Walker’s rhetorical flourishes would make a profound impression on the administration of President Benjamin Harrison. Though the president himself would not embrace Walker’s extermination proposals, the policies enacted by Congress with Harrison’s full approval would achieve the same results. In 1887, with the passage of a law known as the Dawes Act, Congress not only turned its back on the “supremacy clause” in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which stated that federal treaties would be the “supreme law of the land,” but also upended the promise George Washington made to the tribes in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, vowing never to take their land without their expressed permission. The Dawes Act, also known as the Allotment Era, abrogated dozens of treaties and opened treaty-protected Indian lands to white settlement. The long-anticipated agrarian expansion onto the Great Plains could now move forward, blessed with the high hopes and expectations of the Harrison administration. Railroads, with a twofold interest, were given a free hand to promote the scheme. They were anxious to sell to settlers the land they had been awarded for building the roads in order to create future markets. With Crazy Horse dead, Red Cloud imprisoned on a reservation, and Sitting Bull riding as a featured attraction in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a new page had turned in the unfolding story of America. At the Chicago Exposition of 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared that Americans had fulfilled their “manifest destiny” by reaching the Pacific Ocean. “The American frontier,” he announced, “is closed.”
On the Upper Missouri, women from Like-a-Fishhook could return to their fields without warrior chaperones. Encouraged by new government policies promoting private ownership of land, twenty families left the village by 1882 to farm their own “allotments.” By late 1885, the remaining families in the village were told that if they did not begin farming their allotments, their government assistance would cease. Within two years, Like-a-Fishhook was a ghost town.
In 1885, the new agent at Fort Berthold reported to his superiors in Washington that thus far, he had succeeded in preventing the Indians from organizing “dancings and other heathen rituals that celebrated their savage past.” Slowly but surely, Congress was told, the wild children of the plains would be transformed into respectable gentleman farmers. As evidence of their progress toward this goal, he noted that the last resident of Like-a-Fishhook, a withered little old man named Red Roan Cow, a veteran of the Fort Laramie Peace Council of 1851, lived alone in his earth lodge in the company of bleached buffalo skulls and cold medicine pipes. In contrast to this last holdout at Like-a-Fishhook, the Hidatsa tribe’s newest leader, Chief Old Dog, had moved upstream to his allotment on a wooded plain near a north turning bend in the river. Others were certain to follow.
By the spring of 1894, the agent’s predictions had proven accurate. Government surveyors began laying out the streets of a new agency town, about a mile south of Chief Old Dog’s log cabin and earth lodge. And since it would rise in a small forest of live oaks, wild plums, and maple trees at a deep bend in the river, they would call this town Elbowoods.
CHAPTER IV
Great White Fathers
“The European is to other races of men what man in general is to animate nature. When he cannot bend them to his use or make them serve his self-interests, he destroys them and makes them vanish little by little before him.”
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE
A few miles downstream from the mouth of the Heart River in central North Dakota, a bronze plaque marks the spot on the west bank of the Missouri River where the Lewis and Clark expedition met up with its first grizzly bear. What followed, rather hastily, was a one-sided tête-à-tête between the toothsome critter and the captains’ feeble-eyed subordinate, Pierre Cruzat. Firing wildly at the animal from close range, the Frenchman threw down his single-shot flintlock and ran for his life. Lewis named this animal “white bear” for the silver coloring in the adult grizzly’s fur. “I saw several fresh tracks,” he wrote in his journal on October 20, 1804, “three times as large as a man’s track.” These ferocious, short-tempered monarchs of the plains would continue to bedevil the expedition for the next two years.
Wildlife biologists estimate that fifty thousand grizzly bears roamed the Great Plains at the turn of the nineteenth century. For millennia, Homo sapiens and Ursus horribilis thrived side by side at the top of the food chain in the lush ecosystem of the Missouri River floodplain. This semi-isolated reserve provided both man and beast with a rich diet of protein, vegetables, and wild fruits and berries. “They flourished because they didn’t have to eat each other to survive,” explains natural historian Ken Rogers. “For the alpha species, these river bottoms were the modern equivalent of a strip of fast-food take-out windows.”
In a mere lightning strike of geologic time, the silver-tipped bear with the humped shoulders and large footprint has vanished altogether from the plains. The westward migration of European immigrants put the animal’s natural habitat inside a fence and under the plow. The last grizzly bear walked off the plains at about the same time the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse surrendered at Fort Robinson in 1877. When the “wild tribes of the West” had been subdued by starvation and the cavalry had herded them onto reservations, the great white bear lumbered off to islands of seclusion in the “shining mountains” of the Rockies. There, in ever dwindling numbers, the grizzly has remained.
The plaque commemorating the encounter between the bear and Monsieur Cruzat is mounted beside the Missouri’s last stretch of free-flowing water between the Montana border and the state of Iowa. Rogers says that this seventy miles of river, between the Garrison Dam and the Oahe Reservoir, is the only segment of the Big Muddy that Lewis and Clark would recognize for hundreds of miles in either direction. One-part historian and one-part ethnographer, Rogers is an avid canoeist who has several times retraced the explorers’ water route on the Upper Missouri.
“These guys were the last in a long line of explorers to come into this country. What made them different from all the others was the underlying nature of their mission. Everybody else wanted to secure a trading monopoly with the Mandan. Lewis and Clark wanted that and a lot more.” Where the French, English, and Spanish saw piles of beaver pelts they could sell at a premium in Europe, the young Americans saw a wide-open empire. “They were the first to stand on the banks of this river and see not just a river but a national resource,” says Rogers. “That assessment has pretty much dictated the story of the Missouri, and the people who live beside it, ever since.”
After measuring the bear’s enormous paw print and noting its size in his field journal, Lewis climbed a steep embankment to reconnoiter the abandoned Mandan village of On-a-Slant. Lewis described the village’s defenses as formidable and estimated the area inside the walls to be six to eight acres in size. The earth lodges were intact. He found cache pits of dried corn and squash, and cairns of weather-bleached human skulls. Through his Arikara guide, Lewis learned that when the Mandan abandoned On-a-Slant, the village had been occupied for three centuries. The golden age of Mandan prosperity had ended right where they were standing, less than twenty years before.
“When that first wave of smallpox hit in 1781,” says Rogers, “the Mandan died by the thousands. For all they knew, this was a curse from God. Whatever the cause, the tribal leaders knew that they had arrived at a defining crossroads. They had to make a decision. They had to choose between pulling up stakes and moving on by themselves, as they had for hundreds of years, or opening up their culture and merging with other societies.”
Surrounded by heaps of bodies that grew higher by the day, the Mandan leaders decided that the tribe’s survival now called for a break with seven centuries of tradition. When the epidemic’s survivors migrated upstream to the Knife in 1781, they began to share their customs, ceremonies, language, and lodges with the Hidatsa and Arikara. This commingling, says Rogers, gave the Mandan the wherewithal to survive the second wave of smallpox in 1837 and the catastrophic flood of 1949.
“In
many respects, Garrison Dam is the great-grandchild of the Corps of Discovery. It would finally turn this mad elephant of a river into a resource. But for the tribes, Garrison Dam was as devastating as the 1837 smallpox epidemic. This series of disasters, starting back in 1781 at On-a-Slant, created the great future leaders in the tribes: the Cross family, the Baker family, the Walkers and Lone Fights.”
Rogers argues that the twentieth-century composition of these clans, and the great leaders they produced, resulted from the daring decision made by the leaders at On-a-Slant in 1781 to open up the Mandan society. Had the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara leaders decided to remain isolated from one another, the three tribes could not have emerged intact from the disastrous wars and plagues of the nineteenth century.
What lay between the placid river flowing past the Mandan Villages at the Knife River in 1804 and Lewis and Clark’s vision for the Missouri was 150 years, and billions of federal dollars, that would be required to transform a national menace into a national resource. Jefferson’s fact finders had no way of knowing that they were camped beside the most unpredictable river in North America, a concourse that might be idyllic one moment and deadly the next. As Missouri River Valley farmers would learn in the 1800s, their neighbor was the most promiscuous waterway on the High Plains. It seldom slept in the same bed and was forever jumping its banks and crossing state lines, and changing its course from one week to the next without knowing where it was headed. The river went dry when farmers were desperate for water, and brought torrents when they were saturated. In 1863, the editor of the Sioux City Register newspaper wrote: “Of all the variable things in creation, the most uncertain are the actions of juries, the state of a woman’s mind, and the condition of the Missouri River.”
So when the first of three large floods inundated Omaha, Nebraska, in the spring of 1943, nothing about the deluge seemed out of the ordinary. In the first week of April that year, a sudden thaw on the Northern Plains coincided with a low-pressure system that was racing north from the Gulf of Mexico. Rapidly melting snow and ice along the Rocky Mountain front had already pushed the upper segment of the river over its banks, saturating hundreds of miles of floodplains. Then came the downpour. In Omaha, the river crested three feet above flood stage at two o’clock in the morning on April 12. Sullen skies wrung themselves out for days on end, dumping torrents of warm rain on waterlogged farmlands. With nothing to hold back the deluge, and no place to store the excess water, the river quickly filled to capacity and spilled over its banks. For residents of east Omaha and Kansas City, the coincidence of thaw and downpour was devastating. The only way to reach the airport from downtown Omaha that week was by canoe or powerboat.
But in the spring of 1943, the nation’s attention was focused elsewhere. Allied armed forces were fully engaged in the war in Europe and the Pacific. The first reports of the flooding on the Missouri were buried in the second and third sections of the New York Times. General Patton’s Fourth Army had just routed Rommel’s elite Afrika Korps at El Guetar in north Africa, and American bombers were pounding Japanese rail installations in Burma. In late May, when the second flood carried away entire communities in Iowa and Nebraska, the story was bumped up to the inside pages of the New York Times’ front section.
When the third flood crested on the thirteenth of June, millions of acres of rich farmland were inundated. Midwestern states lay beneath the largest lake on the continent. Hundreds of homes were carried off in the night by the river’s rampaging currents. Drowned horses and cows came to rest in treetops in city parks. Claims for property damage climbed into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Day after day, the stiff-legged carcasses of farm animals floated past waterfronts at St. Louis and New Orleans. From Sioux City, Iowa, to the Gulf of Mexico, the foul stench of rotting flesh hung over the nation’s heartland. When the third flood finally pushed the river onto the front page of the New York Times, Congress and the White House declared war on the Missouri.
While researching her now classic study of the Missouri, Down by the River, Constance Elizabeth Hunt discovered that prior to the floods of 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers had spent three decades building an extensive network of dikes and levees along the lower stretch of the river. When the first surge of water pushed down from the north in April 1943, the Corps’ artificial riverbanks prevented rising waters from dissipating into low-lying marshes and wetlands. Floodplains adjacent to the Corps’ new levees had been pumped dry and planted with crops. The riprap banks had successfully protected at least one generation of farmers from the river’s menacing temper. But when the downpour of Gulf rain collided with the heavy spring runoff, the resulting bulge of water had nowhere to go but over the levees. Prior to the building of those levees, the floodplains and wetlands along hundreds of miles of river bottoms would have absorbed the heavy runoff. Hunt’s study led her to a disquieting conclusion: the devastating floods of 1943 were man-made.
Fed by runoff from the Rocky Mountains, the Missouri weaves itself together from the icy yarn of mountain streams near Three Forks, Montana. Once it collects the Ruby, the Madison, and the Jefferson, the river meanders another five hundred miles before joining up with the Yellowstone at the North Dakota border. There, the reinvigorated river suddenly doubles its size, becoming from head to tail the second longest river on the continent, and the seventh largest in volume. Yet even these figures can be misleading. Flash floods on any of the river’s many tributaries could cause it to leap out of its bed at a moment’s notice. The river’s unpredictable upstream behavior often had lethal consequences in downstream farm states. The annual outflow of the Little Missouri could range from a mere trickle of four thousand acre-feet per year at Alzada, Montana, to a roaring million acre-feet at its mouth, four miles upstream from the small community of Elbowoods. The mercurial nature of these larger tributaries continually reinforced the Missouri’s demonic reputation.
When Congress created the Army Corps of Engineers in 1824, the military’s civil engineers were assigned the mission of regulating navigation on the nation’s inland waters. The agency’s first commission on the Missouri came in the spring of 1838. Engineers sent two boats up the river to remove snags that were continually impeding and befouling the burgeoning flotilla of commercial steamboats. With mounting reluctance and at ever-increasing expense, the Army engineers maintained navigation channels on the Missouri until railroads spanned the continent in the 1880s. Unable to compete with the railroads in speed, price, or tonnage, the steamboat vanished from the Upper Missouri. When the Army engineers ended a half century of duty on the Missouri, they reported back to Congress that if left to its own, the river could be expected to return to its “former state of uselessness” in short order. The agency cheerfully conceded defeat and redeployed its engineers to more worthwhile rivers.
At the same time the Army Corps of Engineers were waving a white flag on the Missouri, the Bureau of Reclamation was being created by Congress to build civilian water projects and irrigation systems for farmers and communities in the arid West. Federally funded water projects on the High Plains had been the dream of dryland farmers for decades. Ever since white men had stepped out of the woods and sunk plows into the short-grass prairie, western rivers had taunted them with their limitless but inaccessible resources. None of the West’s great rivers was more contemptuous of man’s hubris in controlling nature than the river known as the Big Muddy.
The river, it seemed, was a living thing with a capricious will and a mercurial temper. The Missouri appeared determined to defy human schemes to shackle its energy, or make greater use of its flowing resource. In the 1920s, politicians from Upper Missouri states approached the Bureau of Reclamation hoping to sweet-talk the agency into building a regionwide irrigation system for dryland farmers. But the civilian engineers were as reluctant to get involved on the Upper Missouri as their counterparts in the military. The bureau’s early experience with irrigation projects on the Colorado plateau had taught them a harsh lesson in the e
conomics of cold-terrain farming. Schemes to bring water to the arid plateaus quickly turned into losing propositions for taxpayers. Congress intended the bureau to act as a low-interest banker to fund economically viable water projects, not as a pawnbroker for destitute farmers. Projects that looked economically viable on paper commonly turned into bottomless sinkholes for the Department of the Treasury. Against its better judgment, the agency yielded to pressure in Washington and built nine moderately sized irrigation projects on the Upper Missouri. The system was scheduled to be paid off in the 1960s. When the due date came and went, the bureau estimated that the farmers still owed the American taxpayers $55 million. The bureau projected that at the rate the debt was being paid off, the irrigation systems they built in the 1920s would be free and clear in the year 2140. If this was the outcome of a modest irrigation system costing less than $100 million, what, asked the bureau’s bookkeepers, would the schedule of payments look like following an investment of billions?
Despite the bureau’s humble efforts on the Upper Missouri, most dryland farmers on the Great Plains in the 1920s had made peace with the idea that moisture sufficient to grow their crops would have to fall from the sky. The historian Samuel Eliot Morison argued that “the conquest of the Great Plains, land that had for so long posed a formidable barrier to settlement, had been America’s most notable achievement” in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1890, the United States had seventy-seven acres of land under cultivation for each of its citizens. Many of those acres had been virgin prairie just a few years before. By World War I, that figure dropped to four acres per citizen. Advances in agricultural methods had revolutionized the small family farm. Moreover, moderate climate and consistently high rainfall during the 1910s and 1920s produced bumper crops and heady optimism among High Plains farmers. In the two decades prior to the disastrous dust bowl years of the 1930s, agriculture on the plains looked like the new American gold rush.
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