Lake Sakakawea & Garrison Dam ~ Elbowoods, ND

According to the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, the territorial lands of the Three Tribes was an area of more than 12 million acres, extending from east of the Missouri River into Montana. In the following years, to justify taking more land, the federal government, through several allotment acts and the 1910 Homestead Act, reduced the reservation further to less than three million acres. The flooding of the prime river bottomland was yet another assault on the autonomy of the cultures of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara/Sahnish. Flooding the reservation bottomlands reduced the reservation even further, leaving only 500,000 acres of individual and tribally owned lands.

Map shows communities existing on the
Fort Berthold Reservation before dam construction.

Beginning in the 1940s, the Corps of Engineers built five main-stem projects that destroyed over 550 square miles of tribal land in North and South Dakota and dislocated more than 900 Indian families. The most devastating effects suffered by a single reservation were experienced by the Three Affiliated Tribes whose lifeways were almost totally destroyed by the Garrison Dam, as a part of the Pick-Sloan Project.

The construction of Garrison Dam on tribal land resulted in the taking of 152,360 acres. Over 25 percent of the reservation’s total land base was deluged by the dam’s reservoir (known as Lake Sakakawea today). The remainder of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara/Sahnish lands was segmented into five water-bound sections. The project required the relocation of 325 families, or approximately 80 percent of the tribal membership. For many successful years as ranchers and farmers, these industrious people lost 94 percent of their agricultural lands.

The Corps of Engineers, without authorization from Congress, altered the project’s specifications in order to protect Williston, North Dakota, and to prevent interference with the Bureau of Reclamation irrigation projects. However, nothing was done to safeguard Mandan, Hidatsa or Arikara/Sahnish communities. When the army threatened to confiscate the land it needed by right of eminent domain, the Three Affiliated Tribes protested in Washington, succeeding in having Congress halt all expenditures for the Garrison Dam project until they received a suitable settlement. This legal action was based on the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, which provided that land could not be taken from the tribes without their consent and that of Congress.

The lands that the Three Affiliated Tribes were forced to give up were not just some undesirable tracts assigned them by a government more concerned with encouraging the westward movement of the American pioneer than with the fate of the native inhabitants. The river valley environment of the Three Tribes had been their home for perhaps more than a millennium, although not the particular segment of the valley that lay above the Garrison Dam. They had developed ways of adjusting to this environment over a time span nearly inconceivable to white Americans. Moreover, they had emotional and religious ties with it that no American descending from old world immigrants would fully comprehend.

The original communities before the flooding of the Garrison Dam were Elbowoods, including the central business community which housed the Indian Bureau, the Indian school and the hospital. The communities of Red Butte, Lucky Mound, Nishu, Beaver Creek, Independence, Shell Creek and Charging Eagle were also flooded. The Mandans had settled in the Red Butte and Charging Eagle area, and the Sahnish settled in the Nishu and Beaver Creek area. Independence was settled by the Mandan and Hidatsa, and Lucky Mound and Shell Creek by the Hidatsa. Elbowoods was a combination of all Three Tribes. The other communities had government, Indian day and boarding schools, churches, communal playgrounds, parks, and cemeteries. Some had ferries. Although parts of these communities remain, gone were the close traditional gatherings and community living; as were natural resources, such as desirable land for agriculture, timber that provided logs for homes, fence posts and shelter for stock, coal and oil deposits, natural food sources and wildlife habitats for which most would or could never be compensated.

Map shows Lake Sakakawea and the inundated
communities after dam construction.

The reservoir that formed behind the Army Corps of Engineers’ Garrison Dam was named after Sacajawea, the legendary Shoshone Indian woman who guided Lewis and Clark through the mountains of Montana. 178-mile-long Lake Sakakawea, the third largest reservoir in the country, flooded a quarter of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, forcing the relocation of 325 families from the towns of Sanish, Elbowoods, Lucky Mound, Shell Creek, Nishu, Charging Eagle, Beaver Creek, Red Butte, Independence and Van Hook.