The New Wild West

by Blaire Briody

  But the arrival of Lewis and Clark was the beginning of a long history of heartbreak for Marilyn’s ancestors. A smallpox outbreak tore through the area in 1837, taking half a million Indian lives. Many of the victims died within hours of their first symptoms. The heaps of bodies—which had turned black from the disease and swelled in the sun—grew higher every day.

  In 1851, with the Treaty of Horse Creek, the federal government allotted 12 million acres to the three tribes, but over the next 20 years, the government proceeded to chip away at that acreage, many times justifying the breaking up of Indian lands as an attempt to “civilize” the Native population. By the time the official reservation borders were drawn in 1870, a few years before the first homesteaders arrived in the Williston area, the land had been reduced by nearly half.

  The federal government’s takeover didn’t stop there. Congress passed the General Allotment Act of 1887 in order to take away communal land from tribes and create individual landowners. On the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, heads of families were given 160 acres each, unmarried men and women were given 80 acres each, and children received 40 acres. This shift to individual ownership made it easier for white settlers to purchase Indian lands, and 1.6 million acres of reservation land opened to white settlers during this time. By the early 1910s, fewer than 3 million acres of the reservation were owned by Native Americans.

  Within that acreage was a town called Elbowoods, located in a valley about 40 miles from New Town, and where Hudson and her siblings grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. Her upbringing was in many ways similar to that of her ancestors. She and her family hunted, gathered wild foods, rode horses, and farmed the productive valley. There were nine villages along the Missouri River, and Elbowoods was a social hub. People from the outlying communities would come to the town’s main square once a month to gather, pass tobacco pipes, and tell stories. Tribal members knew everyone by their first name, which clan they belonged to, and who their ancestors were. They lived peacefully and sustainably. When Hudson was a young child in the mid-1940s, fewer than 3 percent of those living on the reservation received federal assistance.

  Hundreds of miles downstream from Hudson’s family, however, in Nebraska and Iowa, non-Native farmers along the lower Missouri River were fed up. Those who had survived the Great Depression and dust bowl of the 1930s were now battling unpredictable floodwaters that were destroying valuable crops. Floods in the spring of 1943 had caused millions of dollars of damage. The farmers’ losses and complaints would result in the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation proposing the Pick-Sloan Plan, flood-control legislation that would construct 110 dams—the first, largest, and most ambitious located about 60 miles from Elbowoods near a small town called Garrison.

  Once built, the Garrison Dam would flood some 800 square miles of rich farmland. The Army Corps of Engineers claimed the new dam would bring “immeasurable wealth to North Dakota”—but somehow the plan would disproportionately flood Native American lands and avoid white communities like Williston. Less than 10 percent of farmland to be covered by floodwaters was owned by white farmers. Hudson’s father, Martin Cross, the tribal chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes and the vice president of the National Congress of American Indians, fought with everything he had to stop the plan. He testified before the U.S. Senate, wrote letters, and argued with lawmakers over the plan’s legality. But in the end, his efforts failed. The plan was approved, and some 155,000 acres of land and 436 properties owned by the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes were set to disappear underwater forever.

  The tribes received only $12.5 million in compensation for the loss of land, their homes, and their livelihood, a gross undervaluation (private appraisers had estimated the land’s value to be $21 million). The package was also intended to cover the relocation and reconstruction costs for homes, schools, hospitals, roads, cemeteries, and more. The final draft of the bill forbade the tribe to use the money to hire lawyers or agents to represent them to appeal the plan. When the tribe’s then chairman, George Gillette, added his signature to the bill in Congress, he wept openly in front of the crowd and media photographers.

  One of the few items the compensation package did protect, however, was the tribe’s subsurface mineral rights—which at the time were thought to be worthless. Most of the mineral rights from the “taken” land would be transferred to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and displaced landowners were given plots of land with the mineral rights intact above the valley.

  When it was time to start moving homes, many residents didn’t receive notice of the date their house would be relocated. Some were in the middle of eating dinner when they heard rattling and felt their home move beneath them. Others, like 21-year-old Louise Holding Eagle, came home from the grocery store to find her home, along with her husband and two children, gone—all that was left was an empty field and the home’s foundation. The Corps had stopped by while she was out, loaded her house onto a flatbed truck, and driven it away. She didn’t even know which plot above the valley they took her home to.

  A few elders said they’d rather die than move. One local businessman committed suicide instead of packing up his dry-goods store and the home he shared with his wife and daughter. The dam was completed in 1953, and in late summer of 1954, water lapped onto the streets of Elbowoods. Some residents stubbornly waited until the last minute to make preparations and were too late—they watched their beloved homes swallowed up by the floodwaters and scrambled to evacuate. Many sacred religious sites washed away. As the water level rose, a group of former high school basketball players realized no one had packed up the trophies in the trophy case at the high school; they maneuvered rowboats down the school’s hallways to retrieve them.

  Hudson graduated from high school a few months before the flood and was part of the last graduating class of Elbowoods High School. She left to attend college in Minot, and her family moved to a shack in Parshall while they waited for their home to be moved to its new foundation near Main Street. The toll of fighting the dam and the loss of his community broke her father’s heart. He and her mother split in 1954, even though divorce was practically nonexistent in the Elbowoods community before the area was flooded. Martin Cross moved to a ranch 20 miles south of Parshall with no neighbors for miles and attempted ranching, with little success.

  The transition to life on higher ground was difficult for the displaced tribal members. Most were now scattered across some 1,500 square miles of land, and close-knit clans were now separated by the vast, 178-mile-long Lake Sakakawea. On the high ground, people were exposed to forceful prairie winds and had little protection from weather extremes. There was little water for farm irrigation or to grow small gardens, the soil was arid and unproductive, and the wild game population for hunting was thin. “All of a sudden you’ve got all these people living out here and their livelihood has been taken away,” said Hudson. Few jobs were available in Parshall and the newly formed New Town, and most that existed paid minimum wage or less. In Parshall, a mostly white town established in 1914 by Scandinavian homesteaders, racial tensions worsened as hundreds of Native Americans moved in. A study by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1964, 10 years after the move, concluded that relocation had “created a situation in which actual starvation for many of these people is a real possibility.”

  Hudson’s siblings relocated to northern California, Seattle, and Denver, and hundreds of tribal members did the same. For those who stayed, by the 1990s, members relied heavily on government assistance and more than a third lived below the poverty line. “The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people went from being the only self-sufficient tribal enclave in the U.S. to being one that was almost wholly dependent on outside help for day-to-day survival,” wrote Paul VanDevelder in Coyote Warrior.

  So when oil companies came, it was easy to see why many tribal members signed away mineral rights and cashed in. With those funds, some were able to live free of government assistance for the first time in their lives. Afte
r the boom began, unemployment on the reservation fell to the single digits. But this time, the money was coming from a new type of outsider—one with deep pockets, slick salesmanship, and, like those who came before, a desire for Native lands.

  21. CHELSEA NIEHAUS

  When Chelsea Niehaus arrived in North Dakota, she had no idea tensions were rising between tribal members and newcomers. Or that newcomers like her and Jacob Klipsch living on the reservation had become a symbol of the pain and suffering tribal members were experiencing. All Chelsea knew was that she needed to clean the camper, unpack, and figure out dinner before the sun went down.

  Right away, she got to cleaning. There were no whiskey bottles or dirty laundry strewn about, as she’d worried, but a layer of dust had coated the cushions and the carpet, and grime had built up in the crevices of the fiberglass walls. There was no water and no working toilets so they drove to the Cenex gas station about a mile up the road when someone had to use the restroom. The nearby truck-stop showers that Jacob used were notorious for being unsanitary and filled with grimy men recently back from their long shifts in the oil fields. Chelsea decided she and Will could go at least a few days without bathing.

  The first evening in the camper, Chelsea watched a thunderstorm roll in—the lightning burst through the open sky and crept closer. She and her family settled in for the night to wait out the storm. As the thunder crashed and echoed, Chelsea lay awake listening to the wind howl outside while Jacob slept next to her. Dust blew in through the crevices of the camper walls. The master bedroom was only a crawl space. She could barely sit up, let alone stand. Will slept on a camping mat in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, and Thor curled up on the other side of the bed. Eventually Chelsea drifted off to sleep.

  After three days in the trailer park without water, Jacob received approval to move into a different RV park. He had been hired at a new company, called DuCon, an oil field services and supply company, and his boss wanted him to live closer to his coworkers. The new park was located 20 miles away in Parshall, North Dakota, but still on the reservation. It was situated on a large plot of scoria gravel, surrounded by tall prairie grass scattered with oil rigs and aging grain storage bins in the distance. There wasn’t a patch of green lawn in sight, but this park had running water, plumbing hookups, a shower house, laundry facilities, and Wi-Fi. It felt luxurious compared to the previous lot. At $800 a month to park there, it was double the price, but DuCon paid half the rent. They hooked up to the water source, turned on the hot water heater, and Chelsea took a hot shower for the first time since they arrived. Soon after, however, the rain came.

  When it rains in North Dakota, it rains hard, fast, and with purpose. It’s not the quick sheets of downpour like in the East or the slow constant drizzle in the Pacific Northwest. Rainstorms on the prairie are not for the weak. You can see a storm coming from miles away, the dark clouds marching through the expansive sky like determined soldiers, with angry winds accelerating their encroachment. Then the sky darkens—the sun’s rays have no chance to peek through. The thunder booms, shaking you to the core, and lightning bolts announce the storm’s arrival. All you can do is hunker down to hide, wait it out, and hope it clears before dawn.

  At the new Parshall trailer park, it rained and rained and rained. The rain would let up for a moment but then thunder down on top of the trailer’s thin rubber roof with even more force. Chelsea worried they could be washed away. Jacob’s company halted work because of the rain—the unpaved roads leading to the oil rigs morphed into thick, muddy, impassible channels (though plenty of companies operated in such conditions). Most of the time, forceful winds accompanied the downpours. “It felt like the trailer was going to blow over because the wind just blew and blew and blew,” Chelsea said. If she had to leave the trailer for any reason, she’d immediately sink into mud like quicksand. The doormat and steps to the trailer’s entrance became permanently cemented over with a thick sludge.

  With Jacob unable to work, the three of them holed up in the camper together for days on end. Their patience with each other withered. A testy remark or small squabble turned into a screaming match within seconds. “Woo … there was some tension there,” Chelsea recalled. “We were all piled on top of each other, and we couldn’t go anywhere and it was raining and the wind was blowing … it was painful to watch.” Jacob drank more. He paced back and forth in the camper or puttered around outside. Most days, the windows inside the camper fogged up and they couldn’t see out. Will ran around screaming as Chelsea tried to do craft projects or read books with him. When it stormed outside, she thought about the stories Jacob’s mother had told her before they’d left Kentucky about women living on the plains 100 years ago, who went crazy from the sound of the wind. “I felt like the walls were closing in,” she said later. She began to truly understand how women could lose their minds here.

  In early June, after Chelsea and Will had been there two and a half weeks, Jacob broke down one night. He had too much to drink at his boss’s camper. When he came home around 2 a.m., he was belligerent. He threw dishes and tossed some of their belongings out of the camper. He didn’t hit Chelsea, but at one point he forcefully grabbed her waist. “He just lost his mind,” Chelsea said. “He was drunk and acting fucking crazy.” He screamed at them, telling Chelsea she was a horrible person, and eventually the police knocked on their trailer’s door. Chelsea never found out who made the call. The police officer asked four-year-old Will if Jacob had hit him or his mother. Will shook his head and said no. Jacob seemed calmer and Chelsea promised the officer they were fine, but Chelsea was furious at Jacob. “I’d never dealt with anything like that before. I was just horrified,” she said.

  The next morning, she packed their bags, and she, Will, and Thor left. They stayed at a hotel in Minneapolis that night and she drove to Jacob’s parents’ house in Vincennes, Indiana, the next day. She left Will with his grandparents and drove to Louisville. The Walnut Cottage house still hadn’t sold, and Chelsea almost cried when she saw her old home. She was so happy to have a place to return to, even if most of the furniture was gone. Two days later, she turned 33, and spent her birthday alone. It was one of the worst birthdays of her life.

  She and Will stayed in Kentucky for six weeks. Jacob apologized profusely for the incident, and, eventually, Chelsea’s anger softened. She also knew she couldn’t stay at the house forever. Financially, they were struggling again. Without Chelsea’s full-time job and with Jacob not working, she couldn’t continue the mortgage payments much longer. Chelsea heard that a friend and her partner were looking for an affordable rental, so her friends moved into the Walnut Cottage home and Chelsea packed up and returned to North Dakota with Will and Thor. The sun was shining when they arrived, and Jacob was back to working full time. Chelsea was determined to last in North Dakota for the rest of the summer.

  * * *

  Chelsea met Jacob in German class in their sophomore year of high school. She was the new kid at school—a transfer from a small Catholic school in Vincennes, Indiana. Lincoln High School was more than four times the size of her old school. Jacob was a former football player who then joined the marching band. He had made a reputation for himself the year before at a school assembly, after the administration announced it would start drug testing. Jacob stood up at the assembly and said the testing violated everyone’s rights, then dropped the microphone and walked out. Kids at school were still talking about it when Chelsea enrolled.

  In German glass, Jacob sat near Chelsea and tried to get her attention by yelling random things like “I have a snake!” “He was goofy and different,” said Chelsea. She saw him perform in the marching band, and it inspired her to try out for the color guard. They went to band camp together, talked on the phone often, and hung out at each other’s houses. “We obviously liked each other,” she said. At age 15, their parents went to a party and left them alone together in the house. They kissed for the first time. “We basically grew up together,” Chelsea
said. “Even if we couldn’t make it together, we’d still be friends. We’ve been through so much together. Sometimes I don’t like him—especially when he’s drinking. Jacob when he’s drinking is a total nightmare. But we have a kid to raise—we’re going to have to get along.”

  I drove out to meet Chelsea and Will one Sunday afternoon in late July 2013 while Jacob was away at work. Thor was tied up outside and barked when I pulled in next to Chelsea’s Mitsubishi. Chelsea had placed a few potted plants outside, growing tomatoes, basil, and mint. An Oriental rug covered the dusty ground in front of the camper’s doorway. The carpet was held down by large rocks to keep it from blowing away. Next to the doorway was a mini-fridge draped with a blue tarp. There were two men working on the trailer next door, maneuvering some PVC pipe that lay on the ground. A four-wheeler was parked behind them. Grasshoppers leapt onto my jeans as I exited my car.

  Will watched from the window as I approached but hid when I reached the foldaway steps leading into the camper. Chelsea was behind a rickety screen door in the kitchen and gestured for me to come in. The door banged shut behind me. Chelsea was wearing a long flowing skirt with a tank top and greeted me with a big smile. Her straight brown hair cascaded down her back and framed her round face. She had soft features, and light brown freckles speckled her pale cheeks. She apologized about Will; he was shy, and it took him a few minutes to warm up to new people. She was busy making pulled pork in a Crockpot—the sweet, pungent smell saturated the small space.