A flood of tears: Five decades later, tribes still recovering from dam losses

By Patrick Springer
pspringer@forumcomm.com

6/08/2003 - NEW TOWN, N.D. -- Marilyn Hudson's family used an old cottonwood tree as the measuring stick to gauge the rising floodwaters that swallowed their farm nestled in the Missouri River Valley.

The flood level rose gradually, over a span of many months, until the farm that once supported a family of nine children disappeared under more than 50 feet of water.

The flood wasn't caused by nature run amok; it was created by one of the most ambitious engineering projects to reshape the Northern Plains: Garrison Dam, dedicated 50 years ago, on June 11, 1953 -- Marilyn Hudson's 17th birthday.

Her family was one of 349 on the Fort Berthold Reservation in west-central North Dakota that were uprooted by the huge reservoir, Lake Sakakawea, made by the dam. More than 1,700 people were forced to move from the rich bottomlands that had sheltered three tribes for centuries.

Five decades and 21ž2 generations later, the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara, which became the Three Affiliated Tribes under an 1851 treaty, still are recovering from the inundation of 155,000 acres of their best land. The river bottom was lush with gardens, woods and pastures that made the people of Fort Berthold self-sustaining.

"Life in that period of time was based pretty much on what you produced," Hudson said. Her father raised cattle, horses, pigs and chickens; her mother grew corn, beans, potatoes and peas.

Life along the river followed the growing cycles of the plants and animals -- raising enough food during the summer to get through the winter.

"It was pretty much a cycle of survival," Hudson said.

In its place, the permanent flood delivered a cycle of poverty and dependency. Payments for flooded land paid only pennies on the dollar to members of the Three Tribes, who lost a quarter of their reservation -- and almost all their best agricultural and timber lands.

The federal government made promises that it failed to keep: 20,000 kilowatts of free power never materialized, and the tribes still are lobbying for a full-service clinic to replace the hospital they lost.

But many of the losses remain intangible for the reservation's 3,776 residents. Families and communities, once clustered in villages along the river bottom, were divided by a huge reservoir that split the reservation into five isolated districts.

"It took away so much," said tribal chairman Tex Hall. "It was more than just the land -- it was the language, it was the culture, it was the history. It was more than just a simple flooding."

One bitter irony for the people of Fort Berthold: Although one-quarter of the reservation was drowned by one of the world's largest man-made reservoirs, 300 families today must haul treated drinking water to their homes, a hardship during icy winters.

Artesian well water that runs from the tap in many rural areas is brackish, and sometimes pungent with the odor of rotten eggs. The tribe maintains that the water, high in sodium, alkali and magnesium, has been linked to high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.

Hall once provided a glass of water drawn from the tap at his ranch for a congressional hearing.

"It looked like tea," he said. "Dark tea."

'With heavy hearts'

Residents of Fort Berthold pleaded with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to spare their reservation from catastrophic flooding.

In a heated meeting held in a reservation classroom in 1946, Drags Wolf, a traditional Mandan chief, wore a war bonnet and war paint. He confronted Lt. Gen. Lewis Pick, chief of engineers for the corps, whose uniform was armored with a row of medals.

"You'll never take me from this land alive!" an exasperated Drags Wolf told the stone-faced general.

Pick, one of the authors of the Pick-Sloan plan, which called for a series of five dams on the Upper Missouri, was enraged by the outburst. He labeled the Three Tribes "belligerently uncooperative" and forced a harsh "take it or leave it" settlement on their leaders.

The Three Tribes offered free land for another dam location, upstream from the chosen site, that would avoid major flooding on the reservation. But the federal government rejected the location because it lacked adequate water storage capacity for flood control and the more than 1 million acres of irrigation Garrison Dam was to deliver to North Dakota.

The Three Tribes had no choice but to accept the sacrifices forced on them.

Tribal chairman George Gillette dabbed tears from his eyes after he signed the contract in 1948 surrendering the heart of the reservation. "The members of the tribal council sign this contract with heavy hearts," he said. "Right now, the future does not look good to us."

The original settlement awarded just $5.1 million, or $33 an acre, to pay for the land and improvements. The sum also was to cover relocation and reconstruction costs. Landowners were denied the opportunity to clear timber from their land.

A private appraisal later calculated $21.9 million damages to the tribe. That goaded Congress into boosting its compensation by $7.5 million, or a total of $12.6 million -- still $9 million below what the tribes said was fair market value.

In another blow to the tribes' self-sufficiency, the final settlement also denied mineral rights to the lands lost and deprived them access to mineral rights and reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting and fishing.
They would have to make do with the exposed uplands -- barren range nicknamed "coyote country."

Drags Wolf, the old chief who vowed that he wouldn't be taken alive from his land, died a short while after his quarrel with Pick. His body and scores of others in reservation cemeteries had to be exhumed and moved to escape the flood.

Sometimes the reburials were haphazard. Graves in the relocated Old Scouts Cemetery -- named to honor Arikara scouts who served under Gen. George Armstrong Custer -- had to be redone because they were facing the wrong direction. Instead of being laid east-west, as Arikara tradition requires, they had been buried facing north-south.

The corps' heavy-handed treatment of the tribes left bitter memories for those who witnessed it. Celina Mossett, who was raised on the Little Missouri River south of Heart Butte, saw her family's orchards covered by 100 feet of water.

"We lost everything," she said in a recent tribal history of the dam's aftermath.

"The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are like the cavalry. The old days the cavalry came and annihilated our people. Now they have changed from the cavalry to the Corps of Engineers. It's like they just changed their name."

Torn from the land

Louise Holding Eagle came home one night after a long shopping trip and discovered that her house was gone.

The unpleasant discovery came as a shock, but she knew where to look for her husband and three young children.

"I figured he was up on the rocky top," she said, referring to high ground her father-in-law owned that was selected as their new home site.

Although the relocation program lasted several years, Fort Berthold residents often were given little notice of their moving date.

As a result, the moves often were chaotic. Employees of some out-of-state moving contractors hired by the government stole belongings from families.

Families faced difficult decisions about where to rebuild. New communities were laid out on the prairie to replace villages lost to the river. One, appropriately named New Town, replaced Elbowoods as the reservation's central community.

The Holding Eagles, a young couple, were just starting out in ranching when they were forced to move. They settled on high ground three-quarters of a mile from the nearest paved road, accessible only by a rutted path worn in the prairie.

"There was no roads up on top," Louise Holding Eagle said. Travel was especially difficult when the dirt road was muddy from spring rains or covered by snow drifts in winter.

"We'd have to struggle to get the kids to the school bus," she said. "That was really a hardship."

Worse, the couple quickly discovered that their ranching days were over. So were the days of hunting and fishing and picking berries to help put food on the table.

"That was our livelihood," she said. "We were no longer able to earn a living that way." The big gardens and fruit trees from the river bottom were gone, and much of the game left because its habitat was destroyed.
Matthew Holding Eagle became a police officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a job that meant he had to move the family to other reservations, raising their children far from home.

"I wasn't really angry," Louise Holding Eagle said. "I was young, you know. This was happening -- what could you do about it? I guess I was in shock."

Historians have noted the immense scale of the hardships endured by the people of Fort Berthold, named after a garrison that served the area during the fur-trading era.

Brian Keith Russell, who wrote a master's thesis on the Three Tribes, compares their dislocation to the forced removal of the Cherokees from Georgia to Oklahoma in the 1830s -- the notorious "Trail of Tears" that resulted in at least 4,000 deaths.

"Although they would not suffer the loss of life as the Cherokee had, the loss of lifeways was just as devastating for the Three Tribes," Russell wrote in his history thesis for the University of North Dakota.

The depth of those losses have become more apparent to Louise Holding Eagle in the years since her family was forced to leave the reservation to find work.

She moved back to Fort Berthold seven years ago, after her husband died, and settled in the town of Parshall, which has a nursing home and other services for the elderly, key considerations now that she is 72.

Over time, she has grown to resent the hardships and unkept promises Fort Berthold residents were forced to endure following Garrison Dam.

"When I look back at all that, I get angry," she said. "But I don't want to be angry. It's not good to be angry."

The human toll

Marilyn Hudson was a member of the 1953 senior class at Elbowoods -- the school's last group of graduates. The finality of being among the last didn't weigh heavily upon the Class of 1953. They were eager to start their own lives.

"I don't think we, as teenagers, were as tuned in to the whole issue," she said. "It was kind of a worry of the old people."

But before she left home for college and a career in government service, Hudson saw the difficulties many families faced. Her father, Martin Cross, was tribal chairman during the relocation years.

Her mother complained that he couldn't even finish a row while plowing his field without being interrupted by worried constituents.

The strain proved especially difficult for the men, Hudson said.

"A lot of the men did not live probably past 55," she said. Her own father died at age 59 in 1964, after seeing his ranch fail.

Frederick Baker, chairman of a group of reservation elders, said the social costs from the upheaval of Garrison Dam still weigh upon the tribes in what some call intergenerational trauma.

"Unfortunately, many of our people died in the process of relocating and readjusting from the Garrison Dam," he told a congressional committee last year. "Many of us turned to alcohol, and ourselves and our families suffered as a result."

Baker and others compare the destruction from the dam to the smallpox epidemics that decimated the tribes in 1781 and 1837.

"Without question, the most devastating event for us was the Garrison Dam," he said. "It was almost as devastating as the smallpox epidemics."

What free ride?

Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of Garrison Dam's dedication, will be a day of quiet reflection at Fort Berthold.

Tribal Chairman Tex Hall plans to hold some kind of observance. It won't be a day of celebration; it will be a day to take stock of the flood and its aftermath, of progress made and problems remaining."We should turn it into a positive and review our vision," Hall said.

On the plus side of the ledger: establishment of Fort Berthold Community College and Four Bears Casino and Lodge, a resort complex opened in 1993 that provides jobs to more than 400 reservation residents.

The year before, Congress awarded the Three Tribes a settlement of $149.2 million as delayed compensation for losses they suffered from Garrison Dam. A 1986 study concluded they were due additional compensation of $178.4 million to $411.8 million.

"It's a great piece of legislation, but it gives us 25 cents on the dollar," Hall said, referring to other estimates that they were entitled to quadruple the sum awarded.

Interest from the settlement helps the tribe to fund public investments in community and economic development projects.

Although the reservation was promised $70 million in water development projects, rural residents still must haul their drinking water. "We got the authorization, but now we can't get the appropriation," Hall said.

The tribe estimates it will take $86 million to provide adequate drinking water throughout the reservation, but funding comes piecemeal, subject to the whims and generosity of each federal budget cycle.

Hall is confident, though, that funding will be secured for a full-service clinic, open 24 hours a day, and hopes for better ambulance service. The reservation copes with ambulance delays, with calls answered in communities like Hazen or Watford City, 60 miles or more away.

White crosses, often in clusters beside highways, memorialize traffic accident victims throughout the reservation.

"We all know the golden hour that occurs," Hall said. "My brother-in-law died on a highway down here," bleeding to death while waiting for an ambulance.

Hall is bothered by talk of the United States helping to rebuild Iraq when Fort Berthold still must wait for the fulfillment of decades-old promises.

"We've been waiting and waiting and waiting," he said. "Fifty years is a long time. I think that's a disgrace for this country not to have a commitment for its own people.

"It galls me when people say Indians get a free ride. How did we get a free ride?"

Readers can reach Forum reporter Patrick Springer at (701) 241-5522

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