Judd did not speak to James for a while after that. He did not see Tesha again, either. Rick dropped by; they looked in KC’s room. When weeks passed and KC still had not appeared, Judd tried to file a missing person report. According to Judd, the sheriff told him—incorrectly—that only a relative could file a report, so Judd called his roommate’s ex-girlfriend in Brownwood, whose mother was allowed to file. In May, when Jill called Judd, he was rude to her: “I said, ‘Your son’s been missing for three months, and you haven’t bothered to call me. No one’s bothered to call. Do you know how frustrating that is? I have a roommate that disappears, and it’s like no one cares. The only people that care are an old girlfriend in Texas and a grandfather who thinks he’s somewhere else.’ ” Judd felt bad for saying it and was kinder to Jill after that.
But something about James had bothered Judd, and one night Judd called him again: “I said, ‘Hey, KC’s nowhere around. Do you have any idea where he’s at? I mean, aren’t you his best friend?’ He’s like, ‘You know, I’m not really his best friend. I don’t really know KC that good.’ I said, ‘Really? I thought you guys had known each other for a long time.’ I thought it was interesting to hear him say that, knowing how they were. At least a few times I’d talked to KC about motorcycles and racing and James and stuff. James had known him a long time. So it wasn’t too much longer after that, I called James again. I just struck up a conversation. ‘Things are going all right?’ He said, ‘Yeah, we’ve got some work.’ And I said, ‘Man, I heard that KC was going to damn take some of your business and go to Running Horse.’ And he said, ‘I know, can you believe my best friend would do that to me?’ My best friend. He probably remembered, too. He probably wished he would have caught himself. I thought, Really, your best friend? That was the last time I talked to him.”
3
Oil Kings
WHEN I THINK NOW OF the day I first arrived on the reservation in April 2011, ten months before Kristopher Clarke went missing, I think of how muted the place looked, how a late winter storm had flattened the deadened grass, how the snow had withered into dusty patches and the sloughs were still hardened with ice, how the only forests to speak of were the gray brushes of cottonwoods filling the canyons and junipers dotting the clay cliffs, and how all of it blended and washed out, faded into a low, gray sky. I drove from the south on a two-lane road through a border town called Killdeer, dropping into the valley of the Little Missouri River fifteen miles west of the confluence with the Missouri. There, on the far bank of the tributary, a sign marked an entrance to the reservation. Then the road cut through cliffs and emerged on a prairie where houses appeared—lone bunkers battered by the wind—and Mandaree Village, its homes of all the same size and shape, and a water tower standing garishly at odds with the flatness of the landscape. The road straightened. To the west rose Thunder Butte and the Killdeer Mountains, and then I turned east and glimpsed the Missouri, feeding from the north through a narrow passage and widening toward the south.
The 4 Bears Casino & Lodge is on a spit of land that forms the west bank of this passage. I arrived after dark and parked between two pickup trucks. A sign blinked the dates of a wrestling match already past, and lit the insides of cars with its fluorescence. The lodge was full, I soon found out, so I continued over the bridge into New Town, where I knocked on the door of a motel. The proprietor didn’t answer. I returned to the casino and waited in the lobby in a leather chair until the receptionist took pity on me, called an oilman who had booked a room but not shown, and learned he would not be coming for another week.
I had been sent to Fort Berthold by High Country News, a small magazine where I had just begun to work, my first job out of college. Five years earlier, in May 2006, a company from Texas had drilled an exploratory oil well in the northeast corner of the reservation, near the town of Parshall. The oilmen used a new technique called horizontal drilling: Rather than bore straight into the ground, they maneuvered their drill bit downward and then across, needling through a deep layer of shale. Into the well, they pumped a mixture of chemicals, sand, and water, the pressure of which fractured, or “fracked,” the shale. The well gushed oil, outdoing the company’s expectations, and it was not long afterward that men and women began appearing at the doors of reservation homes with offers of bonuses and royalties.
The formation the company had tapped was called the Bakken, a miles-deep shale layer extending from western North Dakota into eastern Montana and southern Saskatchewan. It contained, by conservative estimates, four billion barrels of recoverable oil, enough to supply the nation for six and a half months. Geologists had known about the Bakken for years, but it was the advent of new techniques—hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling—that made the formation accessible. In the summer of 2010, after the boom had already overtaken western North Dakota, it arrived on Fort Berthold, as well: the tearing up of sod and blasting of rock, the setting of culverts, the molding of embankments, the piling, compacting, and surfacing of roads, the laying of track, of rails and ballasts, the filling of water depots like giant backyard swimming pools, the digging of trenches and fitting of pipe, the drilling—switchboards, generators, tanks, mud pumps, masts lifted and set erect, wells bored and cased—the hauling of fresh water, of used water, the injecting of sludge into old wells, the assembling of pump jacks and lighting of flares, the building of man camps where workers slept—engineers, operators, surveyors, scaffolders, welders, mechanics, riggers, supervisors, dispatchers, janitors, electricians, pipe fitters, carpenters, journeymen, tool pushers, drillers, mud men, floor hands, derrickmen, motormen, and roustabouts.
On the heels of the Great Recession and the highest national unemployment rate in three decades, North Dakota’s population grew faster than any other state’s. Fort Berthold—located in the center of the Bakken—was no exception. By the time I arrived to write about the oil boom, the reservation population had doubled with non-Native workers. In the course of a month the summer prior to my arrival, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation had earned more than $1.5 million in taxes and royalties, while its members who owned land earned, collectively, $2,781,670. It was estimated the reservation contained a third of the oil in North Dakota, more than most nations in the world. In a matter of five years, one billion dollars would land in tribal coffers, placing it among the wealthiest tribes in the United States.
During my first days on Fort Berthold, I spent a lot of time at the casino. It had been built in the early nineties not long after the U.S. Congress passed a law allowing gaming on reservations nationwide in a rare effort to foster economic development among tribes whose poverty seemed intractable. You could visit almost any reservation in the country and find a casino of the same vintage and similar design. The 4 Bears had two entrances—one that led to the game room, a dim, smoky parlor crammed with slot machines, poker tables, a dance floor, and a small bar; and the second into the lobby, a round room with a vaulted ceiling, sparsely furnished with pinball machines and the leather chair where I had waited that first night. When I had nowhere else to be, I often sat in the leather chair and observed the goings-on of the lobby. It did not take me long to realize the casino was at the center of a constellation of transactions. I saw fishermen come to fish the lake; a woman looking for a job; elders cracking crab legs at the casino buffet—one of two restaurants on the reservation that served breakfast, lunch, and dinner; and a steady flow of men in suits. One morning, I watched a tour bus disgorge a hundred elderly passengers and learned they had come from a senior center in Bismarck. They were among the few patrons I saw come solely for the slots. The other gamblers were oil workers and tribal members, many of whom lived in the lodge. I would learn that around four hundred tribal families had inadequate or no housing—a number that had risen as workers competed for shelter—and for all its capitalist ambition, the casino was in certain ways an equalizer of wealth. A portion of its revenue went back to the tribe, helping to pay for salaries and hou
ses and medical bills, among other reservation services.
It was at the casino that I began to note signs of the oil boom: “No vacancies for 5 weeks,” I wrote, and, “Oil worker surprised at $400/mo camping fee, says it was 300 only last month.” Beyond the casino, the most obvious sign was the number of trucks. All day and night, semis groaned on the bridge over the lake, hauling fresh water to drilling sites, used water to evaporation pits, oil to storage facilities, and modular homes, tanks, pipe, and concrete among all the other materials that assembled into a boom. One day, in the course of twenty-four hours, deputies stationed at an intersection north of New Town counted twenty-nine thousand vehicles headed for the reservation, 60 percent of them large trucks. Roads had been crushed under the weight of these trucks, pounded back to dirt, and new gravel tracks had sprouted all over, sending up plumes of red scoria dust in the wakes of speeding semis. There were frequent accidents. Months earlier, an oil hauler had strayed into oncoming traffic and killed a family of four. On the way from Mandaree to New Town, roadside ditches were littered with deer carcasses and plastic flowers memorializing the dead. One morning, I dropped by the health clinic, where I was told that ambulances were in short supply and, due to the traffic, trauma victims had died before paramedics could reach them. I continued on to the fitness center, in a building in New Town called Northern Lights, where I spoke to a receptionist who said she often caught oilmen walking on treadmills in their mud-caked work boots.
I began to feel like a doctor recording the early symptoms of an illness—the oil boom, like an illness, was all anyone wanted to talk about. Yet I also detected in my conversations with tribal members a sense of awe that their fortune had so suddenly reversed. The boom had just begun. Fewer than a hundred wells had been drilled on Fort Berthold; companies were waiting on permits to drill hundreds more. While I waited in a lobby to meet with a tribal official one day, I came across a brochure titled MANDAN HIDATSA ARIKARA: KEEPERS OF THE BAKKEN, and in smaller lettering, SOVEREIGNTY BY THE BARREL. It opened to a letter from the chairman, Tex Hall:
We are a sovereign nation, recognized by treaty with the government of the United States. Our sovereignty can be maximized by the number of barrels of oil taken from our Mother Earth. We call it sovereignty by the barrel. The potential is here to obtain financial independence for our nation, education for our youth, sustenance for our elders, maintenance of our culture, and above all to set the people of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation on the road to independence.
* * *
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OVER THE LAST two centuries, the sovereignty of tribes—that is, tribes’ inherent authority to govern their own territories and affairs—has been upheld by treaties, courts, and the U.S. Constitution amid avid efforts to dismantle it. So it seemed a reversal of policy when, in 1934, Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act, halting the division of Indian land into allotments and the sale of land to white homesteaders. In the fifty years prior, tribes nationwide had lost two-thirds of their land base. The IRA allowed tribes to form governments to replace the traditional institutions colonization had suppressed, and in 1936, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara elected a council and adopted a constitution. Prior to the IRA, the three tribes had relied on a ten-member body to consult traditional leaders and lobby federal agencies, but the IRA restored more of the tribes’ authority. The new council set about acquiring land it had lost and regulating use of its pastures, which the Bureau of Indian Affairs had long allowed ranchers to overgraze. Later acts of Congress permitted tribes to charter companies and manage schools, courts, police departments, and social services, and while federal agencies retained some major responsibilities, such as criminal jurisdiction and management of the Indian Health Service, the tribe largely became the entity on which its citizens depended, around which most aspects of reservation life revolved.
On the morning I was to interview the chairman, Tex Hall, I arrived at the tribal headquarters, a single-story brick building next to the 4 Bears Casino & Lodge, and found it empty. Nearly everyone, including the chairman, had gone to a funeral.
I waited in a lobby beside a glass case containing portraits of Hall. In all of them, he was wearing either a warbonnet or a cowboy hat. He had shiny cheeks, a long, firm nose, and thick, dark eyebrows shaped like upside-down birds. “Isn’t he handsome?” his press secretary plied when she saw me studying the photographs. The last journalist to write about Hall had described him as possessing “a John Wayne swagger” and “a Clint Eastwood squint,” she said.
Our appointment had been for eleven o’clock. At noon, the secretary led me into an office where I was greeted by a tall man with a ponytail and a crushing handshake. He offered me a seat beside his desk and then leaned back in his own chair as if we were about to watch a football game.
I had known before I met Hall that he was among the most influential politicians in Indian Country. He was fifty-four years old, born to cattle ranchers in Mandaree. When his segment elected him to the council in 1996, he had been a superintendent of the Mandaree schools. Hall quickly ascended political ranks, becoming chairman in 1998 and, three years later, president of the National Congress of American Indians, an assembly of tribes that lobbies federal agencies. Hall was a fixture at congressional hearings. He befriended the Clintons and members of Congress and often appeared at White House parties in his warbonnet or cowboy hat. It was rumored he would run for governor, but in November 2010, he was elected to his third term as chairman. In the five months since, it had become clear this term would be unlike any other he had served. Presiding over a cache of minerals worth billions of dollars, Hall’s influence in Washington, D.C., had grown. Recently, he had testified before a Senate committee, requesting that it force the Interior Department to speed the approval of drilling permits. “This boom should create a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for our tribe,” Hall told me. “The curse of it is that we have a very aggressive industry that wants the oil, and the price is right now, and they don’t like the bureaucratic red tape.”
The “red tape” Hall spoke of was the process through which companies gained access to Indian land. The allotment era had made a mess of this land—divided it into a checkerboard of plots, each with its own kind of ownership. There was “allotted land” that belonged to individual Indian landowners but that the federal government managed in trust; “tribal land,” which the tribe had reacquired after losing it to allotment, but which the government also managed in trust; and “fee land,” held privately and taxed by the state, which had been sold a century earlier to white homesteaders. To drill on fee land, companies approached landowners directly, offering an up-front payment—the “bonus”—and a percentage of their profits to be paid later in royalties. But on “trust land” the process was more complicated. Companies could approach Indian landowners directly with offers, but they had to deal with four federal agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which approved leases, and the Bureau of Land Management, which issued drilling permits. The process, Hall said, was too cumbersome. The BLM had a backlog of applications to drill, and some companies had been waiting on permits for months. The price of oil was the highest it had been in decades. Hall worried that if the permits were not granted soon, the boom would pass the tribe over.
I glanced around his office. It was bright, lit by a window and decorated with old photographs. In one of the photographs, fourteen men in suits gathered around a desk where a white man was signing a document. Beside him stood a Native American man who had taken off his glasses and was weeping into his hand.
I would learn that the photograph had been taken on May 20, 1948; that the white man was J. A. Krug, the secretary of the interior at the time; that the weeping man was George Gillette, chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes; and that the document was the contract with which the tribe relinquished the bottomlands of the Missouri after the United States had claimed them by eminent domain for the construct
ion of the Garrison Dam. This was after the tribe had fought the proposal for years. In 1945, four councilmen had met with the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs to present a resolution:
Whereas construction of the proposed Garrison Dam…would inundate 200,000 acres of the best irrigable land of our reservation; and Whereas this will force approximately 200 families to move from their permanent homes…; Whereas it will flood or cause them to be useless, all Government buildings and improvements at Elbowoods, Nishu, Shell Creek, Independence, Beaver Creek, Lucky Mound, Charging Eagle, and Red Butte, including the hospital, school buildings, total value over $1,000,000…; and Whereas cause to be either cut and removed all timber now growing along the bottoms, thus destroying natural shelter for the cattle and taking away the continual fuel supply of our people, and source of income from sale of timber, fence post, lumber, and firewood…; Whereas the cemeteries of our forefathers will be destroyed, and with it all our memories and kind remembrances of these burial places that have been held sacred for all; and Whereas this large body of water will separate the reservation…; and Whereas the various treaties and Executive orders have given the people of this reservation promise of a perpetual use of this land…; Whereas we have permanently located on these lands, and our forefathers also have lived on these grounds, and it is the hopes and plans to have our children and their children to occupy this land continuously forever; and money or exchange for other land will not compensate us for the land, landmarks, and sentimental attachments…: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the tribal business council…That we oppose the present plan of constructing a dam at Garrison, or any other plan which will destroy the flood areas of the Missouri Valley.
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