The Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds
OF SEVERAL IMPEDIMENTS I evaluated from the wrong end, the great staircase of reservoirs on the Missouri was paramount, but when I was planning, my concern lay with their lower sections, the downriver ends where the dams are, and how to get around those massive pilings of earth and concrete without losing any significant water mileage. I neglected to consider that a dam on a river like the Missouri causes it eventually to remake itself into what it once was—a broad and shallow and frequently changing braided flow. Like a living being, an impoundment has a lifespan, and it starts moving toward its demise the moment it begins; when the currents of a silty river get slowed, they start to release sediment, and few things impede a river more than a deep lake, especially one behind a dam that can be closed to stop the flow altogether. The Missouri “mainstem lakes” are filling in from upstream down, and the time will come when the reservoirs will have to be massively dredged (at an economic and environmental cost beyond calculating) or removed. Left as they are, the Missouri will one day wash them away or turn them into spectacular cascades. This is another problem our era—we who believe in the mastery of nature and the supremacy of human desires—is bequeathing to another generation, not to some distant one, but possibly to children living now.
Sitting at supper in a place just behind the Gavins Point Dam, we began hearing about heavy siltation at the upper end of the impoundment blithely called Lewis and Clark Lake. One fellow told of Nio brara, Nebraska, our next stop, being flooded from time to time after the closing of the dam thirty-eight years ago and of a mass of silt that “backed up into town like one of those big-blob science fiction movies.” But the news that concerned us was about the reed beds. Said he, “Did you see that African Queen movie when Bogart and Hepburn get lost in the tules and give up? That’s what’s there for you below the Niobrara River. If you don’t know the place, you could spend days finding your way out.”
I liked the notion of discovering a hidden passage, and I’d learned weeks ago to listen to and then largely discount difficulties residents described. Rule of the River Road: The more authoritative the adviser, the less reliable the advice. I expressed as much to Pilotis who said, “You’re too cocky. No, not cocky—too assured. Assured of your luck.” I’m not that assured, I said, but most of the time I do believe in the way opening. “All well and good,” Pilotis said, “but let’s get some reassurance.” The Professor agreed, so he went off to find a man I’d heard about who knew the thirty miles up to the Niobrara.
The next morning at a café we met Jim Peterson, a retired teacher of business law who had spent most of his life around the Missouri and its people. I tried to glean from him everything he knew about the reed beds. He was articulate and informed, and I invited him to join us for a day. We stopped by the Corps of Engineers offices to ask questions all over again, and the words were disquieting. The next dam, at Fort Randall, sixty-nine miles upriver, was keeping back its water, letting little pass, to avoid exacerbating the flood in Missouri. The river above the mouth of the Niobrara, a natural section, was virtually dry but for pools. I asked whether our canoe could carry us through, and the Corpsman said, “Yes, if you want to drag it between wet spots and then risk tearing it open. There’s a lot of Detroit riprap up there, junked cars that have washed off the banks into the water. That run is just damned dangerous.” We can undertake danger, I said, but a stove boat is something else.
I disliked losing those river miles, few as they were, and I said, I love when engineers rebuild nature—in this year of near-record high water, a section of the Missouri is impassable because it’s dry—since I want to do every mile of it, I guess I’ll have to come back during a drought. Then, in a couple of sentences more laded with river language than necessary, I said something that boiled down to this: That engineers could build such colossal dams credits their intellect; that they actually built them discredits their foresightedness.
“You think you’re miffed?” the Corpsman said. “Go to the tailwater below the dam and watch the fish swarming. Their gonads are telling them to swim upstream to spawn, but all they can do is beat their heads against the concrete. It’s heartbreaking to see them massing up. Projects like this turn a natural system ass over teakettle. It was just imbecilic to think we could dam off one of the biggest rivers on the planet in fifteen different places and not upset balances.”
Never before had I encountered, face to face, the heralded greening of the Army Corps of Engineers. He knew that many old mossbacks, like those who still called the river “the canal,” did not agree with him, and he spoke at some risk to himself, but he was young and smart, and I told him I hoped he was the future of the Corps.
“With every flood,” he said, “views like mine become less heretical. I’m not really an enviro, but if I were, I wouldn’t be running scared. Green thought has the whole natural system on its side—that’s about three billion years of trial and error posed against a couple thousand years of human engineering.”
We went down to Nikawa and set off in fine weather, Pilotis and Peterson aboard, and headed up the long and “temporary” impoundment, fifty feet deep behind the dam and at that moment within twelve inches of the top of the spillway. Those inches were now critical because the snowpack in the northern Rockies was as much as 150 percent above normal, melt-off that would soon be on its way toward the oceans. Pilotis said, “Too much water above us and too much below, and in another few miles we’re going to run out of it in the middle.”
At first we took a due-west course, ignoring the old river channel at the bottom of the reservoir, but after ten miles of smooth running we began using the charts to try to follow the submerged Missouri and avoid shallows full of upright and broken trees that, within memory, stood living along the river. The reservoir has some beauty to it, largely because the Corps controls developers and requires them to cluster their buildings and leave miles of green and open shore.
Pilotis: “A tree at the edge of a river is a thing of elegance, but one in the water is a potential boat eater.” Looking at the map and counting aloud, the first mate said, “Over these twelve miles of river, there are fourteen hazard areas marked on the chart.” That was the reason we were winding our course over seemingly open water. Peterson said, “Fishermen love those fourteen places. The good aspect about snags, besides fish, is you can see between them and find your way through, but they’ll break your props. The reeds won’t likely break anything, unless it’s your will to go on because you can’t see the way out.”
He talked of the Missouri he remembered from his childhood, before the dam. “Back then, the old river would take a farmer’s land, but there was a fifty-fifty chance he’d get it back in his lifetime, and a hundred-percent chance his descendants would, and what they got back was fresh, rich topsoil ready for bumper crops. Now, the river here puts the topsoil underwater, where tractors and combines don’t run too well.” He paused, then said, “I have two photographs taken below the dam fifty years apart. The first is of my dad standing by a chute of the Missouri flowing north to south. The other is of my son in the same place, and the chute goes east to west.” He paused again. “And my great-great-grandfather’s homestead was a mile from the river—now it is the river.”
The Santee Reservation lay along the south side of the impoundment and extended to the tail end of the lake where the water went from two and a half miles wide to just a half mile. Above Springfield, South Dakota, we reached the freshly remade ancient river and began twisting out a course among the stumps and sandbars, a piloting exercise to stir us alert. The Missouri became progressively shallower until the depth finder was useless, and I looked to our guide, and he said, “I can’t believe how much this end has filled in. It all looks so different.” His directions at first proved sound, and we moved through expeditiously until the reeds became heavy and the strands of water numerous; then we had to slow and guess. Because that section was more swamp than river, the current was again imp
erceptible. Our charts, older than the reed beds, proved nearly worthless, and the winding channels turned compass bearings to nonsense, so I tried to steer a course ninety degrees off the angle of the sunlight to avoid getting turned around and going back downstream. If a boat could be said to stumble, that’s how we went. Jim shook his head. “I’m sorry I can’t remember all of it, but the reeds are so much bigger than the last time I saw them. Maybe a good flood would scour them down.”
We guessed onward, surmising here, conjecturing there, and some times Nikawa advanced, usually circuitously, and other times we had to retreat. The way became harder, and we began running aground, poling off, trying somewhere else. We were simply too low to see a route, and I said, If only we had a hot-air balloon and a thirty-foot tether, you could send me up to spy out the way.
The bewilderness went on. Then I made a mistake by proceeding too quickly and had to throttle down fast in front of a narrow shoal, and a splendid thing happened: our wake rolled under Nikawa and carried her over the sand. Asked Pilotis, “Did you do that deliberately?” Just an old riverman’s trick, I said. “Well then, do it again and get us the hell out of this labyrinth.” Flushing over the small bars was fun, and I would have enjoyed it more if I’d been certain I was flushing us in the right direction. The nightmare of reed beds is that we could travel miles up a dead end, then have to return to an entry point we were unlikely to recognize. I thought it possible to make the same mistake again and again, never to escape until we became the Phantom Ship of the Missouri Reeds, celebrated in story and song. We tried to memorize the stalks, attaching imagined resemblances to the bend of a leaf, the twist of a cattail, but it was like attempting to commit to memory ten million sticks of spaghetti standing on end.
Pilotis, working to match the charts to the distant hills we could see in places, said, “I think we just passed Lost Creek,” to which I grumbled, Even the damn creeks around here can’t find the way. And Pilotis: “I don’t remember how Bogart frees the African Queen from the tules.” A storm washes them out, I said. “What’s the forecast? Where’s your famous rainstick? Or maybe we can get the engineers to irrigate the Missouri.”
At what I guessed to be the ninety-eighth meridian, the reeds began thinning, thinning, until we had open river, and we went on more easily, the water deeper, the current apparent, all the way to the mouth of the Niobrara (Ponca for “river spreading,” oh yes), above which lay only the parching bed of the Missouri. The boat ramp nearby was a mudhole, so we radioed the waiting Professor to meet us back downstream at the old Running Water ferry crossing. That ramp was gravel and mud, and the current swept past so swiftly the Professor had to wade in to hook the hand winch to our bow so Nikawa could swing around and climb onto the trailer for the portage to Fort Randall Dam. I was equally relieved at being off the river and displeased with giving up those thirty-seven miles, but I vowed to return one day and canoe that section.
We hauled up to Niobrara, Nebraska, the one that recently moved out of the floodplain to higher ground but still saw almost half of its residents give up on the place altogether. The new Niobrara had a chance to lay out an innovative village plat, but the citizens only put down another grid and built a string of mock Old West false-fronts. I groused about it, and Pilotis said, “Is a mock false-front like a double negative where you end up with a positive?” Since the real West was full of false-fronts, perhaps Niobrara had to fake it to be real.
The reeds may have turned our wits to swamp muck, because such embrangled conversation continued in the Two Rivers, a new Old West saloon, and Peterson also fell into the bibble-babble of tired travelers. He said, “See if you can make sense of this sentence,” and he wrote: Is that that that that that that that that person meant? We sat numbly until the Professor said, “It makes sense if you can hear it with the right inflections.” I remembered a sentence grammar teachers used to inflict on students to punctuate: Hadley where Haddam had had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the instructor than had had had. Pilotis said, “I’ve done had had it. That that-that-that sentence is just like that reed bed—a damn tangle of sameness.”
We went out and pulled Nikawa up along flooding Ponca Creek, left Nebraska, reached the Missouri again at Pickstown, South Dakota, and took a big room in the hotel of the Fort Randall Casino owned by the Yankton tribe. About those people, William Clark wrote (the passage corrected by his first editor):
These are the best disposed Sioux who rove on the banks of the Missouri, and these even will not suffer any trader to ascend the river if they can possibly avoid it; they have, heretofore, invariably arrested the progress of all those they have met with, and generally compelled them to trade at the prices, nearly, which they themselves think proper to fix on their merchandise; they seldom commit any further violence on the whites.
We were about to see how the old commentary was holding up.
How to Steal Indian Land
SEVERAL YEARS AGO in Seattle, I was walking along the water, front to see up close the business of Puget Sound when a man approached me for a handout. He was tired, possibly ill, and probably younger than he looked. His T-shirt said HOKA-HEY, an Indian greeting, and I asked what his tribe was. He said, “Sioux.” Does that mean, I said, that you’re a Lakota? He looked stunned, awakened, and his eyes filled with tears, and he said more confidently, “Yes. Lakota. Oglala Lakota,” and he smiled.
On the thirty-first of May, Nikawa entered what was once known as Sioux Country, a vast region covering nearly all the northern half of the Great Plains, the home of peoples who gave to most of the world the current perception of what an American Indian is. Even in the United States today, tribes with no connection to the Siouan nations have taken up certain elements of their nineteenth-century culture and apparel. Until we reached the mountains some weeks hence, the Indians we met would be Sioux, a name their ancient enemies the Chippewa put on them: “adders.”
I reminded the crew that for the next fifteen hundred miles we’d be passing through Indian lands, reservations where we’d be foreigners, and I suggested they avoid the word “Sioux.” I asked them to remember the four branches of those inhabitants of the northern Plains: Teton, Santee, Yanktonai, and Yankton, with each except the last having several bands, such as the Oglala, Hunkpapa, Assiniboin. Even better, I said, call the Tetons Lakotas, the Santees Dakotas, and the others Nakotas—if you wanted to make friends with someone from London, would you call him a limey, a European, or an Englishman?
We talked of that matter in the breakfast grill of the Fort Randall Casino and Hotel while a young Yankton waitress needled us about our losses (but for the Professor who had won twenty dollars) at the slot machines the night before. Pilotis said, “Consider the money reparation.” And she: “You’ve got a long way to go then.”
In the mid-nineteenth century, the Yanktons, under the usual pressures of white encroachment, were forced to sell most of their land for about thirteen cents an acre, although they had long demonstrated an amicable disposition to whites with their world-changing enterprises. In 1862 the Yanktons even sent warning to settlers about an impending raid by other tribes. From the earliest traders on, for the next half century, Yankton land marked a traveler’s entry into Sioux Country, and those people were often a white’s initial encounter with Indians still living their traditional ways directed by the ancient visions. In short, Yanktons were frequently the first full-fledged aboriginals Missouri River travelers met, and such meetings typically began with trepidation. Had an intractable and bellicose tribe, say, the Tetons, lived along here, the Anglo opening of the West would have gone more slowly, more bloodily. Despite the significant negotiations Lewis and Clark conducted with the Otos and Missouris downstream, it was the captains’ parley with the Yanktons at Gavins Point that first began to reveal to them how insufficiently they understood the red world about to encompass them.
The adventure and romance of the great Expedition have blinded many Americans to its central aims which
were more political and economic than scientific. A key duty of Captain Lewis was to inform people who had dwelt in the land for twelve thousand years and probably more that they were now “children” under the hand of the great and distant White Father. That is an act of conquest, not science. (The American West is today, of course, a bastion of resistance to anything emanating from Washington—except subsidy checks—and those who yelp the loudest about federal “intrusion” are the grandchildren of those who overran aboriginal lands. Right-wing militias are an ironic amusement to Indians.)
The world of the Plains peoples was considerably more complex and independent than any other native realms the Expedition had yet encountered, but relations began happily when the Yanktons welcomed two scouts Lewis sent ahead by carrying them into the Nakota camp on a bison robe, a sign of honor, although later one of the chiefs, Weuche, made it clear his people wanted more than words, peace medals, and American flags. When he learned the Expedition was not there to trade, he asked permission for his warriors to stop the next merchant boat and help themselves. Another chief, one of fine name, Half Man, prophetically warned that Indians farther upriver had ears harder to open. Indeed, in the next encounter, the Brulé Tetons so troubled the Corps of Discovery that Clark wrote words (again corrected by his editor) of uncharacteristic vehemence: “These [Tetons] are the vilest miscreants of the savage race [and] must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri until such measures are pursued by our government as will make them feel a dependence on its will for their supply of merchandise.” Some history buffs prefer to ignore that sentence, just as they ignore the overt imperialism of the Expedition, as well as the words of its father, Thomas Jefferson, in of all places the Declaration of Independence where he speaks of “merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
River-Horse: A Voyage Across America Page 28