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.

A TOWN MEETING IN DEADWOOD -- er, VALIER.

The mini-Bakken boom around here has changed the dynamics of Valier, adding itinerant oilfield labor to the demographics.  Once Swift Dam and the canal construction that is the heart of the town's economy had been completed in 1910, the previous boom dynamic of male gypsy labor moved on to other territory.  Cut Bank became the saloon town and petit professionals like school teachers did their relaxing in more upscale emporiums in Valier, places more like restaurants.  Froggies, which had been closed down, reopened as a pizza parlor with beer.  Since then, it has become more of a dive, though the parking lot fistfights have been kept to a minimum.

In fact, Froggies, its growing clientele, and the general weakness of the town council as they struggle with the fraying of infrastructure built a century ago and a constant stream of imposed requirements from the state, has meant that the malcontents and the mutineers have solidified into a kind of alternative political hub, though they have no background or information that is current.  Froggies is their headquarters.

This came to a head last night in a council meeting during which the Froggies crowd expressed huge outrage at the lack of respect for their fireworks event on the Fourth.  On the one hand the owner actually wept over the grievous insult of a town council member, gentle and quiet Dave Widhalm, coming into the bar and asking whether they had remembered to get insurance for the fireworks in a year so dry that in many places fireworks were flatly forbidden.  The indignation focused on Dave asking these questions in front of his clientele.  Also, this man felt that the posting of the Valier regulations for fireworks was an assault on his dignity.  He had a handful of notes detailing these failures of respect.  After a half-hour of being harangued, Dave humbly apologized.  I didn’t see why, though it was a generous thing to do.

In addition, the Froggie owner spoke out about the constant fury from people who want to do things that are blocked by city rules.  This news must be conveyed by city employees who are personally blamed.  

Then there was a diatribe over the failure to properly respect and support the older man who has volunteered to run the campground, so full on the Fourth this year that four spaces were double-camped.  He and his friends prepared the camp before the fireworks and then cleaned up afterwards -- all for no pay.  Among the other indignities, he has to go around to the camps to collect the fees because the town has not provided registration boxes the way the national parks do it.  

Valier fish cleaning station

One wonders at the enormous popularity of the campground this year.  This is the first year there has been a full-time resident camp tender.   One of the more peculiar complaints about the campground was that the very bright lights by the fish-cleaning station and the wash house should be turned off at night.  They were installed to deter persistent vandalism.

The campground (and the lake) is owned by the Pondera Canal Company and the head of THEIR board gave permission for the fireworks.  Again, rather strangely, no one seems to have consulted the fire department, though it’s only volunteer.  The Pondera Canal Company is a sort of “third government” of the town, but very quiet in most circumstances.  It is the whole reason for the town’s economic existence -- NOT tourists, nor fishing nor even ranches.  Froggie claims that the fireworks display was not advertising for his bar but rather a benefit event for the library (the most vibrant and irreproachable institution in town) and the VADC which springs into being whenever the ladies of the town want to undertake some improvements of a cosmetic nature. 

In fact, two ladies were there to propose more grant applications to improve the looks of the town, because surely money would follow if only the weeds were gone.  Of course, they propose to write the grants, as they have done before.  (The town can barely get the old ones paid off since they are usually partial funding.)  Many of the complaints by the Froggie crowd are demands for repairs to streets and so on that simply can’t be afforded without going into even more serious town debt which must be repaid by property taxes.  Maybe a third of the town is “owned” by Pondera County (the county -- not the Canal Company) because of unpaid taxes.  The county does not pay itself taxes.

Valier grain elevator

This is a collapsing town.  The grain elevator is old-fashioned and there is talk of abandoning it, esp. since the railroad spur may be closed down.  One grocery store is left and a proposition to sell it to someone younger has broken down.  The cafe has been sold to people who don’t have the vision of the previous owners.  The engine rebuilder of great talent is seriously ill.  The bank provides less and less service.  The owner of the Medicine River Trading Post is too ill to open.  One large and prosperous family, reaching critical mass, has bought the only service station (the other one closed) and the motel.  The car dealer is gone.  The other major business in town, a construction company, has an adjunct office in Kalispell and the company wives would rather live over there where there are many amenities.

Valier is less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border, next to the Blackfeet reservation, and on dealing terms with a half-dozen Hutterite colonies.  Our population is divvied up into compartments.  The whole situation is ideal for people who like to evade the law without attracting attention.

Lethbridge, pop 83,000, was originally Fort Whoop-Up, based on the whiskey trade (the Whoop-Up trail went past here), and after that a coal mining town.  It has always been a sin city with a veneer of upper class culture: universities, art galleries, and so on.  It is 131 miles from Valier.   Apart from the many 18-wheel haulers,  traffic up I-15 is fast, sporty cars with Canadian plates.  Great Falls’ population is not quite 60,000 with the same bourgeois cultural features (museums, universities, orchestra) but also Malmstrom Air Force Base.  It is 86 miles away.

Lethbridge, Alberta

When the cultured ladies who want to propose grant applications think about small towns, they do not think of the larger context or the opportunities for evading the law.  They do not think about the world wheat economy or the international corporations who own it.  They do not dream that a new water agreement with the Blackfeet tribe might very well cause ranches to fail, if the lack of snow pack in winter doesn’t end irrigation first.  They haven’t penciled on the back of napkin how many major construction projects on the northern prairie remain on the federal agenda, which have been what sustained the company.  Nor are they aware of how federal funds are steadily dwindling.

Their thinking is all on nice domestic terms, which is how they don’t notice the drug scene.  They drive up government costs simply by bustling around imposing surveys on people who never fill them out.  It’s not a glass wall that seals them off from the handsome, wolfish, money-making men or makes them the tools of the steak-eating, red-faced, heart-attack bait who hold office and run businesses.  It is a mirror.  But this has always been America’s problem.

I think that I will honor my grandmother, a staunch Women's Christian Temperance Union member in her prairie homestead years, by putting a referendum on the ballot this fall to make Valier a "dry" town.  Let the soreheads drink in Cut Bank.