Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  UNREAL

  CITY

  ALSO BY JUDITH NIES

  Native American History: A Chronology (1996)

  Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition (2002)

  The Girl I Left Behind: A Personal History of the 1960s (2009)

  Copyright © 2014 by Judith Nies.

  Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group

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  Designed by Jack Lenzo

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nies, Judith, 1941–

  Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the fate of the West / Judith Nies.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-56858-487-4 (e-book)

  1. Southwest, New—History—20th century. 2. Las Vegas (Nev.)—History—20th century. 3. Coal mines and mining—Southwest, New—Political aspects. 4. Black Mesa (Navajo County and Apache County, Ariz.)—History—20th century. 5. Indians of North America—Arizona—Black Mesa (Navajo County and Apache County)—Social conditions—20th century. 6. Coal mines and mining—Southwest, New—History—20th century. I. Title.

  F787.N54 2014

  979.3’135—dc23

  2013048336

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory of Roberta Blackgoat (1916–2002)

  This extreme reliance on federal money, so seemingly at odds

  with the emphasis on unfettered individualism that constitutes

  the local core belief, was a pattern set early on.

  —Joan Didion, Where I Was From

  In 1492 the natives discovered they were Indians;

  They discovered they lived in America;

  They discovered they were naked;

  They discovered there was sin.

  —Eduardo Galeano, Children of the Days

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Phoenix, 1982: A Pattern Set Early On

  PART I

  1. Everyone Comes for the Money

  2. Goldwater and the Desert Inn

  3. The Ladies from Black Mesa

  PART II

  4. Founding Myths: Laughlin, Nevada

  5. Gilded Age Land Grabs

  6. The Indian Lawyer and a Brief History of Coal

  7. The Mormon West

  8. Legal Theft

  PART III

  9. Learning from Las Vegas

  10. Chinatown 2

  11. The Bechtel Family Business

  12. Roberta Blackgoat’s World

  Epilogue: Who Will Pay? Gambling on the Future

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  PHOENIX, 1982: A PATTERN SET EARLY ON

  In 1982 Robert Redford starred in a modern cowboy western called The Electric Horseman. Set in Las Vegas in the early 1980s, the story was about a former national rodeo champion—and current alcoholic—who made his living pitching cereal as a “breakfast of champions” for a giant American food conglomerate. The corporation merchandised his former glory by sending him out into rodeo arenas mounted on a beautiful horse, both cowboy and horse trimmed in glowing electric lights. Often too drunk to remain upright on his horse, the electric horseman in the saddle was frequently a cowboy double substituted by the corporation.

  Then, in one existential moment in a Las Vegas ballroom, the cowboy (Redford) decided he had been a commodity long enough and rode the horse off the stage, out through the endless corridors of casino slot machines, down the Las Vegas Strip, and into the magnificent wilderness of Nevada’s purple mountains. The movie had all the elegiac themes of the contemporary American West: soulless corporations, feckless media in the character of Jane Fonda as a television reporter, the symbolic lone cowboy striking out on his own, and the transformative power of western spaces. The movie was a huge success.

  About the same time the film was in the theaters, a man named Leon Berger—not a household name—had his own existential moment. As director of the Indian Relocation Commission located on East Birch Street in Flagstaff, Arizona, he resigned from his job with a public statement of shocking clarity: he called the congressionally mandated relocation of ten thousand Navajo people the equivalent of “American genocide.” Berger, who had once worked for Senator Barry Goldwater, was an unlikely rebel.

  Thousands of Navajo families were being expelled from a 4,000-square-mile reservation that was jointly occupied by the Navajo and Hopi Indians. Located some 150 miles northeast of Flagstaff and ending some 25 miles before Monument Valley, the entire reservation was known legally as the Executive Order Reservation of 1882 and geographically as Black Mesa. In 1974 Congress passed a poorly conceived bill that divided the surface of the Executive Order Reservation on a fifty-fifty basis between the two tribes. As a practical matter, only a handful of Hopi, who lived clustered in villages at the rocky edge, were affected, but thousands of Navajo families, who lived in sheepherding camps spread out in the interior, had to be moved. Black Mesa was so isolated it was not mapped in the grid system of the US Geological Survey until late in the twentieth century.

  Berger had been handpicked to direct the commission. But as the man charged with removing thousands of Navajo families from the newly delineated Hopi lands, he was no longer able to ignore the realities of an impossible job. For one thing, no one had ever accurately counted the number of Navajo to be moved; for another, no planning had been done to buy alternative land or provide social services or build housing to relocate them; and finally, the Navajo relocation marked the first time in a hundred years that a boundary issue between two tribes was being settled by removing uncounted thousands of the opposing tribe. Why hadn’t the usual arrangement of alternative public lands and a financial settlement been worked out as compensation? This last was a question no one seemed able to answer, especially since that was the solution already in motion to compensate the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine who otherwise might have requested the removal of many prominent Boston and Philadelphia families from their ocean-front property on the Maine coast.

  Berger’s incendiary resignation brought unwanted publicity to certain complex details that had theretofore remained invisible. As it turned out, those same disputed Navajo-Hopi lands contained the largest untouched coal deposit in the country. Black Mesa was made of coal. Mapped and measured by the Arizona Bureau of Mines, the Black Mesa Coal Field lay entirely beneath the Hopi-Navajo lands and held more than 21 billion tons of valuable low-sulfur coal. (“The Black Mesa Field,” said the Keystone Coal Industry Manual, “is totally within the jurisdiction of the Navajo and Hopi Indian tribes.”) Two huge strip-mining sites on the reservation lands were already in operation, feeding coal to two massive power plants that ran air-conditioners in Los Angele
s, pumped water from the Colorado River into Phoenix, and illuminated dazzling neon signs in Las Vegas. One plant, called the Mohave, was ninety miles south of Las Vegas. Another, called the Navajo Generating Station, was one of the largest generating stations in the country and was located in Page on the Navajo reservation at the Arizona-Utah border. It had little to do with the Navajo because the tribal government had no ownership. More than half of Navajo families did not have electricity.

  More nuanced interpretations of the relocation began to emerge on a daily basis. But before the details behind Berger’s remarkable announcement could gain media traction, another event distracted public attention. The Electric Horseman himself was coming to Phoenix.

  The iconic image of an astonishingly handsome Robert Redford on the party invitation for a celebration of Hopi arts and culture was from The Electric Horseman, a modern cowboy in a dusty denim jacket, his hand raised to the brim of his cowboy hat, squinting off to a distant horizon. The invitation seemed both wonderfully glamorous and a window into the New West. “For the good purpose we will gather,” promised the invitation in both Hopi and English. The celebration, sponsored by an Indian education group called Futures for Children, included a press conference at the Valley National Bank Building; an exhibit of Native American–themed paintings, photographs, and sculpture at the Gallery Wall in Scottsdale; and a dinner at the Marriott Mountain Shadows Hotel.

  My invitation came from a photographer friend, Susanne Page, whose book about the Hopi was to be launched as part of the celebration. We had been neighbors in Washington, DC, when I was working as a speechwriter in Congress, and in 1973 I got to know her more when a graduate school friend, Steve Hirst, came to Washington to lobby with the Havasupai Indians. At that point, I knew little about Indian history, but one of the congressmen I worked for was on the Interior Committee, formerly known as the Committee on Public Lands. The Havasupai lived in the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the staggeringly beautiful Havasu Canyon, but had originally lived, hunted, and grazed livestock on the plateau and farmed the side canyon only in the summer months. In 1881 the government surveyor gave their plateau lands to white settlers and confined them to a reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. (There are as many terms to describe Indian lands as the Inuit have for snow—allotment, leasehold, trust title, treaty, checkerboard—so I am giving only the general outlines of the Havasupai claim.) They were lobbying for a bill that would redefine their reservation back to the 1881 lands. Their strongest opponent was the national Sierra Club, whose leaders distorted the Indians’ position and maintained that the Havasupai reservation must be included as part of the Grand Canyon National Park. I put Steve in touch with Susanne Page, who had just published a much-praised book of photography about the Navajo and was chair of the Sierra Club’s national committee on Native American issues. Susanne’s committee passed a resolution supporting the Havasupai bill, opposing the national directors of the Sierra Club. I called an editor at the Washington Post who was sufficiently interested in the split in the Sierra Club’s position that the paper ran an editorial in favor of the Havasupai and questioning the national Sierra Club.

  By 1982 I had just revisited some of this story with Steve and his wife, Lois, because in August I had made a trip down into Havasu Canyon to visit. By then they had lived on the Havasupai reservation for more than a decade, and Steve had written a book about the Havasupai, which included their remarkable perseverance over four generations in pushing for the return of their original lands. (By air the village of Supai is only 35 miles from Grand Canyon Village; by car it is roughly 128 miles, the last 8 of which are by foot or horseback down an old streambed into the canyon.) After the hike in, I understood what it had meant for their leaders to negotiate the marble halls of Congress. We laughed about the Sierra Club’s fear of the tribe’s commercializing the Grand Canyon because the morning I had been sitting by the natural swimming pool at the bottom of Havasu Falls, a helicopter from Las Vegas had choppered in, depositing an Australian film director and two actresses/hookers.

  Thus, I saw this invitation for the Hopi celebration as being in the same spirit of restitution for past wrongs. I thought an event that recognized the value of Native Americans’ voices and cultural achievements was both historically enlightened and forward thinking. Because Hollywood films have claimed such a large space in the American imagination and have long presented a pseudohistory of the American West—a simple morality tale of good (white cowboys, cavalry, settlers, homesteaders, ranchers) versus bad (dark Indians)—I thought the use of a Hollywood movie star to present a counternarrative was both interesting and newsworthy. I also thought it would be fun to meet Robert Redford.

  A week before Christmas in 1982, I flew to Phoenix from Boston with a press credential from the Atlantic Monthly. I had proposed a short article along the lines of “New Voices from the New West,” and editor Mike Curtis gave me a letter. In truth, I couldn’t have been more misinformed.

  On December 16, 1982, a well-tailored and glamorous Robert Redford arrived at the Phoenix Press Club to launch a three-day celebration of Hopi arts and culture. Accompanied by the chairman of the Hopi Tribal Council and a retinue of well-known Native American artists such as Hopi Dan Namingha, photographers, authors, publishing executives, and filmmakers, he told the crush of reporters on the twenty-first floor of the Valley National Bank Building how “at home” he felt on the Hopi mesas. Noting the national historical significance of the Hopi villages, he pointed out that Old Oraibi, a pueblo village on the tip of the rocky peninsula called Third Mesa on the road between Tuba City and Gallup, was the oldest continually inhabited settlement in the United States. He also said, rightly, that archaeological evidence dated back to 1140. Historical documents recorded by a priest in the conquistador Coronado’s exploring party described entering a Hopi village in 1540.

  The only Navajo associated with the event were a small group of protesters who clustered outside the entrance to the Valley National Bank, twenty floors below the press club, handing out flyers to anyone who would take them. The single fact sheet thrust into my hand reproduced excerpts from Leon Berger’s resignation statement and described some of the anomalies that led to congressional passage of the Hopi Land Settlement Act in 1974, a bill that I actually remembered because I had been working in Congress when the bill was making its way through committee hearings.

  The tone of the press conference was not oriented to probing questions because the entire press corps jumped to its collective feet in a standing ovation the minute the movie star entered the room. Only one lone reporter from a small Arizona newspaper asked Redford how he felt about supporting a relocation project that affected thousands of Navajo families and was characterized as “a tragedy of genocide and injustice.” The reporter was booed before he even finished the question.

  Redford was unfazed. He stepped back and gestured to Abbott Sekaquaptewa, the Hopi Tribal Council chairman, to take the microphone. Leaning on two canes, the result of severe arthritis that he had had since he was a teenager, the tribal chairman was articulate and passionate in his defense of the Hopi cause in pressing for return of lost ancestral lands, particularly the 1882 Executive Order Reservation that had been allocated to the Hopi, but invaded by the Navajo. Sekaquaptewa, who had been tribal chairman off and on since 1962, and who was known among congressional staffers for his dramatic testimony, explained that for more than a century, Hopi lands had been encircled by the Navajo reservation until the Hopi reservation had been reduced to a small island in the midst of the “mighty Navajo.” He described the ten-year lawsuit between the two tribes and said the Hopi won because of steady encroachment by the Navajo on land that did not belong to them. He did not employ the dramatic style he had used during congressional hearings when a public relations firm was writing his testimony, but he was effective. “This was a centuries-old land dispute,” he masterfully concluded. “This case went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Hopi won. The law is the law. The
question is, do you believe in enforcing the law or not?”

  After that, there were no further questions about the Navajo relocation project. Or about who wanted the coal that lay under the lands from which the Navajo were being removed. Or how the coal was being used to bring water and electricity to the parched desert cities of the Southwest. Or about where the profits from these massive strip mines were going. Anyone witnessing the scene could be excused for not delving more deeply into whether there was far more complexity to this story than a boundary issue between two fractious Indian tribes. The basic story line told in every mainstream newspaper from Boston to Los Angeles was that these two tribes were the Arabs and Israelis of the American western desert.

  It was at this point that I had my first nagging doubts. I wondered how it could have been a centuries-old dispute when a century earlier, the Navajo, who then numbered around eight thousand people and had mostly lived in New Mexico, were still recovering from having been rounded up by Kit Carson and the US Army and confined in a miserable labor camp at the New Mexico–Texas border for five years. When they were finally released in 1868, their former lands had been taken over by white settlers or miners, and they were sent to a small reservation at the Arizona–New Mexico border, which even at the time was recognized as inadequate. How could a “centuries-old” dispute have developed in the intervening twelve years? Then while driving to the gallery in Scottsdale, I had another question: How could the Hopi sue the Navajo? There was no court in the American legal system authorized to hear such a case. That’s why Indian peoples were always coming to Washington to petition Congress. Only Congress had authority over the status and boundaries of Indian lands. A congressional colleague, a Stockbridge Indian from Wisconsin, introduced me to the idea of legal theft when it came to Indian lands. Always ask: How did the law get to be the law? Why do anything illegal, he proposed, if you have the power to rewrite the laws?