Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  “Let’s find a place where they’re biting,” Paul said and started the engine. He drove ten minutes northeast. The wind was out of the west, and a light chop was building. There are more than 14,500 islands in Lake of the Woods. Granite and greenstone in the north resisted glaciers, leaving most of the islands there. Glacial deposits on the US side created broad sheets of shallow water, sand dunes, and marshy shorelines.

  We dropped our hooks near a granite outcropping and caught eight more walleye in about eight minutes. Paul added them to the cooler, looked at his watch, and said we had to get back to meet the school bus. He said he wasn’t sure how long his family would last in the Angle, as the boat skipped over the chop. His sister wasn’t interested in running the resort. Border security and tense relations with Canadian game wardens were hurting his business. The Angle school had closed when his youngest boys graduated, and it didn’t look like there were many more kids on the way.

  Karen hopped off the boat at the dock and headed home to meet the kids. I followed Paul to a fish-cleaning station, where he emptied the cooler onto a stainless steel counter. He filleted each fish with one sweep using a long, thin knife, then tossed the head, tail, and spine into a bucket. “We put up this building to keep the flies down,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe it in the summer.”

  Paul asked whether I wanted to join the family for fish tacos. I declined and packed my things for the trip home. He was already dropping fillets on the grill when I passed by on my way out. I drove west past road signs riddled with bullet holes and a few commuters headed home from Warroad. A wall of hardwood lined each side of the dirt road that Jake Colson had cut.

  The road had been graded recently and ran straight and smooth for fifteen miles. I couldn’t imagine the old man and his neighbors chopping their way through the forest. It must have taken thousands of man-hours, hauling brush and removing stumps. Jake would probably be proud that his grandkids drove the road twice a day, following the dusty finger through Canada back to the US.

  PART IV

  SEVEN FIRES

  11

  ROUTE 1806 WAS CLOSED. THEN HIGHWAY 6 CLOSED, AND 1806 reopened. An hour into my drive from Fargo, North Dakota, to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation three hundred miles west, police outfitted with body armor, assault rifles, and concussion grenades blocked both roads. Military-grade vehicles, National Guardsmen, cops from ten different states, and a private security company were stationed farther down the highway. Some officers held tear gas launchers; others had shotguns loaded with rock salt.

  The imminent threat thirty miles south was two unarmed Lakota Sioux protestors. They had secured their arms around construction equipment with plaster a few miles north of the reservation. One, named Happi, wore a red bandanna and a gray, button-down shirt. In photos, he looks bored, and a bit pleased at the spectacle he helped create. The excavators around the pair had been installing a pipeline that would cross the Missouri River a half mile north of Standing Rock. Tribal members had set up a protest camp to fight the pipeline the previous spring, saying that construction crews were destroying cultural sites and ancestral land and that a spill would be devastating to the reservation. The camp had since made headlines around the world and swelled to more than fifteen hundred people. A federal judge had ordered the company building the pipeline to stop a few days before, while the judge figured out whether it was destroying centuries-old Sioux burial sites and sacred rock formations.

  The tribe’s legal team said that the company responded by bulldozing the sites in question. In the months leading up to the completion of the 1,172-mile, $3.8-billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)—which runs through North Dakota’s northland, then dips through South Dakota and Iowa to refineries in Illinois—Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) had proved that it was not afraid of protestors or the law. It was fined for not reporting Indian artifacts in the pipeline’s path and for rerouting the line without permission. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Advisory Council on Historic Pre­servation all noted that the environmental impact study that the company had submitted—and paid for—was insufficient, and they recommended that the US Army Corps of Engineers revisit the study before issuing permits. In Iowa, lawyers for some of the two hundred affected farming families—many of whom had been on their land for more than a century—claimed that ETP had improperly used eminent-domain laws to take their property.

  The Army Corps regulates crossings on navigable waterways in America and is required to consult with tribal governments before processing permits that might affect their land. The Corps appeared to fast-track the project, though, regardless of risks that a spill would pose to Standing Rock residents and millions of others downstream. It accepted ETP’s incomplete environmental study and failed to communicate with local tribes through proper channels. The Corps’s final assessment: “The anticipated environmental, economic, cultural and social effects [of the project are] not injurious to the public interest.”

  The Corps had come to a different conclusion months earlier when the original pipeline route crossed the Missouri upstream of Bismarck. Given the history of pipeline spills in the United States—an average of one a day in 2016—the threat of polluting the state capital’s water supply was too great. Sixty-one thousand people live in the city; 92 percent of them are white. So, engineers moved the crossing thirty miles south, directly upstream of Standing Rock’s primary source of drinking water.

  IT WAS NINETY-SIX DEGREES the day I drove across North Dakota’s northland. The state cuts across the northern plains—the boreal tip of the 1.5-million-square-mile Great Plains that has existed in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains for sixty million years. The landscape was a one-dimensional, silver-green stratum. Golden sunlight spilled through the windshield. Telephone poles lined up like birthday candles for miles. Rows of cottonwood wandered along streambeds. Strands of barbed wire and dusty farm roads were the only visible boundaries.

  The forty-ninth parallel caps the state for three hundred miles. Stretching from Minnesota to the Pacific, the forty-ninth is the longest straight border in the world. It was marked by wooden stakes and wandering waterways until 1873, when the same Canadian and American surveyors who had marked the Northwest Angle turned around and drew the line nine hundred miles west to the Continental Divide.

  The Northern Boundary Commission fought off clouds of mosquitoes, extreme heat, thunderstorms, and prairie fires while painstakingly making their way across the plains. The border ran straight through Sioux territory, and commissioners were wary of marching 270 white men onto the Indians’ land. British and Canadian surveyors, who had never had any problems with the Sioux nation, were particularly concerned—realizing that raiding parties would not be able to distinguish them from their American colleagues. Major Marcus Reno, with two companies of the US Seventh Cavalry—the same that would fight at the Battle of the Little Bighorn three years later—escorted the American commission. The British and Canadian surveyors hired thirty multiracial Métis guides and Chippewa Indians, dubbed the “49th Rangers,” to ride ahead and suss out trouble.

  Sioux scouts were uninterested in the bearded and bespectacled foreigners dressed in Hudson’s Bay Company hooded greatcoats, moccasins, and sealskin pants. Astronomers and their assistants took sixty readings from Ursa Minor, Cepheus, and Polaris, at dozens of stations along the line to ensure accuracy. Surveyors dragged sixty-foot Gunter’s chains, made of eight-inch steel wire links, to measure the border: a quarter chain was a rod, ten chains a furlong, eighty chains a statute mile. The team also used theodolite survey telescopes, air levels, sextants, fifty compasses, and eighteen synchronized chronometers—top-of-the-line equipment for mid-Victorian field science.

  It took two seasons—the commission took the winter off—to reach the divide. Despite their efforts, none of the monuments along the forty-ninth parallel actually touch the line. Instead each segment veers an average of three arcseconds (295 feet) north or
south. In two cases, the line deviates 575 feet north or 784 feet south, placing properties, roads, and half a town in Washington on the wrong side of the border.

  IN THE HALF-LIGHT OF late summer, the cropland between Fargo and Bismarck was dull green. I’d never seen the northern plains before. Silvery flecks of cottonwood bark and broad, galvanized-steel barn roofs reflected the dim light. Thunderheads cut shadows into the fields. Light falling from the underbelly of the clouds touched one-story ranch homes and domed silos. There were no mountains or valleys to deflect wind and rain. Everything was flat.

  A hundred miles north of Bismarck, in Rugby, North Dakota, is the geographic center of North America. Montana is three hundred miles west. Saskatchewan and Manitoba are another hundred to the north. The distance to the North Pole and the equator are exactly the same—creating an impact zone between two hemispheres of weather. The confluence makes North Dakota the most extreme weather zone in the world, with hurricane-force winds and temperature swings of 180 degrees between seasons—from minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit to 121. Studies of lake beds across the state reveal similar fluctuations for thousands of years. Extreme droughts and floods have lasted as long as a century. The Dirty Thirties blew soil from millions of acres away in “black roller” dust storms. In 1997, floodwaters in Grand Forks reached more than three miles inland and caused $3.5 billion in damages.

  I could have ridden a bike along this stretch. I could have hiked or saddled a horse. But that’s not how they do it here. People drive across the northern plains. They load up minivans, pickup trucks, and sedans, tune in a talk show, and eat up the miles. The road is the link. It is a conduit for families, public services, and business. When your neighbor lives ten miles away and fresh milk and eggs are forty, you depend on it. North Dakota is one of the only states in the country that casts its highways in concrete so they never fall apart.

  I drove west over the ancient beaches of Lake Agassiz to the Drift Prairie, the Missouri Escarpment, and the Missouri Plateau. The plateau tops out at thirty-five hundred feet in Slope County before crumbling into the Badlands on the Montana border. There, the Missouri—America’s longest river—cuts the state in half along the Missouri Trench.

  Eastern North Dakota marks the northern edge of America’s Central Lowland—a trough of shale and limestone that once sat twenty-five hundred feet below the Western Interior Seaway. The seaway was six hundred miles wide sixty-five million years ago and divided North America in two. Another shale formation in the Northwest, the Bakken Formation, is the epicenter of North Dakota’s oil boom. Oil companies tried to tap it for half a century without any luck. Hydrofracking and horizontal drilling technology in the early 2000s achieved what had until then eluded them. Overnight, North Dakota became the second-largest oil producer in America, after Texas.

  Between 2002 and 2008, oil production doubled North Dakota’s GDP. Williston Basin oil fields, which the Bakken is set in, pumped a half-million barrels of oil a day in 2010. Between 2010 and 2014, the boom created two thousand new millionaires in the state every year. Speculators renamed it Saudi Dakota. The massive yield put America on a path to energy independence and helped make the US the number one oil and gas producer in the world. Ten percent of domestic oil in 2015 came from the Williston Basin.

  Existing pipelines, trucks, and trains couldn’t handle the surge, and moving the oil became a problem. In 2014, ETP announced a solution. ETP, Phillips 66, Sunoco Logistics, Enbridge, Marathon Oil, and seventeen of the largest banks in the world—spearheaded by Citibank—financed the Dakota Access Pipeline. The thirty-inch pipe would carry a half-million barrels of oil a day from the northland to refineries and other pipelines in Illinois.

  Thousands of farmers, Indians, ranchers, and residents living along the proposed route protested, saying that a spill would be catastrophic. A few years before, a pipeline 150 miles north of Standing Rock had ruptured and spilled 840,000 gallons of Bakken shale oil into a farmer’s field. It was one of the largest onshore oil spills in US history. Cleanup crews began working around the clock on the seven-acre site, digging fifty feet down to remove contaminated soil. The pipeline management company Tesoro Logistics estimated it would take two years to clean up the mess. Three years later, still working twenty-four hours a day, they had completed a third of the job and had no timeline for finishing.

  In September of 2016, ETP announced that despite the protests, its pipeline was almost complete and DAPL would be operational by the end of 2016. The final section would tunnel under a dammed section of the Missouri called Lake Oahe, near Standing Rock. Things there did not look good. The Sioux Nation had a long history of standing up to corporations and the US government. They were the only Indian nation to have defeated the US Army in a war—and to have received everything they asked for in peace negotiations. The government had been taking from them ever since. It sold off millions of acres of their land and violated multiple treaties. Mining corporations had recently started digging for uranium and dumping radioactive waste on Sioux land. In September of 2016, the protest camp, set on the Cannonball River, prepared for what many saw as a last stand against a century and a half of oppression.

  I TOOK A CHANCE ON ROUTE 6 and found it open. The road runs perfectly straight through the northland, past thirty miles of ranchland and sunflower farms. I passed Saint Anthony and Breien and pulled into the Cannon Ball Pit Stop, a few miles from the protest site. The Lakota woman working the cash register appeared genuinely frightened by the number of strangers walking through the door. Fifteen hundred “water protectors,” the name protestors gave themselves, from all over the world occupied the camp. (More than eight thousand others would show up in the coming months.) Hundreds arrived every week, from tribes as far away as Florida, Maine, and Japan. Many came to protest how the pipeline would dampen America’s climate change initiatives. Susan Sarandon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Willie Nelson, and other celebrities spoke out in support of the camp, and nearly every major news outlet in the world had covered it.

  I bought two boxes of mac and cheese, and a few cans of black beans, then asked the woman if she had seen the camp.

  “I try to keep a low profile,” she said.

  “How many people are down there?”

  “If people need things, they come here,” she said. “We will be here tonight. Food stamps for this month are activated at midnight. We stay open late for that.”

  I followed 1806 around a long bend and saw dozens of large, white teepees spread across a field near the Cannonball River. In between were horse trailers, eighteen-wheelers, pickup trucks, tents, camper trailers, RVs, and rental cars. Pale-green cottonwoods growing along the river circled the hundred-acre camp. Army tents, shelters made from plastic tarps, geodesic domes, and upside-down American flags flapping from makeshift poles huddled against the waterway. The Missouri was a blue streak in the background. Twenty paint horses walked in circles around portable steel corrals, and people wandered muddy, rutted roads past bright-green portable bathrooms. The council tent, where leaders met, stretched eighty feet across the middle of the field. Hundreds of Indian-nation flags, erected by tribes that had joined the protest, flew from white flagpoles alongside the dirt driveway.

  Organizers called the camp Oceti Sakowin, the actual name of the Sioux tribe. It means “Seven Council Fires” and refers to the seven tribes that make up the Great Sioux Nation. Two young Lakota men guarded the entrance. They asked an elderly white lady in front of me whether she was carrying any weapons, alcohol, or drugs. She said no. One of the guards searched her Buick and pulled a four-foot, double-bladed axe from the trunk. “I’m going to keep this here for now,” he said.

  I told the guard I was a writer, and he grabbed a thick media packet and told me to follow him. He led me to a faded-blue pavilion tent that he said was the media center. North Dakota’s legendary wind had blown down one of the tarp walls. Rocks held down stacks of calendars, information packets, and registration forms. Carol Two Bears introduced herself as a med
ia liaison. She was my height, with square shoulders and long, black hair. She told me that there were some rules I had to abide by. I was not allowed to take photographs of ceremonies, drum circles, the council lodge, or certain religious events. “Rule of thumb,” she said, “ask before you shoot.” I asked her where different tribes were camping and if there was an area for visitors. “Five days ago I could’ve told you where everybody was,” she said. “Now I have no idea.”

  The camp was well managed, with a chain of command and various services for protestors. There were full-time medics, a legal team, security, a radio station, an elementary school, and a sprawling kitchen staffed by volunteers. A water truck supplied drinking water. A disaster response trailer and an ambulance stood ready. Most people coming through the entrance brought donations of food and clothing that lay in heaps behind the kitchen. By the end of September, the camp was one of the largest towns in North Dakota.

  Carol suggested I find a place to pitch my tent, then meet back at the central fire circle for the evening’s presentation. The security guard at the gate was supposed to stay with me at all times, but he had wandered off. A veil of dust and woodsmoke hung in the air. I set up my tent near a temporary horse corral and went back to the fire circle, where another northland tribe, Washington’s Lummi Nation, was blessing a twenty-two-foot western-red-cedar totem pole on its way to Winnipeg. Since 2001, Jewell Praying Wolf James had been carving poles with the House of Tears Carvers on Lummi Island, near Bellingham, and delivering them to causes around the country.

  Sioux tribes weren’t the only Indians fighting environmental injustices. The Lummi Nation had been taking the US government and fossil fuel industry to court for fifty years, mostly to protect their fishing rights. Four other northwestern tribes were protesting an oil terminal in Vancouver, Washington. The Western Shoshone Indian Nation was trying to stop contractors from burying nuclear waste on Nevada’s Yucca Mountain. A confederation of tribes in Texas was combating another ETP pipeline, the Trans-Pecos, which would transport fracked natural gas through the Big Bend region to Mexico. Jewell’s last four totem pole journeys were to oil pipelines, coal trains, and tar sands regions. As environmentalist Bill McKibben said, the indigenous environmental campaign had become “the vanguard of the movement.”