Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [123]
One small faction of the Three Tribes, led by a flamboyant young radical named Crow Flies High, remained opposed to any compromise at all. As negotiations were already underway between the Interior Department, the Corps, and the Tribal Business Council, a delegation from the dissident faction burst into the room in ceremonial dress and began disrupting the proceedings. The leader of the group, who was probably Crow Flies High, went up to Colonel Pick and made an obscene gesture. Pick turned the color of uncooked liver. It was an insult, he said lividly, that he would remember as long as he lived.
On the basis of that petty insult, Pick stormed out of the negotiations, never to return. As far as he was concerned, all of the points of agreement that had already been reached were null and void. When Arthur Morgan, the first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority—and the one person who kept the memory of the Indians’ tragedy alive—visited the Three Tribes some time later, however, he discovered a different sentiment as to why Pick had walked out. There was, he wrote, “a nearly unanimous opinion that the Corps welcomed the attack of the Crow Flies High group because it provided a semblance of justification for ignoring the clear terms of the law....”
Before the negotiations were interrupted, the Corps had offered the Indians some scattered property on the Missouri benchlands to replace the bottomlands they would lose. (“I want to show you where we are going to place you people,” a local Congregationalist minister quoted Pick as saying.) Under the law, all compensatory lands were to be “comparable in quality and sufficient in area to compensate the said tribes for the land on the Fort Berthold Reservation.” It was up to the Secretary of the Interior, Cap Krug, to decide whether the criteria had been met. As Krug well knew, there was no land in North Dakota that could adequately compensate the tribes for prime winter cattle range in a river valley. He had decided, therefore, to accede to the Indians’ other demands for water, at-cost hydroelectric power, and first timber and mineral rights. Since even this appeared to be too little, he also agreed to pay them $5,105,625 for the 155,000 acres they would lose. It was only $33 an acre, but it was better than nothing.
Colonel Pick, however, was still smoldering over the indignity he had suffered, and he had his good friends in Congress. A few months after Krug announced that he was prepared to meet most or all of the Indians’ terms, the disposition of their case was removed by Congress from Interior’s hands and given to the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. The committee soon tore up Interior’s version of the bill and wrote its own version exactly along the lines suggested by Pick. The Fort Berthold tribes would not even be permitted to fish in the reservoir. Their cattle would not be allowed to drink from it, or graze by it. The right to purchase hydroelectricity at cost was abrogated. The tribes were forbidden to use any compensatory money they received to hire attorneys. They were not even allowed to cut the trees that would be drowned by the reservoir, except in one case, and there, according to the new terms, they were not permitted to haul them away.
On May 20, 1948, Secretary Krug ceremoniously signed the bill disposing of the Fort Berthold matter in his office in Washington. Despite some intervention by the Interior Department, most of the Corps’ vengeful provisions were still intact. Standing behind Krug, alongside a slouching Mike Straus of the Bureau of Reclamation and a scowling General Pick, was handsome George Gillette, the leader of the tribal business council, in a.pinstripe suit. “The members of the tribal council sign this contract with heavy hearts,” Gillette managed to say. “Right now the future does not look good to us.” Then, as Krug reached for a bundle of commemorative pens to sign the bill, and as the assembled politicians