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

by Nies, Judith

  CHAPTER 6. THE INDIAN LAWYER AND A BRIEF HISTORY OF COAL

  69“Coal is a portable climate”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 86–87, quoted in Barbara Freese, Coal: A Human History, 10.

  70“the biggest increase in global energy output has come from coal”: Daniel Yergin, The Quest, 403.

  70In 2012 the US Geological Survey published a graph: US Geological Survey, 2012, Energy Resource Reports, http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2012/1205/pdf/Coal_Fields_Map.pdf. See also J. A. East, 2013, “Coal Fields of the Conterminous United States—National Coal Resource Assessment,” updated version, US Geological Survey Open-File Report 2012-1205, one sheet, scale 1:5,000,000, http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2012/1205/. See also “BP’s Annual Review Paints a Grim Picture of Global Energy Use”; and BP Statistical Review of World Energy Use, 2012, www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/about-bp/statistical-review-of-world-energy-2013.html.

  71“Coal was no mere fuel”: Freese, Coal: A Human History, 10.

  75The desire to conquer nature: Ibid., 100–101.

  78did the Ute work pro bono: Boyden’s daughter states, “John’s friendship with the Indians and his empathy for their grievances motivated him to work for many years without pay simply because it was a cause he believed in.” Orpha Boyden, John S. Boyden: Three Score and Ten in Retrospect, 164. Boyden worked on a contingency basis for a while, but it was clear he expected to be paid. Abbott Sekaquaptewa said that in 1951, “Boyden was really representing the people who were trying to get the Council back together. He was not paid.” As soon as the tribal council was sworn in, however, and the BIA approved him as claims attorney for the Hopi, he knew he would be paid. All Indian Claims Commission contracts confirmed that attorneys could receive up to 10 percent of the settlement amount the tribe received. The Hopi received a $5 million settlement. For reasons not clear, the Hopi council voted to give him a $900,000 fee, later raised to $1 million. A year later when Boyden was confirmed as tribal attorney, the tribe knew they had to pay him. In describing the exploration leases that the tribe signed for oil and coal, Sekaquaptewa said. “We were a poor tribe. . . . We were in a great need of money. For tribal operations . . . and to continue to have legal counsel.” Anita Parlow, Cry, Sacred Ground, 203, 205. Legal suit by the Native American Rights Fund confirmed that Boyden was paid a total of $2.7 million in fees by the Hopi.

  78shared a fee of $2,794,606: Ernest L. Wilkinson and W. Cleon Skousen, Brigham Young University: A School of Destiny, 434n.

  79“Bought, shot and left to rot”: Peter MacDonald with Ted Schwarz, The Last Warrior: Peter MacDonald and the Navajo Nation, 37.

  79“It is well to remember”: Harold S. Colton, director, Museum of Northern Arizona, “Report on the Hopi Boundry [sic],” 12, John Boyden Papers, Special Collections, Brigham Young University, Healing v. Jones, Navajo Exhibit, no. 15A, December 1939. Although the Hopi villages are frequently described as independent entities, similar to the separate pueblos of New Mexico, they were never given Spanish land grant and therefore never recognized as separate pueblos. After 1848 and the US victory in the war with Mexico, they were treated as a single political entity by the US government.

  81“My father was a driving force”: Abbott Sekaquaptewa quoted in Parlow, Cry, Sacred Ground, 203.

  81“Boyden went through the villages”: Ibid., 204.

  81“We have explained plainly”: Carl Hayden Papers; “Hopi Elders Seek to Avoid Court Test,” Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 16, 1957, including “Draft Copy of Letter to Barry Goldwater” opposing S. 692, the three-judge-court legislation. Additional text of the letter reads: “Attorney John S. Boyden claimed he represents the majority of the Hopi people. That is a pure lie and he knows it. The fact is, the majority of the Hopis are against him as a lawyer. All the traditional villages rejected him when he first came on the Hopiland. Today the people in Lower Moencopi, including some of the Upper Village are against him. Hotevilla, Oraibi, Shungopavy, and Mushongnovi Villages are all against John S. Boyden, the so-called Hopi Tribal Council, and are strongly opposed to the Bill S. 692. . . . Boyden claimed he represented seven Hopi villages. This is not true. He represented only those who were pressured into signing his contract, or contracts, without knowing what was in those contracts. If the people in the ‘Tribal Council’ villages were given a chance to express their views on this matter it would be found that the majority of them are against Boyden, the so-called Hopi Tribal Council, and this Bill S. 692.”

  81“On top of all this”: Caleb Johnson letter, Hayden Papers, Feb 27, 1957.

  82“Several recent efforts”: Colton, “Report on the Hopi Boundry [sic],” 7.

  83“We were a poor tribe”: Parlow, Cry, Sacred Ground, 205.

  84The extent of Black Mesa coal reserves: Pierce and Wilt, 1911, quoted in the 1984 Keystone Coal Industry Manual, 480. “Black Mesa is an erosional remnant of Upper Cretaceous strata surrounded on all sides by older Mesozoic sedimentary rocks. Within Black Mesa, the Cretaceous strata have been warped into long and broad synclines and anticlines. The principal coal reserves within the northern half of Black Mesa are preserved within two of these downwarps, the Maloney and Black Mesa synclines. It is the former that contains the reserves being mined by the Peabody Coal Company. The Upper Cretaceous section is thickest to the north and thins southerly by erosion until the basal formation, the Dakota Sandstone, forms the surface on the south.” See also the map titled Geologic Cross-Section of Navajo Reservation—Black Mesa, US Park Service and Zion Natural History Association, 1975.

  85“When it comes to ambition”: Summit County Bee, June 1924, quoted in O. Boyden, John S. Boyden, 13.

  86Coalville and Grass Creek Mining Coal Company: WPA Guide to Utah, 366. See also David Hampshire, Martha Sonntag Bradley, and Allen Roberts, A History of Summit County, 36, 46; and www.coalville.utah.gov/history.

  86“I therefore hold”: Opinion of Felix Cohen, acting solicitor, Department of the Interior, “Re: Ownership of the Mineral Estate in the Hopi Executive Order Reservation,” Departmental Recognition of Indian Tribal Representatives, US Department of the Interior, Decisions of the Dept. of Interior 59 (January 1945–June 1947): 248–254. Also copy in Hayden papers, Arizona State University Libraries, 1946.

  88Wilkinson’s Washington, DC, firm and the Claims Commission: The impetus to settle Indian claims came about during World War II, when a survey by the Interior Department determined that more than 30 percent of America’s untapped energy reserves—coal, oil, uranium, natural gas—lay beneath Indian reservation lands in the West, lands previously considered useless for ranching or farming, but perfect for Indian reservations. Many mining companies, railroads, and ranchers occupied lands with ambiguous title because many Indian tribes still had treaty rights to the same lands. The government had granted the land twice, sometimes three times.

  The settlement paid to the Ute Indians of Utah and Colorado was the single largest settlement ever paid by the US government to Indian people. Wilkinson was a Utah Mormon with a Harvard Law degree. Originally hired by a New York law firm (which included Charles Evans Hughes, future chief justice of the Supreme Court) to work on a complex tax case involving the merger of Utah Copper with Kennecott Copper, he was also given the Ute case. When he moved to Washington to open his own practice, he took the Ute case with him. Wilkinson knew of Boyden because he was tribal attorney for two bands of Ute in Utah. The claim of various Ute bands dated back to 1868 when a number of Ute Indian bands had given up vast tracts of Utah Territory in exchange for a treaty with the US government that guaranteed them payment for the ceded lands to Mormon settlers. Although the Mormon settlers continued to occupy more than 1 million acres, the promised payments never arrived.

  Wilkinson’s firm was well known because it was one of two firms that handled more cases than any other before the Indian Claims Commission. He was also well known within Indian law circles because he had actually helped to write the Indian Claims Law along with Felix Cohen, the brilliant solicitor of the Departm
ent of the Interior and the author of the definitive Handbook of Federal Indian Law. (In the Interior Department the Claims Commission files were known as the “Wilkinson files” because the firm had represented so many Indian tribes.) The commission was conceived as a solution to ambivalent land titles and the exceptional length of time it took to have cases decided before the US Court of Claims. Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, America’s Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power. See also Charles F. Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest; Ernest L. Wilkinson and W. Cleon Skousen, Brigham Young University: A University of Destiny; and O. Boyden, John S. Boyden.

  90“The amount of service”: E. Wilkinson and Skousen, University of Destiny, 434.

  90Boyden and Wilkinson’s partnership on Ute case: Wiley and Gottlieb, America’s Saints, 171–174. See also C. Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau, 155–160; E. Wilkinson and Skousen, University of Destiny, 452–468; and O. Boyden, John S. Boyden, 164–172.

  90“A number of us have wondered”: Thomas S. Shia to Congressman Stewart Udall, May 15, 1957, author copy.

  91“Dear Tom”: Udall response to Thomas Shia of Valley National Bank, May 17, 1957, author copy provided by Black Mesa Trust.

  91“We have two problems out here”: Johnson letter, Hayden Papers.

  92“Being a true friend of the Lamanites”: O. Boyden, John S. Boyden, 245.

  CHAPTER 7. THE MORMON WEST

  96Alta California was known mainly for the cattle ranches: Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, 106.

  96the US Army under President Andrew Jackson: The Five Civilized Tribes were the Cherokee of Georgia; the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creeks of Mississippi and Alabama; and the Seminoles of Florida. The Cherokee had a written language, a newspaper, their own schools, public roads, agriculture, mills, and a well-organized political system. Their people were more literate than many of the white settlers who wanted their lands. (Individual Indians were not allowed to buy and hold title land.) In a suit against the government, they sued and won the right to hold their lands. Andrew Jackson was supposed to have said, “Justice John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” As president, Andrew Jackson enforced the Indian Removal Law and sent federal troops to force sixteen thousand Cherokee to walk from Georgia to Oklahoma in December, during which an estimated one out of four Cherokee died.

  The Choctaw, who had fought on the American side during the War of 1812 and had helped Andrew Jackson’s weak Tennessee militia successfully defend New Orleans from the British, were not rewarded. Of the thirteen thousand Choctaw who were forced to give up all their lands in Mississippi and move to western Arkansas, four thousand died of hunger, exposure, or disease.

  The Seminoles fought two wars against ten thousand US Army troops over a ten-year period in resistance to the effort of removing them from their lands in Florida and Georgia. The war against the Seminoles was the most costly and least successful of all the American wars until Vietnam. Some Seminoles retreated into the Everglades and others eventually did move to Oklahoma, but they never ceded defeat.

  After the five tribes were moved, it opened up millions of acres for the expanding cotton kingdom of the South. A lottery was held for the newly cleared Cherokee lands in Georgia, and many of the new cotton plantation owners in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were friends of Andrew Jackson. In 1837 Congress passed a Jackson-sponsored law that ended direct payments to Indian tribes for lands they had ceded or sold to the United States. Instead, the funds were to be held “in trust” and used for the benefit of the Indians. Irregularities were rampant: Indian trust funds showed no interest over decades and declining revenues despite deposits, and tribes were refused the right to audit their own funds. In a 1996 audit the BIA couldn’t account for more than $2.4 billion in trust account transactions. In 2008 the Indian trust funds were still under negotiation.

  Although historians have described Andrew Jackson as an icon of frontier democracy, he was a land speculator, a slave trader, and a merchant, and as a young lawyer he stood with creditors against debtors with property. As a politician and as president, he was the most aggressive enemy of the Indians in early American history.

  99“The death of the modern Mahomet”: Quoted in Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 397.

  99“I have been commanded of God”: Ibid., 478.

  100the two men spoke in tongues: John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, 32.

  100“He was a mythmaker of prodigious talent”: Brodie, No Man Knows My History, ix.

  101“all of these vestiges”: Henry M. Brackenridge, Views of Louisiana, Together with a Journal of a Voyage Up the Missouri River in 1811, 182–283. Brackenridge also said that some attributed the vestige ruins to “a colony of Welsh or Danes.”

  102As treasury secretary Gallatin sponsored: George Squier and Edwin Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley: Comprising the Results of Extensive Original Surveys and Explorations.

  102he made the correct connection between the similarities: Francis Jennings, The Founders of America: From the Earliest Migrations to the Present, 62–66.

  104“Their hatred was fixed”: Book of Mormon, Book of Enos, 1:20, 137.

  104They “did till the land”: Ibid.

  108“one of the foremost intelligences of the time”: DeVoto quoted in Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, America’s Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power, 43.

  110A map in the Library of Congress: The Map Division of the Library of Congress has a map of Deseret, 1850–1868, attributed to the Historians Office, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, showing successive reductions to the territory over those years.

  CHAPTER 8. LEGAL THEFT

  111“The first full-time missionaries”: Helen Sekaquaptewa with Louise Udall, Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa, 240.

  112“The Book of Mormon,” Wilkinson wrote: Ernest L. Wilkinson and W. Cleon Skousen, Brigham Young University: A School of Destiny, 735.

  112“teaching Emory [Sr.], Abbott, and me the Gospel”: Sekaquaptewa with Udall, Me and Mine, 241.

  112“Here is a religion”: Ibid, 243.

  113“the lands most desirable for the Moquis”: J. H. Fleming, December 4, 1882, copy in John Boyden Papers, Special Collections, Brigham Young University.

  113“Believing that the Mormons are about to settle”: Galen Eastman to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, March 20, 1880, copy in ibid.

  113when Toova and her great-aunt returned: Sekaquaptewa with Udall, Me and Mine.

  114“Coal mining on Black Mesa happened”: Brian Jackson Morton, “Coal Leasing in the Fourth World: Hopi and Navajo Coal Leasing, 1954–1977,” 13.

  115“New jobs, large tax benefits”: Kammer, 87.

  115“a textbook example”: Alvin Josephy, “The Murder of the Southwest.” Also quoted in Gottlieband Wiley, Empires in the Sun, 45. Also author interview.

  115“I was always involved . . . on behalf of minority groups”: Stewart Udall, oral history interview, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston. In 1964 when Secretary Stewart Udall was trying to build a new dam on the Colorado River to power the Central Arizona Project, one of the old-timers from St. Johns, Arizona, sent the following letter around to many Arizona and New Mexico politicians. Mo Udall, who was known for his wit and sense of humor, reproduced it in his political autobiography, Too Funny to Be President.

  Dear Sirs:

  I am an old man and I know a lot about . . . this Udall outfit. My father had a ranch on the Little Colorado River when I was a boy. We had cattle, sheep and goats and horses. In the bottom land we raised our corn and beans and chile and we were contented and happy. Then David K. Udall moved down to Saint Johns . . . and he and some other men like him put in a dam across the Little Colorado. We objected because it was a dangerous place to put in a dirt dam but they went right ahead and put it in anyway.

  When it broke, it ruined our land and drowned our cattle an
d goats and . . . I have been poor ever since. They never paid us a cent for the damages. I confess I do not like the Udalls and this is one reason.

  Another reason is that you cannot trust any of them. The whole tribe were Republicans and David K. Udall and his brother Joe Udall tried for years to get the Mexicans, who were then all Republicans to give them a public office. But Don Lorenzo Hubbell, who was a great leader, saw through this scheme and never would let them get on the Republican ticket. And the Mormons, who were nearly all Democrats, would have none of them. But when Franklin Roosevelt came in, some of the Mexicans switched to him and the Udalls went along, or most of them did.

  However David K. Udall, the big shot, had a second wife hid out down the river at a place called Hunt and this wife had some boys who stayed Republican and one of them got to be mayor of Phoenix. In this way the Udall family can now work both sides of the street. I want you to check up on this because I am an old man and want to be sure of my facts. But my granddaughter tells me this Stewart Udall is trying to steal the water from the Colorado and I can believe it. Because this is the way it happened fifty and sixty years ago. The Udalls have been at this business a long time.

  Respectfully yours, Jose (Joe) Chavez

  116“I came out of a political family”: Oral history, JFK Library.

  121“It was ironic, indeed, that a society”: Rayna Greene, foreword to To Lead and to Serve: American Indian Education at Hampton Institute, 1878–1923, by MaryLou Hultgren, 12.

  122“The posts that sent out men to kill their fathers”: Ibid, 12.

  122“We marched to the dining room three times a day”: Sekaquaptewa with Udall, Me and Mine, 136.