Montana Articles

Montana Indians Leave Democrats

6/6/2020

We have 8 tribes in the state and they live on 7 different reservations, which occupy parts of 15 different counties.

Seven of those counties make up the lion’s share of the reservation vote - Lake, Glacier, Blaine, Valley, Roosevelt, Big Horn and Rosebud.

Let’s take a look at how these counties voted in the primary.

Lake: 2,000 more votes for the GOP presidential and senate races than the Dem races, and nearly 2,500 more in the governor’s race.

Glacier: About 1,500 more votes for the Dem presidential race than the GOP and around 1,300 more for the Dem gubernatorial race and 1,200 more for governor.

Blaine: A dead tie at 859 votes for both Dem and GOP presidential race; 22 more votes for Dem senate than GOP; 15 more votes for GOP governor than Dem governor.

Valley: 1,500 more votes for GOP president than Dem; 1,500 more votes for GOP senate than Dem; nearly 1,600 more votes for GOP governor than Dem.

Roosevelt: Around 300 more votes for GOP president than Dem; about the same with the senate and governor.

Big Horn: About 50 more votes for GOP president than Dem; about 90 more votes for GOP senate than Dem; and over 150 more votes for GOP governor than Dem.

Rosebud: Over 1,000 more votes for GOP president than Dem; 1,050 more for GOP senate than Dem; nearly 1,100 more votes for GOP governor than Dem.

Of these 7 Indian counties, just one of them is still in the Dem category - Glacier. 62% of the county is Indian.

Blaine is 45% Indian and is one where they still have a chance, but the others all appear lost to them.

Big Horn County is the main prize. 60% of that county is Indian. When Tester first got elected to Congress, he took 64% of that county’s vote, a 2-to-1 margin over Burns.

Choteau and Hill counties also have sizeable native populations. In Choteau, around 1,500 more voted for the GOP president than the Dem, same for Senate, but 1,600 more for GOP governor than Dem. In Hill, over 400 more for GOP president than Dem and 400 more for senate and 500 more for governor.

The tribes have always been important for Dem election chances in this state, perhaps even critical.

In the 2005 book America Is Indian Country, this was said about the 1992 presidential race:

“The results in Montana were even more dramatic. Clinton won in Montana, carrying all the state’s cities. In the rural counties, though, he was beaten badly, except in those counties where Indian reservations were located. He won in those counties, and turnouts of 80 or 90 percent were reported on the reservations. Montana’s Indian Democratic activists clearly carried the state for Clinton.”

When we look back at the 2018 election, we see that Lake, Roosevelt, Glacier, Blaine and Big Horn counties all went to Tester. The margins were sometimes small, sometimes huge. Tester took Glacier with 75% of the vote, for instance...but Lake was won by just 3%.

In 2016, Hillary won just six of the state’s 56 counties - Big Horn, Deer Lodge, Gallatin, Glacier, Missoula and Silver Bow.

Just one native county.

She lost Blaine by 2.5%, Roosevelt by 6%, Hill by 18%, Lake by 20%, Choteau by 35%, Rosebud by 36%, Valley by 45%.

Republicans have been making outreach attempts in native country for years now, at the same time that Democrats mainly take the native vote for granted.

In 2014, Senator Daines became the first Republican senator to step foot on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer.

The Indian population makes up just 8% of the state’s population, but it’s growing faster than the white population. And they do in fact vote. In 2012, 61% of the native population voted.

Here’s how the Trib put it four years ago:

“But increasingly Republicans have latched on to issues where they tend to be in lockstep with Native Americans, such as the extraction of resources including coal. Tribes have said revenue from the energy source on their land, for example, accounts for much of their annual budget to fund health services, law enforcement and education. Coal and oil have been a target of Democrats in Washington who are concerned about their pollution impact on the environment.”

National ideas like the Dems’ Green New Deal and ideas closer to home - such as Missoula’s climate change policies - do not appeal to the leadership of the tribes. These folks need to make money and one of the only ways they can do that is through their land, and what’s on it or underneath it. Dems often oppose that now.

So the Indians are going over to the GOP.

Now, a lot can change in the 150 days we have until the election. We know that Dems will hire Indian outreach people in the hopes they can drive-up turnout. They’ll open satellite voting offices on the reservations, hoping this helps.

We saw these efforts in 2016. It didn’t work for Hillary or Juneau. Hell, Rocky Boy had just a 5% turnout! And let’s not even get into the hell living on the Fort Peck reservation is.

That’s a helluva turnaround from the 80-90% the Indians were giving Dems in the early-90s. But that was 30 years ago. Times change.

The biggest problem is for Cooney.

While nearly all of the Indian counties are now going for the GOP, the totals for the governor’s race were worse than all the others.

Typically, primary votes in those counties made it a point to vote for the GOP governor candidate when they’d already voted for Dem president and senate.

Why did this happen?

Cooney better get his high-priced staff on that question and fast. There’s a huge deficit of support for Cooney compared to Bullock and Biden.

Why is this?

Maybe it’s all the outreach from actual GOP politicians, not just Dem staffers that are hired from out-of-state for a few months of GOTV work. In ‘16, Dems hired a woman from Oregon who’d just gotten married, who then left her husband for several months to live in a basement in Helena while making sojourns to the reservations to get out the vote.

Well, that didn’t work.

What’s on the drawing board this year, Dems?

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Assault at Standing Rock (Should You Care?)

9/6/2016

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It’s clear that there are serious crimes happening to the east of us in the Dakotas.

The corporate media is not reporting this.

That’s no surprise.

Even if they were reporting it, I don’t think most Americans would care.

It’s about Indians, after all.

Standing Rock Stands Against Oil

What I’m talking about is of course the assault and battery of Indians on the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota.

These are Sioux Indians and they’ve been on that land since at least the 1700s. They’ve been in North America since around 28,000 B.C.

They first got to the Standing Rock Reservation in 1868 when the U.S. government put them there following Red Cloud’s War.

That land was first taken away from them in 1876 when the government wanted that gold-rich land for miners and settlers.

This started the Great Sioux War, one battle of which was Custer’s Last Stand.

You can read the detailed history of all this in my book Braves and Businessmen.

The point is, the Sioux tribes have been displaced from their land several times.

First they were pushed off so settlers could take over the areas around the Mississippi.

Next they were pushed off so miners and homesteaders could take over areas around the Black Hills.

Now they’re being pushed off so the oil companies can take over the areas they need for their pipeline.

That pipeline will run 1,172 miles and it’ll be 30 inches in diameter and 470,000 barrels of oil will run through it each day. That’s Bakken oil, which needs to get to refineries so it can be shipped overseas.

Route of DAPL pipeline.

We know that Bakken oil is “more prone to explosion” as it’s “more volatile than most other types of crude,” according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, “which correlates to increased ignitability and flammability.”

That’s one of the main arguments to use a pipeline and not oil trains. We know that 1.15 million gallons of oils were spilled by trains in this country in 2013 and in 2014 there were 141 “unintentional releases” of oil from trains, many from derailments.

Why are so many oil train spills happening, especially since we averaged just 25 of them a year between 1975 and 2012?

Most of it involves shoddy infrastructure, outdated train cars, train speed, routes, and the overall design of the tank cars. The Department of Transportation, far from doing anything about this, has dragged their feet.

That’s no surprise, as we know our federal agencies – through revolving door employment and the tendency to put top campaign donors in key positions – are nothing more than another arm of the industries they purport to regulate.

And because of these derailments and the lack of meaningful change from the government, oil pipelines are pushed by the media as a cure-all.

You know full-well from my reporting on the disastrous Yellowstone Oil Pipeline here in Montana that this is not the case.

Back in 1995 Montana’s Salish and Kootenai Indians forced the Yellowstone Pipeline Company to shut down their operations and get off their land.

They did this because the pipeline had 71 leaks on its route between 1954 and 1995. One of those spilled 163,000 gallons of oil.

Those Indians got the pipeline off their land, and the oil companies rerouted it.

Other Montanans would suffer, however. In 2011 the pipeline spilled 63,000 gallons into the Yellowstone River (the company got a $1 million fine) and in 2015 it spilled 50,000 gallons into the same river.

No fine was ever issued for the 2015 spill.

But let’s get back to what’s happening on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation along the North Dakota/South Dakota border.

Standing Rock

It all started in April when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation called for an Environmental Impact Statement for the project.

A couple months later in the summer young Indians from the Standing Rock Reservation headed to Washington to file an injunction against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers so they’d stop building the pipeline.

They just wanted to protect their water.

Nothing happened.

In August the first protests started and this resulted in a portion of the pipeline around Cannon Ball, North Dakota, halting production.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Susan Sarandon threw their support behind the protesters, garnering a bit of media attention, but nothing from the corporate behemoths that so often collude with Big Oil to brainwash the American public.

It was on September 3 that the company brought in private security to assault the protesters.

They chose the 153rd anniversary of the White Stone Hill Massacre to do it, an event that saw around 100 women and children killed by the U.S. government.

Why bother counting, if you’re a soldier or officer in the 1860s? They’re just Indians, after all.

Think that was just a coincidence on Saturday, or the sick humor we should expect from oil company executives that laugh when they pollute our water, slap their politician friends on the back when they get puny fines?

We know that dogs and pepper spray were unleashed on the protesters on Saturday, and there’s good video of this.

We know that the security guards that were brought in are not from the area.

We know the 30-year-old woman that bloodied her dog’s nose with Indian blood is actually from Ohio, as per the license plates on the car she was driving.

30-year-old Ohio woman that bloodied her dog's nose with Indian blood

She can be proud of protecting white heritage for money, as others like her have done before.

1963 in Birmingham

We know that she and the other mercenaries were hired by Kelcy Warren, the CEO of DAPL’s parent company, Energy Transfer Partners.

He has a net worth of around $3 billion.

This man uses his money to destroy our world

Energy Transfer Partners has a stock price of $41.26, up substantially from the February price of $22 a share.

The company has an enterprise value of $50 billion.

According to their balance sheet, the company has $22 billion in revenue and a gross profit of $5 billion. They have $386 million in cash on hand.

The company started in 1995, is based in Dallas, and has 5,000 employees. They have more than 24,000 miles of pipeline across the country.

They’ve also mobilized Indians to such an extent that we haven’t seen a gathering of tribes like this in 100 years.

The tribes are mobilizing, as they should, as is their right

The reason is simple – the company is trying to destroy their land.

Oh, you won’t hear about that – because these are Indians on oil land, not Indians in Oregon on land that no one cares about.

Remember when the corporate media, including the Montana Democratic mouthpiece, got all excited over the wildlife refuge standoff in Oregon?

A big outcry was over the sacred sites that’d been destroyed by protesters.

When an oil company does the same thing, however, the corporate media remains silent.

They know who pays their bills, they know who donates to the right campaigns.

So they stay silent, and let Indians suffer.

We know that on September 2 Energy Transfer Partners “brazenly used bulldozers to destroy our burial sites, prayer sites and culturally significant artifacts,” the chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe said.

So egregious were these violations that a federal judge came to the office on Labor Day and called for an emergency hearing for Thursday at 3 PM, a hearing that is to have members of both parties.

That should be interesting…but don’t expect to hear about it.

The corporate media and the politicians do not care, not one bit.

You can’t really expect Republican governor Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota to give a damn, however.

When paperwork was filed by the tribe with the state to point out that the land was sacred and that there were burial and prayer sites, the state actually gave that information to the pipeline company so they could bulldoze the area sooner and without a lot of pesky media types around.

Conclusion

I doubt you’ll hear any of this on your evening news or in your newspaper.

Why would you?

It doesn’t benefit the ruling oligarchy that controls us, controls what we watch and read and see and do.

How does that benefit them?

How does you knowing about some Indian protests over oil benefit them at all?

And really, how does knowing benefit you?

Do you care…should you care?

I don’t think so.

You’ve got work today, the kids to worry about later, the bills that still need to be paid, and probably that vacation to plan and lots of stuff to buy.

You’re busy.

And that, my friends, is exactly what our controlling corporate elite is counting on.

When you’re busy, nothing changes.

So keep on having that nice day.

You know damn well that the Indians a state over from us sure as hell aren’t.

But who cares – they’re just Indians.

Oh, I’m sorry…does that make you mad?

So what? Americans are too fucking lazy to do anything about it. And because we won’t do anything – even raise our voice – nothing will change.

Think anyone in Montana gives a shit, any of our politicians?

Hell, the only time we 'care' about Indians is a month or two before the election when we try to get them to vote.

The rest of the year it’s a big ‘fuck you, take your problems elsewhere.’

Our Montana politicians fall all over themselves to approve pipelines and make it easier for oil to operate in this state.

Our tax system demands it, as we won’t be getting funding from any other major sources besides oil and coal and other resources.

Oh, we could legalize marijuana, but then how would the Republicans in the legislature be able to dictate how people live their lives?

Freedom is important after all, especially the freedom to tell people what they can’t do.

I have absolutely no hope for our nation’s Indians or our environment.

People don’t care about those things and driving their car is more important.

It’s more important that Big Oil and other large companies bribe our politicians with campaign contributions so they can get their way, stop those wind and solar farms.

Clean rivers and a nice place to raise your kids?

Pal, we’ve got elections to win and that takes money. Take your concerns and go home – you don’t have a corporate bank account so you mean nothing.

Indians have been hearing that for centuries.

It won’t change.

We don’t want it to.

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Montana Democrats Think Indians Will Save Them

7/8/2016

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James Conner at the Flathead Memo had a post up yesterday called MT Democrats begin major organizing effort in Indian Country.

In it we’re told that the MT Dems have hired Amy Crooker, a graduate of the Salish Kootenai College.

So I’m assuming she’s a member of that tribe. Her job will be a tough one – trying to raise the 45% voter turnout that we saw around the Blackfoot Reservation in 2014 and the 5% that we saw at Rocky Boy.

Ouch, that’ll be a tough job.

And honestly…why are Dems even bothering?

First of all we know that Indians make up just 6.5% of Montana’s voting age population.

Next, we know that places like the Fort Peck Indian Reservation have a 53% unemployment rate.

Finally…Indians are going to Dems now!

Yeah, in 2014 “Democrats won five of the six reservation house districts” and in 2016 “no Republican filed for any reservation house district.”

So those will go to Dems. I guess the main thing is that Dems are trying to increase turnout somewhat for Bullock and Juneau and maybe a few of the other down-ticket races as well.

Bullock is the golden boy, the one that has to be reelected…no matter how many women or other witnesses to his corruption have to be fired.

Juneau is viewed as having a real chance to take the U.S. House seat that Democrats gave up 20 years ago, though why I have no idea.

And really…isn’t Juneau an Indian? Why would she be having problems in those areas, and wouldn’t it just be better to send her up to the reservations all the time?

Oh, I know – this is a way to build up the Democratic bench, even though this new hire was working in Oregon and had to be pulled back here.

I’m honestly not sure how much Indians around the state will be interested in listening to a double-degree holding Salish-Kootenai Indian anyways.

Isn’t that one of the richest tribes, after all? Hell, maybe she’ll just stir up resentment instead of votes.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that this move is pretty much futile, and because of that, seems kinda dumb.

It’s disgruntled, lower-class, feeling-hopeless white people that Montana Democrats need to be focusing on!

Indians are already in your camp!

We see this a lot with gays as well, however, where the Montana Democrats push a lot of policies for them…even though we know full-well that gay people are not going to vote Republican.

To me this is where National’s taint comes in, the DNC’s influence over us here.

We know from reports on Logicosity that the out-of-state ringer brought in to elect Bullock, Eric Hyers, has more power than the executive director of the party, Nancy Keenan.

That’s sad.

Nancy Keenan is a complete idiot but at least she knows something about the state, unlike Hyers and his lackey Pitt who’ll be on the first flight out of here after November.

Again, the taint of National and the silliness it produces.

At this point I’m hoping the monumental losses that Montana Democrats suffer in November will be the wakeup call they need.

Perhaps they’ll get some real talent in top positions in the party, not D.C. sell-outs like Keenan and her posse.

Perhaps we’ll get some people that feel discussing our platform, real issues, and how we can win the state are more important than anonymous attacks from Cowturd.

Perhaps we’ll get some individuals that can plan and strategize and get real results that help us take the legislature and actually deliver real change in people’s lives again.

Yeah, perhaps…but I’m not counting on it.

Montana Democrats are convinced that Hillary is a swell candidate, one whose coattails will pull them all up.

They ignore her scandals, her unpopularity, and all the issues like TPP and more war that they’d usually fight tooth and nail against.

But she’s Hillary, and as we know from the Montana Democratic playbook, it’s her turn.

That’s a big thing with Dems in Montana – waiting your turn. It’s why there’s no bench (most young people leave the state when they realize how hopeless the economy and the political situation is) and there’s no attempt to build that bench.

So Dems in Montana are convinced that Hillary will carry them through.

I’m convinced that Hillary will lose and though Bullock might pull through, another four years of his fuck-ups will just spoil Dem chances in 2020 and for the next few years after.

I sure hope his scandals crop up. I get some news folks contacting me occasionally asking about stuff, so they’re looking.

We just can’t abide corruption, we just can’t, and firing women that saw something or heard something is not right and the universe has a way of dealing with those situations.

It won’t be pretty.

So I really do hope that Dems get some sense knocked into ‘em this year, but even if they do, National and their corrupt-o-squad will probably still try to steer the course, hold the reins of funding, and tell us what to do and think.

It sucks, and I feel it’s one of the reasons for our abysmal 45% turnout in the primary this year.

Most people in Montana just don’t care anymore and they know voting won’t help them at all.

They’re not excited and looking at what Dems are giving them, they have no reason to get excited.

I’m excited, though – I’m excited that Dems will lose big, wake up, kick out the bums, and get some people with backbone in there that’ll get the job done.

It’ll happen, it has to.

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Why Do Montana Democrats Keep Lying to Indians?

4/26/2016

3 Comments

“Greg, hope the campaign is going ok.

I'm so upset with social media today regarding the death of the one year old girl at poplar yesterday. I feel a connection to that community as lived there from 1974-1999.

Not one comment offered any positive in site to why all these problems on this reservation continue to happen. I left there because I watched as the town died with each new democratic poverty program and the Native Americans suffered more.

But they kept buying into the Democratic parties lies and to this day will vote I'm guessing high 90 per cent demo.

Do you have any insight why Native Americans continue to vote this way? I thought maybe with your history background you could gave me a feel why.”

I received that email last Thursday from a man living in rural Montana.

What spurred that email was the story from last Wednesday, April 20, about a 1-Year-Old Girl Found Dead on Montana Indian Reservation.

ABC National had that story via the AP, probably because the story was so gruesome they knew they could get some hits on it, and thus advertising revenue.

For the most part, the little girl named Kenzley Olson “was abducted from her home” in Poplar on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

Area of Fort Peck Indian Reservation

More than 10,000 people live on the reservation, mostly Sioux and Assiniboine Indians.

One of them is Peter Dupree, who lived next door to Kenzley and watched as local and federal investigators “looked through trash bins in the alleys that run behind her house.”

Here’s a bit more from Dupree and the AP:

"It's so sad. It's almost crying time. This is a baby who was probably crawling and everything else," he said.

He added that crimes appeared to be on the rise as methamphetamine use on the reservation became more conspicuous over the past several years.

"I really think it's getting worse. It's not getting better," Dupree said. "The law and order has to step up to the plate."

Investigators found Kenzley's body the same afternoon that she went missing.

We learned the next day that a 42-year-old woman named Johnelle Red Dog had been arrested for the abduction.

Apparently, Red Dog “punched the girl several times and realized she had killed her.” At that point Red Dog “stuffed” Kenzley's body “in a duffel bag before leaving it in the garbage.”

It’s not clear how authorities discovered Red Dog was involved – it was Red Dog’s map that pointed them to the body – or how Red Dog is related to Kenzley or her family.

What we do know is that crimes like this aren’t new.

You might remember the 4-year-old girl that was kidnapped from a park in Wolf Point, also on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

That happened in February and they found the girl “several days later about six miles from the park. It’s clear that the 20-year-old man that abducted her tried to kill her as he faces attempted murder and aggravated sexual assault of a minor.

What’s going on?

To answer that, we might have to go back and look at the problem from its beginning.

A History of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation

The Fort Peck Indian Reservation has about 10,000 people living on it, as we mentioned, and it takes up more than 2 million acres in parts of four counties.

Because of that, it comes in as the ninth-largest Indian reservation in the country. The city of Wolf Point, with its 2,600 people, is the reservation’s largest urban area.

The reservation was created in 1878 and crammed into it were the Indians that’d defeated Custer two years earlier but had ultimately lost the Great Sioux War. So they were shunted off to the reservation, the same as the other half of the tribe that’d lost Red Cloud’s War a decade earlier.

Things went south fast. In 1881 the buffalo vanished from the area and two years later more than 300 Indians starved to death. The Dawes Act came in 1887 to try and give better management to the area. By about 1900, however, Congress opened up the reservation areas to white homesteaders.

The honyockers and clipper-bills had arrived, and they’d stay for about a decade, perhaps two, trying their hand in the land before heading off again from wherever they’d come.

In 1908 Congress passed the Fort Peck Allotment Act, something that surveyed the Indian lands and doled out 320 acres to each eligible Indian. Most of it was grazing land but some was timberland and some even had irrigation on it.

By 1913, 1.3 million acres of this land was still unalloted so it was made available to whites. By the 1920s the government boarding schools that’d been started up in 1877 were closed. Missionary schools run by Mormons or Presbyterians typically replaced these.

In 1927 the Fort Peck tribes wrote their own constitution and kept it when the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 tried to take it away from them. They amended it in 1952 and rewrote it in 1960 and it’s been about the same ever since.

Poverty on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation

A Montana State University PDF report has great numbers on the reservation.

In 1990 the poverty rate on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation was 31.6% and that rose to 35.3% by the year 2000.

In 2005 the reservation had an unemployment rate of 53.5%, higher than the average unemployment of 51.6% that Montana Indian reservations typically see. In fact, in 2005 1,544 people on the reservation were working, less than the 1,778 that were not.

In 2007 the number of reservation children that were eligible for free and reduced school lunches was 77% and in 2010 that rose to 83%.

From 2003 to 2009 the use of the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, or LIEAP, rose by 106%. All other Montana reservations saw increases of just 30%.

In 2000, 52% of the reservation’s households earned less than $25,000 a year. The state average is 37%.

Those are some very troubling numbers.

What do they mean in human terms?

The Herald-News had an article several years ago that got into that. Here’s an excerpt:

“Ed Plentz, the co-founder for the Love Has No Color program, which has worked consistently with the Fort Peck Indian Reservation for seven years to develop a chiropractic clinic in the area, said a cycle of despair contributed to the poverty on the reservation.

He stated when he first started delivering Christmas gifts to children on Fort Peck seven years ago, high school students were uninterested and nearly indignant about accepting the program’s gifts.

When he handed out gifts this year to the now-high school students who were only eight when the project began, he noticed a marked difference. The high school students had built a relationship with him and his team and a mutual trust had developed. Plentz said throwing money at a problem like poverty won’t fix it, but rather cited compassion, consistency and love.

Of course, those elements won’t fix the problem alone. It won’t happen by one person’s hand or overnight. Like most sicknesses in society, it will either be treated slowly over the course of generations or fester into something worse.”

The article goes on to speculate on the causes of poverty on the reservation, and what can be done about it.

He points out a 2011 Forbes Article that said “lack of property rights on reservations contributed to the high poverty rates.” Another argument is that “the isolated locations of reservations lack lucrative economic opportunities.”

Floyd Azure, the Fort Peck Tribal Chairman at the time, had this to say:

“The two factors that can change things for the better are diverse job opportunities and improved access to healthcare. We are working on both of these as well as quality housing and law enforcement to help everyone living in our community.”

Some think that oil is the answer, and in 2013 the Fort Peck Indian Reservation was churning out 1,100 barrels a day from 10 tribal wells and many more that are privately owned.

Despite this, much of the population remains in poverty. They lose hope as incomes drop, more hope as they wonder where they’ll live. Existing housing options are exhausted.

Reservation Housing is Deplorable

Housing is a big issue for the people on the reservation, and on all reservations across the country.

On April 9 the Flathead Beacon had a story up called Tribes Struggle with Decades of Housing Neglect.

The story primarily focuses on the city of Browning on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, which is located 400 miles to the west of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

We’re told that 40% of “on-reservation housing” is “considered substandard.” Compare that to the 6% of non-reservation homes that meet that designation.

The article depicts reservation housing with multiple family members staying one room. “It’s no unusual to find a grandma who has 15 people in her home,” the director of the Blackfeet Housing Authority said.

Because so many are in homes meant for just a few people, everything experiences wear and tear more. “Doors and cupboards designed to be opened and closed perhaps a dozen times a day may see 1,000 uses in a single week,” we’re told. “The major appliances, flooring, carpets, plumbing and fixtures all get worn down and worn out.”

The outside of the homes isn’t much better, and may be worse:

“Empty, weed-filled lots separate the scattered mix of old trailer homes and wood frame houses. To keep the constant Rocky Mountain winds from peeling their roofs away, residents pile discarded tires atop their trailer homes. Boarded windows, missing shingles and torn siding offer poor protection from the frigid Montana winters. Stray dogs rummage through drifts of trash piled against scrap lumber fences.”

Those same conditions exist on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, as was made quite clear in a 2013 article by the Make it Right project, a group that goes in and builds homes for people.

Homes on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation

Here’s what they said:

“Touring the Fort Peck Reservation neighborhoods in Poplar, Montana, we are immediately struck by the poverty and the need for healthy homes. Some people live in shoddy, substandard public housing. Others live in trailers with tires piled on top to hold the roof down in high winds.

Hundreds of people are on a waiting list for the poor quality homes that exist. We hear stories from people who have nine families living in a five bedroom home and take “sleeping shifts” to share the limited beds. Most homes are smaller, one or two bedrooms. We meet a woman who shares a two bedroom home with her elderly mother and her brother’s family – she and her three children sleep on the floor in the living room.”

Suicides on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation

All of this poverty has a seriously negative effect on families. We saw that quite clearly in 2010 when six students from Fort Peck Indian Reservation schools committed suicide and another twenty tried to.

“The rash of suicides in Poplar shocked the community and prompted the U.S. Public Health Service to send emergency teams to provide counseling and mental health services Fort Peck last June.

More than 100 people, including some parents and relatives of suicide victims, attended the Tuesday afternoon hearing in the Poplar High School auditorium.

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, presiding over the hearing, said the youth suicide rate on the Fort Peck Reservation that is 10 times the national average is unacceptable and has largely been overlooked.”

One of the students that killed themselves was 17-year-old Dalton Gourneau. He was suspended from school “and sent home for bringing a can of chewing tobacco to school. He shot himself that evening.”

Fanci Jackson, a 16-year-old student at that time, decided not to hang “herself with a rope when she felt she couldn’t take any more bullying at school.” Her reason? “I thought of my mom and dad and how much they love me,” she said, in tears. “And if I leave, what would they do without me? But most kids don’t think.”

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in Indians, the first being heart disease. The Herald-News tells us that:

“Tribal leaders have worked with representatives from the Montana Office of Public Instruction to strengthen the delivery of mental health support to youth and families on the reservation. The adopted “wraparound” process focuses on developing family-centered teams and plans throughout the reservation-wide school systems to connect students with resources within their own cultural framework. Key elements for success include engaging students and families and teachers, with effective interventions and monitoring.”

For the 90 days that the federal teams were on the reservation, there were no suicides.

Despite that, and despite suicides coming down in recent years, the Fort Peck Indian Reservation has the most suicides of any reservation in Montana, with 82 deaths per 100,000. The second highest is the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation with 64 deaths per 100,000 people.

The Lies Indians Get from Democrats

“The town died with each new democratic poverty program and the Native Americans suffered more. But they kept buying into the Democratic parties lies and to this day will vote I'm guessing high 90 per cent demo.

Do you have any insight why Native Americans continue to vote this way?”

Let’s get back to the email I received last week, and the reason I titled this post the way I did.

Montana Democrats are not helping Indians.

More, I feel Montana Democrats are lying to Indians, saying their lives will get better when we know full well from history that this simply will not happen.

Despite this, Montana’s Indians continue to vote for Democrats.

Or do they?

We know in 2012 that 46% of Montana white households returned an absentee ballot. Just 18% of Indian households did. Worse, many Indians have to drive a hundred miles to vote.

In 2014 Huffington Post had a story up called Does the Democratic Party Have an Indian Problem?

We learned that the Northern Cheyenne Tribe “met with Montana Democratic Party leadership” to ask “for support from Democrats for satellite registration and voting offices on reservations.”

They were unsuccessful in getting what they wanted. That’s a shame, as they’d been asking for the right to vote since 2012.

Secretary of State Linda McCulloch argued that “she can’t order the offices opened,” thus effectively forcing Indians that want to vote to drive “round trips as long as 180 miles across rugged terrain.”

The Montana Democratic Party opposed and “led the charge against the lawsuit” that the state’s Indians brought forth so they could get those voting offices opened.

It’s not clear why exactly the Montana Democrats wanted to restrict voting access to Indians, as the article makes clear:

“Keeping voting inconvenient for minority groups is a common GOP ploy. However, it’s a peculiar philosophical choice for the party of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama. Nor is it legal, according the Justice Department.

And for Democrats, it’s hardly strategic. Montana’s Native Americans make up 6.5 percent of the state’s population and register overwhelmingly Democratic — more than 90 percent on some reservations — in a state of hard-fought elections and razor-thin margins. Montana’s Democratic U.S. Senator Jon Tester has credited his one-percent 2012 win to Native voters.”

Linda McCulloch reversed herself in October 2015, saying she now thought voting offices were a good idea.

Despite this, many claimed in March 2016 that those offices were unequal. The reason was simple – the offices would not be open on primary election day or the general election day.

This seems strange, that Montana Democrats would try and restrict voting for Indians. After all, most of the times Montana Democrats have to go up to the reservations to get the vote out. They clearly want Indians to vote as they try to convince them to vote!

Some might wonder why Indians don’t vote for Republicans but I feel it’s the same reason gay people don’t – the GOP has made it abundantly clear that it hates them.

We know the Montana Republican Party has nothing but racist attitudes toward the Indians of this state.

That helps Democrats, big time.

No, it doesn’t mean they’ll get those Indian votes – we see the abysmal turnout numbers, proving that Indians do not care about the Montana Democratic message – but it does mean they don’t have to do anything to help Indians.

If the Indians aren’t going to vote Republican then all they can do is not vote, vote third-party, or go with the Democrats.

Democrats in Montana know this and that’s why nothing on reservations ever changes for the better. Democrats just need to offer lip-service to the Indians, for the worst that’ll happen is that the Indians will stay home and not vote (third-party votes help the Democrats).

So it’s a vicious cycle every two to four years where Democrats head on up to the reservations in groups, give their little song and dance, and then pat themselves on the back, proud that they ‘did something’ for the less well-off in the state.

Meanwhile, Indian poverty rates go up and the young people of the tribes continue to kill themselves…either quickly with guns or slowly with drugs and alcohol.

I don’t see that changing anytime soon, do you?

That’s why I say our Montana Democratic Party is lying to Indians.

The tell the poor people that their lives will get better when we know that will never happen.

It’s sad, because it doesn’t matter if the Indians of Montana vote Democratic or GOP, their lives will continue to get worse.

I don’t know what to do about this. All I can do is talk about it, point out the problem.

Far from being thanked for this, I’ll be ignored, or if I decide to press it, attacked.

Yes, the Montana Democratic Party will actually attack me because I want to make the lives of Indians better. To them, pointing out their decades of failure to help Indians is a bad thing.

Nope, I don’t expect we’ll see life improve on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.

I do expect we’ll continue to read stories about missing babies and toddlers, sometimes with their bodies being found in dumpsters.

In Montana, that’s how we want it.

Montana’s Indian Tribes: The Assiniboine (March 2013)

Montana’s Indian Tribes in the 1850s and 1860s (August 2013)

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Montana’s Maiden Rock

2/5/2016

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“Standing guard at the mouth of Bridger Canyon,” Annabelle Phillips wrote in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle on November 21, 1965, “is a stately pinnacle of rock.”

It’s called Maiden Rock and the people of the “Valley of the Flowers” know it well. They were the first there, where Montana Highway 293 now passes by, “a few hundred yards north and east of the U.S. Fish Hatchery Site.”

Maiden Rock, c 1890s

The Crow came to the valley to “gather the red raspberries, kinnikinnick and sour grapes for the fever that came with staying too long in one lodge.”

It was a good year, one which saw berries “so large the children put them, like caps, on their fingers.”

There were problems, however, and that was an approaching band of hostile Indians, one intent upon taking the valley for their own.

The chief of the Crow was wise but “the weight of the years sat upon him.” He could only call upon a leading brave of the tribe, Black Eagle.

Black Eagle was honored to take the mantle of leadership on this problem, though his wife Evening Star was not. She’d heard the hoot owl in a tree outside their lodge for three days now, which “foretold death for her beloved brave.”

Black Eagle laughed this off, telling her it was the chief the owl was hooting about. He went off, looking back on the “least little spot on the cliff where Evening Star stood watching.”

She’d climbed up there to see him off, watch until he faded from view. She stayed there for two days before coming down to “put all her things in order.”

Eventually the Crow were driven away, though Evening Star stayed. She’d promised Black Eagle that she’d wait and “none could change her mind.”

Many yeas later the Crow returned to the valley. There, “just below the high cliff where they had left the sorrowing Evening Star, they found a stone maiden.”

Legend has it that she:

“was going down to meet the faithful few who loved their young chief more than their lives and were bringing him home to bury him near the graves of his fathers. But, when only a little way down the mountain, she was turned to stone by the grief that was in her heart.”

“And she stands forever there at the canyon entrance while the evening star lingers long and lovingly over the maiden who bore its name."

Sometimes called “the pinnacle,” Maiden Rock stood at the entrance to Bridger Pass for two years after Philips wrote those words, until 1967 when it was blasted away that year by road crews.

Modernity had come. The maiden would stand no more.

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Who are the Montana Juneau’s?

11/27/2015

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Carol Juneau

Carol Juneau is a Democrat from Browning. She was born in Elbowoods, North Dakota, on April 5, 1945.

She moved to Lawrence, Kansas, to pursue her higher education, earning a business degree from Haskell Institute.

During the 1950s and 1960s Carol Juneau and her husband Stan “worked as part of a Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation program to integrate Native Americans into urban, mainstream culture.”

During this time Carol’s daughter Denise was born, on April 5, 1967.

When Carol was 24-years old she moved to Montana, in 1969. Denise Juneau was 2-years old at the time. The family settled into Billings and Carol and Stan continued their studies at Eastern Montana College.

Carol earned a psychology degree there and eventually a master’s degree in school administration from the University of Montana. In 1974 the family moved to Stan’s hometown of Browning.

On February 8, 1999, the Helena Independent Record had an article called “Juneau works to give tribes a voice.” It reported that Carol Juneau lived on the Blackfeet Reservation for 25 years, “earned three degrees and devoted her career to public education.

We’re told that she and her husband Stan “have worked with schools in Browning and Heart Butte for the better part of the past two decades.” Carol even became a Stay-in-School program director. Stan Juneau “was a school counselor, athletic director and a superintendent before retiring.”

When Representative George Heavy Runner stepped aside in 1998 “to take a post on the Blackfeet Tribal Council” Carol Juneau “saw an opportunity” and got herself appointed to the seat.

In that position she worked “furiously to advance lawmakers’ awareness of Indian issues and needs.” To do this she pointed out that around 10% of elementary school students and 7% of the high school students in Montana are Indian yet just 2% of the teachers are.

Back in the 1999 Montana Legislature, Carol Juneau was just one of four Indians serving, three Democrat and one Republican.

In the first week of February 1999, Carol Juneau spoke in front of the House Democratic caucus, telling them that “Indian people have been really good to Democrats; you need to be good to them.”

The article went on to note that:

In her own home, education has also taken a top priority. Both of Juneau’s children have advanced college degrees.

And unlike many other Browning-area teachers, Juneau raised her family right in the sometimes-rough reservation town of Browning.

‘I wanted my kids to grow up in an Indian community,’ Juneau said, adding, ‘You need to be part of the community where you live and work.’

Above all, Juneau wants to make clear that while Indian tribes are sovereign nations, tribal members ‘are citizens of the state of Montana, the same as any other citizens.’

‘I’d like to see that Indian people and Indian tribes in Montana aren’t left outside of everything,’ she said.”

On January 5, 2009, the Missoulian had an article called “Profile: Indian lawmaker Carol Juneau.”

This was 10 years later and the article opens by telling us that Carol Juneau was “the longest-serving member of the Montana Legislature’s American Indian caucus.”

Even back then she was working on water compact issues, something we’re still grappling with…always grappling with.

We’re told that Juneau had a bill to “extend the Reserve Water Rights Compact Commission,” which was “the only state commission in the country dedicated to striking water compact agreements between state and tribes with federally reserved water rights.”

What we’re getting at is the recent transfer of Kerr Dam to the Salish and Kootenai tribes in 2015, something that Juneau anticipated six years before and was working toward.

Besides that there was “the need to increase the state’s education budget, expand the definition of hate crimes and regulate the sale of energy drinks.” The latter was often confused with alcoholic drinks.

She’d come far, though she was still “most noted for the successful passage of the Indian Education for All Act” in 1999.

What the Act did was “mandate that Native history and contemporary tribal issues be taught to all K-12 students, a law ignore for more than 30 years.”

That included the time when her own daughter was educated in the state.

Denise Juneau

Denise Juneau, Feb 2013

All I was able to find on Denise Juneau at the Montana Historical Society was a single December 2008 article in the Great Falls Tribune called “Another glass ceiling falls: Denise Juneau, First Indian woman in statewide office has always carried high expectations.”

Kristen Cates wrote the article and it profiles the then-upcoming swearing in ceremony for Denise Juneau.

Juneau “jokes that she garnered more votes in Montana than Obama – she had 234,000 votes to his 231,000.” Putting “40,000 miles on her car” during her campaign surely helped.

This likely surprised her mother. Carol Juneau “said that, at first, it was hard to believe her daughter when she called and said she wanted to run for office.”

She goes on to say that “Denise was a relatively shy young girl” and “didn’t try to take leadership roles in things. When she was in high school, she became more assertive.”

“She learned about her heritage through cultural events her family attended, but never in the classroom.”

Because Denise was so tall she played basketball. “Traveling outside of Browning for games and tournaments was sometimes a horrifying experience because she and her teammates hear racist taunts, had rocks thrown at their bus and were spit at.”

Denise was inspired by her high school English teacher, Anna Lunick. After graduating from Browning High School in 1985, Denise headed off to Bozeman for her college years and earned a degree in English in 1993.

“Juneau said there was some culture shock when she left Browning to attend college in Bozeman, where few people looked like her.”

Boston was worse, Juneau said, for that’s where Harvard was located. It took her just a year to get her masters degree in education from the school, in 1994. She later said, “Boston was great, but I don’t ever want to live there.”

After that Juneau went to New Town, North Dakota, for a year to teach on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, “where her mother grew up.”

In 1995 she came back to Montana to teach English at her old high school. By 1997 she was ready for a change and headed down to the University of New Mexico to get her doctorate. She did that for a year until she “gave it up and moved back to Montana.”

It was 1998 and Denise was ready to get “her feet wet in the Indian Education for All program under Nancy Keenan’s administration at the Office of Public Instruction as an Indian education specialist,” a program “funded solely with federal dollars.”

She held that OPI position until 2001 and then went to Missoula to attend law school.

By 2004 she was done there, law degree in hand. It was off to “work as a clerk for the Montana Supreme Court” after that, a position that lasted until 2005, and then “at a law firm in Missoula, where she dealt with tribal law” until 2006.

In 2006 Denise Juneau moved back to Helena to work “as director of Indian Education for All at OPI under then-Superintendent Linda McCullough.”

By 2008 she was running for her boss’s old position and as we saw, she won it. She did so again in 2012 and now in 2016 she’ll be running for the U.S. House.

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What is Colter’s Hell?

9/3/2015

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Colter’s Hell is the novel I’m currently working on, the second in my Mountain Man series.

The book follows mountain man John Colter as he goes back up the Missouri River in the summer of 1807 and then out into the rough winter of 1807-8.

The latter he did alone, with just himself and a 35-pound pack. He had a gun too, and I’ve given him a Northwest Trade Gun, or a Barnett Trade Gun as they were often called.

Manuel Lisa, another main character, has a Brown Bess, which is what the British muzzle-loading smoothbore muskets were called.

Barnett Trade Gun with Dragon plate

Brown Bess British Smoothbore Musket

Yeah, I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. There are about forty men in this book, though we only meet about half a dozen of them by name.

They’re the men that headed up the Missouri with Manuel Lisa to build Fort Raymond, and they reached its spot on November 21. I have no idea when the fort was finally finished, but put it at early-January in my novel.

It is a novel, though one with lots of history that I’ve thoroughly researched. I did that research online, at the Montana Historical Society in Helena and at the Missoula Public Library’s Montana Room. So this book is accurate…though not factual.

What does that mean? Well, if I wanted to stick to the facts, we’d have a pretty boring story on our hands. The facts are that Colter went out that winter and walked around in a big circle before coming back, that’s the gist of it (the complete route is listed below, with images).

Pretty boring, huh? I suppose I could have thrown in some grizzly bear attacks or maybe some run-ins with an angry moose, but instead I chose Indians.

You’ll get about two dozen different Indians in this book, though most are of two tribes. Here’s what that looks like:

Some of these characters were real people, though most are made up

I made up the names of this small Cree band that plays a big part in our story

That’s the political hierarchy of the two Indian groups I have out in the wilderness with the whites. Don’t worry – nearly every one of those names is made up. And don’t worry about keeping track of them – they’ll probably be dead before you’ll need to.

Oh, yeah…there’s a Frenchman too, one named Francois Antoine Larocque. He was an actual trapper that explored the same general areas as Colter, just a couple years before. He went all over and traded and even met Lewis and Clark as they were heading to the Pacific. He was never an Indian captive, though I make him one.

It’s all in the book, and I hope you’ll check it out. I had a lot of fun writing it, which you might have been able to tell – I finished the book in just a month.

Colter’s Hell will be out soon, and if you like Montana history, thrilling stories, and quite a bit of action and adventure, this is a book for you. Check it out!

John Colter’s Montana

Montana was quite a different place in 1807 than what we think of it as today. For one thing, Indians were firmly in charge. Tribes controlled various areas of the state, with some taking up the plains area in the east and others taking up the mountainous areas in the west. Like today, the real dividing line for control was the Rocky Mountains.

Montana was very political in 1807, and that was due to the shifting Indian alliances. There were lots of tribes in this area, many spoke different languages, and they often hated each other’s guts.

Remember, many of the tribes that came here had been pushed west by other tribes, themselves pushed by the whites. Plains tribes became nomadic, and the Blackfoot were a good example of this. No one could ride a horse or kill from it better than a Blackfoot brave.

Here are some maps that show Indian territory in Montana in the early 1800s:

Native American tribes on Upper Missouri in 1810s (map from The Fur Trade of the American West, 1807-1840, by David Wishart)

Manuel Lisa area of operations map (from Manuel Lisa and the Opening of the Missouri Fur Trade by Richard Ogelsby)

Map showing locations of various Indian tribes all across America

This map that I found in a Fort Union brochure at the Montana Historical Society is a good one. I like it because it has forts.

Here’s another map that has fur trapping forts in the early 1800s as well as another that shows the economic trade routes those furs took to get to market.

Fur Trapping Map, 1807-1820 (from Wishart)

Fur Trade Transport route to Market, 1835 (from Wishart)

Fur trapping was changing on the Upper Missouri, and people like Manual Lisa were trying to open up trade more. That was easier than relying on men to do all the work, for if you could give some baubles and trinkets to the tribes, it was a lot easier. That’s where Colter came in.

Montana’s Crow Indians in the early 1800s

Colter set out to open up relations with the nearby Crow Indians, and that’s why Lisa sent him out over the winter of 1807-8. The main camp of the Crow Indians was at the upper end of the Wind River Valley, and he’d be walking.

Colter was to head up the Wind River. On the way he went through Jackson’s Hole, across the Tetons, skirted Yellowstone, and arrived back at Fort Raymond.

He journeyed extensively in the winter from October 1807 to around April 1808, and routinely did so in temperatures below freezing. The temperatures in January alone can get as low as -30 °F (-34 °C), and it’s a wonder he didn’t die from exposure.

He travelled with only a gun, a pack weighing 35 pounds, and the clothes on his back. He travelled hundreds of miles, perhaps as many as 500, through Montana and Wyoming, in areas that had never seen a white man before, and with no maps or guides to show him the way.

Here are some Montana Crow facts:

The Crow split into the Mountain Crow and the River Crow shortly after coming to Montana around the late-1600s and early-1700s.

The French met the Crow in 1743. In 1804 the tribe had 350 lodges and 3,500 members.

Crow men were proud of their long hair and decorated it. Women had short hair.

The Crow had as many as 10,000 horses by the mid-1800s. They also had hundreds of dogs.

Nirumbee was the name for the goblin-like little people of Crow folklore. They’re also called the Little People of the Pryor Mountains.

Old Man Coyote was the name for the Crow Creator God.

Lewis & Clark Characters in the Book

The book opens with Lewis and Clark, and particularly the night of July 26-27, 1806. The men involved were:

Lewis
Drouillard
Joseph Field
Reuben Field

The men had horses, and that’s why the Indians became interested in them, and why two lost their lives. Lewis got 21 horses from the Nez Perce on May 9 (Clark’s group had 49 horses on July 3). Those horses were sought by the Blackfeet, and that incident starts our story, with a fight that took place south of Birch Creek, 25 miles southeast of Browning.

After that we move ahead a year to Manuel Lisa. Some of the men that make up this storyline include:

George Drouillard – a half-Shawnee half-French-Canadian scout.

Sergeant Nathaniel Pryor – (1772 - 1831) - Pryor remained in the army after the L&C Expedition and was a second lieutenant until 1810. He married an Osage girl, and they had several children who were all given Indian names. He is buried at Pryor, Mayes County, Oklahoma, where a monument stands in his honor.

Private John Potts – (1776-1810) - Potts joined Manuel Lisa's trapping party of 1807 to the upper Missouri. In 1810 he was a member of Andrew Henry's party to the Three Forks of the Missouri. Here he again met John Colter, where they were attacked by the Blackfeet, and John Potts was killed.

Private Peter Weiser – (1781 - ?) - Between 1808 and 1810 he was on the Three Forks of the Missouri, and on the Snake River. He was killed prior to the years 1825 - 1828. The town of Weiser, and the Weiser River in Idaho, are named for him.

Private John Collins – (? - 1823) – Collins was killed in a fight with the Arikara on June 2, 1823, an event that started the Arikara War.

Private George Shannon – (1785 - 1836) - In 1807, he was one of the men under Ensign Nathaniel Pryor which attempted to return Chief Sheheke to his home among the Mandans. He lost his foot or a portion of his leg in the attack which occurred. He was a member of George Drouillard’s murder trial, and helped acquit the man. Shannon was elected a member of the Kentucky House of Representatives in 1820 and 1822. He was a State senator from Missouri for a time, then returned to law. He died suddenly in court at Palmyra, Missouri, in 1836, aged forty-nine, and is buried there.

Private Pierre Cruzatte – (? - 1825 - 28) – Piloted one of the boats on the L&C Expedition even though he had one eye and was half-blind in the other. He was killed by 1825-1828.

Private George Gibson – (? - 1809) - Gibson after the expedition, but died in St. Louis in 1809.

Private Hugh Hall – (1772 - ?) – Captain William Clark noted that Hall drank a lot and was one of the more quarrelsome of the party. He was reported as being in St. Louis in 1809 and was still alive in 1828.

Private Joseph Whitehouse – (1775 - ?) – Captain Clark, in his account of the members made during the years 1825-1828, lists the name, Joseph Whitehouse, without comment.

Francois LeCompt – Half-Blood trader

Antoine Bissonnette – Shot by Drouillard.

Etienne Brant – Stole whiskey, slapped, and charged $162

Benito Vasquez – Lisa’s second in command, was on Santa Fe Expedition.

Jean Baptiste Bouche – Cantankerous man that always caused trouble

Edward Rose – Mulatto interpreter who lived with Osage Indians

Edward Robinson

John Hoback

Jacob Reznor

Those last few we don’t know anything about, save for them being on the Upper Missouri at this time. Edward Rose actually got into one helluva fight with Manuel Lisa, but we’ll save that for the next volume in this mountain man novel series.

Mountain Man Statistics

The mountain men led a very interesting life, but it’s not quite what we’d expect. For instance, most did not die…on the job, that is. Those that did die could rarely blame the Indians.

Historian LeRoy Hafen wrote a 10-volume study of the mountain men, and found that 58% of the 292 men he studied died from “old age or associated physical illnesses.” That was 134 men.

“Only 25, or 11%, of the subjects were murdered by Indians,” it’s written on furtrapper.com, “while another 7% were killed by others than Indians.”

Sickness took 16% (or 38 men) while 4.5% (or 13 men) died of “suicide, alcoholism, and miscellaneous causes.” Most mountain men died peacefully, or 77% of them.

All of that was long after Colter’s time, for Hafen puts the average date of birth for the mountain men he studied at 1805…when John Colter was already 31-years old.

Colter had been born in Virginia in 1774 and then the family moved to Kentucky around 1880. Most mountain man followed similar patterns.

Hafen tells us that 53% of mountain men were from Canada (38 men), Missouri (34), Kentucky (31), and Virginia (29). Another 31% were foreign born, with half of those representing Canada.

You’ll get a lot more information in LeRoy Hafen’s wonderful books, which I profiled in a post called the 10 Great Mountain Man Fur Trapping Books. Check it out!

Actual Route of John Colter over the Winter of 1807-8

Alright, we’ve really gone a bit more into John Colter than I was planning, but why stop now? Let’s take a look at the mountain man’s actual 1807-8 winter route through Montana and Wyoming. The best way to do that is by showing images of the places he saw.

Since Colter made no maps, like George Drouillard was doing at the same time in other areas, it’s difficult to tell exactly where he went.

It’s surmised that he travelled near Cody, Wyoming, seeing geysers. He most likely passed through Togwotee Pass along the Continental Divide to get to Jackson Lake, and through Teton Pass to get to Pierre’s Hole in Idaho.

We know he reached the Wind River, which are the upper reaches of the Bighorn River in Wyoming. He also came across Yellowstone Lake, and the area afforded him views of more geysers and alien landscapes.

Here’s a more detailed look at each leg of the 5-month journey, one I had in an earlier post called John Colter’s 1807 Solo Trek Map

Shoshone River
Colter reaches the Shoshone River, after having passed through the Pryor Mountains, which is a smaller range north of the Bighorn Mountains, and then skirts along their southern reaches.

The Shoshone River, or Stinkwater as it was often called

To Yellowstone
Colter passes by Bighorn Lake and continues to follow the Shoshone River. He sees Heart Mountain and turns south there. After a short time he reaches the first of Yellowstone Park near modern day Cody, WY.

Bighorn Lake

Heart Mountain

Tetons new Cody, Wyoming

Skirting the Absaroka Range
Colter continues moving south, skirting the Absaroka Range until he encounters a pass between them and the Owl Creek Mountains. This eventually leads him to the Wind River.

Absaroka Range

Owl Creek Mountains and Wind River

The Wind River
Colter passes over the Wind River and continues skirting the southern reaches of the Absaroka Range, eventually passing north of the Wind River Range.

Wind River Range

The Snake River
Colter makes it to the Gros Ventre River, which he soon recognizes as an offshoot of a larger river. He keeps moving and reaches the Snake River and from there follows it as it flows north. He reaches Jackson Lake, near today’s Jackson Hole, and starts moving north, past the Teton Range to his west.

Snake River

Yellowstone Lake
Colter heads north and passes by the small Lewis Lake before reaching the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake. He discovers that the Yellowstone River feeds into the lake and then drains from it at the north end.

Yellowstone Falls
Colter follows the Yellowstone River as it flows north, possibly reaching the Upper Falls, though it’s doubtful. Once there he turns east and heads overland, meaning to get back to the Shoshone River. Colter then heads back west until he reaches the Clark Fork, which he’d passed by earlier.

Clark Fork
Colter heads north up the Clark Fork and then breaks off to head west overland to the Pryor Mountains when he spots the range in the distance. From there he heads north, back up to the Yellowstone and then Fort Raymond

Stunning scenery, huh? Well, you have to realize that Colter travelled through all of that in winter, when much of it looked like this:

Shoshone River in Winter

Snake River in Winter

Absaroka Range in Winter

Upper Yellowstone Falls in Winter

It’s that winter landscape that you’ll read about and travel through as you read Colter’s Hell. Aren’t you ready to buy a copy?

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The Yellowstone Pipeline’s Troubled History

8/18/2015

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The 2011 Yellowstone River Oil Spill

We’ve got a big problem in Montana, and it’s run-amok oil companies polluting our rivers, and not paying the consequences. They ruin residents’ water supplies, wipe out the profits of tourism businesses, and destroy our environment.

No serious reporting is ever done on this in the state. I’m not surprised – both Montana Republicans and Montana Democrats cozy up to the oil industry as much as they can, for they know they need that money. It’s sad, it really is sad that politicians beholden to campaign contributions can get away with being an accessory to destruction. I doubt this will change.

The Yellowstone Pipeline’s Original Route

Finding information on the Yellowstone Pipeline is nearly impossible. There’s nothing online, and barely anything in the print books on Montana history. Even the Montana Historical Society has little, just one folder, and in that folder, just one old newspaper clipping.

Building the Yellowstone Pipeline in 1954

Helena Storage tanks for oil and gas on the Yellowstone Pipeline route

That’s the Helena Independent Record for August 29, 1954. That was the year the pipeline was completed. It tells how the pipeline’s “petroleum products…are now arriving at the Helena terminal of the Yellowstone pipe line.”

The article says how the Yellowstone Pipeline stretches for 531 miles across three states – Montana, Idaho and Washington. The “10-inch steel line” goes from Billings to Spokane and was described as an “underground freight line.”

It was reported in 1954 that four oil firms owned the Yellowstone Pipeline. Continental Oil and Interstate Oil Pipe Line owned a 40% stake each, while Union Oil of California owned 14% and Havre’s H. Earl Clack company owned the remaining 6%.

The thing with the Yellowstone Pipeline, and just about all oil pipelines, is that it has to constantly remain full of oil that’s under pressure. That’s a lot of oil, 300,000 barrels worth to be exact. And that oil is constantly underground, and flowing right past some of our most spectacular locales. Here’s how the IR described the route:

“The fluid in the line moves at about two miles an hour, surging along the Yellowstone valley, up Livingston hill over Bozeman pass, across the Gallatin valley, along the Missouri river past Townsend and Toston and into Helena, [the] only pumping station on the line outside Billings. Here the pumps lift the fluid over 6,325-foot MacDonald pass west of Helena, highest point on the line. From here the production flows like water down a flume into Spokane.”

The Yellowstone Pipeline cost $20.5 million to build. Back in 1954 it was capable of delivering 20,000 barrels of oil a day to the pumping station in Helena, and that capacity could go up to 50,000 barrels a day. The Helena storage tanks were capable of holding 180,000 barrels of oil, or 7.5 million gallons.

The Yellowstone Pipeline stretched from Billings to Spokane and connected Montana oil to the wider world in a whole new way. The pipeline and the numerous other oil businesses that rushed to Billings in the 1950s ensured that it’d remain the oil king of the state, and an economic and political powerhouse all its own. The city had weight, and it was supplied by oil money. By 1970 that was clear – the city’s refineries were processing more than 85% of the state’s oil.

Many time as of late that oil has flown right into the water. In 2011 the Yellowstone Pipeline ruptured, and the same happened again in 2015. Internet searches on the Yellowstone Pipeline will only bring up this – there’s nothing of the pipeline’s history, capacity, or anything else.

That’s a shame, for many don’t know how powerful Montana’s Indians are when it comes to telling Big Oil to go jump in the lake.

The 1995 Salish-Kootenai Shutdown

On March 4, 1996, Ron Selden had a High Country News story called “Tribes beat back oil giants.” The article discusses how the Yellowstone Pipe Line Co. was trying to “renew an easement” for their pipeline “through the Flathead Indian Reservation.” The tribe didn’t want this, and there was little the oil company could do. Selden mentions how the company “ran an extraordinary full-page ad” during the summer of 1995 in the Char Koosta News.

The thing was, the 7,000-member Salish and Kootenai tribes put a “howling coyote” onto the ad page, an age-old symbol that tipped readers off to the fact that they probably couldn’t trust this news.

By that point in time Conoco, Exxon, and Union Oil of California owned the Yellowstone Pipeline and Selden mentions how they “had underestimated their adversaries.” The lease was denied in October 1995, leaving the company “shocked about their predicament” and “scrambling to find an alternate route.”

The Salish and Kootenai are not tribes to mess around with. They're sovereign nations, first of all, so they don’t take guff from rich oilmen, rich oilmen take guff from them. This is the way nations should operate. The tribe was experiencing a late-20th-century renaissance in power, and they did not shy away from flexing it.

For the Yellowstone Pipe Line Co., this was a disaster. They’d need to find a new route for the “roughly 21 miles of the line” that ran through tribal lands. One of the big problems was getting that oil to Moses Lake, Washington, where the Fairchild Air Force Base used a lot for the refueling of its air tankers near Spokane.

So why did the tribes block the Yellowstone Pipleline when that easement came up? Easy – the Yellowstone Pipe Line Co. had “71 leaks along the route” since 1954, “and between 1986 and 1993, there have been three major spills on reservation land,” according to Selden. He goes on to say that “monitoring equipment in faraway Houston, Texas, failed to detect any of the leaks.” One of those spills emptied 163,000 gallons of oil into Magpie Creek. According to Sam Morigeau, the tribe’s natural resources program director at that time, “the company didn’t get serious about environmental problems until the lease was in jeopardy.”

The tribe let it be known as early as 1994 that the company would “be wise to get moving on a required environmental impact statement.” Unfortunately for the Yellowstone Pipeline Co., their “executives dragged their feet,” waiting “until just months before the old lease was due to expire to embark on a lengthy study.”

The company was scrambling. Before they’d had 20-year leases that paid $193,000, or “less than $5,000 per year.” Now, seeing their profits threatened, the company offered $7.3 million for a new 20-year lease, plus “a $5 million bond to cover future spills.” By July 1995 the offered amount had risen to $29 million, “plus promises of state-of-the-art monitoring, college scholarships, tribal employment, and cash for cultural programs.”

Conoco had $1.5 billion in profits that year, Exxon had profits of $2.49 billion in 1995, and Chevron – the company that Union Oil of California became – had profits of more than $100 billion between 2000 and 2005. The companies had the money to pay the tribes, but they chose not to. So the tribes told the oil companies to take a hike.

Why? Again, it’s simple – “the company couldn’t ensure there wouldn’t be more spills.”

"They didn't really care about what they're doing," says tribal elder Pat Pierre, a leader in the fight against the company. "All they want to do is make money. It sickens you. This pipeline is just not the Indian way. It destroys what we stand for. I saw a chance to get rid of it, so I went for it."

The company made one last advertising blitz, hoping to get the issue on the tribal ballot that fall. It didn’t work and by the end of October 1995 the tribe ordered the company “to begin dismantling its pipeline, continue cleaning up past spills and,” and to show just how much they thought of the oil company, to “pay $3,561 a day in trespassing fines, retroactive to the previous easement's expiration in April.”

Rerouting the Yellowstone Pipeline

Following the shutdown of the Yellowstone Pipeline through the Salish and Kootenai reservation lands, the Yellowstone Pipe Line Co. began shipping oil by 10,000-gallon tanker trucks across the 50 miles of reservation land to a pipeline at Thompson Falls. Oil in America and Montana would continue to move, either by train or truck – demand dictated such. Also, new pipelines were built around the state, largely in an effort to ensure nothing like that tribal snafu ever happened again.

What continued to happen, however, were environmental disasters. In December 1995 and then in February 1996, severe flooding exposed several pipelines on Prospect Creek, Pricehard Creek, and the Coeur d’Alene River. It was clear that more breaches could occur, and likely would.

Still a new pipeline route between Missoula and Thompson Falls was approved by the Forest Service in 1996. You can find information on this in a Forest Service May 2001 report called “Changes to the Existing Yellowstone Pipeline Between Thompson Falls and Kingston.”

Trucking and train shipments of oil continued until 1998, when “shippers completed improvements for pipeline-rail transfers at their Missoula and Thompson Falls terminals.” After that, a plan for “eight pipeline reroute segments” that would “include ten new stream crossings” was sought.

The 2011 Yellowstone Pipeline Oil Spill

So the oil companies continued on, not learning a thing, continuing business as usual. It would cost them, though not much. As usual, the environment and the tourism industry would pay the ultimate price.

The 2011 Yellowstone Pipeline rupture spilled 42,000 gallons of oil into the Yellowstone River, or 1,500 barrels, on July 1. The Montana Department of Justice listed the spill at 63,000 gallons. The 12-inch pipeline had ruptured by Laurel. By July 6 there were 280 people cleaning it up. The Montana DOJ estimates that 1,000 people would eventually deploy to the spill area.

One of the main reasons this spill was so damaging was that the Yellowstone River was undergoing a 35-year high water event. This carried the oil further up onto land that it otherwise would have gone. Overall, the oil spread to 85 miles downstream, covering 11,000 acres.

In January 2015, it was ruled that “Exxon hadn’t adequately prepared for the possibility that flooding could cause the pipeline to fail.” Exxon was fined $1.05 million for the 2011 Yellowstone Pipeline oil spill. That represented .03% of the company’s $4.2 billion in profits made during just the second quarter of 2015. The company paid another $2 million to private landowners affected.

The 2015 Yellowstone Pipeline Oil Spill

You’d think that Exxon would learn, but with slap-on-the-wrist fines like that, how could they?

On January 17, 2015, 1,200 barrels of oil leaked out of the Poplar Pipeline and into the Yellowstone River. This equals about 30,000 gallons. Three days later the amount spilled was up to 50,400 gallons of oil.

Technically, this was the Poplar Pipeline, which is operated by Bridger Pipeline. The pipeline only had a 1.5 inch breach, but it was enough.

The 1.5 inch breach that caused 50,000 gallons of oil to spill into the Yellowstone River in January 2015

The Poplar Pipeline stretches 193 miles and is under the Yellowstone River, just like the Yellowstone Pipeline. The problem is that some of the river bottom was exposed due to flooding. This left the pipeline exposed, something that can lead to breaches. After all, when the capacity of those rivers increases with spring runoff and winter snowmelt, large rocks can move quickly. It doesn’t take much to cause a 1.5 inch breech at that point. This diagram from Inside Climate News gives a good idea of what this looks like:

Diagrams of how oil pipelines run under the Yellowstone River and break

This map from the Pop History Dig does a great job showing the locations of the two Yellowstone River oil spills.

Map of 2011 and 2015 Yellowstone River oil spills

You can blame the river and the exposed pipeline, but you’d do better to blame the terrible company that allowed this ecological disaster to occur. Bridger Pipeline has had “nine pipeline incidents between 2006 and 2014,” the Guardian stated shortly after the 2015 spill. “Combined, the spills leaked nearly 11,000 gallons of crude.”

Bridger Pipeline’s sister company, Belle Fourche Pipeline, “recorded 21 incidents over the same period,” which resulted in “a total of 273,832 gallons” of oil being spilled. No fines were ever issued.

The companies are owned by the True Family, which is headed up by Tad True.

Tad True at the 2012 GOP Convention

It’s likely his political donations to the Republican Party keep his hands clean while his companies contaminate our nation’s rivers. In 2006 the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration considered fining the companies $70,000, but that never happened.

Oil Pipelines cross water in more than 18,000 places in the US, so you know rich men like Tad True, men that are never fined for polluting the environment in any way that makes sense, will only continue to do so. Tad True’s Bridger Pipeline and Bell Fourche Pipeline are prime examples of this.

The Casper Star Tribune reported on January 31, 2015, in a story called “Montana oil spill latest in a long line of True companies pipeline breaks” that:

“Belle Fourche Pipeline Co. recorded 21 incidents, during which a total of 272,832 gallons of oil was spilled. Those figures did not include a 2014 spill in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, where a corroded line led to a leak of some 25,000 gallons of crude.”

The article reveals that Bridger Pipeline LLC has incident rates “nearly double the industry average.” Despite this, the company insisted that it has a safe record and fought against fines. Regulators were smart enough not to buy this, for they know that by “failing to inspect valves” as well as “procedural violations” and failing “to conduct a post-accident review” you’re not doing a good job. In fact, you’re acting like a terrible company, and breaking the law.

More than 6,000 Glendive residents had their water disrupted because of Tad True and his companies’ record. Something that might help is if the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration had more than just one employee in Montana. The western region has just eighteen inspectors, according to the Casper newspaper.

Conclusion

My, we’ve got problems – our oil pipelines aren’t sound. There are other Montana oil pipelines, as you can see in this map from Phillips 66:

Map of oil pipelines in America and Montana

Many cross rivers, and streams, and flow under our most iconic areas. They flow under ground water, the kind that residents depend on for their daily household needs. And of course they supply us with the oil and gas we need for our daily lives.

Does it have to be this way? Do we need to have these giant multinational oil companies owning a pipeline that they do not maintain, and then when there is an accident, they cover up with bribes? Is this what Montana deserves?

I’d expect to read about this level of environmental degradation back in the Copper King days. Much like then, however, our daily newspapers and other media sources turn a blind eye to this. Our politicians do the same.

It’s now been nearly seven months since the 2015 Yellowstone Pipeline oil spill. Instead of trying to make this state more environmentally sound, however, our politicians continue to cozy up to Big Oil. There’s nothing in the media about it, a media which also happens to be corporate-controlled.

Indians have been using the Yellowstone River for generations and whites have been since the late-1700s. If we continue as we are, however, few today will want to. We know that Yellowstone National Park created 5,300 jobs in 2013, and it’s a good bet the Yellowstone River is creating quite a few thousand in Montana.

What will those people do when Tad True and his oil companies spill so much oil in that river that they can no longer work because people no longer want to visit?

I fully expect it’ll be another $1.05 million fine.

How does that make you feel?

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The Marias Massacre - A Montana Disgrace

12/19/2013

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Note: This is an excerpt from my book, Braves and Businessmen: A History of Montana, Volume Three

Historical Sign at Site

Sunday, January 23, 1870 dawned a cold day in Montana. It was about to grow a whole lot colder.

Major Eugene Baker, a man known for his fondness for alcohol, was leading his Second US Regiment cavalrymen through the snow and toward a band of Piegan Blackfeet Indians led by Mountain Chief.

He’d been ordered to do so by General Philip Sheridan, the head of the Department of the Missouri, which was the department of the US Army responsible for protecting the Great Plains. The reason? Horses.

Cavalry and Indians, 1899 (artist unknown)

A Horse Deal Gone Bad

The reason Sheridan had done this was because of one man, Malcolm Clarke. Clarke was a white trader that had moved to Montana and who had some of his horses stolen from him in 1867 around Helena, and specifically the Sieben Ranch. The theft had been perpetrated by a Piegan Indian named Owl Child.

Near Helena's Sieben Ranch

At that time the Blackfeet were three separate tribes: the Blackfeet, Blood, and Piegan. The horses were stolen because Clarke owed them as a debt, according to Owl Chief. After all, he argued, it was Clarke that had caused him to lose his own horses in the first place.

Clarke wasn’t buying that for a second so he and his son tracked down Owl Child and beat the living daylights out of him. That might have settled the matter, but the beating occurred in front of other Blackfeet Indians. Owl Child had lost face and now had to regain his honor.

On August 17, 1869, Owl Child and several of his Piegan friends tracked Clarke down, shot him to death, and nearly killed his son. The killing shocked the people of Montana and they demanded that something be done. The Blackfeet were given two weeks to hand over Owl Child’s dead body. When the two weeks were up Sheridan ordered Baker to “strike them hard.” (Welch, 30)

And so Baker found himself in the freezing snow on a cold January morning, a village full of Piegan women and children before him. He most likely took a drink and thought on what to do. His choice would prove to be a fateful one.

Montana and the Blackfeet Indians in the Mid-19th Century

Whites had always ignored the land claims of the Blackfeet Indians, and in the last few years of the 1860s the tribes were really faring bad. The Blackfeet had originally been named as one of the tribes that would claim areas of Montana. That had been established with the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851.

To further cement that deal, which many Blackfeet felt hadn’t included them enough, Washington Territory governor Isaac Stevens travelled to them in 1855 and made a new treaty with them specifically. This treaty, called Lame Bull’s Treaty, gave both the Blackfeet and the Gros Ventre large swaths of Southwestern Montana.

By 1865, however, white settlers were encroaching on their lands. Homesteaders were flocking to the new territory of Montana for gold, and treaties were drawn up to exclude the Blackfeet from the very lands that had been given to them by Stevens, who by that time was long dead from wounds suffered at the Battle of Chantilly during the Civil War. No one cared about them, and the same thing happened again in 1868.

What’s more, John Bozeman had blazed his trail right through their lands, angering them even more. Coupled with the rising resentment of the Sioux tribes further to the east toward the US Army and white settlers and you had a real powder keg waiting to explode.

And explode it did during Red Cloud’s War, the conflict that swept through much of the area to the south of Montana Territory in those years. The US government came out victorious and many Indian tribes were left wanting. Things were coming to a boil once again.

The Piegan Blackfeet Village of Owl Child

The village that Eugene Baker stared at as he drank his liquor that cold January morning rested on the banks of the Marias River. You’ll find the Marias River near Cut Bank, Montana, right at the confluence of Cut Bank Creek and Two Medicine River. It flows for sixty miles before spilling into Lake Elwell, and then another eighty miles after that before it flows into the Missouri River near Loma, Montana.

Marias and Missouri Rivers

Baker Ninth from Left (leaning on railing), 1870 at Fort Ellis

In 1869 there was no twenty-seven mile long Lake Elwell, however, as the Tiber Dam wouldn’t be constructed for another eighty-seven years, in 1956. And the place where the attack occurred was nearly 100 miles to the west of it, around Willow Rounds, thirty miles from today’s Shelby, Montana.

Baker left Fort Shaw with a total of six companies, which comes out to about 200 men. And the weather they went out in was a frigid -43°F that they bore primarily at night, when they marched.

It’s easy to think the men were making good time, moving as fast as they could so as to be out in the cold for as little time as possible. And perhaps that’s the reason they stopped at the first village they came to, which wasn’t even that of Owl Child, but of Chief Heavy Runner, who had nothing at all to do with it.

So why didn’t Baker know, or why didn’t anyone tell him he was at the wrong place? There are many theories for this. Perhaps the men were cold and tired, and wanted to get back to Fort Shaw as soon as possible, and if that meant attacking the first Indian village they came to regardless if it was the right one, then so be it.

One story has it that Baker was warned, most likely by his half-Mandan guide Joseph Kipp, but he was suspicious and mistrustful of the man, and even threatened to shoot him. And it could very well have been that Baker was drunk and intent upon seeing the job through no matter what. It was common knowledge that Baker was a drinker, but then many in the army at that time drank.

The men arrived very early in the morning, near dawn, and Chief Heavy Runner himself came out to greet the men. Instead of greeting him warmly, however, the soldiers opened fire. Accounts of children running through the snow and being cut down with gun and bayonet dominate. It’s what its name implied it was – a massacre.

The Aftermath of the Massacre

By the time it was all said and done there were Indians lying dead everywhere. The soldiers suffered but one death, and that from a man who fell off his horse. Baker himself counted 173 Indians in his report, as well as more than 100 captured women and 300 captured horses. Indian estimates were higher, around 217 dead, and most the women, children, and the elderly.

And the people of Montana couldn’t have been happier. On February 10, 1870, The Bozeman Pick and Plow newspaper thanked the soldiers for braving the inclement weather and the “deserved though terrible punishment inflicted upon them.” (Schontzler)

Not all voices were singing the Army’s praises, however, and it was actually from within the army that the first calls questioning the whole affair originated.

General Alfred Sully, the Interior Department superintendent for Indian affairs, wondered why there were so few men of fighting age that’d been killed. Lieutenant William Pease, who was then the Blackfeet agent for Indian affairs, told him that just thirty-three men had been killed. He was also quick to point out that ninety women and fifty-five babies were slaughtered that day.

Somehow that information was leaked to the press in Washington and things really went downhill. By March the Chicago Tribune was calling the event a “most disgraceful butchery,” even while Phil Sheridan defended the actions of Baker. He wasn’t alone, either, as The Helena Daily Herald likened Baker’s actions to hunting down wolves.

The support wasn’t enough, however, and Baker was feeling the pressure. He made a new report that quadrupled the number of men killed that day in January, from thirty-three to around 140. And it worked. Washington and the U.S. Army covered the massacre up and it was largely forgotten.

Ulysses S. Grant, 1869

Phil Sheridan, 1864

No one was ever tried for the crimes committed there, although the Army did suffer somewhat. Before the massacre they’d been pressuring President Ulysses S. Grant to grant them oversight of Indian Reservations. Following that day in January that oversight was given to the Interior Department instead of the U.S. Army. What’s more, U.S. Army officers would no longer be allowed to serve as Indian agents, something that would now only fall to clergymen.

Eugene M. Baker was brought up on charges of drunkenness at a later date, and he’d eventually die in 1885 from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 48.

For the Piegan Blackfeet it was a different story. However much they may have wanted to fight, they couldn’t. Already their numbers had been drastically decreased by smallpox.

So what ultimately happened? The papers applauded the version they wanted to accept instead of reporting the facts; the U.S. Army expunged their own records of the event fearing more public backlash; and business went on as usual and like nothing had happened. Overall the Marias Massacre, or Baker Massacre as it’s sometimes called, is a stain on American history and a shame for Montana.

Interested in More on the Blackfeet Indians?

Montana’s Indian Tribes: The Blackfeet
Montana’s Indian Tribes in the 1850s and 1860s

Notes

Ewers, John C. The Blackfeet: Raiders on the Northwestern Plains. The University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1958. p 238-50.

Fifer, Barbara. Montana Battlefields, 1806-1877: Native Americans and the U.S. Army at War. Farcountry Press: Helena, 2005. p 31-9.

Schultz, James Willard Keith and Seele, C. Blackfeet and Buffalo: Memories of Life Among the Indians. The University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 1981. p 282-306.

Schontzler, Gail. (2012, January 5) Blackfeet remember Montana’s greatest Indian massacre. Bozeman Daily Chronicle. Retrieved: http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/news/sunday/article_daca1094-4484-11e1-918e-001871e3ce6c.html

Welch, James and Stekler, Paul. Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York, 1994. p 25-30.

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Montana’s Indian Tribes in the 1850s and 1860s

8/9/2013

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This is an excerpt from the book Priests and Prospectors: A History of Montana, Volume II

Indian reservations created by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851

The Indian tribes of Montana were left largely untouched until the 1850s.

In 1851 government officials decided that it was time to negotiate treaties with the Indian tribes as the West opened up.

They called tribal representatives from all of the territories of the West to Fort Laramie in Wyoming.

What resulted was the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and the beginning of the reservation system for Montana’s Indians.

Tribes ceded sections of their lands to the government for the building of both roads and forts. Each tribe was allotted a certain portion of land that was defined as its domain, and all tribes were expected to respect the land rights of their neighboring tribes. The Indians received assurances that they wouldn’t be bothered, and they also received many gifts of food and gifts, or what really amounted to trinkets.

Montana’s Indian Lands

Photo taken of Fort Laramie in 1858

The Fort Laramie Treaty made it clear which tribes had authority over which areas of what would become Montana. The north-central portion east of the Continental Divide went to the Blackfeet and Gros Ventre tribes; the upper and milled Yellowstone valley went to the Crow; and the northeastern part of the territory went to the Assiniboine. The Blackfeet had no representation at all during the meeting at Fort Laramie.

Two tribes that called Montana home were left out of the proceedings entirely.

The Flathead, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreille were given their own treaty four years later when Washington Territory’s Governor Isaac Stevens made a deal with the Indians that created the 1.2 million acre Jocko Indian Reservation just south of Flathead Lake.

The tribes agreed to their new home and the government also promised to pay for $120,000 in improvements to the reservation over the next twenty years.

Stevens further cemented ties with the Blackfeet, the tribe that had been left out of the Fort Laramie negotiations entirely. He went to them in October 1855, shortly after the Walla Walla Council in Washington, and convinced them to accept reservation lands from the Continental Divide east to the Milk River and from Canada to the Musselshell River.

In return the Indians agreed to keep southwestern Montana as a general hunting ground for all tribes and would even let whites use their lands to a limited extent. One of the most feared tribes in Montana’s history was suddenly made peaceful.

The Gold Rush and Montana Indians

Montana forts created after Montana gold rush

It was the Blackfeet that were hurt the most when the miners began arriving in droves following the gold rushes of 1862-3. The reservations lands they’d agreed to in 1855 were the prime prospecting spots, and the whites rushing in had little regard for any kind of territorial right the Indians might have enjoyed.

So of course the Blackfeet began to retaliate, often stealing horses but occasionally killing as well.

This caused fears in the people coming into the area, and later territory. By the time the Civil War wrapped up in 1865 the federal government was free to focus its efforts more fully upon the West.

Forts began to be constructed with increasing regularity in the areas where settlers and Indians were coming into conflict the most.

Fort C.F. Smith was established in 1866 along the Big Horn River. Another fort, Camp Cook, was established the same year but didn’t last too long, and by 1869 the garrison relocated to Fort Benton.

The US army came true on its 1854 promise and established forts on the Blackfeet’s reservation lands. Fort Shaw came first in 1867 and was located along the Mullan Road at Sun River Crossing.

It primarily protected those journeying on the Mullan Road and the mining settlements from any Blackfeet threats. Fort Shaw was built later that year, following the death of John Bozeman and Indian scare that had developed around the growing city of Bozeman. The fort primarily protected against Sioux Indian threats coming from the Yellowstone valley to the east.

Montana Indian Reservations

The Death of John Bozeman, by Edgar Samuel Paxson, 1898

It was obvious to many that the Indian lands couldn’t remain as they were. Too many white settlers were coming into the territory, and with dreams of statehood not far off, the flood would only continue.

The Department of the Interior recognized this in 1868 and began dividing the tribes up into various smaller entities. The Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Gros Ventre tribes all received different subagencies, which were separate areas of land, a policy that would continue well into the next decades.

Each area of land would become smaller and smaller and those original treaties signed at Fort Laramie in 1851 and again with Governor Stevens in 1855 would prove meaningless.

In 1868 the government also signed new treaties with the Crow Indians. The crows had originally been granted lands by the Fort Laramie Treaty, but the mining stampede pretty much made those impossible to adhere to. The Bozeman Trail also wound its way through their lands, and clashes became frequent.

The government acted, and called forth the tribe to Fort Laramie again. A treaty was even drafted, but most of the Crow Indians refused to sign it. The government pushed it through anyway, and the Crows were given a reservation that took up a good portion of the southeastern part of the territory.

Unfortunately, new gold discoveries were made on these new Crow lands that same year, ensuring that the whole process would only have to repeat itself once again.

Notes

Brown, Dee. The Fetterman Massacre. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1962. p.157-60.

Hebard, Grace Raymond and Brininstool, E.A. The Bozeman Trail: Historical Accounts of the Blazing of the Overland Routes into the Northwest, and the Fights with Red Cloud’s Warriors, Vol II. The Arthur H. Clark Company: Cleveland, 1922. p 103-11.

Malone, Michael Peter; Roeder, Richard B.; Lang, William L. Montana: A History of Two Centuries. The University of Washington Press, 1976. p 116-27.

McDermott, John D. A Guide to Indians Wars of the West. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1998. p 156.

Olson, James C. Red Cloud and the Sioux Problem.University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 1963. p 60-63.

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John Colter’s Montana

Montana’s Crow Indians in the early 1800s

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The Yellowstone Pipeline’s Original Route

The 1995 Salish-Kootenai Shutdown

Rerouting the Yellowstone Pipeline

The 2011 Yellowstone Pipeline Oil Spill

The 2015 Yellowstone Pipeline Oil Spill

Conclusion

A Horse Deal Gone Bad

Montana and the Blackfeet Indians in the Mid-19th Century

The Piegan Blackfeet Village of Owl Child

The Aftermath of the Massacre

Montana’s Indian Lands

The Gold Rush and Montana Indians

Montana Indian Reservations

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