The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (27 page)

Helen P. Clarke greeting Otoes in Indian Territory, ca. 1890s. Although she sympathized at first with the reluctance of many Indians to accept allotments, in time Clarke grew impatient with their obstinacy, which she attributed to ignorance and superstition. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

By the summer of 1894, however, Clarke’s deep well of forbearance had all but dried up. Although she had persuaded 410 of 759 Poncas and 175 of 352 Otoe-Missourias to select plots, the natives’ unceasing antagonism had worn her down, and she despaired of ever seeing the job through to completion. She vented to Daniel M. Browning, Morgan’s successor, “I scarcely think the Indian Office realizes the situation here. I am working among a people whose very soul abominates anything tending towards civilization, and they are bright enough to see that
allotments
mean civilization ultimately. And because of this fact they have shown a bitterness unparalleled.”
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She concluded her report by recommending that federal officials impose a deadline by which the Indians must select homesteads or have assignments made for them—a total reversal from her earlier position urging patience and understanding.

As it happened, Browning warmed to her idea of an ultimatum, and thus in August 1894 he ordered Clarke to give the Indians thirty days to make their selections. In a sense, her suggestion worked too well: by the middle of December, she had finished her task and now faced unemployment for the first time in her life. This was an especially worrisome prospect for a member of “the class that destiny has ordered to win bread and butter for himself or herself,” as she put it.
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With no job prospects in Indian Territory, Clarke disposed of her horses and equipment and, true to her Piegan name, set off like a migratory bird making the return journey home. She arrived that spring to find her mother’s people locked in their own bitter land dispute with the Great Father.

D
URING THE
C
RETACEOUS
period, about 100 million years ago, an enormous slab of rock—hundreds of miles wide and several miles thick—heaved upward and slid east for nearly fifty miles. This geologic event helped form the Rocky Mountains while dragging the ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest all the way inland to the edge of the northern Great Plains.
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And yet, for all its fascinating biological diversity as well as the dramatic effects of glaciation, which in the process created hanging valleys, sculpted peaks, and aquamarine pools, the area’s scenic attractions held little interest for the white visitors who began showing up in droves in the late nineteenth century. Instead, the newcomers were lured to this remote and serene location by persistent rumors of mineral wealth.

An obstacle, however, stood between the would-be prospectors and their golden dreams: the land they coveted was part of the Blackfeet Reservation. Hoping to open the area for mining operations, federal officials dispatched a three-man team in September 1895 to negotiate with the Indians for its purchase. Although many of the natives were hesitant, the commissioners—a group that included the naturalist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell, a longtime friend of the tribe—held the upper hand. At the time, the Blackfeet were only a decade removed from horrific starvation, brought on largely by government negligence; at its worst moments, the Indians had been reduced to stripping cottonwood trees and eating the bark.
⁷⁰
Therefore, when in 1895 the Blackfeet requested three million dollars for the land in question, the commissioners responded by threatening to dock their rations until they consented to a lower price.
⁷¹

As it turned out, though, Helen Clarke had just returned to Montana following her assignment in Indian Territory, and the Piegans sought her advice on the matter. Though no record exists of the counsel she gave, it seems certain that, considering her recent allotting experience and the outcome of the deliberations, she urged the Blackfeet to accede to the commissioners’ wishes.
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After all, she knew well the coercive power of the federal government, because she had just deployed it herself against the Poncas and the Otoe-Missourias. In the end, the Indians agreed to sell the “ceded strip” for $1.5 million in exchange for supposedly permanent usage rights, but these promises proved fleeting: when no minerals were found, the government set the land aside as Glacier National Park in 1910 and soon imposed severe restrictions on Blackfeet access, limiting their ability to use the land for hunting and recreation.
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Looking back on the treaty from the perspective of the twenty-first century, Darrell Robes Kipp, a leading Piegan intellectual, has characterized the objections of some of his contemporaries, asking rhetorically, “You [all] sold the mountains for $1.5 million on the installment plan? Was that a good deal?” He adds that skeptics might also wonder why Helen Clarke or others did not intervene to insist upon better terms for the Indians. But in explaining, if not necessarily defending, the outcome, Kipp says, “If you were [one of the Indian elders] and you were sitting there watching children starve, you realize, okay, what’s the mountains? What’s anything worth? The only thing of worth is letting our children live. At their darkest moment—at their bleakest moment—they chose survival.” Thus in assessing Clarke’s role in the negotiations, Kipp concludes that by recommending the sale, she did not act out of expediency or insensitivity. “No,” he says, “[she] did it out of love.”
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I
N THE EARLY MONTHS
of 1896, even as Congress was putting the finishing touches on a bill transferring the ceded strip from the Blackfeet to the United States, another document concerning Indian affairs was making the rounds on Capitol Hill. In March the Otoe-Missourias sent a petition to the secretary of the interior insisting that they did not approve of the allotments made for them by Helen Clarke. To be sure, the secretary had received the schedules she had forwarded the preceding December, but thus far he had declined to endorse them, primarily because—as the Indians’ agent explained—many of the natives had simply ignored her assignments and settled together in camps (as in the old days of communal living) the moment she left for Montana. Vexed by their insubordination, the Department of the Interior ordered Clarke back to Indian Territory in the autumn of 1897, with instructions to “adjust the existing difficulties.”
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While surely exasperated by the impermanence of her prior efforts, Clarke was delighted to have the work. The time since her return to Helena had been difficult, and she had gotten by only with help from the Sanders family. So bleak, in fact, were her prospects that in April of that year she had enlisted several well-placed friends to nudge along her reappointment as an allotment agent. To one of her advocates, Senator Thomas H. Carter of Montana, a Republican Party stalwart, she emphasized her good record as well as her “Indian blood,” before adding a sharply partisan appeal. Noting the recent election of fellow Republican William McKinley as president, she wrote, “[I]f to the victor belongs the spoils, why
we
who were on the right side should be remembered.”
⁷⁶

The tribes, of course, did not welcome her reappearance, and as Clarke soon discovered, the natives had grown even more implacable in her absence. Barely a month after her arrival in Indian Territory, the Otoe-Missourias drafted yet another petition to the government detailing their objections to allotment, culminating in a hard truth: “The Indians of the said tribes believed they owned these lands and that they would be allowed to have the undisturbed possession of same, and would not be molested without their consent.”
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The Poncas were equally adamant, and in council with a visiting official from the Bureau of Indian Affairs they attacked Clarke personally. An Indian named Thick Nail declared, “I never did like Miss Clarke; Miss Clarke came down here and allotted these Poncas without their knowing anything about it … ; you white people must like people who tell lies.” Even a pro-allotment chief noted that though he had done all that the government had asked, “today we are hungry, we are starving.”
⁷⁸

If the recent contretemps between Washington and the Blackfeet caused Clarke to reconsider the allotment policy, she did not say. Instead, she worked diligently to complete her task and indicated in an anxious letter to James Sanders, the eldest of Wilbur’s children, “I want to remain in this work of allotting lands until I can save enough to live on in my old age.”
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She was even more direct in a missive she sent to the commissioner of Indian affairs in the spring of 1899, declaring the fulfillment of her duties: “After [April 30] I shall be without work. … I am a struggling woman without fortune … [and] keenly feel the necessity for making every possible provision for the rainy day which comes to all of us who survive the storms of life sufficiently long. I therefore beg you sincerely not to let me remain idle.”
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This time, however, there would be no encore with the Indian Office, perhaps because, as Clarke told James Sanders, “there is a prejudice always at a woman holding any sort of position that pays.” Though she remained on the active rolls of the Interior Department until 1904, she was never again summoned to do the bidding of the Great Father.
⁸¹

Grim as it was, Clarke’s outlook at the turn of the century was still much brighter than the one facing the Indians living in what became Kay and Noble Counties in north-central Oklahoma. Rapacious whites, especially those who founded the 101 Ranch, began to buy up Ponca lands as soon as the Indians gained their titles. Today the tribe itself owns only 785 of the 101,000 acres that formerly constituted its reservation.
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Their neighbors, the Otoe-Missourias, may have fared even worse. With the discovery of oil underneath their land, Washington waived the twenty-five-year trust period and forced “independence” upon many of the allottees, hoping that developers would secure the mineral rights. The Indians lost so much of their territory and in such short order that, in an ironic twist, in 1922 their leaders asked the government—with which the tribe had been at odds over allotment for more than four decades—to step in and reassert control over their dwindling patrimony.
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Woman with the Shadow Eyes

Like his good friend Theodore Roosevelt, George Bird Grinnell was an experienced outdoorsman, a very model of the strenuous life. Born in 1849 into a wealthy Brooklyn family and raised in upper Manhattan on the former estate of the artist John James Audubon, Grinnell was an easterner who felt most at home on the far side of the Missouri River. By his early thirties he had served Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer as a naturalist during Custer’s controversial 1874 expedition into the Black Hills, helped inaugurate a campaign to save the American bison from extinction, and assumed the editorship of
Forest and Stream
, the nation’s premier recreational magazine.

And yet, for all his experience in the West and the reticence born of his genteel upbringing, George Grinnell gushed like a smitten lover in the fall of 1885 after he made his first visit to the back-country of northern Montana. Near the end of a vigorous two-week camping trip, Grinnell crested a mountain ridge and beheld the transfixing panorama of the Swiftcurrent valley below him: “An artist’s palette, splashed with all the hues of his color box, would not have shown more varied contrasts … on the mountain side foaming cascades, with their white whirling mist wreathes, gray blue ice masses, and fields of gleaming snow.”
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Grinnell spent much of the next twenty-five years marshaling support to have the “Crown of the Continent,” as he called it, set aside as a national park.

In the early twentieth century Grinnell’s crusade received an enormous boost from Louis Hill, a railroad magnate who in 1907 had assumed the presidency of his father’s Great Northern Railway. Snaking like a steel thread across the upper Great Plains, from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Seattle, Washington, Hill’s line passed just below the southern boundary of the region that had so captivated Grinnell. Inspired by the Northern Pacific’s success in promoting the Yellowstone area since the 1870s, and the attendant spike in passenger traffic on its rails, Hill threw his support behind Grinnell’s scheme, and the two men rejoiced when in 1910 Congress established Glacier National Park as the nation’s tenth such preserve.
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