EARLY CHANGES ON THE PRAIRIE

The first Euro beings that spread across the continent were microbes, which reduced the human population by half -- sometimes more.  By the time Lewis and Clark crossed the continent, all but Clark had caught some form of European venereal disease, some of it coming inland from ships on the Pacific and otherwise traveling on boats up the Mississippi/Missouri complex, sometimes with the deliberate goal of being lethal.  Most effectively it traveled through the fur traders who were mostly in Canada.  For a while there was rivalry between the Hudson's Bay Co. factors in posts across the high prairie versus the various forms of the American Fur Company on the US side.  In those days Western Canada was not part of the nation so much as a franchise awarded by the English King to the mercantile company named Hudson's Bay.

Trapping out all the beavers quickly left their ponds untended so water could travel faster.  The white people of the time didn't seem to notice.  They were setting about the killing of all bison, whose bones ended up in huge stacks waiting for the railroad to take them to England for "bone china" cups and saucers.  The many boxcar loads of bones are inconceivable today, but photos prove there were indeed so many.

Today, as we know global warming is a result of many small changes added together through the Industrial Revolution, we are more willing to see what these various demographic forces did to the continent.  Prairie grass had responded to many hooves, much grazing, and occasional fires set by indigenous people to move bison herds and renew the plants.  Now grass grew tall and rank.  The flow of the rivers was more intense and diminished earlier in the season, after rampant flooding when it warmed in Spring.  

It's suggested that the loss of crop-raising in the warm climates allowed wild growth, as in tropical jungle, to reclaim the open spaces, bury structures and change the oxygen content.  There were no census counts, so the facts are dependent on records at the time, as well as genomic analysis.

". . . the Franciscan friar Fray Toribio de Benavente wrote that “At this time [Mexico] was extremely full of people, and when the smallpox began to attack the Indians it became so great a pestilence among them… that in most provinces more than half the population died.” 

" . . .Some authors have suggested that the total Native American population size decreased by more than 90%, whereas others have argued that significant population losses were more localized and the magnitude of the reduction relatively modest. . .

"We find that indigenous Americans experienced a significant contraction in population size some 500 years before the present (ypb), during which female effective size was reduced by ∼50%, thus suggesting that the impact of European colonization was both widespread and severe."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3251087/

At about the same time that Columbus struck America, volcanoes around the world threw so much dust and sulphur into the atmosphere that crops failed for lack of sunlight.  This happens periodically and can have harsh effects on people.  Probably the impact on the early Euro contacts was daunting, esp. on those trying to establish northern colonies.  Drought is one of the most dreaded weather events and evidently is what cleared the SW cliff-dwelling people.  Both mean the ends of food production.

We can only guess at what the oceans were doing in this period, but their impact is always there when the currents change due to melting or freezing of continent-sized masses of ice which affects the salinity of the water, which dictates what sinks and what rises.  We know how powerful the alternation is between El Nino and La Nina.  Some people suggest a cycle of 1500 years that controls weather.  We now appear to be approaching a tipping point when the rise and acidity of the ocean will affect cities.  In pre-written history days we see "written" in the evidence that villages have been engulfed.  Of course, the submergence of Beringia was a drastic change.  If we look at the planet over the long term, change is the theme.

The effect of disease, war, enslavement, and even climate was the basis for Euros escaping the guilt of wiping out whole civilizations by claiming that the land was "empty" -- no one lived there.  This justified the use of what seemed limitless land to be a refuge for oddballs, explorers, those wanting land, and so on.  European culture was dictatorial, "root-bound", so individuals were motivated to escape westward long before the beaver/bison economic drives.

Another demographic impact was in the North American south where African people had been defined as a kind of domestic animal, a wealth that could produce crops while reproducing themselves.  Occasionally individuals would escape West, or even in the East would slip away to the persisting tribes of Florida, for instance.

Blackfeet were apart from much of this ferment and change because they were so far north, backed up in the corner of the Rockies and the Canadian border, even in its mostly theoretical terms before it became the Medicine Line.  Not until they acquired horses and gunpowder did they began to interact aggressively, to defend the last remnants of the bison, to define who was "in" and who was "out," mostly in terms of allegiance to the felt group.  

The basis of the tribe's subgroups was in relation to the center point, usually a strong-minded father of many, rather than an attempt to enforce a known border like a river or a divide.  Most of the newcomers were men with vigour and imagination who contributed to the group and "married" the tribal women, producing children who tied them to the whole.  Trappers who were Scots, French, Mohawk, Samoan, Mexican -- cross-national -- both passed through and came to stay, increasing the vitality of the groups that had formed in both what would be Montana and what became eventually Canada.  Most of this went unrecorded.  Early missionary writing might be accessible to multi-lingual scholars with access to Vatican records.

The People of the Eastslope of the Rockies are part of the world dynamics that control what happens to everyone.  The Beaver, the Bison, and the Blackfeet are all players who might be powerless in the singular, but become world-determining in the aggregate.

WHEN THE SEA WAS IN THE MIDDLE

The vast Montana landscape seems as though it's always been there, just like this, but we know better.  It's a long story.  The west side of the Rockies, which form one edge of the Flathead Valley, has quite a different tale to tell.  https://flatheadlakers.org/explore/history-geology/  The short version is that when the massive continental glaciers melted ten thousand years ago, the bathtub-shaped valley filled with water held in place by an ice plug at the south end.  When warm weather or the pressure of the rising water broke through, the water went out to eventually join the Snake and then Columbia Rivers on their rampage to the sea.

The East Slope of the Rockies is so different that it might be a different state -- probably ought to be.  it's hard to understand that the volcanic pushing up and sideways of the tectonic plate under all the Pacific Ocean didn't just fuel the Pacific Northwest volcanoes and push up the Rockies, but also created a vast inland sea across the North American continent.  That sea had much to do with what we see now:  the buttes that were once reefs, the long slant of the altitude, the coal deposits, the clever coiled ammonite fossils that became what the Indigenous people called "iniskum," buffalo stones.  Even the oil which was equivalent to a gold strike was created in those times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Interior_Seaway#Origin_and_geology

"The Seaway was created as the Farallon tectonic plate subducted under the North American Plate during the Cretaceous. As plate convergence proceeded, the younger and more buoyant lithosphere of the Farallon Plate subducted at a shallow angle, in what is known as a "flat slab". This shallowly subducting slab exerted traction on the base of the lithosphere, pulling it down and producing dynamic topography at the surface that caused the opening of the Western Interior Seaway. This depression and the high eustatic sea levels existing during the Cretaceous allowed waters from the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Gulf of Mexico in the south to meet and flood the central lowlands, forming a sea that transgressed (grew) and regressed (receded) over the course of the Cretaceous."

"The Bearpaw Formation, also called the Bearpaw Shale, is a geologic formation of Late Cretaceous (Campanian) age. It outcrops in the U.S. state of Montana, as well as the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and was named for the Bear Paw Mountains in Montana. It includes a wide range of marine fossils, as well as the remains of a few dinosaurs. It is known for its fossil ammonites, some of which are mined in Alberta to produce the organic gemstone ammolite."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearpaw_Formation

https://deeptimemaps.com/western-interior-seaway-thumbnails/

(Maps of the sea, which was really a succession of seas.)

Remarkably, all these phenomena and processes have names as though they existed now.  They have real impacts on our lives.  We can see what they left behind.  But we have real impact on them as well.  Only recently we've realized the impact when Europeans brought their diseases to America, the same diseases that had halved their own European populations in the past.  When infectious invaders came from Africa and Asia through Europe to the Americas, they wiped out the human indigenous agriculturalist population so severely that the cessation of agriculture across the continents actually changed the weather by changing the proportion of plant-produced oxygen.  Microscopic viruses and microbes changed the land masses from sea to sea, and restored the tropical jungles we are now cutting down and burning, changing the atmosphere once more.

This is echoed today when we look at the industrial revolution and the excess of greenhouse gases it has produced, warming the whole planet in only few hundred years.

"Anthropogenic climate change leads to melting glaciers and rising sea level. Between 1902 and 2009, melting glaciers contributed 11 cm to sea level rise. They were therefore the most important cause of sea level rise. Scientists have numerically modeled the changes of each of the world's 300,000 glaciers. Until 2100, glaciers could lead to an additional 22 cm of sea level rise."

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121114083819.htm

We're already imagining Manhattan submerged.  Florida is already flooding.

STICK IN THE MUD

"Starting 16.5 million years ago, they say, vents in southeast Washington and northeast Oregon put out a series of flows that reached nearly to Canada and all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The flows created the Wapshilla Ridge Member of the Grande Ronde Basalt, a kilometer-thick block familiar to travelers in the Columbia Gorge and most of Eastern Washington. The researchers say it is “the largest mapped flood basalt unit on Earth.”

https://news.wsu.edu/2017/10/11/inland-nw-volcanic-eruptions/

Volcanic peaks in the Northwest are scenic features but occasionally they become geological nightmares, as when Mt. St. Helens erupted.  "On May 18, 1980, the Mount St. Helens became the largest and most destructive volcanic eruption in U.S. history. By the end of its cycle of fire and fury, 57 people had died."  In Montana the main result was fine dust raining from the sky.  Then it became clear that the ancient floods of basalt had not reached inland as far as the east slope of the Rockies, but the air borne dust had created the gumbo so characteristic of the area.

"Gumbo" is a popular term for any soil that is largely clay, so that when it is wet it is sticky, slick, and impossible for wheels to travel through.  When it is dry, it is like concrete.  In Valier, when expanded, it swells a dozen times bigger under the houses; but when it dries out, it contracts and bends everything the other way.  Doorways in this town are likely to be rhomboids, but doors themselves stay square-cornered and thus can stick badly.  

A form of gumbo is bentonite, dropped by volcanoes millions of years ago, but not on land.  At that primal time the whole inland of the North American continent was a shallow sea and dropping the dust into water caused chemical changes.  Partly the gumbo is structured as tiny sheets or plates that slide against each other, and partly the particles carry an electrical charge that attracts them to the earth.  The advantage of gumbo is that it can hold water in drought.

In some places dinosaurs left their footprints in the gumbo mud, but in others the entire animal was mired until it died and was fossilized.  They say that gumbo was the lubricant that made it possible for slaves to push huge blocks of stone up inclined planes in order to build the pyramids.  They say that when Brother Van first exited the river steamboat in Fort Benton, by the time he crossed the riverfront road to the saloons aligned there, each foot weighed fifty pounds because of the mud sticking to them.   Until the gumbo roads on the rez were paved, whenever it rained Heart Butte, a hamlet of old folks was isolated.  And gumbo explains why Plains Indians never used wheels, but always used travois that slid behind the horses.  

Once I was driving in a dirt road when a passing shower slicked the surface.  My van slid uncontrollably into the ditch.  Luckily, I had a book to read.  When the grass dried out, I drove back onto the road and proceeded with no problem.

Besides creating soils, volcanoes throw up aerosols that are so full of dust that they shade the sun and drop temperatures so that winter freezes the rivers enough to drive vehicles on the ice and no crops get enough sun to grow.  These are world-wide events that are noted in the records of the survivors.  Eruptions are so effective that some have suggested it is a way to cool a warming planet, but who controls a volcano?

Bentonite is useful stuff for drilling for oil, which is a feature of the east slope.  It's slick to cool drills and can "set up" to plug old abandoned wells.  Today's drilling depends on frakking, which is the injection of water into wells to take the pressure high enough to drive up oil so it's accessible.  The water is mixed with chemicals and useless for any other purpose.  Sometimes it de-stabilizes the foundation rock enough to cause earthquakes.

Every change that yields enough profit for a boom is doomed to bust, sooner or later, but people don't necessarily plan what they will do afterwards, not just for income but also how to give up a home, material culture, a way of life.  There are basic lessons here:  one is that everything is connected to everything else even when there is a separation of a zillion years and a zillion miles; another is that all is process constantly changing and a human being is lucky if their place stays the same for lifetimes; and the third is that whatever humans do is controlled by the land, the air, and the water.  It's not the gods who control what we do, but rather the place. 

BERINGIA: A SUBMERGED LAND

Definitions are crucial to many laws and theories.  What are we really talking about?  Is what I call a tree the same as what you call a tree?  Is what I call conservative what you call conservative?  Are the Bering Straits not a land bridge at all but a country that is low enough in the water that it was marshy before inundation, but only submerged, not gone.

Here's the size of the area that was once "Bering Straits" and how it overlaps both Asia and America.  It's clear that it is the land that was not quite torn apart when the two continents drifted away from each other due to tectonic forces powered by volcanic action under the Pacific Ocean.

Beringia, a country engulfed.

Of course, it was never a country, but it was once a wide land mass.

This is what Beringia would have looked like before it was submerged.  

Pretty much grassy prairie or muskeg.

What ARE "straits" anyway?  There are lots of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_straits

The formal definition is:  "a narrow passage of water connecting two seas or two large areas of water."  Or "A strait is a naturally formed, narrow, typically navigable waterway that connects two larger bodies of water. Most commonly it is a channel of water that lies between two land masses." Like the Straits of Gibraltar or (north of Seattle) Deception Pass.

"Strait" is a geological term that assumes one is traveling on water between land, not that there is a bridge over water.  It was ridiculous from the beginning to call this shallow land a "strait".  The term is wrong-side out, implying narrow land between two big bodies of water.   Better to call it "Atlantis North".  Probably it was settled by hunter-gatherers and animated by herds of browsers like mastodons and their predators.  

It's not that everyone decided to march over a "bridge" in a line, like that schematic of animal evolution that everyone likes so much -- from flopping fish to proud Harvard grad (who drew the idea that put him at the lead) -- but that people kept settling farther and farther east until they were in North America before it had a name or mental image.  Probably before there were glaciers, since it was their melting that made the waters rise, just as the melting of the poles is making waters rise now.  Manhattan and Florida are the next drowned "country."  They are not and never will be "land bridges."

Lately there begins to be curiosity about what the people were like who slowly pushed east to North American and who were then extinguished by the glaciers or just moved away.  They may have come from Europe as well, but no one pretended there was a land bridge on that side.  Islands persist.  I don't know how deep the water around them might be.  That area has been habitable in the historical recorded past.

But it also very clear to my mind that the people of SE Asia got to South America much earlier than the melting of the continental glaciers.  Where there is water, there is food, so they would not have starved.  They were a water-living people with small but sea-going vessels.

Obviously the white "deciders" developed the vocabulary of land according to their concepts -- what they knew -- and then imposed that on the reality they met.   But also, the indigenous people in their effort to become accepted, to be correct, have fought the result ("there was no bridge!") instead of the cause, have used their legitimate resentment as a forced resistance instead of going to the underlying re-framing that is persuasive.  The latter takes longer but also lasts longer. 

In the summers of 2001 through 2006, Piegan Institute sponsored Summer Seminars organized by Roslyn LaPier, an enrolled Blackfeeet then working on a degree at the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was eventually employed as an associate professor.  The first seminar was "Blackfeet history and places along Apaatohs-ohsokoi.  (The Old North Trail)".  

First thought of this seminar was responding to 1801-1802 maps made public from the Hudson's Bay archives in Winnipeg.  Ted Binnema provided copies.  This is what I wrote in notes:  "They are indeed along the east slope of the Rockies, which is where the braided trail ran north and south for millenia, a mixture of game trails and travois paths that can still be seen if you know where to look.  Using the descriptions on the map (which are in terms of landmarks, mostly peaks and valleys that run into the mountains) and reasoning about how far a group could move in a day and what sort of place they would choose to camp, the approximate location of points on the map could be found.  Binnema presented slides he had taken from each of those locations."  His doctoral thesis had been developed into a book called “Common and Contested Ground: a human and environmental study of the northwestern plains.”

Bouncing off of that was the work of Narcisse Blood and Ryan HeavyHead.  (Narcisse was killed in a car accident a few years later, a terrible loss.)  "Narcisse and Ryan arrived a little late, lean and sunburned in straw hats, carrying well-worn backpacks.  The presentation was about the GPS locating of three old dog trails and one horse trail that run roughly north/south along the Rockies.  He and his co-workers had been walking those trails all summer."

It turns out something like the joke about cowgirls being merely transportation of beer from the place of chugging to the place of peeing.  The early people ate chokecherries and carried the seeds to new camps.  With this clue, big clusters of chokecherries and sarvisberries, and also by figuring how far dogs could go in a day, as well as how far a horse could travel without water and grass, they used GPS instruments to  give camp spots specific crosshairs.  Back at Red Crow College, a table-sized map-drawing computer made these points into a traditional map.  Thus modern technology was used to push aside European assumptions (though the trading post factors (managers) had carefully preserved the maps) and bring it all together into new info and insights.  The coordinates could be used to focus satellite attention, another way to look at terrain.

Thus terms and assumptions from Europe and Western technology are explored by feet and eyes on the ground, until the eyes in the sky add input, and new maps emerge for a new people.

VALIER, A COMPLEX REALITY

When I began working on the history of Valier, Montana, a town based on irrigation, the consensus of the town dwellers was quite different.  One idea was that the economic base was the recreation offered by Lake Francis, which is a dam-created impoundment, part of the irrigation system.  Fish are there because they are stocked, planted, but no one in town sells a fishing license.  The kind of fish is quite unlike stream fly-fishing for trout.  Some of the lake use is machines that go fast on water.  It’s not a good place to swim because of mud.  

An island was a roosting spot, a refuge, for herons, but also for seagulls which are considered negatively and nest on the ground.  When a vandal got access because water was low, partly because a construction company had graveled the route as a favor to politicians, and smashed the nests and eggs in a gleeful ATV spree, bird defenders tried to bring in national organizations.  The rookery, trees that had grown there before the dam and had died after that, was cut down to eliminate controversy.  Or maybe the dead trees just fell down.  Things calmed down.

There are no seagulls around this year.  I don’t know why.  No herons either.  The campground next to the lake becomes more and more controlled, with an onsite manager to collect fees for the piped water and electricity.  People mostly come on the weekend in RVs.  We’re all nervous about open fires.

At one point when the Conrad brothers owned the land, it was an open range ranch with many cowboys.  This is often featured in the histories written by women hoping to promote a romantic image based on movies and tv.  The just previous period of raising sheep is quickly skipped over, and the introduction of barbed wire, which ended the “open” part, likewise is only noted.

Another rather idealistic story is that Valier was founded by Belgians whose sense of propriety was offended by the raucous boom culture of oil discovery, particularly since it was associated with the Blackfeet reservation, but also avoidance of Cut Bank, which was still wild and woolly when I came in the Sixties.  The bars are more civilized now, but still thrive.

The boom years of Valier came from the construction of Swift Dam and the ensuing irrigation channels and basins.  The former sheriff from that time, now deceased, told me that weekends were so riotous in Valier that one had to walk down the streets on a layer of beer cans.  I have not researched any of this but only have talked to people, seen the publicity, and observed the land itself.  The exception is the story of how the Catholics, the Belgians, and the railroad developed a scheme for bringing in a community of farmers.  I’ll pursue that story, which I did research a bit, in another post, but it has been a strong force in terms of self-image. 

The dwindling of Valier, which is in process today, is much the same as that of the entire High Line of Montana and small towns across the prairie.  It is dynamic, continuing, and cannot escape forces that have nothing to do with the town.  Maybe most wrenching is the aging of the population, the thinning out of families, the confused transfer of wealth and practises across the generations.  Many people have big powerful vehicles and shop a hundred miles from home, but those with undependable cars and those who have no way to drive — either no car or no ability — are limited, as I discovered when a severe ear infection made me too dizzy to drive.  This is no longer a good place for poor people with health problems.

A counter force, not necessarily helpful, is that of the people from other places who see this village is a refuge, a holdover from long ago when families lent stability and charm.  There are two categories: one is young families hoping to keep their children safe and unaware that drug dealers have discovered that small towns are a good place to cook meth and dispense pot, that an aging (and hurting) population is vulnerable to pharmaceutical pill racketing.  The other is single men who have not formed into families or who have left earlier families.  A theoretically non-alcoholic community is not a problem when one drinks privately, a practise that is not exactly community building.

Another factor is the return of military people, since the area encourages enlistment of the young as a guard against poverty.  These people are educated and energetic, still young in retirement, and accustomed to a rather different ethos than that of the current nation where extreme negatives are seen as funny and powerful.  Something similar happens on the rez where the people who were moved to the cities by Eisenhower — who thought it was a way to disperse the rez — come back home.  Some are used to prosperity and impatient that things are old-fashioned, old buildings are falling down, and so on.

One expectation is that small towns like Valier will be cheaper places to live, cost less for food, taxes, infrastructure and so on.  But the idea also means less quality, less fresh food, more potholes, water problems, and standards imposed by people in the “cities” of Montana, though none of them break the 100,000 population mark.  Professional refugees from competitive cities, much bigger and usually coastal, have little idea of how to live in a rural place.  They don't participate, expecting service.

This close to Canada (a little more than an hour’s drive to the border) we have compensated by interweaving our enterprises, but the federal government’s appetite for national isolation and tariffs is interfering.  Consequences are felt in medical care, academics, and the international pressure from refugees.

One other factor should be mentioned, which is the risk of monoculture.  The beef ranches and hog farms are not so susceptible — or so we think — as the vast stretches of wheat, esp. where irrigation can encourage it.  These fields are vulnerable to the shrinking supply of water (or so it seemed until this violently wet year) and also to tinkering with seeds, both by cross-breeding and by fiddling the genomes.  Today there are people allergic to wheat, people dependent on the beer from barley, undetermined numbers diseased from chemical fertilizers and weed control.  It’s easy to play “sim city” with a small town like this one.  As long as a bad move doesn’t eliminate all the players.