureau planned might have been losers in an economic sense, but the Missouri, if it had to be intensively developed, might have been more useful irrigating crops than providing free transit—at enormous public expense—for a handful of barges.

The Bureau, of course, was not to be denied, either, if it could help it. Ever since the 1950s, it has been trying, without too much success, to build the irrigation projects authorized by the Pick-Sloan Plan—the “then-and-later” dams over which the Corps’ reservoirs took precedence. The O’Neill Project on the Niobrara River in Nebraska, the Narrows Dam on the South Platte in Colorado, the Garrison and Oahe projects in the Dakotas—projects that have become some of the most controversial in the nation—were all authorized by that same misbegotten act. The Bureau, of course, knew well enough that few, if any, of those projects made economic sense, and at least one of its officials, in private, was willing to admit it. In 1955, future commissioner Floyd Dominy, then chief of the Irrigation Division, received an angry letter from two old farmer friends from Nebraska, Claire and Donald Hanna. The Hannas were dryland farmers, and they were incensed that the Bureau’s Ainsworth Project—one of the Pick-Sloan bunch—might literally force them into irrigation farming. “I am really not happy about the Ainsworth Project,” Dominy confessed in his letter of reply of April 15, 1955. “... My views about the impropriety and damn foolishness involved in the construction of irrigation projects in relatively good dry land areas at the present have been repeatedly expressed.... As dear and honored friends I am troubled as to how to advise you,” Dominy went on. “The local towns and businessmen wanted it [the Ainsworth Project]. They could see themselves growing fat on large-scale construction payrolls. They could see something to be gained by increasing the number of farm families in their service area. Like the usual selfish citizen they were willing to accept this increase to their personal larder without thought as to the burden to be placed on the Federal tax payer.”