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| Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes standing on the banks of the Missouri before the dam was built. |
“We grew large gardens,” she said. “We had a very organized society which was similar to the white European societies. There were systems of law and order, food distribution. I think it made the people here more compatible with Europeans because they were farmers.”
When the Indian Wars began in the second half of the 1800s, the Mandan and Hidatsa—along with the Arikara, with whom they allied in 1862—signed on as government scouts. They came to be known as the Three Affiliated Tribes and did not have to move to a distant reservation. Rather, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation was established more or less on their homeland. Amid a bucolic patchwork of riverside willows, cottonwoods and fields, the people ran small farms, sent their children to school, attended church and took pride in their high level of enlistment in the United States’ armed forces. Women and children cultivated beans, potatoes, carrots and beets, storing them for winter. They canned tomatoes and ate lettuce as it grew in the summer. The men used horse-drawn planters to sow corn and cut hay, which they pitched by hand into hayracks. The families also tended cows, pigs and chickens. “Almost everything grown in the garden was consumed by us and our livestock,” remembered Hudson, 74. “The only thing we bought from the store was sugar, coffee, salt.”
And then, in the mid 1940s, the U.S. government decided it needed a dam.
Of all the variable things in creation,” wrote the editor of the Sioux City Register in 1863, “the most uncertain are the actions of juries, the state of a woman’s mind, and the condition of the Missouri River.” In 1943, the restive Missouri had jumped its banks three times, inundating Iowa and Nebraska and angering precisely the wrong person—Colonel Lewis Pick, the short-fused director of the regional office of the Army Corps of Engineers. “As the 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!’ ” wrote Paul VanDevelder in Coyote Warrior, a history of the Garrison Dam and its effect on the tribes.
President Franklin Roosevelt ordered Pick and the Bureau of Reclamation to hammer out a plan. They called for a series of dams on the Upper Missouri—at its center, the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea, which would flood 436 of Fort Berthold’s 531 homes, as well as every square foot of the enviable farmland tilled by the people of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations.
The Indians fought back. But as the news from the government the tribes had trusted for nearly 150 years went from bad to worse, the people of Fort Berthold were stunned, then angry. When now-General Pick appeared at an Elbowoods hearing in 1946, a rancher with a third-grade education and a full-feathered war bonnet named Thomas Spotted Wolf stood up and stuck his finger into the general’s face. “You have come to destroy us!” he shouted, according to his grandson, Jim Bear. “If you look around in our town, we build schools, churches .… we’re becoming civilized! We’re becoming acculturated! Isn’t that what you white people wanted us to do? So we’re doing that! And now you’ll flood our homeland?”
The next year, tribal councilman Mark Mahto told the House Appropriations Committee: “The quickest and most merciful way to exterminate the three tribes is by mass execution, like they did to the Jews in Germany,” recounted VanDevelder in his book, “Everything will be lost if Garrison is built. We will lose our homes, our communities, our economy, our resources.”
But these arguments were no match for the government’s determination to tame the Missouri and spare any ill effects being visited upon its constituent white farmers—who owned less than 10 percent of the land lost to the series of dams the Pick-Sloan Flood Control Act of 1944 installed above Yankton, South Dakota. The rest was all Indian land.
And then, in the mid 1940s, the U.S. government decided it needed a dam.
Of all the variable things in creation,” wrote the editor of the Sioux City Register in 1863, “the most uncertain are the actions of juries, the state of a woman’s mind, and the condition of the Missouri River.” In 1943, the restive Missouri had jumped its banks three times, inundating Iowa and Nebraska and angering precisely the wrong person—Colonel Lewis Pick, the short-fused director of the regional office of the Army Corps of Engineers. “As the 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!’ ” wrote Paul VanDevelder in Coyote Warrior, a history of the Garrison Dam and its effect on the tribes.
President Franklin Roosevelt ordered Pick and the Bureau of Reclamation to hammer out a plan. They called for a series of dams on the Upper Missouri—at its center, the 200-mile-long Lake Sakakawea, which would flood 436 of Fort Berthold’s 531 homes, as well as every square foot of the enviable farmland tilled by the people of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations.
The Indians fought back. But as the news from the government the tribes had trusted for nearly 150 years went from bad to worse, the people of Fort Berthold were stunned, then angry. When now-General Pick appeared at an Elbowoods hearing in 1946, a rancher with a third-grade education and a full-feathered war bonnet named Thomas Spotted Wolf stood up and stuck his finger into the general’s face. “You have come to destroy us!” he shouted, according to his grandson, Jim Bear. “If you look around in our town, we build schools, churches .… we’re becoming civilized! We’re becoming acculturated! Isn’t that what you white people wanted us to do? So we’re doing that! And now you’ll flood our homeland?”
The next year, tribal councilman Mark Mahto told the House Appropriations Committee: “The quickest and most merciful way to exterminate the three tribes is by mass execution, like they did to the Jews in Germany,” recounted VanDevelder in his book, “Everything will be lost if Garrison is built. We will lose our homes, our communities, our economy, our resources.”
But these arguments were no match for the government’s determination to tame the Missouri and spare any ill effects being visited upon its constituent white farmers—who owned less than 10 percent of the land lost to the series of dams the Pick-Sloan Flood Control Act of 1944 installed above Yankton, South Dakota. The rest was all Indian land.
Out of options, the tribes accepted the government’s offer of $5 million in exchange for their homeland. At the signing ceremony on May 20, 1948, in Washington, D.C., the bureaucrats were straight-faced. The suit-clad tribal chairman, George Gillette, stood just to the right of Interior Secretary Julius Krug, crying into his hand.
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| Tribal Chairman George Gillette, front left, weeps as Interior Secretary Julius Krug signs reservation lands over to the U.S. Government. |
The Elbowoods Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officers moved their base of operations to the rolling, mostly treeless prairie, to the aptly named hamlet of New Town. Dr. Wilson set up shop on Main Street. Today, North Dakota’s longest bridge stretches nearly a mile across the white-capped water of Lake Sakakawea toward Four Bears Village and an 18-year-old casino—one reason reservation unemployment has dropped from an estimated 80 percent after the flood to about 30 percent today. Fort Berthold is on much firmer economic ground than many other High Plains reservations, although not nearly on par with the rest of North Dakota, which has the country’s lowest unemployment rate, at 3.3 percent. A rich oil field was recently discovered under the reservation, and oil rigs dot the landscape like oversized praying mantises. This has generated much-needed revenue for the tribe, supplemented by the casino and a 1993 settlement for dam-caused damages that provides $8 million to $9 million annually to community programs. Still, for years people have complained that the federal government never made good on its promise to replace the flooded hospital at Elbowoods. And although the oil boom has brought money, it has also brought an increase in traffic deaths, social tension and environmental concerns so profound that some wonder if the reservation will be habitable in 20 years.
“Men are supposed to be the stronger sex, but I don’t think that’s really true,” said Hudson. “When I start thinking about Elbowoods, it seems like it’s the women who were the survivors.”
As the floodwaters covered his house, Thomas Spotted Wolf, who had stood up so angrily to General Pick, sat on a piece of driftwood. “He found a stick and was singing a song, and he had tears coming down,” said his grandson, Jim Bear. “I didn’t have to ask him what was wrong. After that, my grandfather just went downhill. He didn’t have anything to live for any more.”
As the floodwaters covered his house, Thomas Spotted Wolf, who had stood up so angrily to General Pick, sat on a piece of driftwood. “He found a stick and was singing a song, and he had tears coming down,” said his grandson, Jim Bear. “I didn’t have to ask him what was wrong. After that, my grandfather just went downhill. He didn’t have anything to live for any more.”
“Our neighbor to the north, Judge Wolf, would hold court right in his house,” said Hudson. “Everyone respected him—he was very adamant that ‘I love this land I will not leave this land.’ And he didn’t leave. He died. I’m thinking he wasn’t any more than in his 50s.”
After pouring his life into fighting the dam, Hudson’s own father died just a month short of his 58th birthday. Like many others, he left behind a wife who outlived him by decades. “The lake forced us into a cash economy,” said Leo Cummings, the tribal administrator of employment training. “A lot of people lost their lives in downtown New Town, lost their self-esteem, and drank themselves to death.”
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