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

by Porter Fox

  After the tribes disbanded, most went back to living the way they had before, rich with coffee, beads, blankets, tobacco, sheets of brass, US Army dress uniforms, and medals featuring President Millard Fillmore. For years after, tribes showed up at Fort Laramie in the spring to meet the annuity train and gather their gifts. Shipments continued sporadically through the Indian Wars and beyond, as the US government bought off whoever was willing to come to the table and lay down their arms. Government-approved brokers extended Indians additional credit, often settling debts by taking land for pennies on the dollar. For any tribe willing to stop fighting altogether, Congress drafted more treaties—defining smaller and smaller reservations that Indians could live on, while signing the rest of their territory over to the federal government.

  From 1853 to 1856, western Indians ceded 174 million acres of land to the US in fifty-two treaties. The US government ratified 370 more treaties over the next fifty years. They offered hunting grounds, autonomy, citizenship, friendship, goods, and money to tribes. On a map, territory that Congress guaranteed the Sioux Nation at the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty looks like an inkblot covering nearly half of Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, and North and South Dakota. Once the Indians were safely registered on reservations, administered by a US Indian agent and a detachment of soldiers, Congress amended, canceled, or ignored every Indian treaty it ever signed.

  I WANTED TO SEE the former Sioux territory for myself and drove through it for two days. Freight trains crisscrossed the northland east–west. The highway rolled north–south. Silos broke through the plains like fingers. Underground, a third of America’s intercontinental nuclear missiles sat in temperature-controlled shafts, many in the Bakken oil fields. I put the car on cruise control and sat cross-legged for an hour. Silver oil tankers rushed in the opposite direction. Silver guardrails edged the road. The only points of reference were billboards and gas stations.

  Americans didn’t want this swath of the northland at first. Long trains of prairie schooners passed the northern plains on their way west. Emigrants wanted gold, silver, farms, furs, water, timber, or a route to the ocean. The hardened, windswept plains over their right shoulder didn’t interest them. The soil there was alkaline and hard as cement. Lewis and Clark called it “astonishingly dry,” and Thomas Jefferson estimated that it would take a thousand generations to settle. It rarely rained in the “Great American Desert,” as the territory was labeled in an 1822 atlas.

  The one-hundredth meridian marks the border between life and death on the northern plains. Twenty or more inches of annual rain falls to the east, less than fifteen in the west. Tall prairie grass grows in the east, short grass in the west. Settlers west of the line, who had little wood to build with, burrowed dugout homes into the ground to withstand brutal plains’ winds. For almost a century, banks wouldn’t give a loan to anyone farming west of the line.

  Hardy, land-seeking Scandinavians from Iowa and Minnesota were the first immigrants to move to North Dakota. The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed them—and any American, including freed slaves and “intended citizens”—to settle up to 160 acres of federal land for free. They put down stakes near stands of cottonwood along the Red River so as to have logs to build with. The ground around Fargo appeared so infertile that gardens were for family use only. Frustration with farming the northern plains ran so hot then that a man was killed in the 1870s near Fargo for claiming that he could grow crops in the Red River Valley.

  Yale Law School graduate Oliver Dalrymple changed that. He took on more than seventy thousand acres of farmland in the Red River Valley in 1875 and employed six hundred men, two hundred plows, two hundred self-binding reapers, thirty steam-powered threshers, and four hundred teams of horses to irrigate and reap thirty bushels of wheat a day on one of America’s first commercial farms. By 1881 he was threshing enough wheat on his “bonanza” farm to fill three trainloads a day. The US government publicized his profits. Word spread quickly, and a wave of Norwegians from Minnesota and Iowa settled in Cass and Traill Counties. Canadians followed in Walsh and Pembina Counties. By 1885, North Dakota’s population was 150,000. A half-million acres of land had been plowed under in the Great American Desert, and twelve million bushels of wheat was being harvested annually.

  Flare stacks spewed fire above wheat fields and ranchland as I approached Williston, the nexus of North Dakota’s oil boom, set in the northwest corner of the state. The town was once in the heart of Sioux country—less than a mile from the Missouri and twenty-five miles northeast of Fort Buford, where Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881. It was ten in the evening, and the sky over town glowed dull orange. Light from the flames turned grazing cattle into silhouettes. Oil derricks appeared every quarter mile. Some were pumping; many were frozen in place. Four iron walls surrounded a blazing vent twenty feet off the shoulder. Tall prairie grass grew around silos, tractors, and plows. A white picket fence circled a red barn and ended at another stack launching fire into the air.

  Eighty thousand people flocked to North Dakota at the height of Williston’s boom. Roughnecks in the field made $100,000 a year, and farmers took in $50,000–$200,000 a month leasing their land. Some Indian tribes profited too. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations on the Fort Berthold Reservation received $91 million for drilling rights there. In 2014, the Standing Rock Reservation tribal government leased nearly two hundred thousand acres of their land for oil and gas exploration. (The Department of the Interior estimates that more than 20 percent of America’s fossil fuel reserves sit on Indian land: 5.35 billion barrels of oil, 37.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and 53 billion tons of coal.)

  An influx of oil from the Williston Basin, which includes the Bakken shale play, was a factor in the collapse of oil prices in 2014. The effect in Williston was devastating. After years of surpluses, North Dakota was $6 billion in debt in 2017. Oil companies that had been fighting for land leases left the state without a trace. United Airlines ended direct flights from Houston to Williston, and the little town once known for the bushels of durum wheat it turned out was left to clean up the mess.

  The next morning I had breakfast with a Williston hotel manager. He had a graying beard and bags under his eyes. A few guests holding Styrofoam coffee cups sat at tables around us. The manager had been working at a hotel in Georgia when he was called up to run a new hotel in Williston. Housing was so tight during the boom that he and his wife slept in a pop-up camper for six months. There were no homes for sale, nothing to rent. “Man camps” sheltered thousands on the outskirts of town in cramped, temporary structures. The grocery store ran out of bread by 10:00 in the morning; produce was gone by 9:30. The staff at the Home Depot stopped stocking shelves and made piles of flat-screen TVs and barbecue grills in the middle of the floor instead. “You had to survive,” the hotel manager said.

  He and his wife eventually found a house to buy, an hour and a half away. He commuted every day and spent as little time as possible in Williston. “There were drugs,” he said. “You could get a hooker if you wanted. It was like a city; you could get anything. People also got paid well, but the rents were higher than in Manhattan.” The number of federal prosecutors in western North Dakota tripled to 336 in 2010. A year before, two members of the international Sinaloa Cartel were apprehended nearby, one of several foreign and domestic gangs that infiltrated the region. Meth and heroin were smuggled through Indian reservations, where tribal officers are not allowed to arrest non-Indians. Two hours away in Ward County, meth seizures increased sixfold. One member of a Williston drug gang arrested in the spring of 2014 had nine rifles, six pistols, four shotguns, and three revolvers hidden in his apartment.

  The Williston Brewing Company was empty when I drove through town, and R Rooster BBQ looked like it was closed. The apartments and storefronts at the $15 million Renaissance on Main complex were empty. Developers built ten thousand apartments in town between 2009 and 2016. Vacancy in 2017 was 40 percent. An old department store on the west side of the road displayed poo
fy red and white prom dresses. Someone had planted flowers at a few intersections to spruce them up. Five blocks outside of town, a row of heavy-equipment rental agencies, which had been sold out for years, were full of excavators, bulldozers, pump equipment, and portable urinals.

  I passed a Halliburton truck and more wells on my way south that afternoon. Dust swirled behind a UPS van driving down a dirt road. Steel check valves broke through the soil. Wheels and gauges on the pipes were painted the same bright yellow as late-summer blossoms in nearby sunflower fields. Utility trucks that service the oil fields were yellow as well, adorned with cranes, welders, lockboxes, toolboxes, extra fuel tanks, and compressors. A man stood beside a Suburban with a flat tire and gazed at the scene. His tire hadn’t popped. The entire structure of the wheel was gone, leaving the axle sitting on the ground.

  A few miles down the road I pulled into another reminder of northland profiteering. Fort Buford and nearby Fort Union boomed during the fur trade. Fort Union was the largest trading post on the plains in the 1800s and sold British muskets, Sheffield knives, Cologne pipes, falcon bells from Leipzig, and “rattlesnake whiskey,” made from a gallon of water, a cup of whiskey, a splash of strychnine, and a pinch of gunpowder. Set at the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, Fort Buford was a vital military post and supply depot. When Sitting Bull surrendered there in July of 1881, he handed his rifle to his son, Crow, and instructed him to give it to the fort’s commander, Major David H. Brotherton. Sitting Bull’s only request was that he be known as the last Plains Indian to give up his weapon.

  I was alone at the fort. There were no staff members or other visitors. I walked around a re-creation of the regimental headquarters where Sitting Bull had turned himself in. It is gray clapboard with brown trim. Five brick chimneys emerge from the cedar-shingled roof. The bay window in the northeast corner was the first ever installed in a western post. The yellowed curtains were drawn, and the sills were layered with dead houseflies. Workers at the Fort Buford State Historic Site had rebuilt several of its original structures, including a barracks and a stockade. Soldiers’ accounts of living at the fort in the 1800s recall sporadic attacks from surrounding tribes, baseball games in the yard, and eating boiled buffalo boss ribs with yeast powder biscuits.

  The wind blew so hard off the river that it sounded like a voice in my ear. Fence posts hummed. Barbed wire whistled. Interpretive signs near the buildings rattled, and shingles on the fort looked like they were about to blow off. I stood for a while looking at the buildings, then across the field at the swirling Yellowstone and Missouri. Meriwether Lewis, coleader of the Corps of Discovery with William Clark, had camped at the confluence with his men in 1805. He was so exhilarated by the sight of the merging rivers that he handed out drams of whiskey that night to the corps. Later, someone picked up a fiddle, and the group sang and danced around the campfire into the early hours of the morning.

  JOYE BRAUN WAS MORE WORRIED about security guards and broken treaties than Williston’s boom-and-bust cycle. I found her at Oceti Sakowin under the “legal tent” near the kitchen. Protestors sat around the sacred fire circle, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. Car-camping gear was abundant: roll-up tables, folding sinks, rocking camping chairs, cooking kits, solar flashlights, campfire spits. The cooks had set out stainless-steel bowls of sliced watermelon and boxes of pears donated by Washington’s Yakama Nation. An older white man poured coffee from a five-gallon Gatorade water cooler. Two men stood around the dispensers talking about how to replace the generator at the camp, which burned diesel twenty-four hours a day.

  “Solar panels are on the way,” one of them said.

  “Sustainability,” said the other, nodding.

  Joye is a forty-seven-year-old Cheyenne River Lakota activist. She works for the Indigenous Environmental Network and erected one of the first teepees at the Standing Rock protest. She had camped near Bridger, South Dakota, the previous year, fighting the Keystone XL Pipeline. Bridger was on the front lines of that battle from early on. TransCanada had planned to run the XL pipeline directly across the Cheyenne River Reservation just south of Standing Rock at first. When the tribe blocked that plan, the company shipped megaloads of tar sands mining equipment through Bridger. Lakota actions to block them helped bring the XL campaign into the public eye and get President Obama’s attention. After the president shut down the XL project in 2015, Joye drove north to block another “black snake” planned for Standing Rock. “Next thing I know,” she said, “April 1, we saddled up and had a big ride from Fort Yates to Cannon Ball and I put my teepee up in the snow.”

  Joye has soft, brown eyes, a motherly demeanor, and a wild, percussive laugh with which she punctuates her most salient points. Over the course of the hour that we spoke, six different people walked up to her, hugged her, and walked away without saying a word. She told me how a stroke in 2010 had confined her to a wheelchair. Her husband had brought her back to Eagle Butte, on the Cheyenne River Reservation, where she grew up, and she went to ceremony for the first time in years. One day while recovering, she saw a man on TV lie down on Highway 34 to stop a TransCanada megaload. The trucks are three-quarters of a football field long and two stories high. Joye was so inspired that she wheeled her chair in front of a megaload the next day. “We made a law forbidding oil production equipment from crossing the Cheyenne River Reservation,” she said. “I stopped the truck, and it turned around. The next night, three megaloads came through Bridger and tried to run people off the road. We caught up to them, and they stopped. The National Guard was activated that night.”

  It was approaching noon, and the wind was picking up. A yellow ETP helicopter flew overhead. The FAA had imposed a no-fly zone over the camp to stop protestors from recording ETP’s activity with drones. ETP’s private security company continued flying over anyway. Joye flipped off the chopper and lit a cigarette. In a few days, a judge would decide on the injunction that could stop pipeline construction. Two weeks before, North Dakota governor Jack Dalrymple—great-grandson of wheat farmer Oliver Dalrymple—had declared a state of emergency at the camp, stating that it was a public safety hazard. Police departments from neighboring states, using a “good neighbor” rule that Bill Clinton had passed to help natural-disaster response, converged on Standing Rock. The officers had no connection to the area or knowledge of the Sioux reservation and used military-grade sound cannons, concussion grenades, water cannons, Tasers, and tear gas on protestors over the next three months. Much of the gear had been gleaned from the controversial “1033” military-police exchange program that the Defense Department enacted in 1997, and the subsequent tactical-arms cottage industry that Homeland Security now finances.

  No weapons were allowed at the Standing Rock Reservation—including the axe that the old lady in front of me had inadvertently tried to smuggle in on my first day. Leaders of the movement relied on the courtroom instead. Joye and her fellow water protectors could recite the dates of broken treaties from memory. Lawyers from Earthjustice, the National Lawyers Guild, and the tribe’s own legal team were arguing multiple lawsuits in North Dakota and Washington, DC. Many briefs led with the 1851 and 1868 Fort Laramie Treaties. “There is something poetic about these documents coming back after all these years,” Jan Hasselman, lead counsel for the Standing Rock tribal government, told me. “In the past, a lot of people on the reservations thought, What was the point? Now, for the first time, people are actually listening to them.”

  School let out, and children scattered into the camp. One by one, parents sat in the grass to listen to Joye. There were protests planned in Bismarck that night, and a few more on the construction site over the next few days. No one knew the details; they just happened. Ten thousand people were expected at the forty-seventh annual United Tribes International Powwow in Bismarck that weekend, a few miles from the Morton County courthouse, where David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, was arguing to release protesters from jail. “Someone’s delivering tw
o hundred pounds of buffalo meat here on Saturday,” Joye said. “This place is going to be nuts.”

  Joye agreed with Jewell Praying Wolf James that something larger was taking shape. “There are prophesies that talk about how the First Nations people will rise up and become so enlightened they will enlighten the world,” she said. “This is indigenous rising. We have been the most oppressed, suppressed, people in the world. Indigenous populations, specifically here in America. We were so decimated, but we have been growing and educating ourselves. The common goal is water. Water is sacred. Without water there is nothing. There is an alternative for everything oil makes. There is no alternative for water. And yet they want to commodify it and poison it.” I asked if she thought the camp would be able to outlast a standoff with a multibillion-dollar oil company. “If there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s camp,” she said.

  OCETI SAKOWIN WAS QUIET the next morning. In the early days of the protest, women had gathered by the riverbank every morning to offer handfuls of tobacco to the water. There were nearly two thousand people living at the camp now, and the daily schedule was more spontaneous. Orange light washed over the teepees in the field. Their smoke flaps looked like preacher’s collars, and the lacing pins like jacket buttons. In Lakota culture, the circular floor inside represents the earth. The walls are the sky, and tent poles connect the two spheres.

  Wind whipped a streamer dangling from a smoke flap and pulled at the flags along the dirt driveway. An older man with an image of Chief Sitting Bull stitched into his denim jacket wandered past. Three young boys from the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in Veblen, South Dakota, chopped wood nearby. Helena La Batte of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate—a branch of the Santee Dakota—organized their trip to Standing Rock. She was standing by the van they’d driven, watching the boys, when I walked up. She said she was not as interested in oil as she was in the dairy business in Veblen. Three farms that keep thousands of cows within a mile of the reservation had contaminated the water supply there. The stench of the methane cloud in homes near the farms was overwhelming. Flies buzzed constantly, and children had been infected with a strain of bovine bacteria.