Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [122]
For the sake of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where the Mandan and Arikara and Hidatsa lived, no such intricate gerrymandering of reservoir outlines was even tried. Garrison Dam, which the Corps justified largely because of its flood-control benefits downstream, was going to cause horrific local flood damage the moment its reservoir began to fill. Virtually every productive acre of bottom-land the tribes owned would go under.
Colonel Lewis Pick, the architect of the tribes’ inundation, was the embodiment of a no-nonsense military man. Pick liked to punctuate his conversation with Cagney-style “See? See?”s; these were not questions—they were commands. When first assigned to the Missouri River Division during the early part of the Second World War, he ordered all of his staff to work a series of continuous seven-day weeks. On the first Sunday after the order was given, Pick spied on all his top officers and summarily dismissed those who were not at their desks. Later, when he was in Burma, he fired a whole team of surveyors for laying out a technically perfect road which, in his opinion, would take too long to build. Instead, he designed a treacherous road that could be finished slightly sooner.
Since what Pick proposed to do to the Indians was the most calamitous thing that had happened to them in their history, he might have had the good grace to leave the proceedings through which the tribe would be compensated to someone else. But Pick was a take-charge type. He not only insisted on participating; he insisted on running them himself.
Initially, the Three Tribes pleaded with the government not to build Garrison Dam at all. “All of the bottom lands and all of the bench lands on this reservation will be flooded,” wrote the business council of the Three Tribes in an anguished resolution condemning the plan.
Most of it will be underwater to a depth of 100 feet or more. The homes and lands of 349 families, comprising 1,544 individuals, will be covered with deep water. The lands which will be flooded are practically all the lands which are of any use or value to produce feed for stock or winter shelter. We are stock-men and our living depends on our production of cattle.... All of our people have lived where we now are for more than 100 years. Our people have lived on and cultivated the bottom lands along the Missouri River for many hundreds of years. We were here before the first white men stepped foot on this land. We have always kept the peace. We have kept our side of all treaties. We have been, and now are, as nearly self-supporting as the average white community. We recognize the value to our white neighbors, and to the people down stream, of the plan to control the River and to make use of the great surplus of flood waters; but we cannot agree that we should be destroyed, drowned out, removed, and divided for the public benefit while all other white communities are protected and safe-guarded by the same River development plan which now threatens us with destruction....
However, when the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, threw itself behind the plan, the Three Tribes saw the futility of abject resistance. What they asked for as compensation, considering the agony they were about to be put through, was pitiful enough. First, they wanted at least an equivalent amount of compensatory land. Since it would inevitably be poorer land, they also wanted twenty thousand kilowatt-hours per year of electricity, mainly to run the pumps they would need to bring water, once freely available from the river, up from depths of three hundred feet or more on the arid plains. They asked for permission to graze and water their cattle along the margins of the reservoir, and for first rights to the timber which the reservoir would flood. They wanted a bridge built across a narrow reach of the reservoir so their people could maintain contact with one another (the reservoir would effectively split the reservation in half). Otherwise, they would