THE HYDRAULICS OF LAND

A desirable location for a renewable industrial-scale irrigation development must include:

1.  An inclined plane so no pumps are needed as they are for the big underground aquifers.

2.  Flat land that will be fertile if irrigated, not too far away from the source of water, and not needing to be cleared of trees, only plowed.

3.  A source of water,  collecting it from the sky in the form of snowpack which will hold it in the frozen geological “water tank” to extend the period of melting.

4.  Geological locations for gates and reservoirs -- narrow places and natural bowls to hold liquid water.

5.  Natural waterways that can be extended with canal systems.

6.  Willingness for people to work together for projects too big for individuals.

7.  Government regulators to guard the greater good and keep order.  This includes populating parts of the country in ways that will encourage production and shipping product, particularly food supplies or natural resources like oil or coal.

8.  People willing to work hard for future rewards.
9.  A town big enough, resourceful enough and harmonious enough to serve and hold a maintenance population after the initial boom is over.

The Foley report,

"Before the Indian Claims Commission, the Blackfeet Tribe of Indians, Plaintiff, V. the United States of America, Defendant: Docket No. 279-D : Digest of Historian's Exhibits".  This important 600 page report was written by a researching lawyer to defend the interests of the Blackfeet reservation.  It outlines adventures with irrigation projects on the rez that were constantly blocked, bungled or neglected.  The northern waterway of Milk River was diverted south to supply American-side off-rez ranchers now called the “High Line” after the Great Northern railway route.  If this water were shut off, the High-Line communities would reconfigure drastically because the population would have to leave.  Towns are already shrinking.  Also, revising historical legal rules will affect profit lines.

Near Heart Butte at the foot of Major Steele Backbone.

Photo by Tom Kotynski

At the south edge of the rez, the Marias watershed, which was partly on the rez, was diverted into the Conrad brothers irrigation project with the cooperation of “Major” Steele (he was not military -- it was an honorific) the only Indian agent to serve twice, and the original Kipp, a Mandan/Hidatsa man of enormous energy and intelligence.  These developments went mostly unrecorded, but they were part of a much larger movement to develop the prairies into a profitable part of the nation. 

When I look north along the Rockies, either in fall or spring, I often see that there is snowpack on the mountains that are defined as Glacier National Park.  The geologists say that this area was formed by the action of the continental glaciers, but what we’re seeing now is the melting of the remnant glaciers in the park.  (Al Gore stands as a marker in today’s climatologist’s videos so we’ll look at what has been recorded ever since photography was invented.  Actually that technology -- machine-recorded images -- developed about the same time as the confining of the indigenous people, replacing them on the original lands with Europeans displaced by Civil War or pending war or famine in Europe.)  The rez' southern border was moved north three times -- the last time was to Birch Creek.

Major George I. Steele (1837 - 1916)

Why would the mountains, say, south of Heart Butte at about the same general area as the mountain called “Major Steele’s Back”, be about the southern extent of heavy snowpack in the watershed that feeds Swift Dam?  Was it really “Major Steele’s Backlot” for his profitable crop of melt water in Spring?   Such questions are cross-disciplinary: weather-patterns, geology, sociology, the development of nations, the transition from improvised frontier law-free times into highly complex laws and regulations enforced at many levels and in many hierarchies.  Some of the science reaches back by aeons and millennia and projects into the present Anthropocene with terrifying implications that are yet ambiguous -- very chancy indeed.  Both the terror and the fact of information affect thinking and governing.

The Rocky Mountain Front and the Lewis Overthrust

Actually "fronts"  of the Lewis Overthrust

The East Front is on the right.

Let’s take a different angle.  “The Rocky Mountain Front is the easternmost portion of the Lewis Range which rises abruptly 4,000 to 5,000 feet above the Great Plains.”  When the land was crumpled by tectonic plate pressure on the West coast, it broke in different ways.  Much of it was “uplifted,” like a broken cake layer half on its plate, creating the great stone ramparts right out of “Game of Thrones” or like the Great Chinese Wall, which gives its name to one section.

Collisions of southern heated air currents coming clear from the Gulf of Mexico against this high stone mass creates intense thunderstorms and cyclones.  Lightning hitting the land contributes fertility and the fires set by it repeatedly clear the land of trees.

The earliest maps of the Front were sketched by first white men informed by indigenous world-views.  They didn’t think about the cordilla of parallel N/S ridges -- which we can now see from the air and which so taunted Lewis and Clark, because they would struggle up to one divide only to see another range on the horizon.  What they saw was a horizon, the eye-sight panorama.  The earliest maps show landmarks, esp. peaks often compared to a “tooth” and the deep valleys with streams eroding and irrigating them, good for hunting and for camping with a little shelter and source of firewood.

Here are some links for the actual overthrust:

Lewis Overthrust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Overthrust

Glacier National Park, Montana - NPS: Nature & Science ...
www.nature.nps.gov › ... › Geology › Tour

Geology - Glacier National Park (U.S. National Park Service)
www.nps.gov/glac/learn/education/geology.htm

Images for Lewis overthrust fault

The Lewis Overthrust Fault and Marias Pass - Montana ...
www.mdt.mt.gov/.../LewisOverth...

This last one is meant to point out actual geology as you drive on Highway 2 through Marias Pass.  I’ll come back to the overthrust.

The Inland Seas

First, I want to bring into consciousness "the great Western Interior Seaway (also called the Cretaceous Seaway, the Niobraran Sea, and the North American Inland Sea) was a large inland sea that existed during the mid- to late Cretaceous period as well as the very early Paleogene, splitting the continent of North America into two landmasses, Laramidia to the west and Appalachia to the east. The ancient sea stretched from the Gulf of Mexico and through the middle of the modern-day countries of the United States and Canada, meeting with the Arctic Ocean to the north. At its largest, it was 2,500 feet (760 m) deep, 600 miles (970 km) wide and over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long."  (This paragraph from Wikipedia.)

It is this vast often-shallow sea in which the baculites and ammonites of the Blackfeet ceremonial iniskum formed, the little squidish creatures with segmented shell compartments which -- when broken apart -- look like teeny buffalo.  The original shell with its rainbow mother-of-pearl sometimes still present suggested fat to the indigenous people -- meaning prosperous times.  They are good luck charms.

Iniskim with mother-of-pearl shells

The edges of the seas were interrupted by lagoons and atolls where vegetation grew vigorously, as did the algae and seaweed beds in shallow water.  These conditions produced the oil and coal deposits left by vegetation -- no doubt with a few dinosaur inclusions -- that was eventually crushed into simple carbon fuel we extract today.  Very lucky prosperity for the people who found it, but they are not satisfied.   They hunger for what they might find in the Lewis Overthrust, thinking it will be geologically like the formations that produced the early Blackfeet oil fields and the Alberta oil fields to the north.  Others say the Overthrust is much more jumbled and has trapped any oil in small scattered amounts impractical for drilling.

Badger-Two Medicine

This is the power-struggle at the core of the fight over the Badger-Two Medicine land: a trajectory of profit for a human organization that will disperse in the near future versus a continuous upwelling of sacredness that comes from reducing human lives to humble specks in the great arc of time.

ANIMAL STUDIES

This the view FROM the top of Ear Mountain, which is on the cover of "Landscape and Legacy."

Much of writing about landscape and animals is divided into a kind of either/or that is edited either for semi-poetic admiration with a lot of worshipful liberal assumptions or on the other hand a nuts and bolts compendium showing how it all works.  John Vollertson’s “Landscape and Legacy” allows a continuum of essays united by the place they talk about but also a particular time in history when hunting of animals as food or trophies was being renewed by an attempt to hunt real understanding.  Hunters learn a great deal about their prey and often love them in the way that interacting with them allows, but these new scientists had new means like radio collars and low-level overflights.  They could document and they could follow individual animals through the seasons and life trajectories.

Though they are scientists, normally thought of as lab-coated just-the-facts guys, studying large wild animals on the east side of the Rockies demands strong personalities.  Jim Williams’ chapter on cougars and Mike Thompson’s chapter on mountain goats would be great to compare in a nature writing class side-by-side.  Both are written by seasoned experts describing their early days learning what they were doing.  Williams is matter-of-fact, not writing poetry, though big cats can be big metaphors, while Thompson writes rollicking one-liners and slapstick, entirely justified by the clowning white beasts of high snow.  Not only do "goats" (which are not quite goats) sit on their butts to slide down hills, but also he claims they use their rear ends to waggle a foxhole in a snowdrift that will allow them to hide from predators.

Jim Williams

In a time -- like now -- when philosophizing about the relationship between animals and people can reach such high philosophical soaring as to be nearly unintelligible, it’s a relief to hear about the practicalities of studying critters in obvious hands-on ways.  For instance, the cougar team -- and it was really a team, complete with dogs -- chased the cats up trees, darted them with tranqs, then had to lower them to the ground without killing them.  Williams tells about the encumbrances of tree climbing spikes and safety harness -- let alone rope-and-pulley lowering systems -- and how vital it was to do all of it carefully, because one never knew when the big cats (the size of men) would fail to go under as soon or as thoroughly as expected.  The practice was to nudge them with a stick as a “scientific” test of whether they were really knocked out.  One wasn’t and managed to slash Williams' britches before fading.  A nastier defense from big toms was peeing on heads of those below, so part of the necessary equipment was a hat.

Thompson, the goat man, found an old livestock salt lick where disintegrated minerals had soaked into the ground, so enticing to the goats that they had excavated holes in the dirt by pawing and licking.  The simple idea of setting a foot snare lariat never seemed to work so -- recruiting some help in the form of a horse and a buddy -- they packed in a rocket net that could shoot the edge of the net so quickly that the animals were not only trapped but also held down for tagging, blood draws, and radio collars that revealed at last where the animals went.  

In an effort to figure out what they ate, Thompson carefully studied a goat gourmet, then moved in after it was gone to take samples of the green stuff, tucking sprigs into baggies for analysis back at the ranch.  But the hazard when studying goats is the constant mountain wind so in an unguarded moment the baggies took off “like a flock of waxwings.” 

Thompson’s urine story was about camping high in what was goat but also griz country and therefore at bedtime making a pee-ring on the scree around his tent to mark his territory.  In the night the clashing heavy sounds of feet making the rounds of his mark had him electrified.  When he found the courage to peek it was not a bear but rather a mule deer buck licking up the seasoning.  I haven’t told you all the spoilers.

Gloria Flora

Spoilers.  The usual spoilers: greedheads looking to convert the world into money, leaving devastation and dead golden geese in their wake.  Industrial resource lords are still claiming entitlement while some locals still feel like peasants who must survive however they can.  The only rocket net capable of capturing them is a cooperating webwork of dedicated individuals and interconnected organizations who stay alert, devising laws to be pee-lines they hope will be recognized by predators.  It’s a source of relish to read the chapter by Gloria Flora who managed in this macho melee to slam the door on government leases for oil search along the East Front.  

Daniel Justin Herman

One of the key books in my thinking about these matters is “Hunting and the American Imagination,” by Daniel Justin Herman.  (It’s not in Vollertson’s bib, which is extensive and includes a lot of material you wouldn’t know about otherwise.)  Herman’s key idea is that most of our Euro-based understanding of animals in wilderness comes from a schism in Euro-politics.  In previous days wealth was land-based, so that the “landed gentry” presided over small nations (estates).  These were defined by the king who owned the taxation and military machinery.  Landed gentry saw the animals as signs of their status and employed an army of game-keepers to make sure that only the owners and their friends had the right to hunt.  But the people they had pushed out, who had previously eaten the deer and salmon for subsistence, became Robin Hoods who constantly poached as a matter of moral privilege.  

So some of the people who came to the new continent immigrated with the frank intention to repeat the old world order, except with themselves in the position of the gentry -- land owners with absolute authority.  (This idea hangs on mostly in the South.)  But others among the immigrants came with the idea that this would be a place where no one person -- nor even the government -- owned land, but rather it all belonged to the people in order to keep them alive according to their skills and wits.  This idea sometimes wears buckskin decked with Indian feathers.  It followed the frontier as long as there was one.

What a book like “Landscape and Legacy” gives us is a record of a developing new way for a new world:  hands-on non-consuming accumulation of information which in the course of its acquisition gives us many small bonds of understanding straightly connected to the animals themselves and their relationship to their lands.  And that makes new ways of thinking about human animals.  Technology gives us each other, and includes both goats and bears because we are all part of each other -- even the limestone substrate and the wind that whistles through it -- and the loss of any part is also a loss to the whole.  The loss of the East Slope would be borne by the whole planet.