OF FORT BERTHOLD
THREE AFFILIATED
TRIBES
OF FORT BERTHOLD
When Lewis and Clark came to the area between the Knife and Heart Rivers in present day North Dakota, the Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa tribes lived separately, sometimes peacefully, sometimes warring. They rarely were able of provide a united defense against their common enemy. the Sioux. Though they were agricultural people, they spoke different languages and differed in their religious practices. Fate would see them united.
The Arikara are thought to have migrated to the Missouri River
Basin centuries ago. They came from the south and were closely associated with the Skidi Pawnee. They took up agriculture
and were particularly noted for their corn and melons. They had not directly contacted many Europeans when they
met Lewis and Clark. They usually traded for European goods through other tribes. They had, however, come into
direct contact with one European product, small pox.
In 1780 an estimated eight to ten thousand Arikara lived in eighteen villages along the Missouri between the White
and Cheyenne Rivers.. Then, some time in the late 1780's a small pox epidemic ravaged them. Be the summer of 1804
there were less than two thousand Arikara, living in two villages. The epidemic had not killed evenly. For some
reason each of the eighteen village chiefs, and most of their families had survived. The Arikara were never able
to create a stable political structure; literally, there were "too many chiefs and not enough Indians."
Internal power struggles affected their relations with other tribes and eventually "Whites" who came
to the area. They were sometimes friends, sometimes enemies with their Mandan and Hidatsa neighbors; but their
great nemesis was Sioux domination. The Sioux looked down on them (Farming was women's work.), often using force
as a trading tactic. The Arikara thought European trade would greatly improve their lot, but the Sioux sought to
keep them away from Europeans. Thus the Arikara rejoiced when they heard that some White Men had broken a Sioux
blockade and were headed their way. They were happy to treat with Lewis and Clark. They hoped to trade for guns
and ammunition to help fend off the Sioux. Though the Lewis and Clark goods were meager they thought they had a
promise of better days to come. Those days never came.
The Arikara agreed to send a Chief, Ankedouchera to confer with this "White Father" in Washington. He
arrived in Washington in the summer of 1806, but almost immediately died. It took the government more than a year
to inform the Arikara about what had happened. In the mean time a St. Louis trader, Manuel Lisa and a party of
trappers came to the villages after having conducted business with the Sioux. The Arikara were suspicious and angry
thinking "whites" had killed Ankedouchera. The Indians fired a few shots at the party, but Lisa and his
men escaped without a fight. Soon thereafter Ensign Nathaniel Pryor blundered into the villages, unaware the Arikara
were angry. His small party was attempting to return a Mandan Chief, Shahaka, who had gone with the delegation
to Washington, to his home. The Arikara did not yet know their chief had died peacefully, and the Americans did
not know the Arikara and Mandan were at war that summer. A large group of warriors confronted Pryor.s party. Shots
were fired and the whites retreated. The Arikara thus gained the reputation of being violent, unpredictable, untrustworthy,
not the kind of people to establish permanent trade agreements with. Besides, there was more profit to be gained
by trading with the Sioux and Mandan.
The Arikara desperately wanted a permanent trading post. Several promises were made, but not kept. In 1822 a fur
trader, William Ashley led a party up the Missouri, he conducted business with the Arikara, and falsely promised
to establish a post. In the spring of 1823, following a Sioux raid, seeking revenge, some Arikara conducted an
unsuccessful attack on a Missouri Fur Company trading post. The Company traded with the Sioux. Lives were lost
and the Arikara humiliated. Then in late May Ashley returned. He had hoped to avoid the Arikara, but needed horses.
According to the Indians he offered insulting prices for the horses. One morning Chief Gray Eyes, grieving for
the loss of his only son in the Missouri Fur assault, led an attack on the portion of Ashley's group who had not
remained on boats. Almost all were killed or wounded.
When news of the attack reached Fort Atkinson, near present day Omaha, Col. Henry Leavenworth led six companies
of soldiers up the Missouri. He was joined by a trader, Joshua Pilcher and about sixty trappers. Along the way
he recruited nearly 700 Sioux allies. The ensuing battle was inconclusive. During "peace negotiations"
most of the Arikara escaped. When the soldiers left, the trappers burned both villages to the ground, destroying
grain reserves and killing livestock. Thus a pattern was established, events to be repeated time and time again.
First would come a surprise attack and a small victory for Indians, to be followed by indiscriminate retaliation
by a much larger white force, sometimes aided by "enemy" Tribes.
The "Arikara War" left the Tribe homeless and scattered. They tried to reunite in 1837, only to be ravaged
by another small pox epidemic. The remnants of the tribe mover north, settling among the Mandan and Hidatsa in
1845. In 1862 they would enter into a formal agreement with their neighbors, eventually becoming one of the Three Affiliated Tribes. Today only eleven Arikara-speaking are living.
The Mandan are an Algonquin-speaking people who migrated to the Missouri Basin from the eastern woodlands. They were generally more sedentary that either the Hidatsa or Arikara, thriving on agriculture and trade. Their village became the major trading center in the Upper Missouri area. They had uneasy relations with their immediate neighbors, but were buffered from Sioux raids from the south and from Assiniboin and Cree attacks from the north. They too were victims of the epidemics of the 1780's and had not fully recovered when Lewis and Clark wintered with them in 1804-05. For thirty years after Lewis and Clark they remained friendly with White traders and trappers. They remained on uneasy terms with the Arikara, but became more friendly with the Hidatsa. Then in 1837 the small pox epidemic returned. Seven of every eight Mandans died within a two week period. The few survivors moved north to join the Hidatsa in the Knife River area. They joined the Hidatsa in 1845. Together they signed the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851 (see the Sioux pages.) Their lands covered nearly seven million acres on either side of the Missouri. Their former /friend/enemy, the Arikara joined them in 1862.
Like the Mandan, the Hidatsa are thought to have come to the Missouri
from the eastern woodlands. They spoke a different language and had a different religion. They did take up agriculture
and constructed relatively permanent earth lodges similar to those of their
neighbors. They were less sedentary than their future partners. They fished, farmed, hunted, and sometimes warred
with tribes to the north, west, and south. (In a raid on a Shoshone village far to the west, they captured an Indian
girl named Sakakawea.) Legend says that many centuries ago some women argued over possession of buffalo bellies.
The argument caused a split in the tribe. Many moved south and west, becoming the Crow. Perhaps this legend is
the basis for the French term, "Gros Ventre" (big bellies)m by which the Hidatsa were known.
This mobile life style saved the Hidatsa from the worst of the 1780's epidemic. It apparently came to the Upper
Missouri during a large summer hunt. This the Hidatsa was the larger of the three tribes who met Lewis and Clark.
But the pox is persistent. In 1837 there was no such hunt. Half of the people died this time. Again the tribe split.
Some moved west to Montana, where they would eventually settle at Fort Belknap. Those who remained moved a few
miles north to the Knife River and settled in a village they called Like-A-Fish_Hook, because a bend in
the Missouri where they settled looked like one. There the Mandan and Arikara would join them.
THE AFFILIATED TRIBES
And so it was that the three fractious tribes, faced by common
enemies, small pox and the Sioux, united. They overcame their linguistic, political, and religious differences
to become the Three Affiliated Tribes. Within the political structure each tribe retains
its own identity, though time and inter-marriage have blurred the differences.
In his book, Cedilla
Desert,Mark Reisner says these tribes, possibly because
they were friendly to Lewis and Clark were left alone until the Pick Sloan invasion. Indeed they retained some
of the best bottom land from which developed a thriving farming and ranching economy, but they were hardly left
alone. In 1870 they were told that Congress had never ratified the Fort Laramie Treaty. When the government set
reservation boundaries, the Tribes lost about two million acres. They lost another million when the government
gave a right of way to the Northern Pacific Railroad. Nor were they spared from the Dawes Act allotments when more
than half their land was declared "Surplus." Still they were able to prosper. The woods along the river
provided their cattle protection from the winter. Food for their stock was plentiful. They were able to take advantage
of the annual river flooding to grow what they needed to eat. There was surplus. Indeed the tribes seemed to prosper
more that other Missouri River tribes, but then came the Pick Sloan Dams.
Two federal agencies, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corp
of Engineers, have totally changed the Missouri over the past fifty years by damming it. The Pick Sloan plan(named after the
respective heads of the agencies) is the blue print for this devastation. The Corp builds dams for flood control
and navigation. The Bureau builds dams for irrigation and hydroelectric power (to finance the irrigation projects
which rarely pay for themselves.) The purposes are incompatible, and the agencies were bitter rivals. The Pick
Sloan compromise was hammered out in about ninety days in 1944. The results were that both agencies would get mearly
everything they wanted.
One thing they wanted was The Garrison Dam, which would flood the Tribes' valuable bottom land. How the Dam came
to be and what was done to the community can only be described as one of the sorriest examples of federal Indian
policy in the twentieth century. The Army Corp would build the Dam. So sure were they that they could steam roll
the Tribes they actually began construction before negotiating with the Tribes or receiving Congressional approval
to do so. In doing their benefit/cost analysis to justify the project, the Corp did some interesting analysis.
To value the flood control "benefits" of the project they estimated the future value of land and property
development that would be protected by the dams. To compute the costs, they computed the present value of land
to be flooded. (Land about to be flooded sin't;t worth much.) When they finally did get around to talking with
the Tribes, the Indians had little ammunition.
Some Indians were fatalistic; they wanted leaders to get what they could for the inevitable flooding. Others wanted
no dam and wanted leaders to do what they could to stop it. At one of the negotiating sessions a young dissident
named Crow Flies Figh in full regalia stormed the room where talks were taking place. Shouting in his native tongue,
he threw all the papers there off the table and left the area. Incensed, the strong willed Col. Pick left the negotiations
,never to return. He would play "hard ball!" The Indians would pay for their insolence.
The final "deal" to which the Tribes never agreed offered them $33 per acre for their land, a paltry
sum which would never have allowed them to buy suitable replacement land (even if such land had existed.) The Indians
asked to cut the timber which would be flooded; their request was refused. They asked for access to some of the
hydroelectric power to irrigate their less fertile land; this too was denied. Then they asked for funding for a
diversion project to irrigate land from the lake; no project has been developed. They asked for a bridge across
the . The only bridge which would let them cross the river to visit friends and family was to be flooded. There
wasn't another within fifty miles. Today there is a small bridge near the south end of the lake and most people
must travel more than a hundred miles around the lake to get across. But the Corp wasn't completely inflexible.
The Engineers did agree to reduce the height of the Dam by twenty feet in order to prevent flooding of parts of
Williston , North Dakota, a White settlement. Later when the Tribes tried to repurchase the land taken which was
not flooded, they were rebuffed. Even now they cannot graze their cattle on the vacant land around the lake that
wasn't flooded. But perhaps the worst indignity of all, the lake which flooded 155,000 acres of the basin's best
bottom land and timber, the waters which buried the hopes and dreams, the homes and bones of ancestors, the lake
which destroyed the social fabric of the community was named LAKE
SAKAKAWEA. Would she have helped save the Lewis and Clark
expedition had she known?
THE AFTERMATH
The Garrison Dam has been a major blow to the Tribes. Once a relatively
prosperous community, Fort Berthold now has an unemployment rate approaching 70%. (When U S unemployment reached
30% in the 1930's it was called "the great depression.") The other signs of social dissentigration, poverty,
crime, alcoholism, are now there. Today the once 7 million Tribal land has been reduced to about 900,000, and that
is shared with non Indians. The "Res" is split into five separate sections, with the remaining people
spread out on the plains. Like-A-Fish_Hook is at the bottom of the lake. The people are trying to regroup. They
have forcefully lobbied for Garrison Diversion Project funding. They have opened a Junior College at Fort Berthold.
Recently they leased 450,000 acres of relatively poor grazing land to a Canadian oil and gas company. And the Tribes
have joined MNI SOSE, an organization of Missouri Tribes enabling the pooling of resources to fight for water
rights. The Tribes have articulate spokespersons and their tales and teachings are being published. The May, 1998
Executive Order of President Clinton requiring consultation with decency and respect for Tribes before Indian policy
is made offers some hope that Pick Sloan will not happen again. Finally, the North Dakota Legislature has authorized
spending of $200 million for Indian Irrigation projects throughout the state. Most of the money, however, would
come from the Federal Government. That body has yet to respond. Evenso, it is possible the Tribes may receive some
benefits from the project for which they have paid such a dear price.
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