Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  The public’s outrage over the Merriam Report’s findings was directly responsible for the uncontested passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. The IRA was a sweeping new policy, one fiercely championed by President Franklin Roosevelt, his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, and the new commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier. The IRA asked Congress to reverse a century of paternalistic efforts by the federal government and churches to assimilate the natives into mainstream society. It instructed Congress to replace these policies with John Marshall’s concept of tribal self-government. Congress, in no mood to buck the Merriam Report or the new president, quietly ushered in a new era of federal Indian policy with the nearly unanimous passage of the IRA.

  The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara were among the first tribes in the nation to embrace this radical new proposal. On June 29, 1936, in the Great Depression’s darkest days, the three tribes leaped into the modern political era by formally adopting a tribal constitution under the IRA’s new guidelines. Tribal support for this decision, from the most progressive members like Martin Cross to the most traditional—those still living in such small isolated villages as Independence and Nishu—was nearly universal. The following year, when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes approved the tribes’ corporate charter, the Tribal Council of the Three Affiliated Tribes came into being as the official lawmaking body and government on the Fort Berthold Reservation, which had been formally established fifty years earlier during the Dawes era.

  One of the council’s first acts was to engage the federal government in a cooperative cattle-raising program, a program that thrived and grew each year through the end of World War II. Despite the economic hardships sustained by farmers and ranchers on the surrounding plateau, the default rate on federal loans to Indian ranchers on Fort Berthold was the lowest in the nation. On the Northern Plains, it was common knowledge that the three tribes were weathering the 30s better than their white neighbors. Many homesteaders from nearby towns survived the worst years of the Great Depression by finding paying work on Indian ranches and farms on the reservation.

  At the onset of World War II, a Bureau of Indian Affairs survey of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes found that the population in the tribes’ nine small communities had doubled from 960 forty years earlier to 1,854, a number not seen in more than a century. Materially and economically, the BIA survey found that life on Fort Berthold was an economic step up from the poverty in surrounding white communities. Apart from four cases of tuberculosis, health problems among the Indians were virtually nonexistent. Cases of smallpox, typhoid fever, and diphtheria had been reported in Parshall, Garrison, and nearby Halliday, but none of these maladies had migrated onto the reservation. In 1943, the four-person medical staff at the hospital in Elbowoods assisted in sixty-two births, performed twenty-six minor surgeries, and inoculated a thousand tribal members against typhoid when spring flooding contaminated wells along the river. One person had been diagnosed with cancer, while diabetes and kidney ailments were virtually unknown. In the previous five years, heart disease was listed as the cause of death in fewer than 2 percent of the cases.

  In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 250 adults, mostly men, left the reservation to join the armed forces. To enlist, many had to walk or hitch a ride with a farmer to the nearest bus station in Garrison. From there, enlistees rode a bus to the induction center in Fargo, 250 miles away. In order to ease his own transition into a world of white men, Martin, the week before he left in the spring of 1942, officially changed the family name in Tribal Court from the Hidatsa surname of Old Dog to the more Anglo-Saxon sounding Cross. “Back then, a lot of Indians were anglicizing their names,” says Martin’s son Bucky. “Young men like our father believed that Indians were going to have to close the gap between the Indian and white culture in order to survive. Adopting a new name was one way of closing that gap. It’s a real insight into their thinking, because that would never happen today.”

  For many enlistees from the three tribes, fighting a war on foreign soil was the first adventure beyond their reservation boundaries. Some, like Martin, had attended government boarding schools when they were teenagers, but most went to Fargo—leaving behind a world where they spoke their native language, harvested crops by hand, cut hay with horse-drawn mowers, and canned the food that would see them through the winter.

  “When the men went off to war, the women really had their hands full,” says Phyllis. “Mom had five school-age kids, a toddler on each hip, and she was pregnant with Milton, who was developmentally disabled from birth. She had all the hay fields to deal with, all the animals, horses, cows, pigs, goats, and chickens, the gardens, all the harvesting, canning, and cooking. It wasn’t too long before she was telling my dad in letters, ‘Hey, buster, your warrior days are over. Get your butt back here where you can help me with these kids and this ranch.’”

  “That was the toughest year of our childhoods,” remembers Crusoe, who clearly recalls the hardships the war brought to Elbowoods. Many of his father’s responsibilities in the fields, with livestock and harvests, fell to the two oldest boys, Crusoe and Bucky. “Imagine, no money to speak of, growing your own food, Mom making your school clothes out of flour sacks, shooting coyotes by moonlight to keep them out of the chicken coop, hauling ice from the river and coal for the woodstove at thirty below. If you didn’t have food, you didn’t eat. It was that simple. Things got pretty lean. I was very angry that Christmas because there weren’t any presents. Mom made us mittens out of some old coats she got from a church clothes barrel. Going to bed hungry when it’s thirty below zero after you’ve hauled coal on a sled all afternoon isn’t something you ever forget.”

  By the time Martin Cross hopped off the mail truck in Elbowoods in April 1943, the season’s first floodwaters were receding in downstream Nebraska. But the river was just taking a breather before unleashing the real show, which it was saving for late May. Two weeks before, the Sanish Sentinel, a small-town newspaper published in a nearby community, reported a story that was long on rumor but sketchy on details. A team of engineers, it seemed, had quietly slipped into the town of Garrison and was conducting surveys of some kind down along the river and by the Mandan Bluffs.

  “One of the things we all loved about growing up in Elbowoods was having our own horses,” says Phyllis. “We rode from the time we could walk. I used to ride in the hills outside of town, and that’s when I first saw the red surveyor’s flags. That was way before anybody heard anything about the engineers. I had no idea what they were. Then the paper came out with the story about the engineers being down at Garrison. Those flags were the elevation lines for the lake.”

  It was not until a month later, in May, that the story about the engineering survey officially became public knowledge. Beneath a headline reading, A DAM QUESTION, the Sanish Sentinel made the vague observation that “there was big news in the air,” but ruefully admitted that “we cannot get at it.” When pressed for answers, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers told reporters from the newspaper in Bismarck that they were gathering data to be “correlated with an aerial survey for a topographical map.” By then, however, another local paper, the Stanley Sun, published confirmed reports that civil engineers were surveying the Upper Missouri for possible dam sites. “Hopefully,” wrote the editor, “the dam will be located where it will do the most good to the most people.” In the mind of at least one editor on the Upper Missouri River, a major dam was already a foregone conclusion.

  Then, the second flood of the season inundated much of Iowa and Nebraska and was soon followed by a third. Congress immediately directed the Committee on Rivers and Harbors to convene an emergency hearing on the Missouri floods. Despite millions of dollars spent conducting surveys, a viable, cost-effective solution for managing the Missouri Basin had thus far eluded Congress and the federal water agencies. To veterans on Capitol Hill, the call for emergency hearings in April of 1943 sounded like the boy crying
wolf. President Roosevelt had heard all the high-toned rhetoric and explanations for the Missouri’s irascible behavior. Now he wanted to hear how Congress and the water agencies proposed to put an end to that behavior, once and for all. The president directed his secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, and General Wheeler to have their respective agencies, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, draw up basinwide proposals that would bring this devastating cycle of flooding on the Missouri to a halt. Before the floodwaters had receded, each agency was hard at work formulating its plan.

  The Congress that passed the Reclamation Project Act of 1939 was boxed in on the Missouri by a legal paradox whose pedigree had its origins in royal courts. Somehow, a legal riddle that originated in Elizabethan England had survived the turmoil of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only to become the “takings” mechanism of choice for American legislators in the twentieth. The father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, had predicted as much. On the eve of the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787, the thirty-six-year-old political theorist told his protégé, Alexander Hamilton, that any work they left unfinished in Philadelphia would come back to haunt future generations. In some cases, however, it was already too late to set it right.

  In the summer of 1787, Madison and his chief ally in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, knew that where the law of the land ended—somewhere out on the western frontier—self-interest would inevitably work to unhinge the authority of the new government. After all, colonial leaders were students of their own behavior. For more than a generation they had promoted their own self-interest in defiance of King George III. Now that they were in charge, the young republic’s leaders were determined to discourage that same self-interested anarchy in their own citizenry. With the full support of President Washington, the First Congress moved to foreclose on the temptations of frontier anarchy by passing the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act in 1790. This law was a broadside assault on narrow interests of individual states, most notably Virginia, which persisted in claiming that its original Jacobean charter granted it a swath of land that stretched from the Atlantic seaboard to the western ocean. Those Virginia patricians are delusional, said members of the First Congress, realizing that claims like Virginia’s left it no alternative but to act. The federal government was determined to protect its exclusive right to engage in commerce with Indian tribes and to control all the future exchange of Indian lands. Without specifically saying so, that meant every acre west of the Appalachians.

  The irony underlying the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act was the fact that it owed its legal efficacy to King George III himself. The king had imposed a very similar set of restrictions on colonial land syndicates a generation earlier. Compounding the irony, the most prominent of these syndicates was run by Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. At the time, Franklin’s group was seeking to obtain title to all the lands in the Ohio Valley. But King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763, issued to warrant the English victory over the French in the Thirty Years’ War, denied colonists the right to acquire land from western tribes. All commercial enterprises with the tribes, said the crown, were the exclusive prerogative of the king.

  The question King George III had addressed in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was whether the “savage infidels” had natural law rights to legal ownership of the lands they occupied when they were “discovered” by European explorers. George III’s proclamation answered the natural law question in the affirmative. Indians indeed held aboriginal title to their land. George III’s proclamation reasserted the crown’s exclusive privilege for dealing with the tribes, as one nation to another, one king to another king. Once and forever, the crown’s proclamation dashed the land syndicates’ dreams for privately owned empires against the rock of the mad king’s reasoning.

  Franklin sailed to England to argue that since the Indians’ natural law rights perfected their aboriginal title to land, it followed that the tribes also possessed an undeniable right to sell it to whomever they pleased. George III summarily rejected the syndicates’ argument. Behind the curtains in the royal court, London merchants had forced the king’s hand by arguing that colonial land syndicates would put settlements in the West beyond the control of London bankers and merchants. Losing those markets would slowly bleed the king’s treasury of its vitality. The king’s caveat emptor enraged the colonial aristocrats, who viewed Indian lands as their personal path to riches. London merchants had won the day, but the colonials now had their justification for a break with the crown.

  But no sooner had the colonists won the War of Independence than their legal theories about natural law and Indian title made an abrupt about-face. With the passage of the Non-Intercourse Act of 1790, land speculators on the frontier were told that they would now have to answer to the new Congress, whose members declared their earlier “natural law” arguments to be null and void. The Great White Fathers unilaterally dissolved all claims to Indian lands by individuals, land syndicates, and states. Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were among the chief proponents of this reversal.

  The Indian Trade and Intercourse Act was a poignant reminder that dreams of empire may be born in idealism, but the details of conquest are underwritten by the coin of the realm. During the nation’s centennial celebration of the Constitution, the Dawes Act would reverse the government’s policy by opening Indian Country to private ownership under the pretext of bringing the “savages” out of the cold and into the warm house of civilization and Christian fellowship. Before the end of the century, the Dawes Act turned the ownership of Indian lands into a confused puzzle of private deeds and treaty-protected trusts. Nearly 150 years after Congress passed the Non-Intercourse Act, the legislators who passed the Reclamation Project Act of 1939 found themselves face-to-face with questions they were unprepared to answer. In the federal government’s solemn trust relationship with the tribes, who exactly held title to treaty-protected Indian lands on the Upper Missouri River? And if Congress, the trustee, decides to take that land away under eminent domain in violation of its solemn “supreme law of the land” treaty pledges to the tribes, how does the government legally square that with its constitutional obligations to the Indians? Assuming the knot could be cut, who would then decide what that land was worth?

  When the floods of 1943 inundated Iowa and Nebraska, the insoluble legal paradox posed by a “taking” of treaty-protected land was of no concern to the Army Corps of Engineers’ Colonel Lewis Pick, or Bureau of Reclamation engineer Glenn Sloan. Sloan, a middle-of-the-deck bureaucrat in the bureau’s Billings, Montana, office, would prove his mettle as a politician and a diplomat in coming years. A young maverick with a history of being in hot water with his superiors, Sloan liked to think big and work alone. Ever since it was requisitioned by Congress in 1939, Sloan had been diligently working on a water-management plan for the Upper Missouri Basin. His sweeping proposal featured a strategically designed network of ninety reservoirs and irrigation systems. The galaxy of collection basins would efficiently distribute the Missouri’s resources and deliver irrigation to tens of thousands of small family farms across a half million square miles of arid plains. The plan was designed to manage the river by controlling the flow of its largest tributaries. By creating an interconnected network of upstream catch basins, Secretary Ickes told Roosevelt, Sloan’s “two-for-one approach” allowed for extensive upstream irrigation projects at the same time as it provided flood control along the lower river. Sloan’s reservoirs could store tens of millions of acre-feet of water, more than enough to prevent all three floods in 1943.

  Sloan had been working on his plan for more than three years when the river jumped its banks on April 12, 1943. A few hundred miles south of Billings, Colonel Lewis Pick, the director of the regional office of the Army Corps of Engineers, was poling a rowboat through the downtown streets of Omaha. To his subordinates, Pick’s anger over the deluge seemed to rise with the floodwaters. The short-fused, no-nonsense colonel wa
s animated by an indomitable self-confidence in his own abilities, a polar opposite to his self-effacing counterpart in Billings. But like Sloan, his professional standing among his superiors was chronically unstable. Pick had recently emerged from a session in the woodshed with his boss, General Wheeler. At the beginning of the war, Pick so badly botched the construction of an Army Air Corps training facility that planes could not land on his roller-coaster runways without crashing. When the entire base had to be abandoned, the Air Corps’ General Robbins told Wheeler that his star engineer had the distinction for building the most dangerous runways in the history of aviation. A chastened Pick was reassigned to the Corps’ office in Omaha, where it was thought that he could do little damage while pondering his transgressions.

  Despite the embarrassing contretemps, Pick remained a hot-tempered autocrat who took challenges from nature as personal affronts. As floodwaters rose in the streets outside his offices, Pick jumped up on a desk and bellowed at his subordinates: “I want to control the Missouri!” On May 13, when Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to produce a new survey for the purpose of controlling its floods, Colonel Pick commanded his subordinates to shelve all other projects. The Missouri would get their full attention until they had produced a workable master plan for taming the river. In contrast to the plan being designed by Sloan, a basinwide network of reservoirs and small dams addressing the region’s perennial need for irrigation and drought relief, the Corps proposed to build a flood-control system that also promised to enhance downstream navigation for barge traffic between New Orleans and Sioux City, Iowa. But there was a catch. Either plan would force the American taxpayer to borrow from generations that were not yet born.

  General Wheeler rushed his subordinate’s master plan, a scant ten pages in length, into the waiting hands of Congress. The Pick Plan, as it would soon be known, called for the construction of 2,500 miles of new protective levees along the lower river. He also proposed a constellation of fourteen tributary reservoirs that would supplement the holding capacity of his plan’s cornerstone: a massive new multipurpose flood-control dam at the Mandan Bluffs near Garrison, North Dakota. That crown jewel would be surrounded by four smaller dams, like stair steps descending from the high plateau at the base of the Rockies to the Iowa border. Harnessed together, these “rolled-earth” structures would put the forces of the imperious Missouri into the hands of man, once and for all.