by Nies, Judith
Meanwhile, at the Plaza the pace of the game speeds up. The average bet of the man in the chartreuse shirt is now $200 a hand. If he wins, he doubles his bets. The novice sitting beside him continues to bet the table minimum, $5, win or lose. In the next few hands the chartreuse man wins more than $1,000, an interval of time that takes no more than five minutes, maybe less. No one keeps track of time. There are no clocks and no windows in Las Vegas casinos. It is supposed to be a place of timelessness. Like church.
In the background the floor manager begins talking with the pit boss and watching the table. Brenda deals more quickly now. No more chatting or charming the customers. The stack of chips in front of the chartreuse man keeps growing. He is smiling, but more focused and concentrating on the cards being dealt. The most interesting thing about his play is its consistency. When he lost, and he did, he had a small bet on the table; when he won, he always had a large bet on the table. Was it possible the chartreuse man was counting cards?
Counting is a system that helps a player win in blackjack. In its simplest form, card counting involves keeping a running count of low-value and high-value cards. The player gives low cards (2 through 6) a value of plus 1, high cards (10 through king plus the ace) minus 1, and assigns 7s, 8s, and 9s a zero. Counting has been the subject of the movie Bringing Down the House and an article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. Blackjack is the one game where the player has the best odds against the house. It requires a certain mathematical ability and an understanding of probabilities.
The water situation in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles is two-edged. No one wants to be alarmist because it slows growth and keeps the tourists and their dollars away. On the other hand, there is cause for alarm. Thirty million people are dependent on the waters of the Colorado River. And if the Colorado River keeps shrinking, there will soon be need for federal money, a lot of federal money. Pat Mulroy, Las Vegas’s water manager, rushed to Washington in September 2013 when the Bureau of Reclamation announced that 750,000 acre-feet less would be released into Lake Mead in 2013 and 2014. That could cause another 25-foot drop in the level of Lake Mead. She met with Harry Reid to talk about the possibility of having the president declare southern Nevada a disaster area in order to get federal disaster aid. She compared the effects of the southwestern drought to Hurricane Sandy. Then she backpedaled. The real underlying question is how to finance the Great Basin Pumping Scheme—a network of wells, pumps, and pipelines that will run for 250 miles or more from northern Nevada’s mountain valleys into Las Vegas. How does a low-tax, no-tax state function when faced with a project that requires significant taxpayer-generated revenue? Who will pay?
One of the benefits of hiring a company like Bechtel is that not only does it have experience in building pipeline projects all over the globe, but it also has an unparalleled political and government relations department that knows how to work congressional committees and federal agencies. At the same time, other states might raise objections because Nevada does have two large industries—mining and gambling—that could pay significantly more in taxes. The mining industry has a tax rate that has been unchanged since 1863 and incorporated into the Nevada state constitution. Mining has a tax rate of 5 percent (of net). The mining industry likes to present mining as a thing of the past, all scavenger mines and ghost towns (a lot of photo exhibits of mining ghost towns), but mining is still a thriving industry. Twenty-five percent of the world’s gold supply, for example, comes out of Nevada mines.
The gambling industry in Nevada has the lowest tax rate in the country, a maximum of 6.75 percent. In the rest of the country, the average gambling tax rate is 16 percent. According to the American Gaming Association, in Ohio the rate is 33 percent, in Illinois it runs from 15 to 50 percent, and in Massachusetts it will be 25 percent. (Racetracks and slots and table games are frequently taxed at different rates.) During the recent economic downturn and flat gaming revenues, the Nevada governor (the same one sued for the parking-garage assault) called for a 14 percent reduction in the state education budget. From kindergarten to university, teachers were laid off, budgets slashed, and state workers furloughed. No mention of adjusting the tax rates or auditing the net proceeds from mining companies.
Although Las Vegas is well known for having the highest suicide rates in the country, in 2013 its mental health policies became the subject of national headlines when San Francisco authorities noticed a sharp increase in its homeless population. Through what was called “Greyhound therapy,” it seemed that Las Vegas mental health patients were being “treated” by putting them on a Greyhound bus with a bag lunch, a day’s supply of medication, and a one-way ticket to San Francisco, where they joined the ranks of that city’s homeless. San Francisco estimated it received at least fifteen hundred people from Las Vegas and is now suing the State of Nevada. Other cities such as Boise, Idaho, and Denver, Colorado, also realized that they too were recipients of Las Vegas’s export of its homeless population.
The difficulty in Pat Mulroy’s comparing the long-term drought of Nevada as a disaster that would warrant federal funding similar to the devastating effects of Hurricane Sandy on the East Coast is that for at least thirty years the process of desertification in the Southwest has been well documented, and reported, and increasing. Although a 1983 US government report confirmed that desertification in the Southwest is moving faster than that of Africa, pumping out groundwater and burning coal have only increased.
Even a player with a bad hand can win at blackjack. The chartreuse man was winning with hands totaling fourteen or even thirteen because Brenda’s hand went over twenty-one. But it takes concentration, rationality, and a certain kind of mathematical memory to keep track of dealt cards. The gambling brain tends to magical thinking. The pit boss continued to watch the table. The chartreuse man had winnings far beyond anyone else, pillars of $100 chips stacked up in front of him. Soon Brenda was stuffing her tips into a table slot (all the dealers pool their tips) and packing up her chips, and a new dealer slipped into her seat. The new dealer had a face of stone, no chatter, and no charm. Before she started dealing, she removed all the old cards from the shoe and inserted six new decks. The chartreuse man stopped winning. With new cards there was no history. There was nothing for the chartreuse man to count. The odds returned to the house. Soon he too packed up his chips and left the table with what looked to be more than $5,000 in winnings. That’s not much money in Las Vegas, but the house was going to make sure he didn’t win any more.
As a practical matter, for decades the entire urban Southwest has been living off federal money for subsidized water. As Wallace Stegner observed, “The West has . . . become an empire and gotten the East to pay most of the bills.” On Black Mesa we, as a society, are engaged in destroying some of our oldest sustainable Native American cultures so that people in Phoenix and Las Vegas can water their hundreds of golf courses, swim in swimming pools, and pretend they live in a desert miracle. The oligarchs who control decision making in Las Vegas may have realized that the long-term future of desert living is in doubt, which may be why Steve Wynn (Wynn Resorts) is trying to build a new huge, but “tasteful,” casino in the brownfield marshes of Everett, about eight miles from my home in Massachusetts. That casino also means a new well-funded lobby in state politics.
When Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour wrote their book Learning from Las Vegas, they were not writing about Las Vegas per se, but writing about symbolism in architecture. They were celebrating populist building design—like the fried-chicken stand in the shape of a chicken or the Las Vegas marriage chapel that looked like a wedding cake. They saw Las Vegas as a series of symbols and signs. Forty-five years later you can still interpret Las Vegas as “a series of signs.” Those signs are about excess, about diversion, about scale. You see a city designed around odds and probabilities—a place where Big Bets are in play.
Meyer Lansky used to say there was no such thing as a lucky gambler. The only winne
r was the house. In this case, the house is nature. We’re in the climate casino now. Who will win? Who will pay?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I entered the labyrinth of this story in 1973 when I was still a speechwriter in the US Congress and realized I was uninformed about a version of American history that allowed for an accurate inclusion of Native American events. Belatedly I recognized it also required an education in energy economics, coal mining technologies, Indian law, congressional procedures in the Committee on Public Lands, water planning, population growth, real estate development, the gambling industry, Mormon religion, the railroads, mining, the politics of Indian Affairs, and the political dynamics of the 1960s and 70s that began shifting political power to the urban West. Most important it required placing the events of Native America in mainstream politics and history. Many people helped guide me through these areas of re-education. I take all responsibility for errors.
The idea of a book began with an article published in Orion magazine in 1998. I am grateful to Orion editors Emily Hiestand and H. Emerson (Chip) Blake who supported a point of view about Black Mesa that was at odds with a narrative storyline that had prevailed in the nation’s press for more than twenty years. They championed the article (“The Black Mesa Syndrome: Indian Lands, Black Gold”) on the web and nominated it for the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, for which it became a finalist. Emily Hiestand has continued to act as a friend and valued consultant. During a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard’s Institute of Advanced Study in 1992 and ’93 I was fortunate to meet many Native American students in Harvard’s Native American program and particular thanks go to Dr. Gabrielle Tayac and Professor Phyllis Fast, for their friendship, humor, and efforts to educate me in the complexities of current Native American policy and politics. Ever since I met Martha Blue “by accident” in the Hopi museum on Second Mesa in 1990, she has sent me clippings, answered questions, and corrected historical inaccuracies over the twenty-five years that I kept following Roberta Blackgoat’s remarkable life and fascinating ability to challenge the power of the U.S. government and several huge corporations. The Blackgoat daughters, Vicki and Sheila, helped to keep the connection.
Editor Carl Bromley at Nation Books is that rare editor who actually edits and who gave me chapter-by-chapter notes, tactfully suggesting that a complete revision of my original draft would result in a much stronger book. He was right about both and I am deeply grateful for his superb guidance and editorial insights. Any remaining flaws of substance and style are entirely my own. My agent Don Fehr played a critical role at key junctures and I am indebted to his support and sense of humor.
I owe much to the marketing and production staff at Nation Books with particular thanks to assistant editor Daniel LoPreto for his initiative in marketing; to Sandra Beris, and Annette Wenda for their impressive skills in scheduling, production, and copyediting; and to Alex Christopher for her innovative ideas for promotion.
Books like this require access to a large library system and I am grateful to the librarians at the Library of Congress, Tozzer Library at Harvard University, Brigham Young University, State University of Arizona at Tempe, Lied Library at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Fellowships, grants and residencies were crucial to giving me time from my various jobs to travel, do research, or work on the manuscript. I am extremely grateful to the MacDowell Artists Colony, the Yaddo Corporation, the Blue Mountain Center, Mesa Refuge, and the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation. The unique Black Mountain Institute Fellowship combined both a stipend and time at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress and the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The fellowship was crucial to finally pulling all the pieces together.
Over the years many people in many ways have assisted me by explaining complex events, sharing their own experience, writing letters of recommendation, answering questions, requesting privileged information: John Peters, former commissioner of Indian Affairs for Massachusetts, Professor Karl Teeter, Florence Ladd, Inés Talamantez, Debra Spark, Elizabeth Graver, Jane Holtz Kay, Elise Boulding, and staff members in Senators Edward Kennedy and John Kerry’s offices. Among the people I interviewed over a span of two decades special thanks to the late Senator George McGovern, Audrey Dowling and Jean Page who described Las Vegas in the 1930s and what it was like to be school teachers in 1933 during the construction of Hoover Dam. Maria Mangini spent hours explaining details of her experience on Black Mesa, Anita Parlow, Laton McCartney, Tim Giago, Kit Owens at the Four Corners Power Plant, Lowell Hinkins at the Black Mesa Pipeline, Paula Ellis at the Salt River Project, Manley Begay, Vine DeLoria, Vicki Blackgoat, Sheila Keith, Howard Wright, Arthur Jokela, George Hardeen, Bella Abzug as head of the Women’s Environmental and Development Organization (WEDO). Special thanks to Dorothy Cole, who has been a one woman clipping service, Louise Steinman, who has been a supporter and long term reader-strategist, and my critical writing peers: Ben Brooks, Scott Campbell, Patricia Harrison, Jean Hey. Angelika Festa and Charles Eisenhardt, both knowledgeable about Native American history, generously took time read an entire draft and asked perceptive questions. Others who have helped at critical junctures include Beth Thielen, Rosemary Winfield, Amy Hoffman, J. R. Lancaster, Anne Leslie, Eleanor Ramsay, Tim O’Grady, Jane Midgley, Susan Indresano, Richard Cole, Maria Van Dusen, Anne Spraker, Cristina Garcia, Sara Rimer.
Some books and their authors have been hugely influential far beyond their presence on the bibliography page, and I must cite Barbara Freese’s elegant book Coal: a Human History, and Patricia Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. Last, but certainly not least, I have to thank my daughter Cristina McFadden who has literally grown up with this project and helped in innumerable ways from carrying boxes of files out of the cellar, reorganizing my office, and acting as my driver through several trips through spring snows in northern Arizona and New Mexico on our trips to see, as she put it, “power plants, coal strip-mines and other scenic infrastructure.”
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
xiiiIn 1982 Robert Redford starred: The Electric Horseman was released in December 1971, but all the publicity materials relating to the Hopi celebration used photographic stills from the movie. Along with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the film reenforced Redford’s image as a cowboy-culture hero of the Southwest.
xivno one had ever accurately counted: Author interview with Paul Tessler, August 10, 1990. Tessler was both legal counsel and executive director of the Indian Relocation Commission, or IRC as it was known in Arizona, located at 201 East Birch Street, Flagstaff, Arizona. At that time, he said that the total number of Navajo moved at that date was 7,292 (1,823 households counted as an average of 4 people). The total number of Hopi moved was 15 households, or 60 people. At least 2,000 applications were still pending. The commission continued its work for another fifteen years, going out of business only in 2006 after passage of a bill by Senator John McCain to cut off funding. From 1977 to 2006 the total number of Navajo moved, relocated, or disappeared from tribal roles was estimated at approximately 15,000, the cost to taxpayers in the billions. The relocated Indians remained poor.
xv“The Black Mesa Field”: The Keystone Coal Industry Manual (Denver: Mining Media International, 1984), 479. (No longer published in print format.)
xviSusanne Page, who had just published: Susanne Anderson, Song of the Earth Spirit. Anderson (Page) is also the photographer for Hopi, with Jake Page.
xviiSteve had written a book: Originally published as Life in a Narrow Place in 1976, it was republished in 2006 as I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People.
xviiI had proposed a short article: The Atlantic Monthly was a Boston-based magazine (since 1857) but moved to Washington, DC, in 2005 under new ownership and renamed the Atlantic. C. Michael Curtis was the longtime literary editor who gave the author the press credential, expressing some doubts as to whether Atlantic readers were interested in the West.
xix“This was a centuries-old land dispute”: Author notes from press conference.
xxiPeabody Holding Company: The member companies of Peabody Holding changed during the fifteen-year period from 1976 to 1991, during which Peabody Holding included the Bechtel Group, Newmont Mining, Williams Technologies, Fluor Engineering, the Boeing Corporation, and Equitable Life Insurance as the parent company for Peabody Coal. From 1991 to 1999 Peabody Coal’s parent company was Hanson’s of Great Britain. From 1999 to 2001 it was the private-equity firm of Lehman Brothers (now defunct) and Citizens Power of Boston. It went public in 2001 as Peabody Energy, now the largest coal company in the world.
xxiii“The California settlement”: Joan Didion, Where I Was From, 24.
CHAPTER 1. EVERYONE COMES FOR THE MONEY
4A week before this performance: On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake took place some 16 miles west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. More than 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings collapsed, including the presidential palace, the National Assembly building, and the headquarters for the United Nations Mission in Haiti. By January 24 at least fifty-two aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater were recorded. An estimated 3 million people were left homeless, injured, or otherwise affected by the quake. The delivery of humanitarian and medical aid was hindered because of damage to port facilities and airport runways and collapse of electrical grids. The death count was estimated at 220,000. Morgues were overwhelmed, and tens of thousands of bodies had to be buried in mass graves. The tragedy was soon compounded by cholera that was accidentally introduced by UN forces. Yves Pierre-Louis, “Le choléra—MINUSTAH rebondit.” See also Amy Willenz, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti; and NBC Network News, October 8, 2013.
