Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  Phyllis found her little brother out in front of the school, where kids from Beaver Creek and Lucky Mound were boarding buses for the ride home. Forrest was crouched over and crying on the front steps. Saunders Bearstail had kicked him in the stomach in a playground scuffle, he told her, and it hurt right here, just below his ribs. His little sister, Uppy, wiped the tears off his cheeks as Phyllis lifted his shirt and checked for bruises. Nothing visible presented itself or gave her cause for alarm, so after reassuring him that the walk home would make him feel better, Phyllis and Uppy held his hands and the three Cross children started off down the dirt road for home.

  Phyllis remembers that it was a crisp autumn afternoon, with the smell of burning leaves in the air, and the nostalgic honking of migrating geese ringing from the October sky. She and Uppy tried to take Forrest’s mind off his stomach, but their little brother’s misery only seemed to worsen with every step. When their house finally came into view, Phyllis’s heart sank. The green pickup truck was gone. Her mother and father had gone off shopping to Parshall, or to Halliday, and there was no way of knowing when they would return home.

  “I hated it when they left like that,” says Phyllis. “I had to run the house and feed everybody and make sure all the chores were done and get the little ones to bed. When Mom and Dad left like that, their world landed in my lap.”

  By the time they reached home, Forrest had become inconsolable. As dusk turned to night his shrill cries of pain filled the rooms of the small house. Phyllis despaired at his bedside as Crusoe stood watch at the front window, hoping against hope that the next set of headlights on the road from Parshall would materialize into a green truck. But as evening became night, not a single car approached on Old Number Eight. By the time Martin and Dorothy finally returned home, sometime around midnight, Forrest had slipped into delirium. They gathered him up in a blanket and rushed out the door. Phyllis lay in her bed and listened to the truck race off down the road to Elbowoods. The kids all remember the weight of the silence that closed around their parents’ sudden departure, the sound of the truck going away, and waking suddenly hours later, sometime before dawn, when their father roused them out of bed and called them together in the front room.

  “Dad asked all of us to kneel in a circle,” says Marilyn. “Then he told us, ‘Brother’s really sick and we all need to pray extra hard because Brother needs our prayers right now.’”

  Kneeling shoulder to shoulder around the coffee table, the Cross children sent their prayers into the silent darkness. Pretty soon Martin stood up and covered his face with his hands. Without a word, he turned and walked out the front door and down the steps. The door of the pickup clanged shut and the engine roared to life as the headlights swung against the house and the truck sped off down the road to Elbowoods.

  “I was standing at the window the next morning when Mom and Dad pulled up in front of the house,” says Bucky. “They sat there in the cab of the truck for a long time. They weren’t talking.”

  Finally, Martin and Dorothy stepped down out of the truck and walked across the yard and up the plank steps to the front door. Before entering, Martin held Dorothy’s shoulders. She put her forehead against his chest and wept into her hands. Bucky stood in the window and stared blankly at the pale gray dawn that lit the bare limbs of the trees.

  “He died of blood poisoning. There was nothing the doctor could do,” says Phyllis.

  “Mom walled it off in her heart somehow, but Dad had to wall it off in his head,” says Crusoe. “A long time later, Mom told me that just before he died, Brother was hallucinating that water was rising all around him. He was delirious, but he kept telling her that he couldn’t get away from the water. He was drowning. Mom told me that she held on to his little hands and felt him slip away.”

  “After they brought him home in the little casket, Dad and I went up to Pem Hall’s house,” says Bucky. “Pem met us at the door. Dad asked him if he would help with the funeral for his little boy who had died in the middle of the night. I just stood there staring at my shoes when Dad fell apart. This great big man started sobbing. I’d never seen a grown man break down and cry like that.”

  “Of all of us, I think Forrest had the sweetest spirit,” says Crusoe. “You can see it in his face, in the old pictures. He and Raymond were a lot alike. I don’t think any of us have ever held it against the Bearstail boy. I never believed the incident on the playground had anything to do with Forrest dying. But it probably kept us from seeing what was really going on with him. Would it have made a difference? I don’t know. Would we have gotten him to the hospital earlier? We’ll never know.”

  “Before the funeral, they put Forrest’s casket in our bedroom,” says Bucky. “I’m so glad they did that because I’ve always had that memory. He was a beautiful little boy. He looked like he was sleeping. I combed his hair.”

  Probably no one in the immediate family was more traumatized by Forrest’s death than his shadow and little sister, the six-year-old Uppy. Ever since they were old enough to crawl, Uppy and Forrest were inseparable. With Forrest suddenly gone, her siblings remember Uppy sitting in the front room of the house and staring out the window for hours on end, as she rocked back and forth in a private world of grief. For more than a year after Forrest’s death, Uppy did not utter a word, or make a sound.

  “When Mom died in 1989, we found an unmarked envelope among her things,” recalls Marilyn. “Inside was all of Brother’s schoolwork, his little pictures, his projects from second grade, his homework, crayons, the stuff somebody collected out of his desk at school. Fifty years, she carried that envelope.”

  “A day or two after the funeral,” says Crusoe, “I woke up early and went into the kitchen looking for breakfast. Mom was in there by herself. I must have surprised her. I could tell she’d been crying. She turned away from me and wiped her cheek. I said, ‘Morning, Mom. Where’s Dad?’”

  “Your father?” said Dorothy, slightly surprised by the question. “Didn’t he tell you? He’s gone to Washington to fight the dam.”

  Late one afternoon in the autumn of 1945, Donald Goodbird hopped off the back of the Garrison mail truck at the agency post office in Elbowoods. Shouldering his duffel bag, Goodbird set off down the dirt road toward Martin Cross’s house, where he had left his horse for safekeeping three years before. After a home-cooked meal in Dorothy’s kitchen, he saddled his horse and rode off up the river toward his home in Independence, retracing the tracks he made when he went off to war.

  “That’s the way a lot of our guys came home,” says Crusoe, recalling that all but 6 of the 250 Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara enlisted men and women returned home safely at the end of World War II. “They came walking in over the hills, or down Old State Road Number Eight, with a duffel on their shoulder and pocketfuls of cash. No parades, no fanfare, but they were our heroes. For the first time in our history, most of our people were fluent in English, and a lot of us had had our first experience with the outside world.”

  The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations that Martin Cross was leading into the postwar era were no longer the reclusive, ethnocentric remnants of the once-great tribes championed by his father, Chief Old Dog. Forty years before Martin left for Washington, Old Dog made news in papers across the region when he rejected Congress’ offer of citizenship. The chief had lived a long life, long enough to watch many of the Great White Fathers’ promises vanish on prairie winds. In Old Dog’s view, they had already lost too many of their rights, rights they had foolishly believed to be given freely to all people by the Great Spirit, not doled out like beads and trinkets by the Great White Fathers in Washington. Old Dog’s own notions of “inalienable rights” had governed tribal culture for countless generations. By the turn of the twentieth century, Congress was telling Indian leaders that henceforth, Congress would be the final arbiter of just which privileges would enhance the overall well-being of the Great White Fathers’ “red children.”

  To enforce its will, Congress passed the
Religious Crimes Code in 1887 as an adjunct to the Dawes Act during President Harrison’s administration. This law, written by Methodist missionaries, banned all Indian religious ceremonies in an effort to drive Indian spiritual leaders out of business. Despite the freedom of religion protections in the First Amendment, lawmakers gave Indian agents the power to suppress and jail any native holy men caught practicing rituals such as the Mandan Okeepa ceremony, the original Sun Dance practiced widely by plains tribes. Despite James Madison’s establishment clause in the Constitution, which was designed to act as a legal firewall between civil law (and liberties) and the encroachments of organized religion, Washington put the management of Indian Country into the hands of Christian missionaries. With the blessings of Congress, Methodist and Congregational missionaries initiated the practice of sending Indian children to boarding schools in hopes of “killing the Indian to save the man.” The first missionary to live among the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, a Congregationalist named Reverend Charles Hall, arrived at Fort Berthold in May of 1876 on a steamboat from St. Louis that was piled high with provisions for Colonel George Custer and the 7th Cavalry.

  Not long after Reverend Hall and his bride disembarked at Like-a-Fishhook Village, the straight-laced patrician summarily denied a request by Chief Old Dog to hold a traditional dance in celebration of the harvest. A few years later, in 1894, Old Dog apparently remembered the religion of the man who denied him the right to dance. Rather than attend church at the Congregational mission, he took the sacrament of baptism in the Sacred Heart Catholic mission. Yet, to Reverend Hall’s own amazement, the fifty years he spent among the three tribes transformed him into one of Indian Country’s most distinguished and vocal advocates in Washington, D.C. “The people of these tribes turned the tables on me,” wrote Hall. “I came to convert them, and have myself been converted.” Becoming fluent in all three tribal languages, he set about preserving their vocabularies and grammar in writing. At the end of his career, the Congregationalist missionary from the Bronx was widely regarded as one of white America’s most fierce defenders of native rights.

  By 1945, Hall’s half century of activism was bearing latent fruit on the Upper Missouri River bottomlands. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara communities were growing rapidly and bustling with vitality. A census conducted that year by the Bureau of Indian Affairs found that the tribes had grown to 2,034 enrolled members, almost doubling their population since the turn of the century. The census also found that 80 percent of the tribal members attended weekly church services, and every child on the reservation went home each evening to a two-parent family. Divorce among the Indians was virtually unknown. Cohabitation outside of marriage would quickly turn into a formal invitation from the Tribal Court to make a trip to the altar, or enlist in the Army. “Living in sin” was prohibited by tribal laws. By the end of the war, less than 3 percent of the reservation population received federal assistance. Most of the federal money distributed by the superintendent in Elbowoods went to elderly, or handicapped, tribal members. All five hundred of the tribes’ school-age children, who a generation earlier would have been shipped to distant boarding schools, were enrolled at one of the nine agency day schools, or living at the boarding school in Elbowoods. Even with half of the tribes’ adult men in the armed forces, the BIA survey found that women such as Dorothy Cross and Maggie Grinnell had managed to increase the reservation’s agricultural production during each year of the war.

  Despite the tribes’ achievements, new wealth created by the economic boom in postwar America would bypass Indian Country. The average income on the Fort Berthold reservation in 1945 was $250 per year. The $2 million the tribe received from the 1930s land claims settlement had all been spent. As long as the tribes remained in relative isolation from the white world, $250 was sufficient to see most families through the year in Elbowoods. But with so many soldiers returning from distant countries, their heads filled with new ideas and their pockets bulging with cash, and with the threat of the dam inching its way toward reality with each passing week, Martin Cross, the thirty-nine-year-old leader of the Three Affiliated Tribes, knew that the isolation that once protected the people of Old Dog’s era from the outside world had suddenly become their grandchildren’s greatest liability. Like tribal leaders in 1781, like his great-grandfather Cherry Necklace in 1851, Martin Cross knew that the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations had once again arrived at a fork in the road. Just as before, tribal leaders were being asked to divine the path that would lead to survival.

  The Soo Line passenger train that left daily from the Northern Pacific station in Minot, North Dakota, took three days to reach Washington, D.C. On that October day in 1945, the four Indians that stepped up onto the train from the station’s brick herringbone siding were heading into a foreign country. This was their first trip to the nation’s capital as official representatives of the tribes. In the weeks prior to the journey, the Tribal Council had to decide on a strategy for stopping the dam before construction began. Yet the tribe had very little money with which to wage such a campaign, certainly not enough to buy train tickets to Washington, D.C., and foot the bill for big city hotels and meals. In order to make ends meet, fund-raising dances were held in all the communities. Marilyn Hudson remembers their neighbor, Lillie Wolf, going from door-to-door collecting dimes and quarters in a Bull Durham sack to help the council buy train tickets.

  “Not one of those guys had a stitch of clothes they could wear to a hearing in Congress,” remembers Crusoe. “Dad and I drove all over the country, from church to church, digging through mission barrels for suits, hats, shoes, and socks, whatever they could find to make them look halfway presentable.”

  The four tribal delegates from Elbowoods were met at Union Station in Washington by the Department of the Interior’s acting solicitor, Felix Cohen. Cohen, a forty-year-old bespectacled Jewish lawyer from New York, held a doctorate in philosophy from Columbia University and was regarded in legal circles as one of Washington’s brightest stars. In recent years, the dauntless Cohen had made his mark as a fearless and formidable defender of Indian rights. In fact, he had just completed his legal opus, the Handbook of Federal Indian Law, an encyclopedic project undertaken at the urging of his boss, Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior under Roosevelt. Anxious to help the contingent from Elbowoods, Cohen found rooms for Cross and his fellow councilmen at the New Ebbits Hotel, at Tenth and H Streets in northwest Washington. For Martin, the following day’s hearings in the Senate would be the first of dozens of appearances he would make before committees in Congress over the next several years. Before the end of the decade, people back home would start calling their councilmen “suitcase Indians,” a reference to their frequent trips to Capitol Hill. But none of the later meetings would carry as much weight, or as much anticipation, as the one that now awaited them.

  “Dad loved the responsibility of being the tribal chairman,” says Bucky. “As the son of Old Dog, it was a role he’d inherited, even though he got into it by choice. He shoved his canoe into the river on a beautiful, calm morning. The next thing he knew, the current had him and the river was boiling all around him. From then on, the only thing he could do was ride it out or fall in and drown.”

  “He was trapped between two eras, and he knew it,” says Marilyn. “He had one foot in the past, one in the future. He loved to play the saxophone. After dinner on summer evenings, he’d sit out on the back porch and light a cigarette and play Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’ An hour later, he’d be singing us lullabies in Hidatsa. At times, it must have been very lonely being Martin Cross. I never saw him show his fear.”

  “Once he got on that train there was no way back,” says Bucky. “A lot of people were stuck in the past and couldn’t face the fact that The Flood was coming. It was like the Ghost Dance, when people thought their Ghost Dance shirts would stop the white man’s bullets. All the dead were wearing those shirts at Wounded Knee. ”

  The historic meeting between Marti
n Cross and members of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs was called to order promptly at ten-thirty a.m. on the morning of October 9, 1945. Cross was accompanied into the Capitol by Tribal Council members Jefferson Smith, Martin Fox, and Earl Bateman. The hearing was held in room 424 of the Senate Office Building, with Senator Joseph O’Mahoney presiding. O’Mahoney was a powerful Democrat and veteran Capitol Hill power broker with a reputation as a ruthless deal maker. For its part, Congress tended to regard this meeting as a formality. Officially, it was listed as an investigation into a claim made by the Three Affiliated Tribes that “Garrison Dam, the construction of which is embodied in the engineering plan for the development of the Missouri River . . . will, if constructed, take or inundate 221,000 acres of Indian lands in violation of the treaty between the United States and the Indians.” As the hearing was brought to order, Senator O’Mahoney explained that Congress’ joint resolution, SJ Res. 79, was the “vehicle under which the committee can today hear a protest . . . by a delegation of Indians representing the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota.” In addition to the committee members and tribal councillors, also present were Walter Woehlke, the number-two man at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Department of the Interior’s leading solicitor, Felix Cohen.

  For Martin Cross and the tribal representatives, this hearing was the most important face-to-face encounter with white people since the Treaty of Horse Creek. Yet for many members of the 79th Congress, the hearing of Indian claims was a charade. Congress agreed to endure the ritual in order to claim a richer prize once the complaints were aired and the colorful parade of tribes through the corridors of Congress had finally concluded. The real petard of SJ Res. 79 was concealed in the resolution’s fine print: “To investigate the administration of Indian affairs.” This, in fact, was the sharp end of the wedge that many lawmakers hoped would eventually lead to the dismantling of the Bureau of Indian Affairs altogether.