These laws, which began as “theocratically derived prerogatives” in medieval Europe, advanced and retreated by fits and starts—from the Vatican to the royal courts of European monarchs; through historic debates in the great ecclesiastical universities of Spain; in and out of Elizabethan courts; to fiercely contested debates in the small village of Philadelphia in 1787, where the founders of the American republic gathered to decide how the new nation would be governed. Less than a century after the U.S. Constitution was adopted by the original thirteen states, discovery-era laws would be alchemized by the U.S. Supreme Court as the Doctrine of Discovery, and by congressional lawmakers as the doctrines of “manifest destiny” and “eminent domain.”
In his groundbreaking work on the origins of federal Indian law, The American Indian in Western Legal Thought, legal historian Robert A. Williams Jr. concludes that the adoption of these doctrines by the young American republic “preserved the legacy of 1,000 years of European racism and colonialism directed against non-Western peoples. The Doctrine of Discovery’s underlying medievally derived ideology—that normatively divergent ‘savage’ peoples could be denied rights and status equal to those accorded to the civilized nations of Europe—had become an integral part of the fabric of United States federal Indian law.”
On a busy day, the smooth, shoulderless two-lane ribbon of asphalt of Old State Road Number Eight may carry a dozen cars an hour. This is durum and milling wheat country, as far as the eyes can see. Heading south out of Parshall, population 940 and falling, Number Eight passes Barbara’s Steakhouse and the Redwood Cafe, the Food Pride grocery store, a single white sedan parked in front of the Parshall Farmers Union office, and finally, a cluster of whitewashed grain silos straddling the Soo Line railroad tracks at the south end of town. After rumbling over tracks, veering around the small nine-hole golf course and a landing strip for crop dusters, Number Eight resumes its straight-line course between telephone poles and fence posts for nearly thirty miles. This is High Plains landscape at its horizontal, hypnotic finest. They say you can drive for days out here without touching the steering wheel or taking your foot off the gas. There’s the sun and the horizon, the road bisecting a million acres of wheat, then blue sky and white clouds. As the wheat fields pass in a blur, the windshield of Phyllis’s late-model Chevrolet minivan looks like a picture framing a piece of eternity.
“Back when we were kids,” says her brother Bucky from the backseat, “you had to choose between a Ford and a Chevy. That was the extent of the options.”
“We drove Chevys,” offers their younger sister Marilyn.
“Fords,” says Bucky, gently correcting her. “You girls and mom always wanted Chevys because they were fancier.”
The memory prompts Bucky to flash a broad smile. A college professor in San Jose, California, he has returned for his annual visit. His given name is Alfred, but nobody has called him that since their mother died in 1989. Pushing six and a half feet tall, he still moves with the graceful ease that made him a celebrity on the basketball court as a teenager. His long silver ponytail lengthens the loose, lanky frame of a man whose favorite mode of transportation is his own two legs. His eyes are bright, translucent gray, while his smooth baritone voice seems to shape its words at the bottom of a well.
“Fords held up better on the roads, but Chevys were pretty. So, you had to decide whether you wanted to get to town on four wheels and a frame, or freeze to death out in the middle of nowhere in a nice-looking car.”
“I thought we drove a Chrysler,” says Phyllis.
Bucky scoffs with mock contempt. “Dad wouldn’t have been caught dead in a Chrysler.”
“Well, that’s one thing he doesn’t have to worry about anymore.”
The road suddenly stops atop low-lying, windswept bluffs. Here, less than a mile from the lake, Old State Road Number Eight suddenly became a weed-choked trail. This final stretch, skirting the remnants of an old homestead, has not carried regular traffic in decades. The wreckage of abandoned dreams lies strewn about everywhere in a sea of whorled grass—a bullet-riddled windmill; a collapsed stock tank; an old Ford pickup, rusting to air; a homesteader’s one-story cabin with a roof of sky. A few hundred yards downslope from the cabin, the van pulls over in the tall grass and stops. There, the road makes one final bend to the left, then slips beneath the green waves of Lake Sakakawea.
The same thing happens to Old Number Eight on Sakakawea’s southern shore, five miles away across the whitecapped lake. These two segments of road, one from the north and one from the south, eventually meet on the main square in the village of Elbowoods. The town’s tree-lined streets, the government buildings and boarding school, Simon’s and Twilling’s general stores and the country hospital, now sit at the center of the lake under two hundred feet of water. Elbowoods has been home to schools of walleyed perch and northern pike for almost fifty years. But to Phyllis and her siblings, who were born and raised at the bottom of the lake, it seems like yesterday. Around these parts, folks still refer to what happened here as simply, “The Flood.” With thirteen hundred miles of shoreline, Lake Sakakawea materializes on the horizon like an inland sea, a mini-ocean trapped in an arid wasteland. From certain vantage points on the lake’s eastern shore, water touches the horizon in every direction.
When Congress gave its approval for the construction of Garrison Dam by enacting the Flood Control Act of 1944, their thinking was a straightforward response to a century of catastrophic flooding on the Lower Missouri River. Major floods in the spring of 1943 had caused billions of dollars in damage and flooded thousands of farms in Nebraska and Iowa. The Missouri River portion of the resulting flood-control legislation would be called the Pick-Sloan Plan. This ambitious scheme was devised by marrying competing water development plans proposed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. When the two proposals were folded together, the Pick-Sloan master plan called for the construction of 110 dams of varying sizes, all designed to tame the hydraulic tyrant known as the Big Muddy.
The key to the entire project, the jewel in the crown, would be the first and largest dam. Engineers had already selected a spot for this dam, a narrowing of the river valley that locals called the Mandan Bluffs. This site was located a few miles west of the small town of Garrison, and sixty miles upstream from the state capitol at Bismarck. When Garrison Dam and its five smaller siblings were completed, their combined storage capacity would eventually exceed 60 million acre-feet of snow melt and runoff from the Rocky Mountains and High Plains. This was four times the annual runoff of the Colorado alone, or enough to form a column of water the size of a football field twelve thousand miles high.
The Bureau of Reclamation knew just what it would do with all that water. Less than a decade earlier, dryland farmers in the Upper Midwest had endured the most devastating drought in history. In less than five years, more than forty thousand family farms were abandoned. Instead of being transformed into a Garden of Eden by waves of immigrant homesteaders, the prairie had suddenly returned to grass, wind, and sky. For centuries, their native neighbors on the nearby bottomlands had survived the whimsical vicissitudes of the river by planting their gardens on the floodplains. There, like farmlands in the Nile Delta of Egypt, the soils were recharged with mineral nutrients by the river’s annual flooding. During the dry months of summer, crops were naturally irrigated from below by the shallow water table. These farming methods had guaranteed the Village Indians good harvests even during drought years, but the dust bowl of the 1930s was so severe that even the Indian crops failed when they were planted at a distance from the river. During one three-year period in the “dirty 30s,” meteorologists recorded less than ten inches of precipitation.
Farmers who had managed to survive the devastating dust-bowl decade had viewed the promise of irrigation in the Pick-Sloan Plan as the opening act for the Second Coming. Tens of thousands of families lured west by a succession of nineteenth-century homestead acts had been hostages to the whims of nature
. Every year, millions of acre-feet of water flowed past the parched farms that straddled the Missouri. Annual rainfall west of the Hundredth meridian teetered back and forth over the break-even point of fifteen inches. An inch above that benchmark meant sustenance, a bumper crop, a pair of new school shoes for the kids, a down payment on a milch cow, real glass for the kitchen window, and a few dollars in the cookie jar. An inch below meant hungry children, months of wasted backbreaking effort behind a horse-drawn plow, the long silent stare that measured the interminable winters. Toil, sweat, determination, and sacrifice were not enough. The only long-term solution to the poverty and despair of life on the Great Plains was irrigation, and lots of it, the kind of irrigation that only the federal government could finance. Once the main-stem dams were built, Pick-Sloan promised to deliver irrigation to 4 million acres of bone-dry prairie. To survivors of the “dirty 30s,” Pick-Sloan was a last-minute pardon for a condemned man.
After congratulating itself for expediting passage of a national flood-control program, Congress realized that Pick-Sloan was going to put the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes under a six-hundred-square-mile lake. Lawmakers in Washington immediately launched a regionwide search for replacement lands of equivalent value. But this was a task more easily imagined in a committee room on Capitol Hill than one that could be accomplished on the ground on the Northern Plains. A survey of the Upper Missouri Valley by field agents for the Army Corps of Engineers showed that such land did not exist, for love or money.
With doors to alternative solutions closing all around them, efforts to head off a disaster with these people appeared destined to fail. Heroic figures such as Martin Cross and Senator Joseph O’Mahoney emerged in Elbowoods and Washington, hoping to forestall the inevitable catastrophe. But by 1949, Congress’ patience had worn thin under the constant chafing of downstream states, and its early altruism began circling the drain. Four years of sustained effort by tribal leaders and their allies in Washington succeeded in producing little more than futility and a mounting sense of desperation.
“This was all going on at the same time President Truman nominated a guy named Dillon Myer to be the new commissioner of Indian affairs,” says Bucky, putting the era in context. “Myer and a senator from Utah, Arthur Watkins, decided the time had come for all of us Indians to get out and see the world. So Myer launched a program to round up all the Indians, put us on trains and buses, and scatter us in the big cities.”
“It was the same thing he did to the Japanese at the end of the war,” chimes in Phyllis. “Myer ran the internment camps, then they made him Indian commissioner. So there was The Flood, and now we had to deal with relocation.”
“People we’d known our whole lives were put on trains in Minot and vanished,” says Bucky. “Years later, in San Francisco, you’d read about some guy who jumped off the bridge the day before. ‘Hey, I know that guy. I was in school with that guy in Elbowoods.’”
“Myer and Watkins called it the Termination Era,” says Phyllis. “We owned too much land, too many resources, too many treaties. They thought things would be better for everybody if we just went away.”
“Our dad challenged those guys face-to-face, in Washington,” says Bucky. “They blew spit at each other in committee hearings. Dad and Harold Ickes, Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, and Felix Cohen, the human rights attorney, accused [Myer and Watkins] of genocide, which they denied, of course. It got nasty. Time proved them right. What Indians learned from that experience is that truth comes out in the end, but it can kill you to be patient.”
There was one more ironic twist to the story of “The Flood that stayed forever,” a turnabout that none of the residents of Parshall and Elbowoods could have foreseen. As the floodwaters rose in Lake Sakakawea, many lifelong residents of Elbowoods chose to move to higher ground in Parshall. Most of them had done business in Parshall. Its streets, schools, and neighborhoods were familiar. The residents of Parshall had remained strangely quiet throughout the long fight to stop the dam. Now, hundreds of Indians began immigrating into the tidy little town of straight fences and perfect lawns built by Norwegian homesteaders. The racial divide between Indians and Norwegians, once scarcely noticeable, widened overnight to a chasm.
When the lake had finally filled, government surveyors were sent out by the U.S. Geological Survey office in Washington to reestablish the legal boundary lines of the reservation. With that accomplished, the citizens of Parshall were called to a town meeting by officials from Bismarck and Washington, who had come with news. It seemed that someone had made a mistake, way back when. The town of Parshall, explained the spokesman for the government, lay two miles inside the northern boundary of the land held in trust by the federal government for the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people. So it seemed, they told their stunned audience, the tidy homes, schools, and churches of Parshall had been in Indian Country all along.
Phyllis and her siblings make the drive down to the lake a couple times a year. They take in the sights from the bluffs, visit family cemeteries, and reminisce with old friends over lunch in the town of Garrison, the dam’s eponymous neighbor. When Phyllis’s brothers and sisters visit from out of town on a nice spring day, an afternoon drive to the lake is a good excuse to put off errands in New Town or Bismarck. Michael is behind the wheel today, with Marilyn and Phyllis riding in the backseat. At sixty, Michael is a study in contrast with his sisters. He’s tall, like Bucky, but was built with the thicker chest and broader shoulders of his father. At six foot four, boy number three inherited the arresting looks of his paternal grandfather, Chief Old Dog. Old Dog and his half brother, White Duck, were such striking-looking men that the famed turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis made portraits of both of them when he visited Elbowoods in 1906. Old Dog would be astonished by his mirror image in his grandson.
His sister Marilyn, the middle child, was always the “lively one” when they were kids. Recently retired from a career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, she is now the curator of the tribe’s Four Bears Museum in New Town. Marilyn was the daughter Dorothy Cross relied on to entertain “the little ones” and to help them with their schoolwork. She was the valedictorian of her high school class and has a memory like flypaper, so Phyllis and Michael defer to her quick grasp of elusive details even though each of the Cross children has laid claim to particular fragments of his or her shared history.
Michael turns off-road onto an open bench of sage and cheatgrass. After bouncing across the trackless prairie for several minutes, he brings the van to a stop. He steps out, takes five steps, then rubs the toe of his tennis shoe over the burnished surface of a bronze surveyor’s stake from the nineteenth century. This stake, placed here by federal surveyors more than a century ago, is not much larger than a silver dollar. It was stamped with the precise coordinates of latitude and longitude, down to the seconds of arc, and fixed with a U.S. Geological Survey code. This spot marks the northwest corner of Grandfather Old Dog’s property.
“I will never know how you can remember things like this,” Phyllis calls from the window. “You always drive right to it.”
Michael’s soft chuckle is his way of agreeing. “I couldn’t tell you what I had for lunch yesterday, but I could find this blindfolded in a snowstorm.”
The abandoned ranch house where their father died sits on a broad piece of level ground about a mile west of the bronze stake. Off and on as a teenager, Michael lived there with his dad. By then, in the stormy days that followed The Flood, Dorothy had seen enough of the ranching life. She moved to Parshall with the three youngest children, while Martin, a cattleman from his boot heels to the crown of his hat, built this place and tried to make another run at the cow business. The older boys followed him to the ranch and pitched in, but even in the best years, raising cattle “on top” was a great way to go broke. One generation later, there is little evidence of those efforts. The barn burned down years ago. Plank by plank, the shiplap siding has fallen into splintered piles ski
rting the foundation. The door to the room where Martin Cross died hangs partway open by a single cockeyed hinge. The wind-shredded fragments of a curtain flutter against the blue sky in a broken window. What is left of this place is in a race to fall down.
Martin Cross was buried at the Old Scout Cemetery, just up the road from his ranch. This tidy, well-kept cemetery, with straight rows of white crosses, is a place of honor for the Three Affiliated Tribes of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. He lies alongside the Arikara and Hidatsa scouts who worked for the U.S. Army during the American Indian Wars of the 1860s and 70s. Many of these tribal members were recruited to scout for the fateful Custer campaign in the spring of 1876. All but three of the Arikara and Crow who cautioned Custer against pressing his luck in the valley of the Little Bighorn returned to tell the story of that June afternoon. Those three were buried here. A few miles away is the Sacred Heart Cemetery, where Cross family ancestors were reinterred in the final hectic months before the floodgates closed at Garrison Dam. Thousands of graves had to be moved from cemeteries on the bottomlands to higher ground. As a result of that chaos, the remains of tribal ancestors now lie scattered in cemeteries across 400,000 acres of prairie. Marilyn pays her respects as often as she can. She brings flowers on holidays and cuts the grass around the family headstones.
Phyllis quietly drifts away and kneels in front of a headstone the next row over. Kissing her fingertips, she runs them over the lettering of her brother Forrest’s name. This is the grave of Cross child number five. They called him Brother.
“I always wonder how Brother would have turned out,” she says, turning back to the car. “He had the sweetest temperament in the family. Brother and Ray would have been a lot alike. I’ve never stopped missing him.”
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