In May I received a call from a land manager at the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanting to know if we would be interested in harvesting about one hundred free roaming buffalo. He’s stationed at Fort Thompson, SD, on the eastern bank of the Missouri River, where many of the Dakota people were settled after the famous Minnesota uprising of 1862. The name of the reservation is Crow Creek and, if you can look beyond the fact that the great Missouri River was drowned by the reservoir that was formed behind Big Bend Dam a hundred years after the Dakotas came to live there, you will find the landscape gorgeous. The bridge across the river actually runs along the top to the dam and Lake Sharp swells a mile wide and seventy miles above the dam to the north. Lake Francis Case stretches out below the dam for another seventy miles.
It is difficult for me to look at those huge, beautiful bodies of water and see what the few boaters and walleye fishermen see. I keep thinking about that wild river, still trying to snake along its ancient course, even though it is covered now with a couple hundred feet of still water. Along the banks for many miles, irrigated circles of corn reflect neon green from flatland prairies that once were home to thousands of species of grass, forbs, insects, mammals, and birds. I can’t help thinking of all the bio-diversity that has been lost to huge monocultures of crops and to the eerily, sterile blue of the reservoirs. I remember part of a poem, written by a Dakota high school girl in a class I taught forty years ago at the reservation school on the northern edge of Crow Creek. The poem was a poignant lament for the flooded, fertile river bottom, buried even then below the combination electric power, irrigation, recreation, and flood-control machine of the conquering Whites. I can’t find a copy of the poem and I hope that it still exists somewhere. But I’ll never forget that the poem’s focus was on the bays of the reservoir where drowned cottonwoods can still be seen, dark and twisted, like tortured fingers stretching toward the sky that once gave them life. “The tree tops,” the young girl wrote, “are like black draggers in my heart,”
Even with the massive technology of Big Bend Dam, Buffalo Country, where the reservation of the Dakota people is located, is the poorest country in the United States. The average annual income is $5,213.00. So, even though the Missouri lakes are great playgrounds for main-stream America, wonderful fisheries, and great water skiing venues, it is hard for me to marvel at the forty thousand dollar boats streaking to and fro. It’s hard for me to watch Orvis-clad outlanders loading those boats onto trailers and, with expensive SUV’s, pulling them back to comfortable lives with air conditioning, clean water, and infrastructures that offer stability and safety.
The Crow Creek, Dakota people have very little: alcohol and domestic abuse, a nearly vacant casino, a few government jobs, the promise of a new school. But on the hill-sides above the reservoir the western wheat-grass still grows. There is little blue stem and lots of side-oats grama-grass. The lead plant, prairie clover, yellow cone flowers, and Echinacea dapple the land with surprising color. The Dakota People still have healthy pasture and as a result, they have a wonderful buffalo herd. The first time I looked at the herd they were so wild I had to use binoculars. What I saw was a wonderfully healthy band of buffalo that had never tasted anything but native pasture – exactly the kind of buffalo that Wild Idea Buffalo Company demands.
In the dark, rundown, and cramped Department of the Wildlife office in the tribal administration building I made a deal with the reservation Director of Wildlife who cautioned me that the Tribal Council would have to approve what we had agreed upon. The director’s name was Little Norm and he confided that he did not know much about buffalo or any other kind of wildlife. He was a political appointee. His father, Big Norm, had been on the Council until he was recently indicted for an unspecified malfeasance. Little Norm shrugged his shoulders and let me know that he might not be the Director of Wildlife for long.
As it turned out, the next time I saw Little Norm was when our Sustainable Harvest Crew showed up at the reservation’s only motel. It was the night before we began to harvest the tribe’s excess buffalo. His political star had faded, but he still had some political clout through another relative. He was no longer the Director of Wildlife. Now he was the night maintenance man at the battered little motel that catered to walleye fishermen, a few die hard casino goers, , and, for the next seven Wednesdays, a crew of buffalo harvesters from the Black Hills.
The new Director of Wildlife is Wayne Big Eagle, another young man with little wildlife experience but excellent intentions, a good mind, and as cool as a Navy Seal. He spent the first twenty years of his working life at one of America’s largest mint farms – run by a family from the Klamath Valley, but situated on one of the irrigated flats above the drowned river. When I first met him, Wayne was only a few days into a politically perilous job, so he didn’t say much until he was sure he could trust me. There is financial turmoil at the Wildlife and Tribal level and everything is scrutinized by outside auditors. Wisely, Wayne clears everything with the Tribal Council and leaves a paper-trail a mile wide. He aspires to become a professional biologist and is taking college wildlife courses. He’s a great guy to work with and I liked him from the start.
His number two man is a stocky Dakota man named Rudy Gonzales and in the last two months I have come to know him pretty well. Rudy too is relatively inexperienced when it comes to managing buffalo. Of course they have nothing to work with: The corrals are poor, the electric fence dysfunctional, and the tractor is little better than a junker. The four wheel drive is out of the pickup that Rudy depends on to get him around some very rough country. But Wayne Big Eagle and Rudy Gonzales are resourceful men and they are not afraid of work. For what they have to work with, they are doing a great job of managing the 350 head of buffalo.
Crow Creek’s pervious attempts to trim down their herd numbers have not been good. For one reason or another they tried to corral the buffalo and things did not work out well. The buffalo started running as soon as they saw the phalanx of pickups and ATVs enter the field. There were a couple days of racing around the 3400 acre pasture, then a lot of crashing into coral panels and gates. And finally the job was only partly finished, and not before there were injured buffalo and even some death loss. At his core, Rudy has a kinship with the herd, and so the previous experience left a bitter taste in his mouth. As a result he was skeptical about our plan to drive slowly among the buffalo, pull up very close to the animals to be harvested, and take them down with a single, short shot. Still, Rudy wanted to believe that the buffalo could be harvested without trauma and so he pitched in on a few weeks of pre-harvest training that finally reestablished the natural trust and kinship between the buffalo and the people. I spent days sitting in Rudy’s pickup in the buffalo pasture. The idea was to keep everything clam. We drove slowly and reassured the buffalo. We talked to the buffalo and we talked to each other.
Through the weeks of training, and now the weeks of harvesting, I have asked Rudy a few exploratory questions about what he knows of his heritage and I have found out that his understanding of his own people’s history has great gaps. I know about gaps in one’s history because I have almost no knowledge of my own, except the generic Irish stories that go along with my name. I have no recollection of any O’Brien older than my grandparents. Between County Clair in Ireland and the Ohio town where I was born is the same sort of great gap that Rudy has between New Ulm, Minnesota and Crow Creek, SD. It is odd that I know more about his great gap than I know of my own and I hesitate to tell him what I know. But more and more now, as we pass hour after hour in the buffalo pasture above the Missouri River Lakes I toy with the idea of bringing up the subject of the Battle of Birch Coulee where Rudy’s ancestor, Chief Little Crow, defeated Colonel Henry Sibley. I want to ask him if anyone ever talks about the time during the American Civil War when his people were denied the provisions guaranteed by President Lincoln’s government and the trader told them to go eat grass. I’m curious about what his reaction would be if I told him of the atrocities his people carried out on mine: the raped women and girls, the tortured corpus of the trader found among the five hundred slaughtered, his mouth stuffed with grass.
As the harvest progresses we continued to stay with the buffalo. Every week now for over a month, and for another month to come, we move with them as they travel the rough but beautiful pasture. We talk about the plants in the pasture. I tell him what I know about the grasses and he teaches me how to find the wild turnips that are so good in venison stew. When the tractor refuses to start we lay under it and tighten cables. When we drove into a hole and bust the steering arm on his pickup we achieved a temporary fix with a short piece of chain and pair of vice grips. Now the buffalo do not run from us. They come to us and the harvest proceeds without a hitch. I don’t want to do anything to spoil the joy I find in Rudy’s company but still I want to ask him if the old people ever talk about their grandparents being sent into exile along the Missouri River when it was still a river. I wonder what he thinks about, or if he even knows, the fact that it was the Great White Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, that gave the order to hang 38 of his ancestors. I wonder if he ties his presence in the buffalo pasture to the largest mass execution in American history.
Maybe our conversation will get around to all of that, but probably not. With luck, we will learn to sit more quietly in the beautiful pasture there above the sleeping river and let the wind carry messages between us and the grazing buffalo.
In May I received a call from a land manager at the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanting to know if we would be interested in harvesting about one hundred free roaming buffalo. He’s stationed at Fort Thompson, SD, on the eastern bank of the Missouri River, where many of the Dakota people were settled after the famous Minnesota uprising of 1862. The name of the reservation is Crow Creek and, if you can look beyond the fact that the great Missouri River was drowned by the reservoir that was formed behind Big Bend Dam a hundred years after the Dakotas came to live there, you will find the landscape gorgeous. The bridge across the river actually runs along the top to the dam and Lake Sharp swells a mile wide and seventy miles above the dam to the north. Lake Francis Case stretches out below the dam for another seventy miles.
It is difficult for me to look at those huge, beautiful bodies of water and see what the few boaters and walleye fishermen see. I keep thinking about that wild river, still trying to snake along its ancient course, even though it is covered now with a couple hundred feet of still water. Along the banks for many miles, irrigated circles of corn reflect neon green from flatland prairies that once were home to thousands of species of grass, forbs, insects, mammals, and birds. I can’t help thinking of all the bio-diversity that has been lost to huge monocultures of crops and to the eerily, sterile blue of the reservoirs. I remember part of a poem, written by a Dakota high school girl in a class I taught forty years ago at the reservation school on the northern edge of Crow Creek. The poem was a poignant lament for the flooded, fertile river bottom, buried even then below the combination electric power, irrigation, recreation, and flood-control machine of the conquering Whites. I can’t find a copy of the poem and I hope that it still exists somewhere. But I’ll never forget that the poem’s focus was on the bays of the reservoir where drowned cottonwoods can still be seen, dark and twisted, like tortured fingers stretching toward the sky that once gave them life. “The tree tops,” the young girl wrote, “are like black draggers in my heart,”
Even with the massive technology of Big Bend Dam, Buffalo Country, where the reservation of the Dakota people is located, is the poorest country in the United States. The average annual income is $5,213.00. So, even though the Missouri lakes are great playgrounds for main-stream America, wonderful fisheries, and great water skiing venues, it is hard for me to marvel at the forty thousand dollar boats streaking to and fro. It’s hard for me to watch Orvis-clad outlanders loading those boats onto trailers and, with expensive SUV’s, pulling them back to comfortable lives with air conditioning, clean water, and infrastructures that offer stability and safety.
The Crow Creek, Dakota people have very little: alcohol and domestic abuse, a nearly vacant casino, a few government jobs, the promise of a new school. But on the hill-sides above the reservoir the western wheat-grass still grows. There is little blue stem and lots of side-oats grama-grass. The lead plant, prairie clover, yellow cone flowers, and Echinacea dapple the land with surprising color. The Dakota People still have healthy pasture and as a result, they have a wonderful buffalo herd. The first time I looked at the herd they were so wild I had to use binoculars. What I saw was a wonderfully healthy band of buffalo that had never tasted anything but native pasture – exactly the kind of buffalo that Wild Idea Buffalo Company demands.
In the dark, rundown, and cramped Department of the Wildlife office in the tribal administration building I made a deal with the reservation Director of Wildlife who cautioned me that the Tribal Council would have to approve what we had agreed upon. The director’s name was Little Norm and he confided that he did not know much about buffalo or any other kind of wildlife. He was a political appointee. His father, Big Norm, had been on the Council until he was recently indicted for an unspecified malfeasance. Little Norm shrugged his shoulders and let me know that he might not be the Director of Wildlife for long.
As it turned out, the next time I saw Little Norm was when our Sustainable Harvest Crew showed up at the reservation’s only motel. It was the night before we began to harvest the tribe’s excess buffalo. His political star had faded, but he still had some political clout through another relative. He was no longer the Director of Wildlife. Now he was the night maintenance man at the battered little motel that catered to walleye fishermen, a few die hard casino goers, , and, for the next seven Wednesdays, a crew of buffalo harvesters from the Black Hills.
The new Director of Wildlife is Wayne Big Eagle, another young man with little wildlife experience but excellent intentions, a good mind, and as cool as a Navy Seal. He spent the first twenty years of his working life at one of America’s largest mint farms – run by a family from the Klamath Valley, but situated on one of the irrigated flats above the drowned river. When I first met him, Wayne was only a few days into a politically perilous job, so he didn’t say much until he was sure he could trust me. There is financial turmoil at the Wildlife and Tribal level and everything is scrutinized by outside auditors. Wisely, Wayne clears everything with the Tribal Council and leaves a paper-trail a mile wide. He aspires to become a professional biologist and is taking college wildlife courses. He’s a great guy to work with and I liked him from the start.
His number two man is a stocky Dakota man named Rudy Gonzales and in the last two months I have come to know him pretty well. Rudy too is relatively inexperienced when it comes to managing buffalo. Of course they have nothing to work with: The corrals are poor, the electric fence dysfunctional, and the tractor is little better than a junker. The four wheel drive is out of the pickup that Rudy depends on to get him around some very rough country. But Wayne Big Eagle and Rudy Gonzales are resourceful men and they are not afraid of work. For what they have to work with, they are doing a great job of managing the 350 head of buffalo.
Crow Creek’s pervious attempts to trim down their herd numbers have not been good. For one reason or another they tried to corral the buffalo and things did not work out well. The buffalo started running as soon as they saw the phalanx of pickups and ATVs enter the field. There were a couple days of racing around the 3400 acre pasture, then a lot of crashing into coral panels and gates. And finally the job was only partly finished, and not before there were injured buffalo and even some death loss. At his core, Rudy has a kinship with the herd, and so the previous experience left a bitter taste in his mouth. As a result he was skeptical about our plan to drive slowly among the buffalo, pull up very close to the animals to be harvested, and take them down with a single, short shot. Still, Rudy wanted to believe that the buffalo could be harvested without trauma and so he pitched in on a few weeks of pre-harvest training that finally reestablished the natural trust and kinship between the buffalo and the people. I spent days sitting in Rudy’s pickup in the buffalo pasture. The idea was to keep everything clam. We drove slowly and reassured the buffalo. We talked to the buffalo and we talked to each other.
Through the weeks of training, and now the weeks of harvesting, I have asked Rudy a few exploratory questions about what he knows of his heritage and I have found out that his understanding of his own people’s history has great gaps. I know about gaps in one’s history because I have almost no knowledge of my own, except the generic Irish stories that go along with my name. I have no recollection of any O’Brien older than my grandparents. Between County Clair in Ireland and the Ohio town where I was born is the same sort of great gap that Rudy has between New Ulm, Minnesota and Crow Creek, SD. It is odd that I know more about his great gap than I know of my own and I hesitate to tell him what I know. But more and more now, as we pass hour after hour in the buffalo pasture above the Missouri River Lakes I toy with the idea of bringing up the subject of the Battle of Birch Coulee where Rudy’s ancestor, Chief Little Crow, defeated Colonel Henry Sibley. I want to ask him if anyone ever talks about the time during the American Civil War when his people were denied the provisions guaranteed by President Lincoln’s government and the trader told them to go eat grass. I’m curious about what his reaction would be if I told him of the atrocities his people carried out on mine: the raped women and girls, the tortured corpus of the trader found among the five hundred slaughtered, his mouth stuffed with grass.
As the harvest progresses we continued to stay with the buffalo. Every week now for over a month, and for another month to come, we move with them as they travel the rough but beautiful pasture. We talk about the plants in the pasture. I tell him what I know about the grasses and he teaches me how to find the wild turnips that are so good in venison stew. When the tractor refuses to start we lay under it and tighten cables. When we drove into a hole and bust the steering arm on his pickup we achieved a temporary fix with a short piece of chain and pair of vice grips. Now the buffalo do not run from us. They come to us and the harvest proceeds without a hitch. I don’t want to do anything to spoil the joy I find in Rudy’s company but still I want to ask him if the old people ever talk about their grandparents being sent into exile along the Missouri River when it was still a river. I wonder what he thinks about, or if he even knows, the fact that it was the Great White Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, that gave the order to hang 38 of his ancestors. I wonder if he ties his presence in the buffalo pasture to the largest mass execution in American history.
Maybe our conversation will get around to all of that, but probably not. With luck, we will learn to sit more quietly in the beautiful pasture there above the sleeping river and let the wind carry messages between us and the grazing buffalo.
Comments 12
Nice piece, Dan. There’s tragedy enough to go around at least twice. Maybe saving the prairie and growing the buffalo will be a tale told with the older ones 100 years from now.
I hope so.
Great story Dan. I too, would like to hear the stories Rudy’s grandparents had to tell, but in this case, don’t know if pealing the onion one more layer achieves the effort. Keep up the good work and we enjoyed our visit. bill
I’m a lawyer-librarian at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul MN. One of the faculty members I work with has done a lot of work and knows the history about which you speak very well. In the process of doing research for him, I have learned a lot about the Dakota pain as well. The Dakota are a proud and old culture, and we can learn much from their journey. Thanks for telling this story.
I’m in hopes that you will continue to work with the various tribes near you, for the mutual benefit which I’ve always wished was developed more consistently and much longer after our ancestors entered this land. My clan MacDonald has long been associated with the land out west.
MORE PLEASE!!
A very handsome picture of a land and a people who are now coming back into focus.
It’s clarity is stunning.
Beautiful, provocative. Thank you.
Your days being with Rudy, large blocks of time talking, sitting, moving with the buffalo, establishing that calm and respect between the buffalo and you, and your thoughts, kept private, make me think of Walt Whitman’s words:
“Word over all, beautiful as the sky, beautiful that war and all its deed of carnage must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the Sisters, Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again and ever again, this soil’d world. ”
From Reconciliation/Leaves of Grass. Best regards and many thanks for the work you do – with the buffalo and with The People
Pat
Enjoyed reading this! Spent last weekend north of Bismarck, ND where we painted the landscape at Cross Ranch State Park. The park runs along the Missouri and is a small cottonwood forest. The ranch was purchased by the Nature Conservancy and donated to the State some 20 years ago. It is one of the few remaining wooded areas that resemble the winding Missouri before the army core of engineers turned the river into a and barren high desert! One can only imagine the life that thrived along this river before it was damned up! Visit this place when you get the chance!
Thanks for caring enough to do what you do and write what you write. Recently hiked The Narrows (Little Bend) at Lower Brule. Spectacular scenery. Your musing brings home the painful history underlying the beauty. Lest we forget….
I wonder if Rudy read about Dr Eastman and his travels from South Dakota to Boston Medical and back to the west. He made the most of his situation.
My wife, Francie, and I are coming to your country for the Buffalo Round up at Custer State Park and our going to also look at your grassland area. We will be some Eco Tourist.
Hey Dan! Having worked with a few of the tribes and their buff herds here in Montana, your writing strikes a chord. And how refreshing to find someone else who looks at reservoirs with similar thoughts and feelings – we see the dammed Missouri in our backyard as well. Your words are soul touching, as usual. Sorry we missed you this year when we were in the Black Hills with the goshawks. We’ll have to make it work next year!