The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

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  There’s a photo of Cindy and Richard and the seven kids, taken at one of those department store photo studios, where they’re smiling like a happy family. Cindy has a perm, her cheeks are painted with blush, and her long blond hair is dyed dark auburn, a red bow clipped to one side. Richard’s neck is hidden by a thick beard that’s neatly trimmed. His upper lip is completely shaved, making him look Amish. The kids circle them, with the three girls lined up neatly on the left and the boys, including Matthew, on the right, with Richard’s eldest daughter in the center. Jennie is five years old with long braids and thick, blunt bangs. She gives the camera a goofy smile. They look like a typical 1980s middle-class family.

  Behind the smiles, however, life was much more chaotic. As Cindy describes it, Richard was hardly around, and when he was, he would instigate fights. Cindy suspected he was seeing other women, but when she confronted him about it, he told her she was crazy and hallucinating things. Eventually, she started to believe him. “Things were never stable with Richard. He was never there, we never knew where he was or what he was doing,” she said. As their youngest daughter, Jennie, explained their relationship: “When they were together, it was gasoline on the fire, always.”

  Richard constantly tried to invent new schemes to make money. He was arrested when they lived in Lake Stevens, Washington, for writing bad checks. The second time he was arrested, he’d been hired to burn down a friend’s trailer to collect the insurance money. Instead of showing up for court, he packed up the family and moved to a remote location where he hoped the police wouldn’t find him. For a while, they lived in a bus parked in the woods.

  In 1989, Richard’s ex-wife didn’t like what she was hearing about their lifestyle from her daughters and called Child Protective Services. The police came to the girls’ school to take them away. After the police questioned the daughters, they arrested Richard and accused him of sexually abusing them. Richard posted bail after his arrest and waited for trial. Cindy didn’t believe that the charges could be true. Richard convinced her that he was innocent, and although she believed him, from that moment on, she didn’t allow Richard to be alone with her two daughters. Cindy was also terrified CPS would take her children as well, and hid them away at friends’ houses. Every couple of days, Cindy moved them to another location in the middle of the night. Cindy taught her kids to not talk to the cops. She’d say, “If somebody starts asking questions about your mommy and daddy, you tell them ‘It’s none of your damn business.’ You close your lips and you say nothing else.” A few months later, Richard’s eldest, Eric, left to live with his mother. They quickly went from seven kids to three.

  Before the trial, Richard ran from the law to avoid possible jail time and moved his family into the woods again. They lived in tents often. They boiled snow for water. The checks they lived off of were in Richard’s name, so Cindy had to ask him every time she needed money for groceries, clothes, or household items. Many times, he spent nearly every last penny before giving any to her or the kids. When he did give Cindy money for groceries or supplies, she said that he berated her if she spent too much on what he considered frivolous items. She recalled that once when he saw her put baby carrots instead of the cheaper, regular ones in the cart, he picked up the bag and threw it at her. Whenever Cindy had extra money left over after buying groceries, she hid it away for later. But with no income, no car, and no driver’s license, her options were limited. She felt trapped.

  “She was in a very stressful situation,” remembered Jennie. “She didn’t have even the basic necessities for her children. But she couldn’t see that it would have been better for her to go get a little apartment in town, to take her remaining children and get a job.”

  The family moved around often, parking the camper on people’s properties until they overstayed their welcome. Anything to keep Richard hidden from the police. “We just went from place to place to place,” said Cindy’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth. Sometimes they piled into the car and just drove, living out of the car or camping all summer long. “We moved about every six months, from one funky situation to another,” Elizabeth recalled. A lot of times they moved because Richard became suspicious of the neighbors.

  Richard and Cindy would fight often—their fights were loud and angry and, a few times, they became physical. At her lowest moments, Cindy took out her frustrations with Richard by hitting Elizabeth and Jennie. Jennie remembered Cindy forcefully pinching her until she screamed. Cindy would say, “Scream if someone is hurting you. It’s the only way you can defend yourself.”

  Today, Cindy has made amends with her daughters. “I tell the kids, ‘I will spend the next 20 years apologizing to you and trying to make up for the mistakes in the first 20 years.’ In the moment I knew it was bad and I couldn’t fix it. I didn’t know how to fix it. I didn’t have the resources, especially with Richard. When I hear them talk about stuff, I’m like, ‘If you never spoke to me again, I would absolutely understand.’”

  Happier memories were when they traveled on wagon train reenactments together. In 1989, they trekked across Washington State as a family in full wagon train–era costumes, hand-sewed by Cindy. “My mom never asked if I had homework or anything, it was just like, ‘Let’s do this craft project’ or ‘Let’s go on this hike,’” said Elizabeth.

  Sometimes Cindy told the kids, “I don’t know where I’m going, I’m not sure when I’m coming back, but you have a half hour to get ready.” They’d drive to the Four Corners, Colorado, Utah, the Grand Canyon. The first time they went to the Grand Canyon, Cindy wrote in the family photo album: “We were so broke we couldn’t even afford the 25 cents to go up in the tower. Spent pennies to get enough gas to drive to Phoenix.” Once Cindy announced they were leaving for a trip when Elizabeth had a friend over and the friend went too, but Cindy never told the friend’s mother. They were gone for eight days. “Sometimes we wouldn’t get too far,” said Elizabeth. “She would take her money, split it in half, and we would go until half her money ran out, and then we’d go home.” They constantly had car trouble—the car would overheat, the muffler would fall off, or they’d run out of gas and have to walk to the nearest station. “These were occurrences we talked about like other people talked about birthday parties,” Elizabeth said.

  When the kids were sick, Cindy began to use home remedies. They had no health insurance, and she mistrusted hospitals and traditional doctors. Soon neighbors heard about her medical talents and brought their kids over whenever they had minor ailments, like pink eye or warts. But when the ailments started getting more serious, Cindy decided she needed professional training. She applied to a three-year acupuncture program in Denver, and to her surprise, she was accepted.

  Richard, however, wasn’t happy about it. He begrudgingly said she could go but insisted they live in a run-down building four hours away from her school. The thought of driving four hours each way to school to live in another dump enraged her. For the first time, she threatened to leave him and take the kids. She remembered telling him: “I will figure out a way to do this. You can take every penny you want, but you are not taking this away from me.” But two days before Cindy was set to leave with the kids, he apologized and announced he was coming with them. They rented a house in Brush, Colorado, an hour and a half from her school, but something had shifted in their marriage. “It was the beginning of the end,” said Cindy. At 35, she now had a goal—she knew practicing acupuncture could give her a way to make money and provide for herself. “Acupuncture was a huge shift in who I was and in how much backbone I had,” she explained. “I realized there was a world beyond. How I grew up, you get married and there’s your husband and your kids—there is no you.”

  In Colorado, for the first time that Jennie and Elizabeth could remember, they had consistent electricity and running water. They attended school regularly. All three of the kids had their own bedrooms, which was strange at first. The girls snuck into Ricky’s bedroom at night because they were scared
to sleep alone. Richard was still running from the law and wasn’t around much. For three months, he lived in a tent in the woods and Cindy delivered food to him once a week. Ricky, now 15, babysat the girls while Cindy was at school. One day, in 1993, Richard’s past caught up to him. He was arrested and sent back to Washington. “I was in school and they arrested him in front of our little kids and hauled him off,” Cindy recalled.

  In Washington, the child abuse charges were dropped, but Richard was convicted of “bail jumping,” a felony, and two counts of “communication with a minor for immoral purposes,” which were misdemeanors, and sentenced to six months in jail.

  Despite her newfound independence, Cindy didn’t seriously consider divorcing Richard. She was terrified that Richard would take her children and run away where she couldn’t find them. It took another 11 years for them to split up.

  20. FORT BERTHOLD

  About 70 miles away from where I lived in Williston sat the sprawling Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, or the Three Affiliated Tribes.

  Before the boom, about 6,000 tribal members lived on nearly 1 million acres of land—an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. For the most part, they lived peacefully but in poverty. About 40 percent of the tribe’s workforce was unemployed, and many people lived in small homes crammed with three or more families. As on other reservations throughout the United States, alcoholism permeated the lives of many Native families. Life expectancy on the reservation was 57 years, compared with 79 for the state of North Dakota.

  So when reservation leaders realized so much oil lay under tribal lands, they were ecstatic. They had been skipped over by small oil booms in the past and wanted in this time. The tribe’s chairman, Tex Hall, believed that capitalizing on the boom could be their ticket out of poverty and reliance on government assistance. Hall wanted the reservation to be appealing to oil companies and did everything he could to streamline the permit process. He testified in Congress against new fracking regulations. “When the white man said, ‘This will be your reservation,’ little did they know those Badlands would have oil and gas,” Hall said in an energy company video. His motto became “sovereignty by the barrel.”

  Hall’s tactics worked—oil companies came in droves to set up on tribal land. By 2011, one-fifth of North Dakota’s oil came from the reservation. But as oil companies lined up to drill, Hall decided to line his own pockets. He launched his own oil company on the reservation, a direct conflict of interest with his political responsibilities—a conflict the tribe’s council ignored. Rumors spread about Hall using his political power to drum up more business for his own company and undermine competitors.

  “[Tex Hall] was very pro oil and had everything going for him—very charming and charismatic,” said Marilyn Hudson, a 78-year-old tribal elder and historian from the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes on the reservation. “He had the attention of senators and Indian people throughout the nation. He was always in favor of big oil and to lessen restrictions.”

  At the same time, the tribe’s budget wasn’t subject to the same disclosure and auditing requirements as other U.S. governing bodies, and the council was managing millions of dollars with little oversight. For example, the tribal government set aside $421 million in the budget for a “special projects” fund but didn’t disclose what those special projects were or how the money would be spent. A few purchases became controversial and symbols of mismanagement within the government: one was a 96-foot, $2.5 million yacht, supposedly to bring in more revenue for the casino located next to the man-made Lake Sakakawea. But it sat unused on dry land. “I don’t know why they bought it,” said Hudson. “Money is being spent hand over fist, but it’s being spent without any long-range planning or thought.”

  Fewer than half of the tribal members owned mineral rights—the rest belonged to the tribe as a whole or to outside buyers—so while they received oil royalty checks (some upward of tens of thousands of dollars a month), many tribal members weren’t seeing a dime and continued to live below the poverty line—only now they had to stand by and watch their neighbors become rich. “We still feel like we’re in a ghetto,” said Lisa DeVille, a 41-year-old tribal member living in the small reservation community of Mandaree. “The tribe is collecting millions of dollars a month, but yet Mandaree’s still sitting there with a school that was built in the 1950s. It has an old boiler room with black mold in it. We are in great need of housing—70 percent of our community is living in overcrowded conditions.”

  Oil companies began buying up property to house workers and evicted longtime Native residents. In late 2011, a new owner bought Prairie Winds Trailer Park in New Town to house his employees. He told the 180 residents, many of them families with young children, that they had a few months to relocate. Protesters marched down Main Street, angry that Natives were being removed from their homes to make room for workers and out-of-towners.

  More and more tribal members began to question Hall’s unbridled embrace of oil development on the reservation. As time went on, the downsides became increasingly apparent. Hundreds of semi trucks roared through New Town every day, causing a rapid spike of traffic accidents and deaths. Residents began calling Route 23, which runs east to west through North Dakota and cuts through the center of town, “suicide road.” In the early days of the boom, Marilyn Hudson’s granddaughter was hit by a semi on the road and died immediately. She was only 23 years old. The boom brought an increase of crime, drug use, and damage to sacred tribal lands. Industry trucks dumped toxic fluid into ditches by the road or unloaded radioactive waste, a byproduct of fracking, into garbage bins and backyards. A large number of deer disappeared off the reservation in 2012, and many suspected the oil activity was to blame.

  In a strange twist of events, Hall was called to testify in a trial of two murders that occurred on the reservation in 2012 and 2013.

  The main murder suspects were both newcomers—James Henrikson from Oregon and Timothy Suckow from Spokane, Washington. Henrikson was accused of hiring Suckow to murder 29-year-old Kristopher Clarke and 63-year-old Doug Carlile because of a business deal gone wrong. But Tex Hall had a connection to the suspects. After Henrikson launched a business on the reservation, Hall became friends with him. And one victim, Clarke, was last seen leaving Hall’s property before he vanished. Investigators never found evidence to charge Hall with a crime, and Hall denied any wrongdoing, but he testified at the trial about his business dealings with Henrikson, who was sentenced to life in prison. “He let himself be taken in by crooks,” said Marilyn Hudson. “That’s what puzzles everybody—how could he be so dumb? Two men were murdered. There were so many elements of it that were unbelievable.” Finally, in 2014, Hall lost his run for reelection. People began calling Hall’s time in office the “reign of terror.” After stepping down, Hall launched a business to produce and sell marijuana, which had recently become legal on the reservation.

  The murders not only shocked tribal members but accentuated their feelings of mistrust toward the non-Indian newcomers and oil workers. The population of the reservation had more than doubled by 2013, and crime was rising. In 2012, the tribal police department reported the most murders, sexual assaults, domestic disputes, drug busts, gun threats, and human trafficking cases in reservation history. The next year, police ran “Operation Winter’s End” and made a 22-person drug bust, involving heroin and methamphetamine, on the reservation. Police later arrested at least 40 more people connected to the original bust. In the past, the Justice Department had never seen heroin on the reservation—the first case was in 2012. Though the number of addicts was rising quickly, the tribe had one substance-abuse treatment center, which could house only nine patients at a time.

  A number of rape cases involving non-Indian men and Native women also fueled fears. In the spring of 2012, three oil workers offered a female tribal member a ride home from a bar in New Town; instead, they drove her down a dark road, raped her several times, and left her t
here. There also was evidence of sex trafficking on the reservation. Native girls as young as 12 and 13 would disappear from their homes, then resurface a week or two later with matching red flag tattoos. Investigators suspected pimps had branded them.

  When it came to making arrests or prosecuting crimes, the reservation was a jurisdictional nightmare. According to the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court case Oliphant v. Suquamish, tribal officers are forbidden to arrest and prosecute non-Indians who commit crimes on Indian land. Thus, if a perpetrator was non-Indian, an officer outside the reservation had to make the arrest. There was frequent confusion over who should respond to a call, and getting the right deputy to the scene could take hours, given the reservation’s enormous square mileage. Plus, each deputy already had an overwhelming workload. The tribal police force employed only about 20 officers to cover the entire reservation. The bureaucratic mess added to the lawless, Wild-West feeling of the area. As one white mechanic on the reservation told a reporter from The Atlantic: “Basically you can do anything short of killing somebody.”

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  For Marilyn Hudson, the feeling that outsiders were disrespecting Indian lands was all too familiar.

  Hudson was born on the reservation and is the great-great-granddaughter of a man named Cherry Necklace, a warrior in the Hidatsa tribe who adopted a young girl who would later become the legendary Sacagawea (known as Sakakawea in North Dakota, though no one knows the true spelling of her name). Marilyn’s Hidatsa and Mandan ancestors had farmed in a fertile valley near North Dakota’s Heart River for centuries, an area that at one time was home to more than 14,000 Native Americans. In 1804, two explorers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, visited their villages. It was there they hired the 14-year-old Sakakawea to help them make the journey to the Rockies.