Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  With the help of the devastating floods of 1943, Colonel Pick succeeded in upending the Corps’ long-held “hands-off” policy regarding water projects on the Central Plains, transforming a century of wariness into an agencywide obsession with the Missouri that infected everyone from General Wheeler on down. For more than four decades, funding public works on the Missouri had been deemed fiscal lunacy. The construction of Hoover Dam had been an enormous undertaking, one that lifted the nation’s spirits out of the darkest depths of the Great Depression. To tackle the Missouri with five Hoover Dams, and dozens of lesser reservoirs, would require a domestic public-relations campaign unlike any Congress had ever envisioned outside of war. But as the months went by, rather than question the overall efficacy of either plan, legislators acted as if the only unanswered question was which of the two would get the final nod of approval. Would it be Pick’s plan, with its emphasis on navigation and flood control, or Sloan’s plan, focusing on irrigation and a basinwide network of containment reservoirs?

  The Corps infuriated high-level bureaucrats at the Department of the Interior by quietly rushing the sketchy Pick Plan into the hands of anxious congressmen on the Committee on Rivers and Harbors. Nevertheless, the rough proposal sailed through an enthusiastic, one-day review without a single alteration. The Pick Plan was on its way to a full vote by the House when President Roosevelt intervened. The President had serious problems with the plan. For one, he was furious when he learned that Pick had already met with the Missouri River States Commission to promote the plan behind the administration’s back. Newspaper editors in the Missouri Valley were hailing the plan as a fait accompli before the president even saw the first draft. Echoing a now familiar charge, Roosevelt accused the Corps of attempting to make national policy without consulting either Congress or the administration.

  Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, was fearless in his official rebuke of the Pick Plan: “The Corps’ reputation for arrogance . . . is legendary, and every effort that has been made to induce the Corps to listen to recommendations made by the ablest civil engineers in the country has been resisted with an obduracy that is beyond belief.” Furthermore, the Pick Plan was sketchy and vague, said Roosevelt. It appeared to leave many questions deliberately unanswered, or intentionally vague. Flowage estimates and distribution of power and irrigation water were all missing. The upstream governors would spike it on sight, said Roosevelt, because it ignored their demands for irrigation. Finally, he instructed Congress to delay its decision until the Bureau of Reclamation plan was completed, which should be at any time.

  Secretary Ickes ordered the Sloan project rushed to completion. Ickes nurtured a quiet hatred for the Corps and was not reluctant to use his clout with Congress, and his influence with the president, to keep from being upstaged by a brash colonel. Thus a basinwide survey of reservoir sites was conducted by bureau engineers with such haste that $30 million irrigation projects were referred to as “windshield reconnaissance” because they were mapped out on the dashboards of cars speeding to the next valley. Bureau of Reclamation engineers spewed out project proposals in a blizzard of paper. Despite mounting pressures from Congress and Secretary Ickes, the 211 page Sloan Plan took months more to finish.

  Behind the scenes, Colonel Pick used this interval to promote his own plan on the banquet circuit, drumming up support for navigation and flood control. Without saying so, Pick’s public-relations campaign, aided and abetted by politicians from the lower Missouri states, made it clear that Pick was claiming sole jurisdiction on the Missouri. At the invitation of North Dakota governor John Moses, the colonel traveled to Bismarck in August 1943 and addressed a gathering of business leaders from the upper river states. Pick had good reason for wanting to head off incursions on his turf by civilian upstarts like Glenn Sloan. Sloan, in turn, told Congress that the bureau’s plan could accomplish the same goals as the Pick Plan with three fewer dams. The instinctive distrust Pick and Sloan developed for each other during these months would grow into open contempt, nurtured along by leaders in both agencies.

  Secretary Ickes explained to Roosevelt and Congress that the Sloan Plan, featuring the widespread use of smaller reservoirs and containment ponds, would easily impound enough water to prevent downstream flooding. A single 2 million acre-foot reservoir “could have easily regulated” all three floods in Iowa and Nebraska in the spring of 1943. Yet the Corps was proposing to impound 60 million acre-feet, ten times what was needed for effective flood control in a hundred-year flood. A key selling point to the Sloan Plan was its provision for bringing long-promised drought relief to small family farms on the Great Plains. Annually, turbines at the reservoirs would generate $17 million in power receipts; the plan would increase regional land values by an estimated $600 million dollars; and at current price levels the additional irrigation would increase crop values by $130 million each year. Population would grow, basinwide, by 630,000 people over the next thirty years, stabilizing the region’s cities and towns. All of this, in addition to the downstream flood protection, could be accomplished with a savings of hundreds of millions of dollars simply “by eliminating the Army’s proposed Garrison Reservoir.”

  In the previous two decades, Congress had spent billions of dollars to coerce meager to nonexistent harvests of low-value crops from marginal soil in the desert of the central Colorado plateau. Now, the passage of either plan would require billions more in spending in order to flood hundreds of thousands of acres of the most fertile farmland in North America, land that year after year did not require a single additional drop of water to produce bumper crops.

  Before the plans arrived in Congress for the formal debate, each side sought to reinforce its own base of support. Upstream politicians favored the Sloan Plan. Lower river states stood as a solid block behind the Army Corps of Engineers. Debates erupted with such rancorous enmity between the two sides that the challenge for Congress was twofold: settle on a scheme, and find a way to make the financing for this enormous undertaking plausible to the nation.

  Pick believed he had divined a method of plucking the thorn from his rose. If anyone bothered to take a close look at the Corps’ plan, the bulk of the “land takings” would be borne by the twenty-three Indian nations on the Missouri. All twenty-three nations, from the Northern Cheyenne and Crow to the Standing Rock and Yankton Sioux, were signatories to the Fort Laramie Peace Council of 1851. There is no evidence to suggest that treaty rights factored into Pick’s strategy, but in the unlikely event that Pick was aware of the government’s obligations under the Treaty of Horse Creek, he ignored them in the interest of selecting dam sites that would avoid flooding white communities such as Williston and Bismarck. Of the eight hundred square miles of rich bottomland that would disappear above Yankton, South Dakota, less than 10 percent was owned by white farmers. Only a few small towns, such as Van Hook and Sanish, would be affected by the floodwaters. The bulk of the land to be “taken,” approximately six hundred square miles, was owned by tribes. And right in the middle, at the center of the two-hundred-mile-long lake that would form behind the dam near Garrison, North Dakota, sat the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations.

  Spun about by the turmoil of all this legislative logrolling, everybody engaged in the Pick-Sloan debate in Washington overlooked an important aspect of protocol. Neither Pick nor Sloan, nor General Wheeler, Secretary Ickes, Governor Moses, or President Roosevelt ever bothered to consult with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people about either plan. Details about both schemes were drifting back to Elbowoods in disjointed bits of information and rumor. As late as the fall of 1943 nothing official had yet been announced by either Congress or the White House. The editor of the Sanish Sentinel counseled everyone to be patient and to hope for the best. The Tribal Council nonetheless gathered the bits and pieces of rumor floating around the valley and put them together. On November 15, 1943, the Tribal Council passed a resolution condemning any plan proposing a dam at the Mandan Bluffs. The following da
y the tribe sent copies of the resolution to members of Congress, the White House, and to Indian commissioner William Brophy:

  A dam below the Fort Berthold Reservation is being contemplated for future action by the Congress of the United States in cooperation with the state of North Dakota, which action, if realized, will destroy by permanent flood all the bottomland of the said reservation, causing untold material and economic damage to the Three Affiliated Tribes . . . and deprive approximately 250 boys from our reservation who are now serving in the armed forces from land rightfully theirs as the lands of these Indians were inherent property from time immemorial and in no sense [were] given to them by any human power arriving from somewhere else.

  When the telegrams arrived on desks in Washington, Congress’ attention was focused instead on the competing plans. For months, a blizzard of acrimonious letters demanded alterations, suggested recommendations, and promised challenges to both plans from members of Congress, regional governors, senators, and the White House. In congressional hearings, Colonel Pick attempted to portray the Missouri River as a great, unused highway that could easily pump economic vitality back into the nation’s midsection. To approve the other plan, he said, would be a waste of the taxpayer’s money. To politicians from upriver states, Pick’s testimony was a shameless attempt to cover up the fact that American taxpayers were being asked to spend half a billion dollars for downstream navigation channels that would never see more than a few hundred barges a year. The lower states knew that upriver politicians could block the Pick Plan in its entirety unless farmers were given an equal shake in the final package.

  In order to remedy this oversight, an amendment was tacked on to the bill by two senators from Colorado and Wyoming. Their caveat stipulated that in any future contest over the river’s resources, the irrigation requirements of upstream farmers would trump downstream navigation. Water flowing out of western mountains could not be used for navigation unless the latter in no way conflicted “with any beneficial consumptive use . . . in states lying wholly or partly west of the ninety-eighth meridian.”

  Pick allies in Congress did not have the muscle to turn back what came to be known as the O’Mahoney-Millikin Amendment. Yet while western senators from the upriver states had played their cards wisely, the final strategy of the lower states would win out in the end. Despite the clearly worded conditions of the amendment, lower-river politicians have systematically ignored it ever since. The strategy adopted by the lower-river states in 1944 has kept barges floating between St. Louis and Sioux City, without interruption, for more than fifty years.

  The day arrived, as Secretary Ickes had long predicted, when President Roosevelt had to play King Solomon. Congress was hopelessly deadlocked between the Pick and Sloan plans. In the fall of 1944, it fell to the president to choose between them. In the end, he threw his hands in the air and ordered the agencies to hammer out a compromise that would stop the flooding in the lower states, supply cheap hydroelectric power to the region’s growing cities, and offer drought relief to dryland farmers in the upper states. Roosevelt told General Wheeler and Secretary Ickes that he wanted to see the compromise built into the Flood Control Act of 1944, which Congress was already in the process of writing.

  Glenn Sloan flew to Omaha to hammer out a compromise with the Army Corps of Engineers on October 15, 1944. Colonel Pick, having since been sent to Burma to finish the Ledo Road, could not attend. Each agency arrived at the meeting determined to fight for every line item in its own plan. Neither side was willing to give up an inch of the river, or a dam, or a mile of levees, or an acre of irrigation. By late afternoon on the same day, the plans were quietly “reconciled” and sent back to Congress. Not counting the project at Garrison, they embraced more than $18 million worth of projects that one or the other had previously deemed worthless. No attempt was made to consolidate or justify costs. Project dimensions and the duplication of services were kept intact. Of the 113 major projects proposed by the combined plans, 110 survived the meeting in Omaha. The Pick-Sloan “compromise” sent to Congress was the very result critics of both agencies had predicted. When Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1944 on December 22, Farmers Union president James Patton called the final package “a shameless, loveless shotgun wedding.”

  Two weeks after the bureau and the Corps met in Omaha, a new chairman was elected for the Tribal Council of the Three Affiliated Tribes in Elbowoods. Following in his father’s footsteps, thirty-eight-year-old Martin Cross was sworn into office as the new chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations. News of the Pick and Sloan Plans had by now been disseminated throughout the region. Several members of the Tribal Council had met with the North Dakota Reclamation Association in Minot, the largest town upstream from Elbowoods. It was clear now that all nine of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities—Elbowoods, Nishu, Charging Eagle, Lucky Mound, Shell Creek, Red Butte, Independence, Beaver Creek, and Square Butte—and all their farms and ranches along the bottomlands, 152,000 acres in all, would be inundated by the flood. Wasting no time, Martin Cross scheduled a meeting with North Dakota’s new governor, Fred Aandahl, hoping to derail the dam before the plans could gain any more momentum. Aandahl told the new tribal chairman that he was foursquare behind the construction of Garrison Dam. In a follow-up letter, Governor Aandahl told Chairman Cross that until the tribes were ready to accept the damming of the river as inevitable, the two sides had nothing further to discuss.

  Since the governor’s office sat at the high end of a one-way road to inundation, Cross and the Tribal Council decided to go over the governor’s head by appealing to Roosevelt himself through the commissioner of Indian affairs, William Brophy. Cross telegraphed a letter to Brophy inviting him to meet with the Tribal Council in Elbowoods. “We Indians on the Fort Berthold Reservation oppose the construction of the Garrison Dam one hundred percent,” read the telegram. “Can you come and attend a conference with us?”

  Though he had never visited Elbowoods, Brophy was well acquainted with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara. A few months earlier he was present when Martin Cross was elected vice president of the new national organization of tribes, the National Congress of American Indians. Brophy declined the invitation with regrets, however, citing scheduling conflicts. President Roosevelt had died and was no sooner buried than Brophy found himself in a full-scale political battle to preserve his own agency. With the president gone, a new contest over the Indian bureau was rapidly coming to a boil in Congress. Hearings were opened to investigate the possibility of removing all federal protections from the tribes, tribal trust lands, and resources held in trust such as timber, gold, uranium, and silver. This coincided with a scheme being advanced by western congressmen to dismantle the Bureau of Indian Affairs altogether.

  Brophy dashed off a letter to Senator O’Mahoney, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, alerting him to the predicament of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes. In a parallel note to Chairman Cross, Brophy included a copy of his letter to Senator O’Mahoney and counseled the new tribal chairman that his best strategy for opposing the dam would be to work through friendly forces in O’Mahoney’s committee. The letter from Brophy was a sobering disappointment to the new tribal chairman.

  The Pick-Sloan juggernaut was beginning to look unstoppable. The Army engineers had built their entire plan for the Missouri on the shoulders of Garrison Dam. By hook and crook, Pick had persuaded Congress to ignore the scientific recommendations of his own agency, convincing lawmakers instead that Garrison Dam was the key to flood control on the entire river. Before a single shot had been fired in defense of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara treaty rights, the commissioner of Indian affairs was waving a white flag above the ramparts. The agency responsible for safeguarding the federal government’s obligations to Indian tribes seemed to have surrendered without a fight. As he looked out his office window in the Department of the Interior to the bright white dome of the Capitol building, Brophy knew that not
hing in Washington, D.C., was easier to swallow, or harder to kill, than a bad idea.

  CHAPTER V

  Hell and High Water

  “The uttermost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians. Their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent: and in their property, rights, and liberty they shall never

  be invaded or disturbed. . . .”

  NORTHWEST ORDINANCE OF 1787 U.S. CONGRESS

  A week before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs met with Martin Cross, the tribal chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, to hear the Indians’ views on the Garrison Dam and the Pick-Sloan Plan, a brief obituary appeared in the Sanish Sentinel newspaper. Forrest Cross, the seven-year-old son of Martin and Dorothy Cross, died early in the morning hours of October 2 at the agency hospital in Elbowoods. The boy’s death was blamed on a ruptured appendix.

  “It was the first day of October,” recalls Phyllis, “and for reasons that none of us can remember, school let out early that day. I was walking down the hall when somebody came running up from the playground and told me Forrest was hurt. A boy named Saunders Bearstail had kicked him in the stomach.”