Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  Back home, Chairman Cross told local newspapers that the trip to Washington, D.C., had been a great success. On hearing their objections to the building of Garrison Dam at the Mandan Bluffs, Congress had promised that nothing would go forward until the legal issues raised by the tribe were resolved to the Tribal Council’s satisfaction. Upon the council’s return, the first official act was to remain on the offensive by hiring their own point man in Washington, D.C.—attorney Ralph Hoyt Case, whom they had met on their trip. Case’s job would be to safeguard the tribes’ interests in Congress and to coordinate the council’s campaign with other advocates for tribal rights at the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. With this first crucial meeting behind them, a collective sigh seemed to quietly rise from the council. A future that had looked so dark just weeks before seemed to have brightened considerably.

  As winter closed in and once again shut the tribes off from the outside world, the council struck upon the idea of offering the government a way out of its own trap. In February, they hired an engineering firm to investigate alternate sites for the dam. Working with the council and attorney Case, a civilian engineer named Daniel C. Walser soon arrived at a conclusion identical to the one reflected in Glenn Sloan’s basinwide master plan. Walser’s written opinion to the tribe also echoed that of Secretary Ickes: the Garrison Dam was an unnecessary extravagance. Fort Peck, combined with the other four large-scale dams proposed by the Corps, would provide more than enough storage for downstream flood control, upstream irrigation, and barge navigation to Sioux City.

  Building an enormous dam hundreds of miles from a road, railhead, or town made little sense. With just such a point of intersection in mind, Walser proposed that the Corps consider an alternative to the Garrison site another forty miles upstream from Elbowoods. The site above the town of Sanish featured several significant improvements over the Garrison site: It would only flood the upper portion of the reservation, leaving all nine communities intact; it would generate power more cheaply; and the government would save 1 million dollars in construction costs. In late May 1946, the Tribal Council, certain they had been dealt an ace in the hole, approved a resolution offering the upstream dam site as a gift to the American people, with no strings attached.

  As soon as he was notified of the plans for the alternate site, Case launched a campaign to turn the tide on the Upper Missouri through personal appeals to congressmen friendly to the tribes. Case and the council hoped that a handful of lawmakers such as Senator Joseph O’Mahoney could be persuaded to create a groundswell and stop the Pick Plan before it gained momentum.

  Having recently returned from an assignment in Burma, Colonel Pick rallied his allies and promptly shot down the Walser alternative before Case could win a single supporter for the alternative site. Already incensed by the legislative delays, Pick dismissed the Walser proposal with a summary judgment. “It would not be a project that we could justify or that I would recommend,” said Pick, effectively consigning the Walser alternative to legislative purgatory.

  The tribes’ friends in Congress were not yet willing to concede defeat. When Congress passed the War Department Civil Appropriations Act for 1947 in early May of 1946, Congress stipulated that the secretary of the interior would have to certify any “lieu lands” as being “comparable in quality and sufficient in area” to make the tribe whole for the land they were losing. Only after this exchange, which “shall be consummated before January 1, 1947,” could the actual construction of the dam then proceed. The interim secretary of the interior, Oscar Chapman, sent a letter to Case assuring him and the Tribal Council that the tribes would have to sign off on any lieu-lands offer before the dam could be built.

  A resolute Pick decided to press his advantage by arranging a meeting with the Indians themselves. Along with representatives from the BIA’s office in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and Lieutenant Colonel Delbert Freeman—the chief engineer assigned to manage the Garrison project—Pick and North Dakota governor Fred Aandahl rolled into Elbowoods in a caravan of shiny black government cars on May 27, 1946. Before the caravan turned down Old State Road Number Eight, no agreement had been reached between the Indians and their guests as to the purpose of the get-together. The press arrived to report on the meeting with its own set of assumptions. The New York Times titled its May 26 story on the meeting, TRIBES ON THE WARPATH. Locally, the Sanish Sentinel explained that the meeting with Pick and the governor was being convened “for the purpose of blocking the construction of the Garrison Dam, if possible.”

  Indians streamed from all the distant villages into the Elbowoods High School auditorium. Horses, wagons, buckboards, and old cars and pickups converged on Elbowoods and lined every street of town. “I’d never seen so many people in Elbowoods,” says Crusoe. “I was standing at the back door when Pick got up to speak. You could hear a pin drop.”

  Tribal chairman Cross brought the meeting to order and opened the floor to new business by welcoming the guests to Elbowoods. When Pick rose to speak, the packed auditorium awaited the colonel’s comments with stony civility.

  “Several conferences have been held with you people, during which the plan for the construction of this dam has been discussed,” began Pick. “During these conferences it was recognized that you were particularly desirous of preventing the construction of the dam at the Garrison site rather than obtaining compensation for the lands to be inundated. Under the law passed by Congress in 1944, the Army engineers are charged with building the Garrison Dam. We are meeting here today to work out ways and means of building the dam. When it is built, it will create a large lake. Before that lake can be completed, a large number of people living in this valley must be moved out to new locations. We are here as friends. We are here asking that you cooperate with the Army engineers and your official Indian affairs office in carrying out the law as now written. Mr. Cross, I would like to have this statement distributed in English and then interpreted.”

  Colonel Pick’s raspy, high-pitched voice sounded like a ball-peen hammer banging on a metal washtub. No one stirred. Hundreds of blank, enigmatic faces peered back at the expressionless queue of bald-headed white men arrayed in chairs behind the table at the head of the room. Pick’s opening remarks had just confirmed the Indians’ darkest suspicions. This is what they had come to hear with their own ears, and see with their own eyes. As Pick’s final words dissolved into a restive silence, James Driver, an elder from the community of Shell Creek, rose from his chair in the middle of the audience.

  “I hear that you have come here to ask us to give up our lands,” began the old man, who was one of the last living tribal members to be born at Like-a-Fishhook Village. “I am an old-time Indian. I have little knowledge of the English language. You will understand me when I tell you that there are some things that are dear to me, above all others. For instance, the land I am standing on is dear to me. From time immemorial, we have resided on this land. The land beneath our feet is the dearest thing in the world to us, and I am here to tell you that we are going to stay here. We refuse to be flooded. As members of the white race, you have come from across the pond as newcomers to this land. In the years that have come and gone, the time when our chief Four Bears was alive, he made treaties with your government that promised this land would be ours forever. Forever! What confuses the Indian is how he and the white man can have such a different interpretation of that word. We are here today to remind you that we were on this land long before the first white man came, and we are going to remain here forever. I have seen a good many white people with bald heads, and when a person is in that shape, he is usually the most gifted liar in the country. His promises are taken with a smile, but they are not worth the paper they are written on.”

  James Driver quietly returned to his seat. The audience stirred in the silence that followed his speech, but no one at the head table dared to respond. Finally, Chester Smith, another elder, rose to his feet and spoke briefly, reminding the white guests that A
merica had just finished a war to preserve freedom, and many Indians from Fort Berthold had fought for those same freedoms.

  Daniel Wolf, of Elbowoods, then followed with remarks that addressed Colonel Pick directly.

  “I heard your saying that you would do your best to give us the best land in exchange for our lands. I must tell you that I doubt your word. You have fooled us before. Why do I know this? Because there is no land that compares to what we have here. I am here to tell you that if we are forced to move somewhere else, to leave this land, the Indian people who called this place home before the white man came across the water will pass away with loneliness and sadness.”

  The Indians’ initial comments indicated that neither Pick’s flashy arrival nor his starched uniform and phalanx of aides had succeeded in nudging this crowd any closer to accepting the Corps’ plan for the Upper Missouri. Later, reflecting on the encounter in Elbowoods, the Indians told Arthur Morgan, author of Dams and Other Disasters and director of President Roosevelt’s Tennessee Valley Authority, that they believed Colonel Pick had specifically chosen words calculated to provoke the crowd’s anger. As each speaker finished, the meeting’s well-mannered decorum seemed to lose a little more of its fragile civility. The upwelling emotions were about to spill into a flood of anger. Thomas Spotted Wolf now rose, wearing a full headdress, a bolo tie, and a beaded vest.

  “Gentlemen, I won’t say that I am glad to see you, neither will I shake your hands,” began Spotted Wolf. His speech then boiled over into a furious attack of words that were delivered no more than an arm’s length from Colonel Pick’s nose. When Spotted Wolf had finished, the colonel decided he had heard all he wanted to hear from the Indians. As attorney Case presented his appeal for the upper dam, Pick stood up without apology to Chairman Cross and stormed out the door, followed by the governor and his aides.

  This was Pick’s first and last meeting with the many Indian tribes who owned land that would be inundated by his management plan for the Missouri. As for the stated purpose of promoting a free exchange of ideas between the Indians and the men at the head table, Thomas Spotted Wolf had gotten the last word. The lessons of the aborted meeting were not lost on Pick or the governor. As the official caravan made its way back to high ground, they both knew that they were engaged in a battle with a foe who would not be intimidated or bullied at the negotiating table. Pick, however, turned the incident to his advantage by reporting back to his friends in Congress that the event went just as he predicted. He and the governor had gone to Elbowoods with the intention of building a bridge of friendship with the Indians. Their best efforts were rewarded by insults from a belligerent and uncooperative tribe of backward natives who had no interest in the welfare of their fellow citizens on the Missouri.

  As the Corps geared up its public relations campaign among farmers, promising that the new dam would “bring immeasurable wealth to North Dakota . . . which can hardly be visualized in advance of its creation,” the War Department reported to President Truman’s new secretary of the interior, Julius Krug, that the search for “lieu lands” was proving to be a snipe hunt. There were no lieu lands to be found. For a brief period in the autumn of 1946, they believed they had located a possible exchange of bottomlands near the town of Washburn, currently being farmed by whites. When word of this leaked out, once sympathetic whites suddenly became the tribes’ fiercest enemies. News of the proposed land swap was met with a “stunned silence” that quickly gave way to a storm of protests in town meetings and local papers. Yet even this land did not meet the “comparable and sufficient” standard required by Congress. Affirming the argument the Indians had made all along, and with regrets, the Washburn exchange was spiked.

  As Congress’ deadline for an exchange of land rapidly approached, the search for lieu lands suddenly turned frantic. By now, lawmakers were losing patience with this expensive and fruitless search for replacement lands. Some members of the Tribal Council were under the impression that if no “comparable and sufficient” lands could be found, then talk of Garrison Dam would end. More than 6 million dollars had already been spent by the Corps in preliminary engineering work. They had laid a new rail spur to the site and built the town of Riverdale from scratch to house future workers. If anyone thought the government was going to walk away from all that work and money “for a handful of Indians,” wrote the editor of the Hazen Star newspaper, “they were crazy.”

  The War Department finally admitted that “comparable and sufficient” lands did not exist. At last the charade was called off. In the closing months of 1946, administrators at the Corps and bureau began openly discussing a cash settlement for the tribes. Clearly, anxiety was also mounting on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers wanted to see bulldozers moving dirt. With the “drop-dead” day fast approaching, members of the powerful Appropriations Committee in the House began echoing the War Department’s call for a cash settlement. The fact that no money had been allocated for a “taking” in the original appropriation for the dam could be easily remedied. As for the legal problems surrounding the status of trust lands, well, that could be finessed somehow. Neither hell nor high water was going to stop the Corps. The agency now appeared to have a monopoly on both.

  Without risking the liability of actually spelling out its dirty little legal problem, Congress had made its decision. Lawmakers would simply lift their eyes above the troubling distinction between trust lands and allotted lands, and pretend the former was the latter in order to wiggle out of its overarching treaty obligations as a trustee to the tribes. Rather than sending in the cavalry, Congress had learned that it could exert its will in Indian Country simply by passing new statutes. Incidents such as Wounded Knee and the Sand Creek Massacre had put up a foul odor that lingered over federal Indian policy for decades. A hundred years from now, who would know the difference, or remember the cause and effect of a simple statute? As he watched the drama unfold from the sidelines as an observer, engineer, author, and the former director for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Arthur Morgan wrote in his journal that nothing the Corps did could surprise him. In a letter to the former secretary of the interior Harold Ickes, Morgan argued that nothing could be worse for the country than a “willful and expensive Corps” that made up its own rules in defiance of Congress and in contempt of public welfare. Out on the Missouri, continued Morgan, they were witnessing the destruction of an “ideal human community, the Three Affiliated Tribes, a group of people who have lived in a community of goodwill and economic independence” for countless centuries.

  The January 1, 1947, deadline came and went with no agreement on lieu lands. Attorney Case wrote a letter to Cross to inform him that the Department of the Interior was being flooded with letters supporting the tribes, but there was little chance these sentiments would have an effect on policy. Both the BIA and the Department of the Interior were resigned to the fact that the dam was going to be built. The Corps interpreted Congress’ frustration with the lieu-lands deadline as a green light to ignore the ban on construction. When the Tribal Council complained that Army engineers had resumed work on a new rail spur near Sanish, the protest was ignored in Washington. What had taken a day to cobble together in Omaha would take forever and a day to build and pay for.

  A fourth tribal delegation traveled to Washington and testified against a cash settlement on July 17, 1947. A newly elected tribal councilman, Mark Mahto, threw down a gauntlet in a hearing with the House Appropriations Committee.

  “The quickest and most merciful way to exterminate the three tribes is by mass execution, like they did to the Jews in Germany. We find it strange that the treaty made between you and the aggressor nations of Japan and Germany are more sacred than the treaty you made with the three tribes. Everything will be lost if Garrison is built. We will lose our homes, our communities, our economy, our resources. We took in the Lewis and Clark expedition in the winter of 1804. We took those men in and watched them like hawks to keep them from freezing and starving to death. If you are determined
to remove us from our land, you might as well take a gun and put a bullet through us. The principles that we fought for in this last war, right beside you, was for the very homes, lands, and resources that you are trying to take from us today.”

  The campaign to pay off the tribes with a lump sum cash settlement arrived at a moment of truth in the early weeks of 1947. Jefferson Smith and Mark Mahto had no sooner boarded the Empire Builder for the trip back to Elbowoods than Congress huddled with officials from the War Department and quietly hammered out Public Law 296. Before the ink was dry, P.L. 296 was passed by the full House, without a word of protest. With this law, Congress now formally proposed to sidestep its earlier obligations by compensating the tribes with a lump sum payment of $5,105,625. According to the text of P.L. 296, this figure would represent full payment for the “acquisition of the lands and rights therein within the taking line of Garrison Reservoir . . . including all improvements, severance damages, and reestablishment and relocation costs.” The Corps, in other words, could now move forward with work on the dam itself without having to anticipate any further irritating delays.

  When their train pulled out of Union Station, councilmen Smith and Mahto were convinced that this latest round of testimony had cinched the deal. Congress, they were certain, would now move decisively to stop the Pick juggernaut in its tracks. Unbeknownst to them, Smith and Mahto had fallen for the oldest trick in the book by believing their own press. As the councilmen’s train rumbled down the tracks, Congress, instead of cinching the deal to stop Pick-Sloan, was quietly approving the lump-sum buyout. Word of Congress’ betrayal would beat them home. When they arrived back in Elbowoods and heard the news, Mahto and Smith sat through an emergency meeting of the council in stunned silence. After Chairman Cross distributed copies of Congress’ latest bait-and-switch offer, not a word was uttered. The entire council pored over the new law with disbelieving eyes.