Niagara

by Pierre Berton

  In their two-year struggle with the power authority, the Tuscarora held one high card – the collective guilt of white society about what it had done to the aboriginal peoples since the days of Columbus. The press tended to be on the side of the Indians, running features on Greene and explaining the native attitude toward the land. “We think that our land is very sacred,” Greene would declare. “The Indian loves nature. He loves trees. He loves everything that grows.… The way we see it, money evaporates, but the land don’t.”

  The land “is not ours to dispose of,” Chief Rickard emphasized. “We are only its custodians.” This aboriginal view of land as something that cannot be sold or bartered, being held in common by all like the air and the water, completely escaped Robert Moses. He didn’t understand it, would never understand it, and didn’t believe it. The attitude of the Tuscarora baffled him. Why did 634 Indians need 6,249 acres, anyway, especially when much of the land was not being “used”? Moses was convinced that everything had a price. If necessary, he was prepared to pay whatever it took to get a piece of the reservation.

  But not at the outset. His plan was to move swiftly and quietly to get the land at rock-bottom prices. In January 1957, even before he got the FPC licence, he made his first move. William Latham, a power authority engineer, knocked on Clinton Rickard’s door and asked permission to put a survey crew on the reservation. Latham explained, smoothly, that the authority did not want the land; the survey was solely for the purpose of determining the depth of the soil to bedrock. It would in no way interfere with the Indians’ way of life.

  Rickard wasn’t fooled. “We knew they had an eye on our land,” he said later. The Tuscarora council unanimously denied the authority permission to put surveyors on the reservation.

  That September, Rickard’s suspicions were realized when the Niagara Falls Gazette carried a map showing that the authority planned to take 950 acres of the reservation. The chief’s council shot off a strong letter of protest to the secretary of the interior, the FPC, and the president himself, without result. “The braves are whooping it up,” Robert Moses, in jocular vein, told a meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

  In November, a second map was published showing that the state now wanted 1,220 acres of Indian land for the reservoir. The Tuscarora also learned at the last moment that the FPC was about to hold a hearing on the matter. With less than a day to spare, Greene, Patterson, and Rickard rushed to Washington. The commission and the state power authority tried to stop them from testifying because, having had inadequate notice, they had no lawyer. They were finally allowed to speak on the understanding that this would be their only opportunity. Being placed at a disadvantage, the Tuscarora hired a Washington attorney, Arthur Lazarus, Jr., to represent them.

  The hearing was adjourned to Buffalo. There, the town of Lewiston urged the authority to use only Indian land for the reservoir. The authority upped its requirements to 1,383 acres. Moses, in a vague statement, indicated he might be prepared to pay as much as a thousand dollars an acre for Indian land. In February 1958, in an open letter to the Tuscarora couched in blunt, almost insulting terms, he made clear his belief that the authority had the law on its side. “This essential work, already unduly delayed, can and must proceed immediately,” Moses wrote. “While we have understood your reluctance to part with land, we cannot delay longer.… We have no more time for stalling and debate.…”

  “He’s bluffing,” said Greene. The Indians held fast and posted No Trespassing signs on the reservation. “To us the land was priceless and could never be sold,” said Rickard.

  But in April, Governor Averill Harriman gave approval to expropriation. A group of legal experts, workmen, and surveyors appeared at the reservation accompanied by thirty-five Niagara County deputy sheriffs, fifty state troopers with riot equipment, tear-gas bombs, and sub-machine guns, and a number of plainclothes detectives. Some two hundred Indians formed a barrier in front of the trucks. Three were arrested for unlawful assembly, a curious charge, since they were on their own land, and one that was later dismissed.

  With the entire Iroquois confederacy now pledging support, the Tuscarora stood their ground, preventing the surveyors from working. On April 30, a federal court decision suspended all expropriation proceedings but still allowed the surveyors to have entry to the land. The authority then tried again to deal with the Indians but was rebuffed. “We will not sell at any price,” said Greene. Women and children continued passive resistance, blocking the surveyors’ transits, but a court order on May 8 finally convinced them it was wiser to yield.

  Moses now boosted his tentative offer to a firm $1,100 an acre. When that was turned down, he produced one of the glossy brochures for which he was noted, “smacking more of Madison Avenue than the Niagara frontier,” in the words of the New York Times. In it, Moses tried to give the impression that most Tuscarora wanted to sell their land and were being blocked by a “small number of recalcitrants.” Moses dangled a proposed $250,000 community centre in front of the Indians, displayed in an artist’s double-page rendering in his brochure. The Tuscarora weren’t interested. One suggested, facetiously, that the power authority might follow the white man’s original policy of distributing beads and trinkets.

  Meanwhile, Moses’ men moved onto the reservation to begin cutting trees and clearing timber and buildings, using the time-tested technique of acting in advance of legal authority. The Indians moved quickly to get a restraining order. A long and complicated court battle was just beginning. Neither side was prepared to give an inch. In June, a federal court judge ruled that the Indians couldn’t stop expropriation. But in July they successfully appealed, and all work on the reservation stopped.

  Moses now moved to discredit the Indians and their use of the land. In September he sent a wire to a colleague, Thomas F. Moore, Jr., to dig out facts about the band that he could use against them:

  “Do we have the basic facts about the Tuscaroras – for public consumption. Apart from the rhubarb about condemnation and pre-Revolutionary and pre-states rights of the noble red men? I mean acreage they have, living conditions, land, cultivation, how much we take, how much we offer, what they could do with cash, what they work at, etc. I don’t want a lot of mawkish sentiments manufactured by the sob sisters and other S.O.B.s, it would be a hell of a thing if we had to move the reservoir to cemetery and taxable farmland.”

  A week later, the Supreme Court gave the Tuscarora a breathing-space by ordering a conditional stay on condemnation proceedings until it could hear an appeal by the Indians challenging the validity of the authority’s FPC licence. Moses promptly issued a public statement accusing the Tuscarora of a “fanatical effort to shove the reservoir over onto private property.” His timetable for construction would be badly skewed, he said, unless he could build a power line across the reservation. “We have been shunted about and jackassed around from court to court and judge to judge,” he said. The courts allowed him to expropriate eighty-six acres of Tuscarora land as right-of-way for his power lines.

  The Supreme Court rejected the Indians’ appeal, but the Tuscarora got a second reprieve when the U.S. Court of Appeal ruled that the state had no right to take any more land unless the FPC first found that the expropriation would not “interfere” with the reservation. Moses threatened to stop the whole project, a decision that would have thrown 2,726 men out of work. “Disaster threatens the Niagara Falls area,” a front-page editorial in the Gazette cried. “The greatest economic crisis in the history of our community is imminent.”

  Moses was now hinting at an unpalatable alternative, designed to arouse public opinion further against the Tuscarora. If he couldn’t get their land, he said, he’d have to expropriate land from the town of Lewiston and city of Niagara Falls. That would cost an additional $15 million, wipe hundreds of acres off the tax rolls of the two communities, and force the relocation of 282 homes and two cemeteries.

  In November 1958, the FPC opened its hearing to decide wheth
er the flooding of the Indian land would interfere with the purpose for which the reservation was intended. Both towns appeared, taking the side of the power authority. Moses came up with a series of experts who testified that the land was virtually worthless and that, because it didn’t amount to much, the Indians had no right to stand in the way of progress.

  To Moses the idea of land standing idle – not being used – was scandalous. Again, he showed no understanding of aboriginal attitudes. He went so far as to have aerial photographs made showing the location of outhouses on the reservation. As Rickard later put it, “the SPA lawyers decided that the extent of a people’s civilization was determined by the number of flush toilets they had. The whole testimony was an enormously expensive attempt … to belittle our Tuscarora people.… Robert Moses and his henchmen very clearly demonstrated their race prejudice and contempt for Indians. What they were trying to impress upon the FPC was the assumption that since this Indian community did not amount to anything, it had no right to stand in the way of the whites who wanted the Indian land for their own purposes. They respected only power and wealth and might, we had none of these. That such a seemingly insignificant people would stand up to Robert Moses and fight back was the thing that infuriated him most of all, as his hysterical press releases only too plainly revealed.”

  Meanwhile, Moses had renewed his offer of $1.5 million for the 1,383 acres of Tuscarora land. He had already agreed to pay the neighbouring Niagara University $5 million for two hundred acres. In addition, he had sweetened the offer to the Indians, not only with the community centre but also with promises of new roads and free electricity. He even promised to name one of the big generators Tuscarora. The Indians laughed at this. For the first time, Moses began to talk about building a much smaller reservoir outside the reservation.

  Moses continued to press forward in his usual way with construction of the generating plant. As always he was right on schedule. Thirty-five hundred men were now working on the plant and on the huge conduit ditch, one hundred feet deep and four hundred feet wide, being gouged from the rock of the Niagara Escarpment. Eight temporary bridges were being constructed, and five million yards of earth and rock had already been removed. Before the job was complete, the bridges would be torn down and the great cut covered over. The estimated cost had now soared to $720 million.

  The covered conduits to the Moses powerplant

  In January 1959, the FPC delayed its findings, hoping for an out-of-court settlement. A desperate Moses was now offering $2.5 million for the Indian land. At a tribal meeting, Lazarus, the Tuscarora’s lawyer, urged them to negotiate in good faith. Clinton Rickard’s son, William, opposed him, pointing out that the public would think the Tuscarora were simply holding out for more money when they had already said they wouldn’t sell for any price. The atmosphere was heated even though the room temperature stood at twelve degrees below zero. In spite of the cold, the debate continued until two in the morning.

  Rickard was convinced that Moses was out to create a disunity among his people. Cries of “Sell out! Sell out!” were heard from a minority. The majority agreed to continue negotiations, causing the press to speculate that the Tuscarora did have a price. That suspicion was reinforced when Moses upped the ante again to $3 million – more than twice what he had originally suggested he might pay. He set March 1 as a final deadline when the agreement would have to be signed.

  The Rickards, father and son, were in despair, for the Indians appeared to be divided as a result of the new offer. “Money is like water in your hands,” they had often said. “It falls through your fingers and disappears. But the land lasts forever.” Would the Tuscarora heed this message?

  The Tuscarora were to vote on Moses’ offer on the evening of January 29, 1959. That morning, William Rickard received a letter from a friend describing the struggle for civil rights among the blacks in the South. At the meeting he read the letter aloud. Surely, he said, the Tuscarora could be just as courageous. In forty-five minutes the Indians voted unanimously to reject the money.

  Just four days later the FPC handed down its decision, ruling that the use of the Indian land for a reservoir was inconsistent with the purpose for which Indian reservations had been established. The contractors removed their equipment, and Moses announced ruefully that he would build the reservoir on private land expropriated outside the disputed area. By increasing the height of the dikes by ten feet he could cut in half the contemplated loss in capacity.

  It was generally accepted that the Indians had won and that Moses was beaten. But Moses was not a man who ever gave in. Apparently, the March 1 deadline was not inviolate, for he now filed a request for a new hearing before the FPC – one that would certainly drag out far beyond that date. Moses had scaled down his demands, announcing that he would now need no more than 470 acres of the reservation for power lines, a road, and part of the reservoir, most of which would occupy land outside the Indian boundaries. Moses had earlier refused to consider this solution.

  More delays. The federal government stepped into the dispute, contending that the law, as the FPC interpreted it, applied only to land held by the government in trust for the Indians. The Tuscarora owned their reservation; the government had no power over it. Once again the case moved to the Supreme Court.

  The court did not review the case until December and did not publish its decision until March 7, 1960 – and it was a shocker. The court pointed out that the tribe had not acquired their land by treaty but by gift and purchase. By a vote of six to three, the court held that inasmuch as the lands were owned in fee simple by the Tuscarora nation and that no interest in them was owned by the United States, “they are not within a ‘reservation’ as that term is defined and used in the Federal Power Act.…”

  The three liberal judges on the bench, Chief Justice Earl Warren, William O. Douglas, and Hugo Black, dissented. “Some things are worth more than money and the costs of a new enterprise,” Black wrote. “I regret that this court is to be the governmental agency that breaks faith with this dependent people. Great nations, like great men, should keep their word.”

  The battle was over. The Indians had lost and Moses was triumphant. “A Niagara of fictional treacle and molasses has been poured on the Indians, a sticky flow finally stopped by the United States Supreme Court,” he declared triumphantly in a speech before the New York State Society of Newspaper Editors that June.

  But Moses hadn’t really won. He did not get his 1,383 acres; he got only 467, which included the land taken earlier for the power line. Most of the reservoir would be outside the reservation after all. Nor was the new plan as devastating to the project as Moses had suggested. The reduction in power would be minor – 1,700,000 kilowatts instead of 1,800,000.

  The Tuscarora continued to brood over the court decision. “Many of our white friends have assured us that even though we lost the land, we gained a moral victory,” Chief Rickard wrote after the fact. “We unfortunately live in a day when moral victories count for little.” The families who occupied the land taken for the reservoir were moved. Those who lost land were paid for it. The remainder of the Tuscarora received eight hundred dollars apiece.

  The scaled-back reservoir on the Tuscarora’s land

  “The SPA got its reservoir and we were left with scars that will never heal,” Rickard said. Some years later he described the permanent damage that had been done by the reservoir. “It has ruined the fishing on our reserve by damming up the inlet. The Northern Pike like to lay their eggs in swampy areas and our reservation provided several such places for them. Now they are gone, along with the other fish that liked to swim in our waters. We have never been compensated by the state for this loss.…”

  At 11:30 on the morning of Friday, February 10, 1961, the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, pulled a symbolic red-handled switch and formally put into service the largest water-driven power complex in the world. The president, John F. Kennedy, and three of his predecessors sent recorded greetings. Th
e specially commissioned mural by Thomas Hart Benton, showing Father Hennepin at the Falls, was unveiled. Ferde Grofé conducted the premier performance of his Niagara Suite, which Moses had commissioned, hoping (vainly) that it would be as popular as Grofé’s earlier Grand Canyon Suite.

  Moses himself was the recipient of unadulterated praise from press and politicians. He was, in Rockefeller’s words, “a giant of a man … a man of unique and almost incredible accomplishments … a man of fabulous energy and imagination and a genius for getting things done.…” Moses’ reply was brief. “After long, stultifying and maddening delays and obstructions, it has through persistence and, I suppose, luck, finally come about.”

  But Robert Moses was not a man who believed in luck. It had been his own persistence that had got the job done exactly on schedule, just 1,107 days after the first bulldozer bit into the sod on the edge of the Niagara gorge. Moses had achieved it through a combination of bulldog tenacity, hard driving, devious politicking, and sheer charm. The powerplant itself was accomplishment enough, but it was the tremendous face-lifting over which Moses had presided that was his true monument. Moses had never seen the powerplant as an end in itself, but simply a means to restore the American side of the gorge by providing the parklike atmosphere needed to enhance the glory of the Falls. This was his larger vision, and he lived to see it completed.