Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  When Crusoe pulled up to his mother’s house in Parshall on a sunny June morning in 1955, he had a roll of mustering-out pay in his pocket, a car with four good tires that was “bought and paid for,” and a strong back that he planned to put to work doing odd jobs until something better came along. To his surprise, this remote, idyllic little community of Scandinavian Lutherans had been transformed by The Flood into an Indian village. Between time spent in Parshall, and his on-again, off-again life at Martin’s ranch at Raub, the next five years for Crusoe evaporated into “a drunken haze between the dead end at the ranch and the dead end of town.”

  “Life was so drastically different from what it had been in Elbowoods that none of us could begin to make heads or tails of what was happening,” says Crusoe, remembering a childhood friend named Billy Lockwood and his wife, Annie. The couple had gotten married right after high school. When Crusoe came home from the service, Billy and Annie lived directly across the street from Dorothy Cross, on East Second Street in Parshall.

  “Billy and Annie had two little kids. I can still see those bright happy eyes, their beautiful little faces. The shack they lived in was maybe ten feet by fourteen feet. It had a dirt floor, no ceiling. They’d bundle the two babies in blankets and stuff them into a mattress up over the ceiling joists. We’d all sit in there in our coats in the middle of the winter, six or seven of us, each with a bottle of wine, and drink. When it got really cold, Billy would reach up and break off part of a joist, or one of the rafters, and stuff it into the wood stove for heat. We thought that was normal. Everybody we knew lived like that. We buried those babies.”

  Comatose drunks, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, wet brain, and the all-too-famous jalopy crashes and funerals became the currency of exchange of life “on top.” Entire families lived in cars and in grain sheds on the outskirts of Parshall. White people’s anger over the sudden transformation of their clean, well-lit community boiled over onto the streets, and in churches and school classrooms, in undisguised hatred. Nothing in the Indians’ past experience prepared them for the racism that engulfed them. Among their many white neighbors in Elbowoods, racism had been nonexistent. But when hundreds of Indians landed in Parshall after The Flood, animosities once held in check beneath polite exteriors now colored every glance, every word and gesture at the grocery store and gas station. “Indian kids were dying of hunger and exposure all over the place,” remembers Crusoe. “You can walk through the cemeteries today and see all the little graves from those years. There’s dozens and dozens of them.”

  “What worried me most was little Ray and Carol,” says Phyllis. “Mom had gotten chummy with the Seventh-Day Adventists, and Dad was drinking more than ever. He would come to Parshall and beg her to take him back. There were these horrible scenes. Mom would let him sleep it off in the basement, but she wouldn’t take him back. Then he’d disappear again for weeks.”

  By the end of the 1950s, white people in neighboring communities were faring little better than the Indians. The familiar mosaic of long winters, hot, dry summers, and depressed crop prices was painfully reminiscent of the “dirty 30s.” Strangely enough, ever since the Corps seduced white farmers into supporting the construction of Garrison Dam by promising them a million acres of irrigated croplands, the fortunes of farmers had soured at the very moment they expected improvements. Farmers had regarded the government’s promise of irrigation to be as good as gold, better than cash in the bank. Banks, after all, could fail, but the Bureau of Reclamation would still be there to haul the water after the creeks rose and hell froze over.

  But a new generation of farmers was learning that problems tend to merge in damaged habitats. From horizon to horizon, those one-hundred-sixty-acre Jeffersonian units of family and God, hard work and prosperity, were turning into a graveyard as big as the sky. Where dreams failed by the thousands, windmills clattered and clicked and pumped sand beneath an inscrutable blue dome. The wind and silence carried a message: free-market capitalism was no match for the fierce natural forces that had ruled the Northern Plains for ten thousand years. The cruel irony of the Pick-Sloan Plan was inescapable to those who dared to look. Without the support of farmers, the Army Corps of Engineers could not have secured congressional approval for its extravagant scheme. Without ironclad guarantees to the region’s dryland farmers that irrigation would be the crown jewel in the Flood Control Act of 1944, Garrison Dam would never have been built. Yet fifteen years after Congress promised farmers that their needs would come first, the first drop of irrigation water had yet to fall on the Northern Plains.

  By 1960, the irrigation projects approved by Congress in 1944 were still nothing more than promises on paper. Farmers were running out of patience. No one could deny that they had done their part to make Pick-Sloan a reality; now they were calling in their debts. To make matters worse, as the farmers watched their crops wither from thirst, the Corps continued to build huge dams on the Missouri with missionary-like zeal. After the keystone project at Garrison was completed in 1954, the Corps turned next to the Oahe Dam, which was soon followed by the Fort Randall Dam and the Gavins Point Dam, near the South Dakota border. At the end of the decade, Pick dams had impounded nearly 50 million acre-feet of water, yet upstream farmers were still waiting to see the first mile of irrigation pipes. Quiet grumbling soon swelled to public anger.

  Lawmakers realized that if irrigation was ever going to become a reality on the Upper Missouri River, they needed to create an independent administration to manage the Sloan Plan. As long as the two plans were connected, the Corps would get the lion’s share of the funding. Though the two plans were created by the same law, in actual practice they had been anything but equal. To correct that imbalance, Congress created the Garrison Diversion Unit of the Missouri River Basin Project to mollify frustrated farmers. Anxious to show its good faith, Congress then sent a delegation to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, in the spring of 1960 to hear the long-suffering farmers’ complaints. Unfortunately, Congressman Otto Krueger told them, they had picked a bad time to voice their demands. The Sloan Plan had recently come under attack by the United States Chamber of Commerce, which had declared war on “the entire federal reclamation program.” An apologetic Krueger counseled farmers to bide their time until civility and common sense could be restored in Washington.

  Farmers were beginning to suspect that irrigation had been nothing more than a cruel ploy all along. They had been duped into playing obedient pawns in the battle between two federal agencies fighting for control of the Missouri River. After the first dams were built and flooding ceased in downstream states, no one in Washington seemed much inclined to spend billions more dollars on irrigation projects. After yet more hearings in 1963, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch pulled the mask off the Pick-Sloan Plan: “This would be a good time for the governors and senators and representatives of the Missouri Valley states to decide whether they want to be held liable for the consequences of the most gigantic boondoggle in American history.”

  Dorothy Cross had no sooner moved out of Elbowoods than she realized that Parshall was no place for a single mother to be raising two young children. As the months went by, and she moved Raymond and Carol from one shack to another, she watched the once idyllic little town of Parshall falling apart all around her. Quietly but deliberately, Dorothy Cross began plotting her escape. When her daughter Marilyn and son-in-law Kent moved to California in 1959, she purchased bus tickets for herself and the two children, Raymond and Carol, and headed west for the summer. Eventually, by the time Raymond and Carol were in high school, they stayed in California year round. After Uppy and Bucky graduated from Haskell Indian Nations University in the early 1960s, they joined the rest of the family in the Bay Area.

  For a half dozen years now, the BIA office at Fort Berthold had been actively “relocating” tribal members off the reservation as quickly as they could secure vouchers from Washington, D.C. The trail between Fort Berthold and the Bay Area was a well-worn groove.
Crusoe was twice exiled from Parshall on Dillon Myer’s relocation program—once to Chicago and later to San Francisco. By the early 1960s, the entire Cross family, and half of the tribal membership, had been relocated to Seattle and Los Angeles, Chicago, Denver, and the urban centers of northern California.

  “There were a lot of tragedies in those years that will never get into the history books,” says Bucky, who joined his brothers and sisters in the Bay Area in the 1960s, after he was discharged from the Army. Over the years he got to know hundreds of “relocation” drifters from places such as Pine Ridge, Lame Deer, and Shiprock. “Who knows how many thousands of Indians were dumped off in the cities? Years later you heard about the suicides in a bar on the North Beach from somebody who knew somebody, or headlines in the newspapers. NAMELESS INDIAN JUMPS OFF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE, or NO-NAME JOE LEAPS FROM WINDOW. No known origin. No known survivors. No name, or, for that matter, no country.”

  For Crusoe and Bucky, every nameless Indian they read about in the newspaper was a kid they grew up with, a kid they swam with and rode horses with in the hills above Elbowoods. Thousands of “relocated” young Indians disappeared into America’s urban ghettos and were never heard from again. Crusoe was determined to avoid that fate. Each time he returned to Parshall from Chicago or San Francisco, there were fewer lights burning in the windows of the house on East Second Street that Old Dog built. Eventually, one autumn night in 1960, he found the house completely dark, and himself completely alone. Instead of chasing down his old acquaintances at bars in town, he decided to keep on driving out Old State Road Number Eight and headed straight to the ranch.

  “Dad really needed me. I knew it, even though he could never come right out and tell me. Before I left we couldn’t spend five minutes in the same room without getting into a fight. Now we spent months out there on that ranch, just the two of us. Elbowoods was gone, the family was scattered all over the place, and he was out of politics. He must have asked himself a thousand times, ‘How did this happen?’”

  When winter’s deep freeze caught them out on the ranch and held them captive in that tiny house for weeks at a time, he and his father became intimate strangers in their long silences. Despite all the trials Martin had endured in the past twenty years, Crusoe never heard his father complain or bemoan the defeats and burdens the fates had handed him.

  “Of course, there was the drinking, too. There was a lot of that in the later years. And for awhile there, I couldn’t seem to stay out of jail,” says Crusoe. “Dad would come into town and bail me out. We’d go back out to the ranch and work our butts off to make it work and redeem our souls, so to speak, but it was hopeless. In our condition, the ranch and redemption were bigger than either one of us. In his successes, and there were many, Dad was humble. In his failures, he was stoic, like his father. In his self-destruction, he was profoundly human.”

  When Crusoe drove away from the ranch in 1960, he knew that Martin would now be alone to face the remaining years of his life. “By then the drinking was slow suicide. I couldn’t watch it anymore without being a part of it, so I had to get out of there to save my own skin. There was no future for any of us there. He blamed himself for that, but it wasn’t his fault.”

  Crusoe returned to San Francisco with a “relocation” voucher in his pocket. This time he was determined to stick it out and make a new life in the Bay Area. With his mother, brothers, and sisters close by, life seemed to offer real possibilities for the first time since he left the Air Force. With encouragement from his siblings and Dorothy, Crusoe picked up some college credits while holding down a job. Then one spring morning in the first week of April 1964, he awoke with a powerful sense that he needed to get back to Parshall on the next bus or train. He left that morning without telling anyone in the family. When the bus pulled into Parshall two days later, Crusoe knew right where to start looking for his father. With his suitcase in hand, he strode up the street toward the V.F.W. Club and swung open the front door. Martin was the first person he saw, hunched over a drink at the near end of the bar. After a boisterous reunion and a brace of boilermakers to celebrate Crusoe’s homecoming, Martin bought two bottles of wine and the pair headed for the ranch. As the blood red sky drained to purple on the western horizon, Martin and Crusoe dragged two chairs off the front porch and drank their wine under the gathering stars. When the bottles were empty, the bleary-eyed pair helped each other up the steps and into the house, and passed out on their beds.

  The following morning, father and son both awoke with “jangling nerves and atrocious hangovers,” and neither stirred throughout the morning. Finally, Crusoe got dressed and walked down to his aunt Alice’s house and brought back a plate of ham and bread, but Martin was too sick to eat. His father fell back against the pillows and did not move for the rest of the day.

  Bright and early on Tuesday morning, Martin surprised them both by bounding out of bed at dawn. Crusoe listened to the meadowlarks and song sparrows through his open window, where chicory and wild mustard were in full bloom. Martin’s spirits seemed miraculously restored by the crisp morning. He even whistled while he took a bath, and sang some of the old Hidatsa songs. When he had gotten dressed he said, “Wha’d’ya say we go into Raub, get some beer?”

  A little “hair of the dog” might be just the thing, thought Crusoe. His nerves felt like a million rusty fishhooks. He hopped out of bed and jumped into his clothes, but when they stepped off the front porch, Martin took two faltering strides, then turned back toward the house. Maybe he should lie down for a few more minutes, he told Crusoe. It was still pretty early yet, and his feet seemed to be acting up again. Crusoe followed him to his bedroom and covered him with a blanket, then looked around in the kitchen for something to eat.

  “I was telling him stories about everybody in California—Mom, Raymond and Carol, the bigger kids, about Bucky’s new job, how Raymond was doing so well in school. That pleased him. School was the number-one thing with Dad. He never missed a PTA meeting the whole time we were growing up. After a few minutes he asked me to come in and lay down beside him, so I did. Then he asked me something about Mom and made a big yawn. He let out a sigh, real deep, and his hand dropped onto my leg, and then he didn’t move. ‘No,’ I said, ‘you can’t do this to me. Not like this.’”

  Crusoe lay still on the bed and stared at the plaster ceiling. His father’s dead hand lay across his leg. He began mumbling things to himself, anything, any whispered noise to hold the silence at bay a few moments longer, until he could think of what to do next. Finally, he sat up on the bed and swung his feet down and walked to the sink in the kitchen, then drew some water into a porcelain basin from the hand pump at the window. Closing his eyes, he lowered his face to the basin and splashed his forehead and neck with the ice cold well water, then dried off with a hand towel. He stood at the sink a while longer and looked out the window at the new morning. Killdeer swooped and wheeled against the blue sky, and the bright sun squinted his eyes and felt warm on his cheeks. After a little while he closed his eyes and bowed his head and said a prayer. Then he turned from the window and walked back to the bedroom and stopped in the doorway. Finally, when he looked over at his father, the silence rushed in all at once, and Crusoe folded his arms over his head and sank to the floor.

  Brother Martin died today,” begins the April 7, 1964, entry in Martin’s sister Alice’s diary. Saying nothing more about their loss, the entry rambles on about the weather and the arrival of the coroner. The county coroner told Crusoe that the moment Martin yawned and sighed in the seconds before he died, a vein in his chest opened up like a broken zipper. “There’s not a thing you could have done,” he assured him. “He never knew what happened.”

  Along toward evening, a hearse arrived from the funeral home in Parshall. Martin’s sisters, Alice and Lucy, drove to the BIA agency offices in New Town to inform the agency superintendent, and the Tribal Council, of Martin’s death. Crusoe stayed behind at the ranch and started organizing his father’s p
apers. In a small saucer on the windowsill, there was a quarter, a dime, and a nickel. Martin’s bank account was empty. He had sold his last head of cattle in the fall. There was the house, the barn, the horizon, and blue sky.

  What seemed the strangest of all at the moment, says Crusoe, was that Martin’s favorite double-breasted suit had mysteriously disappeared. “I tore that house apart looking for that suit.” He was buried three days later in a tattered brown suit in a place of honor at the Old Scout Cemetery. Dorothy and all the kids drove straight through from California and arrived the night before the funeral. The morning of the ceremony broke warm and clear over the prairie. As the mourners walked back to their cars from the graveside service, sixteen-year-old Raymond told Crusoe that maybe it was his turn now. Maybe that was how it should be.

  As soon as the reception was over, Dorothy, Marilyn, Bucky, and the children reassembled the small caravan of cars and headed back for California. When Crusoe drove back to the ranch later that evening, it seemed like the silence of the prairie had reclaimed the ground. Making one last pass through the house, he found his father’s double-breasted suit hanging on a hook on the back of a closet door. He threw the suit into the cab of the pickup truck and drove back to Parshall, where he had promised to spend a few days helping a friend with a construction project before returning to California.

  “When I got back home from work one day, I knew right off that I’d had a visitor. The back door was standing wide open,” remembers Crusoe.

  In broad daylight, a burglar had broken into the Cross family home on East Second Street. The thief had helped himself to a pan of potatoes on the stove, a photo album that Crusoe had brought back from the ranch, and Martin Cross’s suit coat, which Crusoe had left draped over the back of a chair in the living room. On a visit to Parshall two years later, Crusoe walked into a bar in New Town and saw an old school friend from Elbowoods, Eugene Spotted Wolf, sitting alone at the bar. Spotted Wolf was wearing Martin Cross’s double-breasted suit coat.