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

by Porter Fox

  The dark shadow that is Lake Oahe appeared near Snake Creek. In the 1960s, the Army Corps built a series of dams along the Missouri to prevent flooding in downstream cities like Saint Louis and New Orleans. They built the dam that formed Lake Oahe without properly consulting the tribe—and submerged more than two hundred thousand acres of land on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations. There is no shoreline around the lake. Water eases into grasslands like a giant puddle in the spring and contracts in the fall. The final resting place of Sitting Bull in Fort Yates a few miles north overlooks a forest of dead trees, still standing fifty years after Lake Oahe flooded it.

  It’s no wonder that so many young Sioux tribal members on the reservations turn to drugs, alcohol, and even suicide, a bartender told me that night. He was a Lakota Sioux himself. “We’re invisible,” he said. “Half the country doesn’t even know we’re here.” The bar was set in a small blue shack, situated in the middle of a pasture a few miles south of Oceti Sakowin. Three cattle skulls hung on the wall, and sawdust covered the floor.

  No alcohol or drugs were allowed at Oceti Sakowin, and some protestors had visited the bar to get a drink. “I like everything that they stood for,” the bartender said. “It seemed like the right thing. But if you ask me, they never should have crossed that river. It’s not our land. Everything that pipeline company was doing was fucked up. Everything the cops did was fucked up. I think what we stood for was honorable, but I just don’t like how we did it.”

  The bartender handed me a Coors Light and told me about life on the reservation. He was missing a tooth and wore steel-rimmed glasses. His forearms were thick and muscled. He didn’t want me to use his name; he didn’t need the trouble, he said. He told me that Lakota men got fired in Williston’s oil fields because of the protest. Others had been chased or intimidated by the police or kicked out of stores by whites in Bismarck. “I’ve traveled all over the country, and Bismarck is the most racist place I know,” he said. “The payback is coming now. They’re boycotting our casino. They want to take away funding for the tribe. You wait and see what they do and what the state does. Every other protestor went home when the camp was cleared. We have to live here.”

  Williston oil production had picked up again. By spring, drilling operations had grown by 80 percent, and production broke a million barrels a day. Half of that now ran through the pipeline.

  Two boys and a girl in their twenties walked into the bar and bought a twelve-pack of Budweiser. They came up short, and the bartender told them to bring the rest when they could. He and his boss had plans for the bar, he said. They’d known each other since they were seven. “We’re gonna expand in the corner,” he said. “We’ve got another building we’re gonna drag over and attach. Pool table, darts, new sound system.”

  I left him a twenty and wished him good luck. I was no different from the other visitors: my time here was coming to a close, and I was headed home. Outside, the sky was blood red. Clouds in the west hugged the prairie, that’s where the rain comes from. There isn’t much left after the Rockies wring them out. Storm fronts recharge over the Great Lakes and pour down on forests and cities in the Midwest and on the East Coast. That’s the cycle the Sioux tribes pray to, and the one the oilmen were messing with.

  The fate of the pipeline and the Sioux reservations continued to flip-flop. A federal judge handed the tribe a victory in June of 2017, stating that the required environmental impact study filed by ETP was indeed insufficient. He ordered another review to be conducted, but allowed the pipeline to continue operating in the meantime.

  I opened the car door and heard a Whoop! and the sound of hooves behind me. A dozen paints raced by a hundred yards away. A man wearing a cowboy hat swung a lasso over his head and herded the horses in a wide arc. It was a scene from a different time, another postcard from the northland: cowboys and Indians, oil patches and water wars, boom and bust, flood and drought.

  “That’s my boss,” the bartender said, stepping into the lot. We watched as the herd disappeared over a hill. There was a house on a ridgeline behind it, a pickup truck stacked high with hay parked in the driveway. A long shadow slid over the hills, and a few lights flicked on upstairs. I said goodbye again and got into the car. The bartender gazed at the field for a few seconds. Then he walked back inside to wait for another customer.

  PART V

  THE MEDICINE LINE

  14

  POWER LINES GLIDED OVER THE ROAD. RIBBONS OF ASPHALT, steel, water, soil, and trees ran parallel with the highway, cutting the northland off from the rest of the country. I was on US Route 2, somewhere in eastern Montana. The two-lane “Hi-Line” shadows the northern border twenty-five hundred miles from Maine to Washington, with a break over the Great Lakes.

  There were curves at the western end of the northland: river bends, winding train tracks, Swainson’s hawks banking low, wide arcs over the road. The earth slanted to the east. Sage flats skirted the road. There were sacred formations south of the highway: the Black Hills, the Bighorn Mountains, the headwaters of the Missouri.

  “Montana” is a Spanish name, though Spanish explorers never made it that far. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado crossed the Rockies in 1540 near present-day Santa Fe, but he chose to trek east to Kansas instead of north. Montana license plates call their home Big Sky Country. It was easy to see why. The state is larger than Japan. You can see a good chunk of it from almost any vantage point. Humidity averages in the low sixties. The whipsaw crest of the Rocky Mountains is visible from a hundred miles away. Big Sky Country averages seven people, one pronghorn antelope, one elk, and three deer per square mile. Eighty percent of the counties are still classified as “frontier,” meaning they are occupied by six or fewer people per square mile. There are more elk, grizzly bears, loons, and trumpeter swans in the state than anywhere else in the continental US.

  The air was so clear that I could see the legs of an antelope five miles away. A stand of whitebark pine three miles beyond that swayed in the breeze. A teenage boy cruised past in a beige 1970s Lincoln Continental. Square head, square shoulders, pale blue eyes. Looking in the mirror, he parted his hair with his left hand while dangling his right hand on top of the vinyl steering wheel. He didn’t have to steer; the car steered for him. He didn’t look like he was driving at all. It was like something was pulling the road out from under him. Time stopped moving in eastern Montana sometime around 1973.

  Montana and “Oregon Country” were some of the last unexplored and unmapped regions on the planet in the early 1800s, along with interior Africa, Australia, and both poles. Oregon Country stretched 250,000 square miles from the Pacific coast to the Continental Divide in western Montana. Thomas Jefferson considered it the last piece of America, that would someday complete an “Empire of Liberty” from sea to sea. It was a pipe dream. America was having a hard time managing the territory it already had. And the Northwest was already claimed by Russia, England, France, Spain, and dozens of Indian nations.

  The Northwest was the final stretch of the northland for me as well. I was twenty-five hundred miles from home, fifteen hundred from the Pacific. It was fall again and getting cold. The last miles were not going to be easy. Montana, Idaho, and Washington are home to some of the tallest peaks on the continent, scattered across remote wildernesses, rain forests, alluvial plains, and a matrix of lake and river systems. I would be driving and camping the whole way. The weather forecast predicted a hard frost by the end of the week. I needed to make it to the coast before the first snow.

  Low-angle autumn light glanced off buttes alongside Route 2. Barn swallows flitted over hay fields. Dirt driveways in Culbertson and Blair were dry and dusty. Covered porches had been closed up for winter and storm windows installed. The Continental floated ahead of me. The car was an apparition. Wheat and flax fields moved by like they were on a studio set. The land wasn’t flat like in North Dakota. Combines ran up and over knolls and ravines, harvesting wheat. Bright-red fire hydrants had been installed every
quarter mile in one field, thirty-foot-tall iron sculptures of birds in another.

  Sitting Bull made his last stand near here. Shortly after the Battle of the Little Bighorn, he had led what was left of his tribe through Montana’s northland. They camped and hunted across the northern plains, outwitting Colonel Nelson Miles and six companies of the US Fifth Infantry Regiment. America wanted blood after Custer’s defeat, and Generals Sherman and Sheridan initiated a policy of killing every Indian their troops could find. Mainly they found women and children headed to a reservation to turn themselves in, most of whom were shot or hung.

  The winter of 1876 was severe, with fierce wind and temperatures dipping to minus thirty. Miles outfitted his men with buffalo robes, mittens, and face masks cut from wool blankets. Sitting Bull went largely undetected, but freezing temperatures and a lack of game weakened the tribe. They retreated farther north and, the same month that Crazy Horse and nine hundred Sioux tribal members surrendered at Camp Robinson, Sitting Bull crossed into Saskatchewan over what Indians had begun to call the “Medicine Line.”

  The “strong medicine” of the forty-ninth parallel stopped US forces in their tracks, allowing Indians a measure of peace to the north. American officers wouldn’t have thought twice about pursuing an enemy across the US-Canada border twenty years earlier. But cross-border bootlegging skirmishes in the 1860s had alerted Canadians to the porous and dangerous state of their southern boundary. After Britain granted Canada dominion status in 1867, and the line along the forty-ninth was marked in 1873, Canadians and their North-West Mounted Police let it be known that the border was real.

  Montana’s “Medicine Line” was not the first in America. The Iroquois used the same sobriquet for the French-British boundary in the Seven Years’ War. They documented the border on their wampum as a white line between two black ones. Great Lakes tribes used the term as well for the line between British Ontario and the American colonies.

  Wallace Stegner wrote about Medicine Line country. He grew up thirty miles north of the Montana border in a small Saskatchewan town called Eastend. Like many northland settlers, Stegner’s father was a roamer. The author spent time in an orphanage when he was four, then lived in an abandoned dining car near the Canadian Pacific Railroad in Saskatchewan. The family moved to a shack on the border in the summer, where they farmed wheat. In a memoir of his childhood, Wolf Willow, Stegner wrote about the evolution of small towns in the region: “The first settlement in the Cypress Hills country was a village of métis winterers, the second was a short-lived Hudson’s Bay Company post on Chimney Coulee, the third was the Mounted Police headquarters at Fort Walsh, the fourth was a Mountie outpost erected on the site of the burned Hudson’s Bay Company buildings to keep an eye on Sitting Bull and other Indians who congregated in that country in alarming numbers after the big troubles of the 1870’s.”

  I DROVE ROUTE 2 past draws, moraines, hollows, arroyos, rift valleys, and mesas in the east near Frazer and Nashua. This is the language of Big Sky Country: laccolith, dike, shonkinite, marine shale. The state is split in two along the Rocky Mountain Front. East is prairie; west is the Northern Rockies. The front is a fifty-million-year-old thrust-and-fold jumble of wetlands, forests, and vertical subranges. The wall of rock is so formidable that it shapes weather across America. Western-flowing air from the Gulf of Mexico hits the front and reflects it back onto the plains, helping to create a vortex of wind and storms across the Great Plains known as Tornado Alley.

  The single-engine plane sticking out of the roof of the Hangar Bar in Glasgow, Montana, looked like it had seen some weather. Another plane, a US Air Force T-33 trainer, sat in the front yard of the Valley County Pioneer Museum. There were six casinos, one rodeo arena, one Taco Shack, three car-parts stores, and the Busted Knuckle Brewery downtown. Afternoon light dropped out of the sky on my way through, touching the tips of Sudan grass growing along the soft shoulder.

  The sun became a spotlight just before it set, shining through an opening in the clouds and splintering on my bug-splattered windshield. I’d been following the Continental for hours. A barbed wire fence bordered the road most of the way. Rifts and mesas lifted, fell, vanished, then reappeared. The bluffs on the horizon looked bigger than anything I’d seen in a while. I drove past a steak house, a bowling alley, a hundred wide-screen TVs shining through double-paned windows. A pharmacy at the edge of one town was closed, but a string of Christmas lights had been left on.

  I passed a grain elevator, and the sky darkened like an eyelid closing. A sliver of sun held out just above the horizon. A silver moon shone through the clouds before the sun went down. It was simultaneously night and day for about seven minutes. A freight train rushed past, and the rumble shook the car windows. The train was a mile long and stacked double high with forty-foot containers. A string of black, cylindrical oil cars took up the rear. The train blasted east, and the eye closed. Then everything was gone: traffic, tracks, Continental, casinos, town. It was thirty-five degrees. Snow tomorrow in the high peaks, the radio announcer said. The last of the light leaked out of the clouds, leaving me at the dark edge of the Rocky Mountains.

  IT WAS A CANADIAN who first traversed the Northwest in 1793. Alexander Mackenzie was a young Scotsman who grew up in New York City and Montréal. He was a fur trader with the North West Company and was working in central Canada. He had been searching for new trapping ground and a Northwest Passage and, after a few false starts, decided that the Peace River, two hundred miles northwest of present-day Edmonton, Alberta, was likely it.

  Mackenzie set out from Fort Fork in May in a twenty-five-foot birchbark canoe. A crew of voyageurs and several others joined him. The canoe held three thousand pounds of supplies, gear, and gifts for Indians. Emptied of its cargo, Mackenzie wrote, “two men could carry her on a good road three or four miles without resting.” The crew didn’t rest much paddling and portaging upstream on the Peace, then up the Parsnip River and overland to the Fraser River. They eventually met a band of Carrier Indians, who saved them from rough water and a dead end, advising Mackenzie to follow West Road River. Mackenzie took their advice and followed a network of Indian trails to six-thousand-foot Mackenzie Pass and the Bella Coola River. Two days downriver from there, he happened upon an Indian village built on stilts. From that vantage point, he said, “I could perceive the termination of the river, and its discharge into a narrow arm of the sea.”

  The fact that a Canadian logged the first traverse of North America, north of Mexico, infuriated Thomas Jefferson. He immediately accelerated plans to explore and win the Northwest. The exact location of the northwest coast had been discovered only a year before. On May 11, 1792, captain Robert Gray, the first American to circumnavigate the world, sailed into the Columbia River and calculated a longitude of 124 degrees—making Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” just under three thousand miles wide.

  Jefferson’s campaign to extend America’s northern border to the Pacific got an unexpected boost in January of 1803. That month he sent James Monroe to Paris to meet Robert R. Livingston, US minister to France. (Monroe had to sell his family’s silver flatware, porcelain plates, and a china tea set to afford the trip.) Their orders were to purchase the port of New Orleans, where a quarter of America’s produce floated south, avoiding taxes and encouraging a separatist movement. Napoleon countered with a stunning offer. He wanted the US to buy all of Louisiana, the same territory La Salle had named.

  The French emperor had had visions of restarting New France at one point, but a rebellion against a French colony on Haiti soured his enthusiasm for colonial ventures. That, plus dwindling finances and a desire to check the growing British Empire in North America, pushed him to sell. Monroe and Livingston agreed to buy 828,000 square miles for $15 million, doubling the size of the US.

  Seven months before, Jefferson had put in another bid. This one was to Congress for a secret mission to explore the northland through Louisiana and Oregon Country. He wanted a “Corps of Discovery” to see how far
west the seemingly endless Missouri River went, find a Northwest Passage, and document the remote northwestern corner of the continent. He entrusted the journey to his secretary, Meriwether Lewis. The two had been neighbors when Lewis was a boy, and they lived like bachelors in the recently finished White House. Jefferson was a widower. Lewis slept next to his boss’s extra files, clothes, and furniture in the unfinished East Room—where Abigail Adams had dried her husband’s underwear during the previous term.

  Lewis was unqualified for the job but had military experience and the leadership skills needed to guide a group of three dozen men on a seven-thousand-mile journey. Lewis’s partner would be William Clark, a veteran of the Northwest Indian War and younger brother of commander George Clark, the highest-ranking American military officer on the northwestern frontier during the American Revolutionary War.

  Not knowing where they were going or what they would find made preparation difficult. The northland west of North Dakota was rumored to be another El Dorado. Bits of information gleaned from voyageurs, Indians, and explorers suggested that the territory held endless forests, croplands, gold and silver veins, active volcanoes, prehistoric animals, a mile-long mountain of salt, and a wide plateau from which all the rivers of the West flowed. Some thought that Indians living along the Missouri River descended from the twelve lost tribes of Israel. Others thought the Mandan people in the Northwest were a roaming band of Welshmen.

  Lewis’s shopping list was eclectic: two hundred pounds of “portable” (dried) soup, fishhooks, guns, black powder, chronometer, dried tobacco, shirts, lead canisters, ink powder, crayons, pencils, flannel, mosquito netting, oilskin bags, salt, needles, flint, and a collapsible iron boat that he designed. Jefferson gave Lewis a starter course with a sextant on the White House lawn, then sent him to Lancaster to continue studying with the preeminent astronomer in America, Andrew Ellicott. Lewis continued his studies in Philadelphia with Dr. Benjamin Rush, the leading physician in the nation—and signer of the Declaration of Independence—where he learned how to preserve and document specimens.