Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  Congress’ abdication of its trust responsibilities to the Three Affiliated Tribes, the failure that Felix Cohen had warned them about four years earlier, was the legislative outcome that Chief Justice John Marshall had most feared. The Indians held aboriginal title to the land. As such, they enjoyed rights that were guaranteed to them by treaty, the Northwest Ordinance, and the U.S. Constitution. With the takings act of 1949, Congress inadvertently became a latter-day agent for Pope Innocent III. Lawmakers could follow their “taking” back to Quod super his to find the origin of its preemptive legal justification for forcing the “infidel” to relinquish title to his aboriginal homeland. Yet just as Felix Cohen had warned, Congress could only do so by sawing through a load-bearing beam that supported the American house of democracy.

  In the years immediately following the war, the Elbowoods Warriors always won a berth in the North Dakota state basketball championships. The year after the takings act passed in Congress, the team was snowed in by a late-season storm. There was no chance of getting to Minot by road. Instead, their resourceful superintendent, Rex Quinn, came up with a plan. He and the men of Elbowoods plowed the streets of town to make a landing strip. On a snowy March day in 1951, the U.S. Air Force landed on the main street of Elbowoods with a DC-3 and picked up the team and their coaches. They landed sixty miles away, in Minot, a half hour before tip-off. The Warriors won.

  The following autumn, the Elbowoods Warriors had the best record in the state in football. Going into the final game of the season, against the boys from the high school in the new town of Riverdale, the Warriors were undefeated. So were their opponents, the Knights, who had been soundly beaten by the Indians in their two previous contests. These were the sons of the engineers brought in by the Army Corps of Engineers to build Garrison Dam. They knew about the tall and lanky Cross kid named Bucky. He had great hands as a receiver, and a fair turn of speed, and if he got loose on the sidelines it usually meant six points. But the young man they were laying for that week was already a high school football legend in North Dakota. Arnie Charging, a young Arikara fullback, had already been offered six scholarships to play college ball, including a full-ride offer from Notre Dame. No one in the history of North Dakota football had scored as many touchdowns, or piled up as many rushing yards, as Arnie Charging. Against the Underwood Comets the previous Friday, Charging rushed for four touchdowns, kicked two extra points, passed for another two touchdowns, and gained 194 yards on the ground. And that was an off night.

  The matchup against Riverdale was the final game of the season. This time, the Warriors would be playing on Riverdale’s home field. Like most games played late in the season, it was a nasty, bitter cold day. These were perfect conditions for an Indian fullback from Elbowoods.

  “The only thing we’ve ever been able to figure is somebody got to those refs before the game,” says Charging. “On the first play of the game, I ran a sweep around the right end and went seventy-eight yards for a touchdown.”

  The referees called the touchdown back. A line judge said Charging had stepped out of bounds when he turned up the field. On the very next play, Charging took a handoff from the quarterback and flicked the ball to Bucky Cross, who ran the length of the field for another touchdown.

  “They called that one back, too, on a clipping penalty,” says Charging. Soon, the weather deteriorated along with the game. An Arctic storm was howling across the plains. By the start of the second half, the frigid winds had kicked up a ground blizzard that made it impossible to see the far side of the field. When the final whistle blew, the Riverdale Knights had won the game, fourteen to three. According to the story in the Minot Daily News, by all rights the Elbowoods Warriors probably should have won the game handily. But the referees, who had all been brought up from Bismarck, called back all six of their touchdowns.

  “We lost that game before we ever set foot on the bus,” says Charging. “It’s the kind of thing that stays with you for a long, long time.”

  Martin and Dorothy Cross’s biggest surprise of the postwar years would be the birth of their tenth and final child. The little boy, born at the hospital in Elbowoods on August 24, 1948, was named White Duck. As dictated by custom, a relative from the father’s family organized a traditional Hidatsa naming ceremony two weeks after the child was born. A generation earlier, another White Duck, Alice’s uncle and Chief Old Dog’s brother, became a celebrated warrior in tribal legends that immortalized his bravery and exploits in battles against the Sioux. When White Duck’s namesake was baptized at the Sacred Heart Mission, Father Reinhart, the same priest that had buried his brother Forrest three years earlier, asked the parents, “And how will this child be known?” Martin and Dorothy Cross answered, “His name will be Raymond.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Leaving Elbowoods

  “I wish all to know that I do not propose to sell any part of my country. I am particularly fond of the little groves of oak trees. I love to look at them because they endure the winter storms and summer heat and, not unlike ourselves, seem to flourish by them.”

  TATANKA YOTANKA, HUNKPAPA (SITTING BULL)

  In late May of 1951, Louise Holding Eagle had just celebrated her twenty-first birthday with her husband and their two young children. The couple had eloped and gotten married as soon as they graduated from the high school in Elbowoods in 1948. Early the following summer, the couple moved into a small farmhouse on the outskirts of town. There they raised a few cows in the pasture and put in a crop of oats and durum wheat. The winter of 1951 had been exceptionally long. By May, Louise’s pantry shelves were bare. Indians had always called late spring “the starving time.” On a warm and sunny afternoon a few days after her birthday, Louise left her two children with her husband and drove to the grocery store in Beulah, thirty miles away. After shopping for sugar, flour, beans, and potatoes, she stopped for a bite of dinner at the home of some old school friends, then turned for home in the twilight.

  “Nobody had a phone back then, so I couldn’t call my husband and let him know I’d be a little late,” remembers Louise. “He was an easygoing man, and I knew he wouldn’t mind.”

  The long summer evening suddenly darkened when the road home dropped into the valley. When Louise reached the turn to her house on Old State Road Number Eight, she thought she must have been disoriented by the gathering darkness. Inadvertently, she had turned down a long driveway that ended abruptly in an empty field.

  “It took me a minute before I realized I was in the right place. I was home, all right. Everything was right where it was supposed to be. Except my house.”

  The house, the barn, and the chicken coop were gone. The Corps had come in that afternoon with a crew and a flatbed truck and driven off with the house and two outbuildings. The only thing they left behind was the old foundation. Louise Holding Eagle spent the next two hours chasing her house across the prairie.

  “It was just like that for a lot of folks,” says Louise, a bright-eyed, cheerful woman who now entertains her grandchildren at her small home in Parshall. “For years and years we heard stories like that,” she says, chuckling with a tinge of sadness. “I know one lady who had to chase her house on horseback.”

  The challenge for tribal leaders was to penetrate the hardened silence of their members when it came to moving to higher ground. Nearly all of the Indians still considered the high ground foreign country. The Tribal Council finally realized that as long as the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ offices remained in Elbowoods, nobody wanted to make the first move. But the Corps had an answer for that problem. In the summer of 1951, two years before the scheduled evacuation of government personnel, they began moving homes out of Elbowoods and surrounding environs. Arnie Charging was having dinner with his new bride one evening when they heard a racket outside their house. The couple continued eating and thought little of it until they felt the room lifting beneath them. “They never told us a thing or gave us a word of notice,” says Charging. “I ran outside to find out what the
heck was going on. There was a bunch of white guys out there with jacks and sledgehammers. ‘Oh, sorry, we didn’t know you were home. We’re moving your house, Mister. Where do you want us to put it?’”

  If there was reluctance in Elbowoods to accept the inevitability of relocation, by the summer of 1951 the dam was fait accompli in Washington and Bismarck. Sixty miles upstream from the state capital, a permanent cloud of dust now hung over the eastern horizon, day after day, like smoke rising from a wind-driven prairie fire. Charles Pickering, the editor of the Sanish Sentinel, got in his black ’46 Buick and took a drive down the valley to see for himself. “Earth-movers are at work excavating the powerhouse and a test diversion tunnel on the west side of the river,” he told readers. “Visible from the dam site are the water tower, the powerhouse, and dwellings of the government-built town of Riverdale. White people in the valley are about to get a taste of what the Indian has been experiencing for the past hundred years.” In other words, whites and Indians alike who lived in the flood area could protest the dam until they turned blue in the face, but they had better be doing it while they were packing their bags.

  In Washington, a storm of a different kind had suddenly blown up over the implementation of the Pick-Sloan Plan. Torrential rains in the spring of 1951 once again brought a “hundred-year flood” to Nebraska and Iowa. Seeing a golden opportunity in the Missouri’s rising waters, the newly promoted General Pick had his picture taken on a stack of sandbags outside of Omaha and blamed this new wave of devastation on Congress’ “needless foot-dragging” in funding the main stem flood-control dams. Pick’s widely published accusations made legislators look like dunces. This time, the general had overplayed his hand. A newspaper editor in Kansas City wrote that Pick’s “stampede tactics . . . made General MacArthur look like a small-time operator.” Furious congressmen demanded a review of the general’s conduct. Anxious to cooperate with the goose that laid the golden egg, the Corps’ top brass publicly censured the general.

  Pick’s censure was immediately underscored in a long-awaited report on public works released by a high-profile commission headed by former president Herbert Hoover. Produced at the request of the Truman administration, the Hoover Commission study could not have been released at a more inopportune moment for the Corps and the bureau. Himself an engineer, Hoover appointed former Wyoming governor Leslie Miller to write the report on natural resources. After studying federal water projects for two years, Miller launched a broadside attack against both federal water agencies in the Saturday Evening Post. The bureau and the Corps were so violently jealous of each other, wrote Miller, that their “senseless competition” was leading America to the poorhouse. Both were guilty of “cockeyed” cost overruns in the billions of dollars, and the Pick-Sloan Plan, which was shaping up to be the most extravagant public works project in the nation’s history, was “a conscienceless bit of political compromising. The Engineers will use navigation and flood control as a guise for a hydroelectric project, while the Reclamationists use irrigation as their alibi for hydroelectric development. . . . Do you want to pay a fifty-two-billion-dollar water bill?” asked the governor. “You may have to if someone doesn’t stop the money-spending contest between the Army engineers and the Reclamation Bureau.”

  Although the Hoover report got the most attention in the national press, Governor Miller’s diatribes were not the Corps’ biggest worry. Word had filtered through the legislative grapevine that the takings law passed by the previous Congress had serious problems. Somebody in committee had jumped the gun. The tribes’ new attorney, James E. Curry, was asking thorny questions about the act’s underlying legalities, and even the government’s own attorneys at the Department of the Interior admitted that Congress had gone too far. The bill Congress wrote to resolve the Indian issues, once and for all, had created a raft of new ones.

  An undeterred Senator Watkins reassured the Corps that any problems with the bill would be ironed out forthwith. Construction on the dam should proceed at full throttle. The massive excavation work was ahead of schedule. The Corps had started moving the homes of tribal members to higher ground, and a relocation team had set up shop in Elbowoods. Also, a crew from the Department of the Interior was on the scene and had started building new roads.

  As a feat of engineering, Garrison Dam was an ambitious, impressive undertaking. Site selection for any dam was a tricky “science” at best. For a “rolled earth” structure such as Garrison, in which various kinds of soils would be built up in thick layers to form the main body of the dam, the stability of subsurface geology was a critical factor in site selection. At full capacity, the dam would have to be strong enough to hold back 24.5 million acre-feet of water, enough to form a lake hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of miles long. To engineers poring over the blueprints, the cross sections of the dam were breathtaking. What they were about to build here would be unlike any structure ever constructed by man and machine.

  At a cost of $600 million, Garrison Dam was Lewis Pick’s monument to American know-how. The crest of the completed dam would be four miles across, spanning the entire breadth of the Missouri River Valley. Half a mile wide at its base, the entire monolithic structure would sit on an impermeable, ten-foot-thick clay blanket that covered the lake bed for almost a mile upstream. From its base to its crown, the dam would be formed by layers of “rolled earth” that would measure 210 feet high. Set down in New York City, Garrison Dam would swallow twenty-story buildings on a continuous run from Washington Square to Central Park. Heavy equipment operators moved a million cubic yards of dirt every week for two years to stay on schedule. Nearly all of the 65 million cubic yards of earth and rock that were poured into the dam’s massive breastworks were excavated from nearby bluffs and upstream bottomlands. The huge scars made by the steam shovels, bulldozers, and earth-movers would eventually be hidden beneath the lake’s placid surface. Byron Sneva, the grandson of a Norwegian emigrant who settled in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, in 1879, had just graduated with a degree in civil engineering when the call came from the personnel office of the general contractor, Peter Kiewit Sons of Grand Island, Nebraska, to report for work at the dam. Now retired from a lifelong career as a civil engineer, he still marvels at the engineering challenges that were posed by the Garrison project.

  “For a bunch of young engineers who were full of piss and vinegar, Garrison was a great experience,” he says. “Most of us would never be involved in anything like it again. When I remember that site in my mind’s eye, I’m awed by it.”

  Sneva spent two years at Garrison, but he did not see the finished dam until he revisited the site in the mid-1960s. A two-lane road ran along the crest of the dam. Sneva recalls his astonishment at his first sight of the lake as he drove across the dam.

  “When I looked out over that stretch of water, all I could think about was the bitter cold days I spent four hundred feet beneath the surface of that lake at the outlet channel. What was in front of me was this enormous lake, but what I saw in my mind’s eye was this huge expanse of dirt, with hundreds of huge pieces of earth-moving equipment. It was really strange.”

  Sneva worked on the west side of the dam, where he set the elevations for the diversion channels, huge culvertlike structures that would allow the dam’s operators to control the release of water once the lake had filled. Similar channels, called the intake towers, were built on the upstream side of the dam. These were 20-foot-wide tunnels that would direct the river’s flow through turbines to produce electricity. Both the intake tunnels and the diversion channels, or spillways, had to be built into the 210-foot-high pile of dirt.

  “We used a massive dragline to carve out those channels. Those buckets scooped up three average-size dump-truck loads with every pass.” When finished, the diversion channel spillway would be two thousand feet wide and hundreds of feet deep. The dump wagons hauling earth out of the cut through the bluffs never stopped moving. “It took a crew of five hundred men just to keep that equipment running. They mad
e two bucks an hour, and from Monday morning till Saturday afternoon, there was always a line at the employment office in Riverdale.”

  Sneva’s responsibility was to direct the excavations in the spillway cut and to calculate the volumes of earth that needed to be moved. Once he staked out the shape of the channels and the elevations for the cut, the big scoop shovels and bulldozers went to work. “Those dozer drivers were crazy. They’d bring those huge blades right up to the edge of the bluff, lower the blade, start the cut, and ride that avalanche all the way to the bottom, straight down, hundreds of feet, with their legs braced on the dashboard. The things they could do with those bulldozers, you had to see with your own eyes.”

  For men like Byron Sneva, work on Garrison seemed more like a race against time than a race against the river. In winter, high winds, blizzards, and subzero temperatures directed the pace of the work. Instead of bringing relief, summer brought its own catalog of miseries. By mid-June the humidity in the bottom of the cut approached 100 percent. Temperatures routinely soared past one hundred, and black clouds of mosquitos and gnats made life miserable. The only relief from the extremes came in autumn. Late September and October brought crisp nights, warm days, and brilliant blue skies. It was then that Sneva and his pals first headed for the floodplains along the river bottoms to hunt grouse and deer.

  “Those river bottomlands were a different world. There was so much game in the fields and woodlands of the bottom that we never bought meat at the grocery store.” It was on one of those October hunts, in the wooded bottomlands between the dam and the mouth of the Knife River, that Sneva first saw the Indian farms and villages. In his two years at the dam, he does not remember anyone ever discussing how The Flood might change the Indians’ world.