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

by Nies, Judith

  I had hoped it was Vicki, but alas, when the car pulled up, it carried two white men who were on their way to a big water conference in Phoenix. They were stopping for gas. As they filled their gas tank, they asked what I was doing there. By then it was late, and Blair would soon be closing the trading post. They suggested I follow them out to the highway, after I described the nine miles of savage ruts that awaited them on the road out to Route 264. They had come from the north on the Peabody coal-access road, unpaved but well kept up. Arthur Jokela and his friend Howard Wright were professors at the Southern California Institute for Natural Resources. (Weeks later, when I finally talked to Vicki by phone, I learned she came on Sunday, a day later. We had gotten the days mixed up.)

  We set out in our little two-car caravan, but less than a mile down the road, my vehicle started making such alarming noises I thought I had a flat tire. I slowed down, and their car soon disappeared in a cloud of dust. I was standing in the dust examining my tires when they came back. We agreed that the tires had plenty of air. Soon, in order to examine the rear tire wells, we had emptied the trunk and filled the road with my luggage and all the groceries I had planned to bring to the Blackgoat camp.

  “You might have a bent axle,” said Arthur after a test drive of a hundred yards. “Or maybe the shock absorbers are gone. Highway cars don’t have a high-enough undercarriage for these roads. That’s why the Indians drive those pickup trucks, Indian Cadillacs they call them. But if the axle were really broken, you wouldn’t be able to move.”

  After an inconclusive diagnosis, Arthur offered to drive my car as far as Second Mesa, where the Hopi had a visitors center, telephone, motel, and restaurant. Howard would follow in their car. As we came out on Route 264 and turned east, the car groaning and clanking, my breath stopped at the sight of the vast desert spread out below us. We were perched at least six hundred feet above the desert floor, at the actual knife-edge of Black Mesa, where long peninsulas of rock cliffs jutted out into the desert. As the road wound along the mesa edges, I tried not to think about what an unstable axle could mean at the edge of such cliffs.

  Over dinner in the café, we discussed my car (call Phoenix and tell the rental agency to bring another one and tell them the car hadn’t been checked out when they gave it to you), their water conference (more than a thousand scientists, academics, and government officials coming from all over the country were convening to discuss the ongoing drought and declining water resources of the Southwest), and the coal-slurry pipeline. I asked them about the transmission lines and the electricity, all the questions I didn’t dare ask Blair. They asked me about the coal-slurry pipeline. Howard explained that they had driven down from Nevada because they wanted to see the Mohave plant and the coal-slurry pipeline, but they didn’t see much of it. I explained that it was an eighteen-inch pipe that was not visible from the road. The Black Mesa coal-slurry pipeline was famous among water engineers for being the most egregious use of water in the water-starved West.

  They left for Phoenix, and I learned I would be sleeping in my car because all the rooms in the Hopi motel were full. The members of the board of the Hopi Foundation were meeting that weekend and had occupied all the rooms. As a result, I awoke the minute the sun came up and saw the amazing sight of the desert come alive as sunlight washed over the desert floor. An hour later I was in line at the restaurant when I saw the woman in front of me sign her credit card slip with a name I recognized. “Are you Martha Blue, Roberta Blackgoat’s lawyer?” I asked. From the serendipity of that meeting came a twenty-plus-year correspondence. In the parking lot, I introduced myself to former tribal chairman Abbott Sekaquaptewa, who was directing Hopi Foundation board members into vans for a trip to the destroyed Hopi village of Atawovi. Atawovi was the first Hopi town that Spanish explorers from Coronado’s expedition entered and where Spanish missionaries later succeeded in building a church. Other Hopi villages were so angered by the persistent foreign presence that in 1700 they banded together, destroyed the village, killed most of the men, and distributed the women and children among the other Hopi villages. Atawovi became an archaeological ruin on Antelope Mesa, closed to visitors except by permit or special tour.

  For my purposes the telephone was useless because Roberta Blackgoat’s camp was without electricity or telephone. I couldn’t go back to the Dinnebito Trading Post because I couldn’t drive my car, and it would be early evening before the Phoenix car rental agency showed up with a replacement. So I spent the rest of the day touring the Hopi villages and visiting Hopi potters on the different mesas on a tour arranged by the Hopi Cultural Center. Without that experience, however, I would not have understood the complexity of the topography and the disparate history of the different Hopi villages. Water was the determining factor. Each Hopi village had been located near a spring. The towns might look as though they sat on rock pinnacles in the sky, but each village had its own water supply.

  LAND AND CULTURE

  Water and the mandatory sheep reduction were among the reasons that Roberta Blackgoat and Violet Ashke went to see Senator Goldwater. The relocation orders were another. The traditional Navajo refused to move. Land was more than real estate; it was the essence of Navajo culture. Goldwater, who boasted that he had “spent more time with Arizona’s Indians than any other white man,” must have known that there was no word in Navajo for relocation. Their only word was disappearance.

  On occasion Mrs. Blackgoat, acting as a spokesperson for the residents of the area, many of whom did not speak English, had explained to reporters how integral their connection was to the land and why they could not move: “Our great ancestors are buried here. Their spirits are still around. I had all my ancestors being buried around this area. It’s where our prayers and songs and offering sites are. That’s why we can’t forget and can’t move.” She told me, “If I had to move away, I don’t believe [my ancestors] would give me any prayers. I’d leave my sacred prayers back here. I’d be unknown, a strange person, and then get sick and not live long.” To move was to disappear.

  Because the land partition, the sheep reduction, and the removal of whole families into poorly built and soon foreclosed-upon tract housing in Gallop and Flagstaff had come about as a result of legislation Goldwater had introduced and supported, Mrs. Blackgoat and Mrs. Ashke were in Washington not simply to lobby or inform him but to ask him to come speak to the people at Black Mesa. They wanted him to explain the intent of his legislation. He was the only person who could give them honest answers.

  On the second day, they again sat in the office all day, and again Senator Goldwater was too busy to see them. Another legislative assistant came out. They shook their heads. Only Senator Goldwater could help them, they repeated. But they told the young man a little more about their concerns.

  Did Senator Goldwater want to find a peaceful means of settling the so-called land dispute, as he said, or did he mean to move thousands of Navajo off their lands? Who had given the coal company approval to pump massive amounts of water out of the ground for a coal-slurry pipeline? In the high desert, water was more valuable than coal. Their water came from an Ice Age aquifer, and after it was pumped out, annual rainfall would never replenish it. Blackgoat’s well was going dry. In some areas water holes for sheep had become so toxic from sulfates released during coal strip mining that sheep died after they drank. Lambs that were born in the spring were dead by fall because of the mercury and heavy metals that leached into the groundwater. What was going to happen to the water supply of Black Mesa? These were questions the senator had never answered. No one had been able to ask him. He had counted on other senators deferring to him as the senator from Arizona, the man most knowledgeable about Indian affairs. As Congressman Sam Steiger said in introducing Goldwater to the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, “He is a man that not only knows the people, he knows the land. He knows it in a way that, I think, very few non-Indians know it.”

  What I would later come to understand is that what really separates
Indians from Anglos is the idea that the universe is alive and that land is sacred. “Understanding sacred lands,” explained Vine Deloria to an audience at Harvard Law School, “is not just a warm feeling you get at a waterfall. The larger society mistakes aesthetics for religious feeling.”

  On the third day of their visit, Goldwater agreed to see Mrs. Blackgoat and Mrs. Ashke. And after their conversation, he agreed to come out to Big Mountain and meet with the Navajo. He assured them he would come by the end of the month.

  Thirteen years later, in February 1991, I asked Mrs. Blackgoat, “How did you convince him to come?” She was sitting at her loom, weaving, still on her land, having successfully resisted more than fifteen years of increasing pressures—including a government agent with papers for her to sign who had come to her hospital room after she had heart surgery—to dislodge her from it. She could not repair her buildings, two-thirds of her sheep had been taken away, but she was still there, sitting at a loom in her hogan, weaving a rug from wool that she had sheared and carded from her own sheep. She smiled at my question. I inferred that she had appealed to Goldwater’s vanity by asking him to come and stay for three days and “sleep on sheepskins” like the traditional Navajo.

  But she began weaving with so much determination that I asked her who the rug was for. The curve of her mouth turned up another quarter inch, and her eyes crinkled as though she was remembering a particularly satisfying moment. It was then that I remembered being told that Goldwater had a penchant for young Navajo women when he was at the trading post on Navajo Mountain. Mrs. Blackgoat smiled and said the rug she was weaving was for a “special friend” of Barry Goldwater’s. Whatever she said to the senator, however, he quickly rearranged his schedule and made his way to Black Mesa in July 1978.

  GOLDWATER AT BIG MOUNTAIN

  A photograph taken during Goldwater’s visit to the Big Mountain area of Black Mesa shows him in a striped polo shirt and khakis standing in the dappled shade of a sunlit brush arbor with his right hand raised in a fist and his left hand jammed into his pocket. He is listening to someone outside the frame of the photo, and his mouth is compressed and tense.

  This was not the romantic West that Goldwater so effectively evoked in speeches and at cocktail parties. These were knowledgeable Indians who were aware of how Washington worked, how legislation worked, and how deeply corporate energy interests were involved on their reservation, as well as the massive relocation of residents under way. More than two hundred Navajo had prepared for Goldwater’s visit on Black Mesa with a big spread of roasted mutton stew, fry bread, corn, and peaches, a traditional Navajo meal. (The peaches originated with the Spanish.) Accompanied by an aide and several reporters, the senator came by helicopter from Phoenix two weeks after the Navajo women’s visit. A brush arbor had been erected to provide shade and a battery-powered microphone set up to ensure that everyone could hear him, even though many of the elderly Navajo did not understand English.

  He opened his remarks by saying that he was happy to be back in Navajoland, that the Navajo were special friends and he would be happy to answer all of their questions. But almost immediately, he displayed total obliviousness about the consequences of the legislation that he had introduced and guided through multiple rounds of congressional hearings.

  “There has been no decision that says you have to move,” Goldwater insisted in answering one question about how many people would have to be relocated. He appeared unaware that the partition order of Black Mesa was already posted at the Dinnebito Trading Post and that a million-dollar barbed-wire fence looped deep into the interior, enclosing some eighteen hundred square miles. All the Navajo who lived on the wrong side of the fence were told they would have to move and had been pressured to sign relocation papers. That land would be added to the Hopi reservation. The fence, in the shape of a hitchhiker’s thumb, demarcated the newly divided reservation land.

  “No money has been appropriated for relocation,” Goldwater insisted, answering another question, even though the Indian Relocation Commission was in operation on a side street in Flagstaff and had been receiving money for more than three years.

  He said he knew of no federal orders for mandatory stock reduction. The only stock reduction he knew about, he said, was the program that had been organized by John Collier in the 1930s. So who, one woman demanded to know, had ordered the livestock trucks that showed up at dawn and kidnapped her sheep?

  The English-speaking Navajo became exasperated and angry. Percy Deal, a member of the Navajo Land Dispute Commission, said, “I can tell you right now that relocation is in progress, livestock reduction is in progress, fencing is in progress, and you are here telling us that this has not come about yet. I would suggest that you go back to the Phoenix office or your D.C. office and tell your staff to get on the ball and keep you current on information going on out here.”

  Goldwater did not like Indians who talked to him like that. But the final confrontation came when Daniel Peaches, a Navajo member of the Arizona Legislature and a Republican, implied that they knew that Goldwater had sold them out because of the energy resources. “The people here have suffered because . . . our Republican leaders from the state of Arizona failed to understand that if the land was to be divided 50–50, it was inevitable that tragedy was going to fall on the shoulders of the Navajo people.”

  When it became clear that his answers were insufficient to satisfy anyone and neither the questions nor his answers were going to change, Goldwater abruptly announced that his wife was ill and that he would have to return immediately to Phoenix.

  As he and his aides began walking toward the helicopter, Roberta Blackgoat came up alongside and reminded him of his promise to “stay three days and sleep on sheepskins.” He didn’t answer her. Instead, he turned to a reporter from the Navajo Times and said angrily, “I’ve lived here fifty years, and I probably know this land better than most of these Navajos here today do.” Then he stepped into the helicopter, which rose up over the rust-red soil dotted with piñon and juniper, and he was on his way back to Phoenix, a city that was greatly benefiting from the coal mined on the Black Mesa lands because the coal was being used to run the fourteen pumping stations that rerouted a portion of the Colorado River into Phoenix. When Goldwater made his trip to Black Mesa to answer questions about the mass removal of the Navajo, ten years of strip mining had been under way at two different sites, digging out 13 million tons of coal a year, making the Black Mesa mines the largest strip-mining operation in the United States at the time. One of the strip mines was supplying coal to the Navajo Generating Station, a 2,250-megawatt coal-fired power plant. More than half of the plant’s energy was supplying the energy to run pumping stations to lift the waters of the Colorado River up over three mountain ranges into Phoenix and Tucson. The other plant was a 1,580-megawatt plant in Laughlin, Nevada. From one point of view, 3,800 megawatts of electricity were being derived from the land seventeen miles from Roberta Blackgoat’s home.

  Sheepherding and strip mining are not compatible activities. Blasting the coal beds releases sulfates and other pollutants into the groundwater and coal dust into the air. Shallow wells for drinking become contaminated, and water holes for livestock become toxic. People living in the vicinity of the mines had unusually high rates of bronchitis, asthma, and emphysema from the particulates in the air. Additional legislation had been introduced and passed in order to implement the removal of thousands of Navajo families from these same lands. Unfortunately, no plan had been put in place to figure out where thousands of Navajo people might go, or where they should live, or how they might earn a living.

  The important thing to remember, however, was that the coal was about more than money. It was about growth—the power to pump water into Phoenix, air-conditioning to Los Angeles, and the electricity to light the giant casinos and cool thousands of new homes in Las Vegas as the population doubled and then tripled every year. Las Vegas became the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States. To
day, two-thirds of Nevada’s population lives in southern Nevada, once called a “profitless locale.” The magic of the Southwest Boom required the energy resources of Black Mesa.

  MORE THAN MONEY

  During the hearings on the Hopi-Navajo Reservation Partition, Goldwater had maintained there was no other solution except to remove the Navajo from their land. He testified: “I had hoped that this matter could have reached a mutual settlement long, long ago. But it became obvious to me back in the 1950s that this was not going to happen and I was instrumental in getting the special court set up which first heard this problem, and this court . . . ruled that the Navajo were in error, and they should get off.”

  The truth was that Goldwater did not have the imagination or the legal training to have a special court set up. Goldwater was not a lawyer. His much-lauded gift for simplifying issues was often grounded in a lack of appreciation for complexity. He was notorious for becoming quickly bored with the minutiae of legislative drafting and bill markups. He also, as he frequently reiterated, “didn’t believe in new laws.” Goldwater claimed to believe in repealing old ones.

  The legal architect who designed the special court was the Hopi’s lawyer John Boyden, a millionaire from Salt Lake City, a candidate for governor of Utah, and a Mormon bishop. Many people called the court and subsequent legislation that Boyden orchestrated a classic example of legal theft. Why do anything illegal when you can pass laws that make it legal? Several corporations saw opportunity and profit.

  Black Mesa was home to the first coal slurry–pipeline delivery system in the world, a system that could make coal as liquid and transportable as oil and revolutionize the coal industry. Bechtel designed and built the coal-slurry pipeline with the help of a federal grant. The slurry pipeline and the plant it supplied were a template for the future. In the 1980s the Reagan administration approved the creation of Bechtel China as a joint energy venture in China; Bechtel would help the Chinese develop coal-powered generating stations, slurry pipelines, and strip-mining operations. At the time the only operating prototype in the world was the Mohave plant in Nevada.