Coyote Warrior

by Paul Van Develder

  “No, sir, it must be decided today!” said Cross. “The secretary has the authority to authorize per capita payment, but he does not have the authority to force us into termination. Only Congress can do that. There is no sense in continuing this conference if you are not going to make a decision today.”

  “We thought we were here to talk about programming and planning.”

  “Look, our people are in a very bad way,” said Councilman Sam Mathews.

  “We recognize that,” said Spaulding. “And the last thing you want now is to have the members that have left the reservation come back, since all you have left is hilltops. The valley is all gone, isn’t that correct?”

  “That is right, gone.”

  “You need to make arrangements to start moving more people out. We know what your problem is. You’ve been elected to get the money for the tribal members, but we have the responsibility to enforce policies that are going to lead to long-term benefits . . .”

  “It’s the older people who are asking for their money,” said Mathews. “They have no other way of living, no way to grow food, no cattle business, no way of securing loans.”

  “I still believe that any group of people capable of handling twelve and a half million dollars is competent to handle themselves without supervision of the bureau,” said Spaulding. “This whole thing is a question of whether or not you want to talk about it [termination], or whether you have closed your minds.”

  Chairman Cross had heard enough from Spaulding to know where he was headed. As far as Cross was concerned, Spaulding could get there alone. The Mandan and Hidatsa leader had spent too many days in the past ten years sitting around polished walnut tables just like this one not to recognize a setup when he saw one. He was no longer thrown off by his surroundings, or intimidated by the endless parade of expensive suits. At this juncture in the discussion the official transcript reports, simply: “Mr. Cross left the meeting.”

  Cross and Spaulding were both gambling. Both had hoped to come away from this meeting with a trophy. The government still owed the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people approximately $4.42 million. After taking their land, Congress had used the compensation money as leverage to extract more concessions from the tribes on completely unrelated matters. Now, Spaulding was hoping to extract guarantees from Cross that if the money was released by the agency, the tribe would agree to initiate the process of termination. Spaulding was coy. He knew that Cross had been reelected tribal chairman on a platform promising to force the government to release the remaining funds in per capita payments. The deputy commissioner’s strategy was to pin the chairman’s back to the wall by locking in linkage between termination and per capita payments, two completely unrelated issues. Cross knew that these so-called win-win arrangements somehow always turned into one-sided affairs that favored the white man and hurt the Indian.

  This time, Spaulding misjudged the chairman’s inner resolve. Although Cross was committed to bringing home the remaining money, he was not about to be blackmailed by the bureau. After Cross stormed out, Spaulding continued to press his initiative for linkage with the other tribal councilmen. These were well-meaning men who, to an individual, were naive about the deputy commissioner’s ulterior motives. Intimidated by their surroundings and anxious to smooth the waters, they were quickly seduced into placing both feet squarely in Spaulding’s trap. Before the meeting was over, they all agreed to negotiate over the remaining money.

  Spaulding’s victory would prove to be short-lived. Even as the Three Affiliated Tribes were disintegrating around him, Martin Cross kept his head in the contest and ultimately prevailed by refusing to allow the BIA or Congress to link the dispersal of funds to termination. Unbeknownst to most of his fellow councilmen, Cross had initiated a counteroffensive through North Dakota’s congressional caucus and the National Congress of American Indians. In March 1956, President Eisenhower signed off on the tribal chairman’s demand for a final per capita dispersal of the remaining funds. They had lost the bitter, decadelong battle over Garrison Dam, but Martin Cross had won the war to stave off termination.

  “To defend the Indians in their rights,” wrote his friend Robert Yellowtail, “inevitably means a lot of grief for whomever takes on the job.”

  The regionwide battle over termination unexpectedly flip-flopped when a report on Public Law 280 was released in 1956 by two young attorneys in North Dakota. The report written by Emerson Murry and Hans Walker recommended that lawmakers take a new approach to this radical law. “Hans and I recommended that they allow the tribes to decide whether they wanted to relinquish jurisdiction, and to their everlasting credit, and after much debate and drum pounding on the Capitol steps, that’s what they did. Of course, the North Dakota tribes all elected to retain their own civil and criminal jurisdiction.”

  As a caveat to their general recommendations, Murry and Walker urged the tribes to surrender their civil jurisdiction over disputes with white businesses. That would allow state courts to reconcile any future disputes in civil cases. “We felt this was the only way we would ever see any kind of white investment on the reservations,” says Murry. He and Walker reasoned that the non-Indian community would always be reluctant to invest in Indian Country without certain guarantees to legal remedies for malfeasance. “Unfortunately, the tribes didn’t adopt that provision, and I think it hurt them in the long run. But it didn’t take a brain surgeon to see that this was headed for the courts. It was only a matter of time.”

  Murry’s prediction for P.L. 280 revealed his insights into the conflicts embedded in federalism. Eventually, something would have to give at the highest levels of government, and those conflicts would have to be resolved by the nation’s highest court. Just as he and Walker predicted, the final years of the Eisenhower administration saw a reversal of fortunes for the protermination forces in Washington. As momentum and opinion began to swing in the other direction, protermination lawmakers made one last attempt to rally support. Eisenhower’s assistant attorney general, Perry Morton, called a news conference to announce that “recent court decisions relating to old Indian land claims could now cost the federal government billions of dollars.”

  Newspapers across the country jumped on the story. The Indianapolis Star wrote, “A government attorney reported yesterday that the Indians are on the warpath again. This time, they want more wampum. The tribes are demanding that Washington pay a fair and honorable price for vast areas that were won by early settlers through firearms, fast-talk, and firewater. Indian memories, it seems, are long, and according to these same attorneys, it appears that the Indians are given unique rights and privileges not enjoyed by any other citizens.”

  This time, the old tactics had little effect. Through the National Congress of American Indians, once widely dispersed tribes had begun to rally around the clear voices of Robert Yellowtail and Martin Cross. The painful experiences of the previous decade were plainly reflected in the Declaration of Indian Purpose that was drafted by the NCAI at their Chicago conference in 1961:

  When our lands are taken for a declared public purpose, scattering our people and threatening our continued existence, it grieves us to be told that a money payment is the equivalent of all the things we surrender. Our forefathers could be generous when all the continent was theirs. They could cast away whole empires for a handful of trinkets for their children. But in our day, each remaining acre is a promise that we will still be here tomorrow. Were we paid a thousand times the market value of our lost holdings, still the payment would not suffice. Money never mothered the Indian people, as the land has mothered them, nor have any people become more closely attached to the land, religiously and traditionally.

  As termination policy began to lose steam in the final days of the Eisenhower administration, P.L. 280 and House Resolution 108 suddenly came under ferocious attacks from both the political left and right. In a speech delivered from the well of the Senate on March 9, 1959, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater took aim at termination
and challenged Congress to cast off all previous resolutions made in support of terminating the federal trusteeship over Indian lands and resources. Goldwater was followed to the floor by Montana’s Lee Metcalf, who lambasted termination as a national disgrace: “There is no satisfaction in our record of dealing with the American Indian, from the beginning to the present. Ultimately, Indians must be given the management of their own affairs.”

  Though encouraging, the chorus rising in defense of Indian tribes was not enough to banish the ghosts of termination from the halls of Congress. Wary tribes would continue to see termination lurking behind every legislative act directed at Indian Country. Their well-founded suspicions were based on the experience of half a dozen tribes, such as the Menominee and the Klamath, who had been coerced into dissolution against their will. Hard-fought battles in Washington would eventually restore terminated tribes to full tribal status in the 1960s. Although senators such as Watkins and Anderson were now long gone, the damage done to “terminated” tribes could not be undone. The Klamath, for example, were forced to sell half a million acres of virgin timberlands to private timber companies that, in turn, began harvesting those resources almost immediately. Entire forests in southern Oregon were reduced to a landscape of stumps.

  As soon as President John F. Kennedy had taken the oath of office in January 1961, he declared that living conditions of the American Indian were a disgraceful blight on the conscience of the nation. The desperate condition of America’s “first citizens,” said Kennedy, was the direct result of federal Indian policy of the previous two administrations. The new president’s commissioner of Indian affairs let it be known to western congressmen that a new day had dawned at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “WASPs [white Anglo-Saxon Protestants] assume that the value system of the Anglo-Saxon is universal, and that the individual ownership of property is the only natural way for people to live,” declared Commissioner Philleo Nash. Congress was told that the government’s Indian agency was open for business, and the new man in the White House was determined to reverse recent trends and expand the agency’s services.

  For the Three Affiliated Tribes, the change of heart in Washington was probably too little, too late. The damage of the previous two decades could not be undone. By the time John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, the former tribal chairman was living alone on his new ranch outside of Raub. His children had all been “relocated” to cities on the West Coast. Crusoe returned home for six-month intervals to help run the ranch, but ranching “on top” was a shortcut to financial ruin. Life for Martin had been reduced to a day-to-day struggle to keep the tribal cattle business solvent and intact. After winning the battle against termination, he had taken a much-needed leave of absence from tribal politics. From the first weeks of 1944 until December 1956, he had worked day and night at the business of the tribe. Most of that work was done without pay. Now, following a four-year respite from the burdens of leadership, Cross decided to return to the council when John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House in 1960. Emerging from long seclusion, Martin seemed reenergized by his return to politics. To Crusoe, the vigor his father had shown throughout his years as chairman had returned with a vengeance. For his distant children, his letters were once again filled with optimism and his signature enthusiasm for life. In a letter written to Marilyn in February 1963 during a trip to Washington, her father reflected on the bittersweet experience of returning to the city he had once known so well.

  “I have been to Washington to see the Great White Father and other lesser white fathers to boot,” he began, explaining that the “lessers” included the new secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, and Kennedy’s commissioner of Indian affairs, Philleo Nash. “I did not enjoy the visit there, as I found many new faces in the BIA . . . but anyway, I got to see and talk with President Kennedy.”

  By the time he met John F. Kennedy in the spring of 1963, a decade had passed since the evacuation of Elbowoods and his divorce from Dorothy. With the lake now filled all the way to the Montana border, and new dams being built downstream that would soon flood Sioux lands, the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided it would be a good idea to update previous profiles of the Three Affiliated Tribes. Specifically, they wanted to know how the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara were meeting the challenges of building a new life “on top.”

  The winter the new study was conducted, 1964, was ferociously cold. Cattle and other range livestock perished on the High Plains by the thousands. Frigid temperatures imprisoned tribal members in desolate outposts, without food or fuel, for months on end. In a tersely worded summation, the BIA investigators reported: “Their poverty, coupled with the isolation of many in the remoter parts of the reservation, has created a situation in which actual starvation for many of these people is a real possibility.” The dire conditions at Fort Berthold made assimilation into mainstream society more remote a possibility than it had been twenty years earlier. The tribal cattle program was in shambles. The herd of cattle the tribe had carefully built up over the past three decades had been sold off to buy food and propane. Their subsistence economy had been shattered by their eviction from the bottomlands. The tribes’ material and social needs, once met with agricultural abundance and tight-knit communities, had crumbled. Tribal members were scattered far and wide across a desolate geographical area. The few jobs available in service or farm-labor sectors paid subpoverty wages. Opportunities for economic growth were nonexistent. The authors concluded that the forced relocation of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people had effectively wiped out a century of progress.

  On top, the Three Affiliated Tribes were finding it impossible to grow their own food or to feed themselves. Wild game, once so plentiful on the bottoms, had vanished. Even if the Indians could turn the soil and plant small gardens, either their wells were bad or there was not enough water to keep the crops alive. Materially and culturally, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people were reexperiencing their ancestors’ darkest days at Like-a-Fishhook in the early 1870s. Despite his native optimism, when he glanced ahead, Martin Cross saw no relief in sight.

  As bitter weather gripped the Great Plains, Martin Cross was again back in Washington on Tribal Council business. Now they were meeting with officials from the Department of the Interior on the land-claim suit filed by James Curry ten years before. “Since I have time on my hands,” he wrote his family in California, “I thought I would put them to good use and write you a few lines. This probably doesn’t mean anything to you, but I have been on the water wagon for forty days now. Doctor Wilson tried to send me to the Jamestown alcoholic center for treatment, but I couldn’t see it. I have no feeling in my toes, they seem numb, and I guess my blood circulation is punk. I have a letter from Mickey [Mike] with some disturbing news about Crusoe’s behavior bouting [sic] with Jim Beam again. I was not too surprised to learn of it and suggested to Mickey to locate some AA clubs, take him in hand, and get him back on his feet. I have to get going now. We meet with our claims attorney this afternoon. I am very happy to be here again, and enjoy the business of meeting with authoritative groups again. . . . My health is not too bad. My feet are bothering me, but my appetite is good. My nerves can be relaxed without any sleeping pills or intoxicants. Try and write sometime soon. I like to know how you kids are doing.”

  For Crusoe, the thought of “coming home” to Parshall from the Air Force was a deeply incongruous one. Throughout his childhood in Elbowoods, Parshall was the “white town on top” where Martin bought their trucks and Dorothy occasionally went shopping. When Crusoe drove back to North Dakota in 1955 with his discharge papers in his duffel bag, the world he left behind on that summer morning four years before no longer existed. His mother and father had split up. Many people of his tribe were living on isolated farms scattered across half a million acres of High Plains. The streets and familiar landmarks of Elbowoods were at the bottom of a lake. Marilyn was in teachers’ college in Minot. Uppy was finishing high school in Garrison, and Bucky had gone into sel
f-imposed exile by joining the Army. After spending a year and a half in Parshall as shiftless nomads, Dorothy and her two youngest children, Raymond and Carol, were living in Old Dog’s house at its new location on East Second Street. Coincidentally, Phyllis and Crusoe both came home from the Air Force at about the same time. The two oldest Cross children moved back into the house that Old Dog built and quickly slipped into what Phyllis calls “a state of functional shock.”

  “We couldn’t believe what we were seeing,” says Phyllis, recalling the early days in Parshall. “The dam money was gone, and the bars on Main Street were filled with Indians. People we’d known all our lives were passed out in the streets in the middle of winter. It seemed like every ten minutes we were going to a funeral. Sixteen-year-old girls went out on dates on Saturday night and came home two years later with a baby on each hip. In Elbowoods, if you got caught drinking, you went to jail. Babies out of wedlock were unheard-of. Overnight, these things had become commonplace.”

  When Phyllis left the Air Force she planned to get married and settle down on the reservation. A short stint of employment at the new medical clinic in New Town soon cured her of that notion. “It was big-city trauma-room medicine, out on the prairie. I wasn’t cut out for that kind of nursing. I felt so disassociated from my past, my family, from everything I had ever known, I’d be driving home from work and not know where I was. I had to get out of there for my own survival, but that meant abandoning Raymond and Carol. They were so little. Their lives were crazy.”

  But people do not ask your consent at that age, says Raymond. “It’s what you’re given, what you have to deal with.” The day he turned six years old, on August 24, 1955, his eight-year-old sister, Carol, had the responsibility for taking him to school. “She dumped me off at the front door,” remembers Raymond. “I sat on the steps and started crying. Finally, some teacher came out and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and hauled me into the building. That was my first day of school.”