In the first years of the century, Norwegians, Swedes, and Swiss and German immigrants turned millions of acres of virgin prairie and High Plains topsoil under the plow. For an all too brief period in the early 20s, everybody farming land beside the Missouri River was getting rich. Postwar demands for wheat soared. In 1920, the population of North Dakota was the highest it would be for the next eighty years. Through intensive resource development and the good luck of steady rain, the American homesteader fell into the comfortable habit of expecting miracles. By 1930, farmers on the northern Great Plains supplied the entire country with butter, beef, leather, wheat, and numerous other valuable commodities. The visionary logic of the Homestead Acts had paid off, relieving pressure on eastern cities and putting the continent’s valuable resources to the most beneficial use of a growing American society.
But to anyone who knew the region, and to any farmer accustomed to glancing overhead at the inscrutable dome of sky, the idea that man could somehow “conquer” the elements that governed life on the Great Plains was a dangerous conceit. Any farmer familiar with the natural history of the Great Plains knew that the bumper-crop years of the 1910s and 20s would sooner or later come to an end.
After mapping the West’s great river systems in the late 1800s, John Wesley Powell of the U.S. Geological Survey recommended to Congress that the federal government should promote settlement in the West by river systems rather than by geographically organizing the continent according to arbitrary boundaries drawn across empty deserts by railroad magnates in eastern cities. He also warned Washington that the boosterism of western congressmen was a pied piper’s tune that would soon lead them, and hordes of emigrants, down the path to disaster. Sustainable agriculture on the Northern Plains was simply not possible, warned Powell, without a massive investment of federal dollars in public waterworks and irrigation projects. If scarcity of moisture was not intimidating enough in the continent’s heartland, the growing season between killer frosts across northern tier states was often less than 130 days. In other words, life for homesteaders on the Great Plains would be a devil’s gambit. If one demon did not get them, Powell told Congress, another surely would.
In the two decades following Powell’s report, homesteaders arrived in Minot and Fargo by the tens of thousands on trains, foot, horseback, and wagons. In the 1870s, there were fewer than 2,500 immigrant farmers in North Dakota. By the late 1920s, railroad land sales and Homestead Acts had increased that number to 690,000. Basinwide, more than 70 million acres of virgin sod—an area the size of France, Germany, and Spain combined—had been sectioned off by government surveyors and turned under the homesteader’s plow. The alluvial topsoils left behind 16 millennia before by receding glaciers were uniformly high in fertility across the entire region. As long as the annual rainfall stayed above the magical fifteen inches, the soil produced bumper crops. But when the drought years returned in the 1930s, Bureau of Reclamation hydrologists told Congress that homesteaders had in less than three years gone from celebrating good fortune to learning a cruel lesson of nature. It was a lesson, they told Congress, that they had better learn as well. Beyond the Hundredth meridian, climatic realities of the Great Plains transformed Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of gentlemen farmers, on 160-acre homesteads, from a pretty mythology into a vast graveyard now forming between the rock of the western mountains and a dry place called Fargo.
In hopes of heading off a complete disaster, Congress spent a billion and a half Depression-era dollars to bring relief to farmers in the Northern Plains states. Despite this infusion of cash, commodities, and good intentions, it soon became apparent that no amount of money could stem the exodus. In less than five years, first-generation homesteaders abandoned 300,000 family farms. In the Atlantic Monthly, E. V. Smalley wrote that “an alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new prairie states among farmers and their wives. In proportion to their numbers, the Scandinavians furnish the largest contingent to the asylums.” At forty below zero, the harsh conditions of life on the Great Plains played out in the maddening silence of 10,000 homestead kitchens. Engineers and hydrologists in both federal water agencies knew that halfhearted stopgap measures by long-winded congressmen were not going to restore the people in those kitchens to sanity. The only way to subdue this land, if that was possible, would be through a massive, federally sponsored program of public works. It took the dust-bowl disaster to chasten the western congressmen who had scoffed at John Wesley Powell fifty years earlier. Now, no one in Washington dared guess what such an enterprise would cost. Coming off the “dirty 30s,” farmers agreed that the only sensible alternative to a federally funded water project was to give it all back to nature.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s negative attitude toward the Missouri served as a reminder to their cross-town rivals, the Army Corps of Engineers, of their own half century of frustration on the river. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Corps continued to build and maintain dikes and levees on the lower portion of the river, but when it came to the Upper Missouri, above the border at Sioux City, Iowa, they busied themselves elsewhere. Then, after nature asserted her dominion with a series of nationwide floods in 1927, Congress turned again to the Army engineers and asked the agency to prepare a formal hydrological study of the Missouri, from its headwaters in Montana to its confluence with the Mississippi above St. Louis.
Time and again since the turn of the century, proposals for bringing the Missouri under man’s control had been rejected out of hand as too expensive. But if anyone could get the pig of a publicly funded basinwide water project through the snake of the national treasury, it was the National Farmers Union. In the prosperous years following World War I, the national union of small farmers had grown into a powerful political force in Washington. This group of independent, single family farmers was broadly allied with the larger industrially based labor movements. The National Farmers Union fused rural populism with urban socialism across America’s vast rural center. Seeing its moment of opportunity in the aftermath of the 1927 floods, the union stepped forward to flex its muscle with Congress, hoping that one more big push would bring a huge infusion of federal water-project dollars to the Missouri Basin.
For its part, the Army Corps of Engineers viewed Congress’ request for a basinwide study of the Missouri as an opportunity to shut the door forever on the senseless hydrologic adventures being promoted by farmers and politicians. On February 5, 1934, the agency submitted a 1,245 page report to Congress that specifically assessed the river’s potential for hydroelectric production, navigation, irrigation, recreation, and flood control. The Corps’ study, five years in preparation, was the first comprehensive analysis ever made on the Missouri. Presented by the chief of engineers, Major General Lytle Brown, the study informed Congress that in the opinion of the Army engineers, expenditure of federal funds for flood control on the Missouri would be an egregious waste of taxpayer money and goodwill. General Brown conceded that hydroelectric facilities could become feasible on the Missouri under more favorable economic conditions. However, he declared, this provisional concession should not be taken as an endorsement for building the dam on the Mandan Bluffs at Garrison, North Dakota, that is often proposed by politicians and farmers. This site, in the view of field engineers, was “entirely impracticable.” The underlying geology lacked the stability necessary to support a high dam, and any dam of that size would be constructed with the Achilles’ heel of rapid siltation. In order to achieve some control over downstream flooding and navigation, the Corps recommended that Congress consider building a massive earthen dam above the Yellowstone at Fort Peck, Montana. Other than that, Brown told Congress, his agency could not recommend any water projects that would alter the river above Sioux City, Iowa. When Brown concluded, the subject of the Missouri was tabled.
The following year, however, one of the Missouri’s notorious tributaries struck again. A ferocious storm materialized without warning on the Republican River in the summer of
1935. Those who saw the deluge described it as a river falling from the sky. The resulting flash flood killed 105 Nebraska residents in minutes. The maelstrom on the Republican quickly prompted Congress to pass the first nationwide legislation to address the problem of untamed rivers in the West. The Flood Control Act of 1936, which passed without opposition, was followed three years later with the more powerful Reclamation Project Act of 1939, a bill that authorized civilian engineers at the Bureau of Reclamation to once again prepare for Congress a comprehensive study of potential multiple-use developments on the Missouri River. Specifically, Congress wanted to know how much it would cost to acquire the property necessary to develop irrigation, municipal, and industrial water systems. Despite the clear and well-grounded recommendations of the Army engineers’ report of the year before—the 1,245 page document that was now gathering dust at the Library of Congress—the new law also directed bureau engineers to work with the Army engineers on flood control above Sioux City, Iowa, and enhancement of downriver navigation.
This time around, Congress anticipated the rash of legal tangles that would inevitably grow out of any new engineering adventures on the Missouri. Land acquisitions would have to be accomplished through a combination of condemnation and “eminent domain.” The Missouri had proven that it was a 2,600-mile-long enigma. One way or another, Washington was determined to bring the mad elephant to heel.
As Patton’s Fourth Army was chasing General Rommel’s battered Afrika Corps across North Africa in April 1943, on the home front, Errol Flynn and Ann Sheridan were starring in Edge of Darkness at Radio City Music Hall. A deep wave cut at the Saks Fifth Avenue beauty parlor cost $1.50, and as the Midwest was drying out from its first flood of the season, farther west an Army Air Corps enlistee named Martin Cross was making his way home by bus to Elbowoods, North Dakota, after spending a year at a training base in Utah. To their great surprise, airman Martin Cross’ superiors had discovered that their enlistee from North Dakota had a wife and seven children, and his eighth child, son Milton, was on the way. Martin was immediately issued a hardship discharge and put on the next bus home.
“We’ve never been quite sure who got to him first, Mom or the Army,” says Phyllis, retelling the story.
“I’m not sure which would have been worse,” chimes in her brother Martin Jr., a tall, thick-bodied man better known to friends and family as Crusoe. Two years younger than Phyllis, Crusoe is visiting Parshall from his home in Saskatoon, Canada, where he recently retired from a career in social work. His broad friendly face, snow-white beard, and baritone voice fill up the room with genuine levity.
“I am,” answers Phyllis without hesitation. “Mom. Why do you think so many men were anxious to go off to war?”
“To get a break from the women and kids,” answers Crusoe. “That was the first time they were apart in fourteen years.”
Martin and Dorothy had met in 1928. Both were twenty-two years old. Martin had recently left the Indian boarding school at Wahpeton, South Dakota, where he discovered that he had talents for language and composition, for playing the saxophone, and for riding broncs. When he left school he worked close to home and spent all of his free time with friends, following the rodeo circuit from town to town. When Dorothy graduated from the one-room schoolhouse in Van Hook, she wasted no time getting herself enrolled in the nursing program at St. Alexius Hospital in Bismarck. While Martin was off being a footloose rodeo cowboy, the daughter of his oldest sister, Maggie Grinnell, was severely burned in a house fire. The little girl was rushed to the hospital in Bismarck in the back of a wagon. While there, the little girl was cared for and brought back to health by a young nursing student from Van Hook named Dorothy Bartel.
This adventurous, high-spirited Norwegian girl became fast friends with Martin’s sister Maggie. When the daughter made a speedy recovery from her burns and returned home to Elbowoods, her nurse followed. Rather than returning to Van Hook to spend holidays and long weekends with her parents, Dorothy started getting off the bus at Garrison and hitching a ride to Elbowoods on the mail truck. There, she soon became a regular houseguest at the Grinnell family home.
“She was a pretty Norwegian girl, the only daughter of first-generation homesteaders, and he was the dashing rodeo cowboy, the son of a tribal chief,” says her daughter, Marilyn. “With our dad, life for this high-spirited girl from dreary Van Hook was suddenly very exciting.”
Throughout her teenage years, Dorothy had secretly planned her escape from the Lutheran austerity of her parents’ home. Once she had left the nurse’s training program in Bismarck, Dorothy ignored her parents’ continuous appeals to return to Van Hook. For a time, she moved in with Maggie Grinnell and helped her new friend care for her growing family, but the Bartels of Van Hook were nothing if not persistent. They drove down to Elbowoods on several occasions, parked in front of the Grinnell house, and sat outside honking the horn. Convinced their only child had fallen under an evil spell, the Bartels were determined to rescue their daughter and bring her back to her right mind. But each time they came to Elbowoods, their headstrong daughter sent them slinking back to Van Hook with an empty luggage rack. “Life in those small farming towns was pretty tough,” says Marilyn. “I spent summers with my grandparents. They weren’t the most fun-loving people you’d ever want to meet. There was no way Mom was going back.”
Martin and Dorothy eloped and were married in September 1928 by a judge at the county courthouse in Washburn, North Dakota. The couple had a “pretty high time” of it through their first years of marriage. Dressed in white Stetsons and raccoon coats, they traveled all over the country in Martin’s roadster, going from rodeo to rodeo and taking in the dances along the way. Through the first spring and summer of their marriage, they were buoyed by the invulnerability and carefree optimism of youth. The landscape the young couple called home was neither Indian nor white. Farm country was prosperous, rodeos were numerous, and all roads in the country seemed to lead back to the secure refuge of family, friends, and the familiar surroundings of Elbowoods.
When Martin and Dorothy returned to Elbowoods after their first summer on the rodeo circuit, the couple moved into the farmhouse that Old Dog had built shortly before he died. While Martin took over the responsibilities of running a small ranch and providing for his sisters, Dorothy planted a garden, cooked the meals, tended to the livestock, and soon discovered that their first child was on the way.
From the very beginning of the marriage it seemed that good fortune was smiling on the young couple. Wealth being produced by industrious Norwegian and German farmers was filtering into reservation communities like Elbowoods and Nishu, Lucky Mound and Independence. Many of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Indians could rely on steady income by leasing their bottomland allotments to white farmers. Most of this rich, untilled ground was irrigated from below by the shallow water table lying inches beneath the valley floor. For their own subsistence, the Indians continued to cultivate extensive gardens.
In addition to bountiful crops and material well-being, in 1930 the tribe celebrated a long-awaited verdict in a lawsuit they had brought against the U.S. Congress in the Court of Federal Claims. Attorneys for the tribe had filed the suit years earlier, seeking restitution from the government for land that was taken by executive order in 1870 and 1880, reducing the original 12-million-acre territory by half. Their claims charged the federal government with unilateral abrogation of the Fort Laramie Peace Council of 1851. The ten-year wait for a decision from the Court of Federal Claims proved fortuitous. Just as banks were failing from coast to coast and the country was plunging toward the Great Depression, this victory brought an unexpected windfall to the Three Affiliated Tribes. After adjustments for expenses, the court awarded $1,000 to every member of the tribe, an enormous sum of money to a society of people still conducting most of their economic activity on barter. With the money, hundreds of new homes were built, older ones were updated, and new equipment and livestock were purchased for farms and ranches.
The Court of Federal Claims settlement cushioned the tribes from the harshest days of the Depression. The sudden windfall of cash also brought many of the Indians into contact with the white world for the very first time. As late as the 1930s, fewer than half the tribal membership spoke a word of English.
More than fifty years after black men were officially recognized as citizens, and four years after women were given the right to vote, in 1924 Congress officially recognized Indians as American citizens. Four years later, the Institute for Government Research released the first-ever investigation into living conditions in Indian Country. The famous Merriam Report, the Pentagon Papers case of its day, confirmed the darkest allegations of the critics of federal Indian policy: the Dawes Act of 1887 had been an unqualified disaster for the American Indian tribes. Contrary to claims made by its most ardent promoters, the Allotment Era of the Dawes Act had neither set Indians free nor succeeded in assimilating a single native into white society. Instead, the Merriam Report found, the Dawes Act had officially sanctioned the theft of hundreds of millions of acres of treaty-protected Indian land. At the same time, it had given government agents a free license to take thousands of Indian children from their parents’ homes and send them off to boarding schools for assimilation into white society. This policy, concluded the report, had only succeeded in transforming America’s original citizens into fragmented enclaves of demoralized beggars.
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