Monday, May 20, 2013

NOTES ON THE '64 FLOOD



CLIMATE

There are no mountains that go east/west on the North American continent, so arctic air can easily travel down the continent.  In fact, the Rocky Mountains guide it along the east side of the range.   At the same time, wet air comes in from the Pacific Ocean and piles up on the west side of the range where it must drop moisture in order to be light enough to cross the mountains.  When it does, if it meets cold air, it almost explodes snow.  This snow is “money in the bank” for growing things, because it melts down the east side until late into the summer.  In fact, the “savings account” becomes glaciers.  But prairie summer rain moisture, after the spring monsoons, stays in the rivers and streams and quickly runs off.

These waterways are highways or at least guide paths for travel, even when they are too shallow for boats.  They also become “long towns,” that is, settlements along the edges where it is cool and there is forage.  Even in winter that’s where the trees and shelter are.  BUT the rivers on the rez run at the bottom of deep coulees with steep sides, originally dug by catastrophic floods when the major North American glaciers melted.  The entire coulee bottoms are fertile and relatively flat because they are flood plains.  The only trouble with flood plains is during the flood, but that problem was solved for the nomadic peoples living in portable shelters -- they just went up top for a while.

DAMS

Euro culture and Meso-American culture learned to impound water behind dams, an engineered version of snow-pack glaciers, so that the water could be piped up to the dry land in order to raise bigger crops.  Sometimes the dams could also impound energy to drive turbines.  The early dams on the Blackfeet rez included Swift at the headwaters of Birch Creek, Two Medicine above East Glacier, and Sherburne in the St. Mary’s Valley.  Irrigation was the Big Promise for the reservation but as the Foley Report showed, it was never properly developed.  The Conrad brothers, who built Swift Dam without much attention to permits and other legalities, were the first to exploit a system of canals that really worked.  Lake Francis is part of their system and also supports boating and fishing.    All three dams were earthen, built by piling up dirt.  They had provision for emergency water release but in 1964 they didn’t work either due to lack of maintenance or because no one was there to operate the mechanism.

The first failure was in the St. Mary system and undermined the highway built along the flood plain, so that a man in a pickup was swept in and drowned.  That system drains north and is problematic now, not because of floods but because it would take water into Canada if it were not diverted back into the United States where it is a crucial water supply for people living along the “Hi-line” of what was originally the Northern Pacific Railroad.  That diversion system is beginning to fail and repair will be costly, but the alternative is to close down farms and towns.

Most of the boundaries of the Blackfeet reservation are determined by rivers, which was more convenient in the days of founding than any surveyed line.  The 49th parallel legal boundary of the United States is the main reason the St. Marys Valley is in the United States.  Nevertheless, the boundary between Glacier National Park and the rez is the water course through the valley, including the chain of lakes.

Gradually rising water is not so damaging as “walls” of water, which kill people and animals because of their suddenness.  Witnesses to the water that came all at once down Birch Creek said it was preceded by a wall of air made visible by the dust it raised.  One person said a cow had been swept up in that preceding wind-wall and was being tossed along, tail over hoof, dead and thumping on the ground.

No one expected dams to break or even rainstorms at the level they reached that June.  School had just gotten out and the old people and children had moved to the homestead allotments at the bottom of the coulees.  There was little or no television in those days and even the radio wouldn’t transmit to many of those relatively remote places.  The alarm had to be spread by people physically going to knock on doors.  All the roads that went out across the rez were unpaved gravel -- some not even gravel.  Much of the soil along the east slope is gumbo, which is caleche, a particular kind of soil derived from volcanic emissions in the Pacific Northwest.  It is famously sticky mud when wet -- impassable except on horseback and even horses must stay on the grass or they will soon have twenty-pound feet.

ECONOMICS

Between Valier and Browning are three bridges on each of the three rivers that went wild. All were destroyed.   Browning was so isolated that grocery supplies had to come in by helicopter.  There was no way out in each of the four directions except by fording water.  The government was overwhelmed.  Once the water went back down, locals began using their farm machinery to rebuild fords and provisional bridges, but paperwork meant work was slow.  Marias Pass was a wreck, including the railroad.  From the east the train could come no closer than Shelby.  Summer tourist trade, a major source of income for the area, was stopped entirely.

The tribe now saw the wisdom of paved roads, even though the flood, hitting perpendicular, had upended paving and thrown it off the engineered right of way, one of the more spectacular sights.  So the “inside road” was paved -- going out of Browning through the railroad depot and along roughly the route of the ancient Old North Trail until it reached Heart Butte, a tiny hamlet which had been devastated by the flood.  Then the roads along Two Medicine, Badger and Birch were paved.  This meant that people who lived in the “long towns” could get to work and school in population centers.  The growing tribal population meant pressure for more housing and when it became clear that clustered housing didn’t work very well because it concentrated dysfunction, new housing was built on allotments along the rivers.  Possibly they ignored the US flood plain housing restrictions.

Once there were roads, the dynamics of Heart Butte changed drastically.  People could get in and out to jobs and work and clustered housing projects were built there.  A new school and a clinic were added.  But law enforcement has never caught up.

To get people back into shelter, the tribal and federal authorities built cheap quick-fix houses intended to be temporary, but they have never gone unoccupied.  Some people moved back into their old log cabins as soon as they were habitable.  (Local standards.)  The pull of habit and convenience was strong.  The contrast between the response on the rez side versus the state and private resources on the state side led to much bitterness among whites.  

WATER RIGHTS

The right of the Blackfeet Tribe to their share of the boundary river of Birch Creek has never been exercised.  The canals that would have to be built were either not built or built in nonfunctional ways.   In the flood some caved out. The motivation to farm as compared to ranching was weak.  But over the years things changed.  The biggest innovation was pivot sprinklers, massive pipe and wheel systems that could water a giant field without any canal -- just pumps.  At the same time education and ambition on the rez were increasing and this time the “haves” versus the “have nots” went the other way.  No one is thinking of garden plots now: they are raising alfalfa.

The dubious history of Swift Dam on the rez and Two Medicine Dam or Sherburne Dam “sort of” on the rez but technically perhaps in Glacier Park, which are not state lands, must now be sorted out through a history-based first-use law that has not been enforced.  Almost certainly it will be necessary to diminish the amount of water used by the Pondera Canal Company.  This will probably be enough of a loss (combined with diminishing annual rainfall) to put some people out of business.  It will also challenge the tribal effort to preserve sovereignty as against federal supervision and intervention.

The climate of the planet is changing, which means that the glaciers are shrinking out of existence.  Rainfall patterns are changing to later in the season so that they are not stored as snow.  They are far more turbulent, which means that they fill the streams and run off faster, making living along flood plains more risky.

DRAMA

Most of the attention to the ’64 flood has been paid to the drama of it all: the deaths, the suffering, the heroism, and what it revealed about individuals, like the priest who was caught in a tree because he was trying to save his private herd of cows.  No one knew he HAD a private herd!  We thought he had taken a vow of poverty!  Bill Grissom, the white Indian agent, threw himself whole-heartedly into rescue and rebuilding.  Jerry Black, the smart aleck radio announcer, stayed by the mic around the clock to guide what was happening, crucial at a time when there was little or no communication gear.

Stories were exaggerated, so that Ramona Wellman desperately wading out of her home with a child by each wrist -- one of which slipped away, luckily caught by the man coming along behind her -- became a “Sophie’s choice” tale about floating on a roof and having to choose whether to save her boy or her girl.  Some bodies were never found.  

Everyone wanted to find a villain.  All the wickedness was far upstream by the time the flood hit.  Trickle-down consequences continue today though much rez land no longer belongs to tribal members and therefore is technically subject to state law, and though there is Indian preference for government jobs so that few whites remain in the towns.  Three towns are tourist-based and much of the economy depends upon fire fighting crews, which are sometimes used for other emergencies now.  Many people have radios and television via cable or satellite, but coverage is still not universal, even for cell phones.  The radio is only intermittently local, mostly being fed from satellites.  Weather reporting is much improved.  Law enforcement is both better and worse -- the FBI having withdrawn to Denver.  People are far better educated and own computers.

Yet no North Korea long-range missile could do the damage that still could be caused by another weather event that spring of ’64.

Myself in the winter of 1963-64




No comments: