INDUSTRIAL IRRIGATION THROUGH THE EYES OF A SMALL MONTANA TOWN

INDUSTRIAL IRRIGATION  10/19/15

Many recent papers have looked at the complexity of moral decisions, though in debate we tend to see “a” morality here and “a” morality there.  In frontier, war, and other confused circumstances -- say poverty or under cultures or enclaves -- outsiders see one set of rules and insiders see another.

The most important realization is understanding that “what to do” is complex.  Part of it is embedded in the body itself as a result of experience.  Much of this material is coming out of PTSD research, both the conflict between killing in combat and civilian laws against violence.  Morality turned out to have nothing to do with the reflexive hypervigilance and instantaneous reflexes of battle.  

Another major challenge to morality is coming out of the clash between industrial profit-development versus protection of the environment and the unentitled.  Globalization brings into conflict groups from ecologies that have demanded entirely different systems or have aimed for quite different goals:  maybe dominance vs. accommodation.

An historical and not always recognized difference is the change made by writing and literacy.  Moralities recorded in Holy books are a step towards “Law” in its largest sense.  They demand definition and fact-finding.  Nowadays the morality we learn from watching public media like film and TV is struggling through crime vs. compassion.  It appears that we have adopted situation ethics whether we like it or not.  And being guided by stories and images is different from reasoning through the legislation.

Writing about recent development history like the irrigation system is to take on questions and information that are “hot,” still highly defended because it’s often a source of pride and identity that winds through capitalism, race, family, wealth inequities, war, romantic ideas attached to frontiers, and the notoriety of individuals.  It’s problematic enough in schools to stop teaching civics and some histories.

Particularly in Western history and related disciplines there has developed an abyss or void between two styles of investigation.  One is the justification of such policies as Manifest Destiny and its opposing tragedy of displacement.  The 19th century is near enough in generational memory for people to believe they can recreate the times of their ancestors, whether indigenous or invading.  Then there will be a de-bunking of the myth of the virtuous and powerful with his interventions in the name of justice.  Then again there will be a re-valuing, a restoration.  All the cowboy stuff on one side of the books and Republicans -- all the saving of species and preservation of landscapes on the other side, usually with Democrats -- means politics has become constant collision.  It has also meant a struggle with revisionism, even evidence-based.

And yet the sciences find evidence that constantly compels a re-evaluation of what has happened in the past, what is likely to happen in the future, and -- most crucially -- what we should to do to protect our children as well as surviving right now.  Ironically, in the newly named Anthropocene, we are no longer the shape that occupies the whole foreground.  Now we are specks in a swiftly moving time.  And we’ve been throwing our children away, though we’re even more willing to throw away other people’s children.  

There is almost no exchange across these divides, even in universities.  People who dearly love Hollywood Westerns and Cormac McCarthy’s cynical violence, find no need to reflect on post-colonial consequences to communities of the present West.  Narratives pitch tales of exceptional individuals surviving feats -- great stories -- against the collective expertise of today’s millennials, discoveries made by girls collecting tufts of grizzly bear fur from barbed wire at bait stations and recording on computers the DNA relationships.  The closest we come are CSI in the wilderness, murders solved by “trace.”  

But these hinge on the morality of park rangers and ecologists, while most readers are in the growing cities.  The seminary principle we used to discuss maintained that the true wilderness is in the city, now particularly the improvised cities of refugees.  Even teeming masses of illiterate and impoverished people have their codes of behavior derived from experience, often learned at great cost.

What does this have to do with a little village on the east slope of the Rockies, so far north that it's continuous with the far-south of the Canadians?  I will make the case that it is relevant from the issues of global warming  to the survival issue of famine.  Ukrainians in Saskatchewan are well aware of how politics can destroy a country, as when Stalin sold the wheat and kept the profits, causing death by starvation to the people who grew the grain.  The same thing is happening now in North Korea and happened in parts of Africa.

Grain -- the most easily transported and stored form of wealth -- can be used to bribe (a cynical interpretation) or save whole countries to make them allies and clients.  This is becoming increasingly plain, so that some people are beginning to say that when agriculture first began, it began a series of hoarding, oppression, and war that we can only end by going back to hunting and gathering -- but in today’s world that would end up being looting.  IS that now.

Agriculture is often portrayed in idyllic terms based on family, a benevolent (mostly) climate, and a simple lifestyle.  Gone, baby, gone.  At its fanciest technology now, huge machines roll across the prairie, sucking up gas and oil, spraying herbicides and pesticides, destroying all nests, burrows, and shelters, and separating the operator from the dust and poisons by enclosing him (not many hers) in a glass box where he operates a computer and possibly an overhead drone that surveys and analyzes the land.  The hailstorms, weeds (which quickly adapted to being Roundup Ready themselves), earlier springs, erratic temperatures, and diminishing ground water cannot be controlled.  No designer genome can adapt to the unexpected and unprecedented.  They are limited by human minds.

Human minds are the limitation and also the salvation of the situation.  Human minds still respond to the little handful of pronghorn antelope that gaze curiously, then bound away.  We still see visions in the clouds, both the thunderheads and the mackerel skies.  It is our variousness and contentiousness that creates the outlier edge that might survive when all the rest is destroyed.  But at other times it’s the stability of people who still do what their great-grandparents did that can keep the system from tearing itself apart.  It’s how we weave them together and into the planet’s time-lines that yields a morality.

TOWN COUNCIL: A Rainy Night on the Prairie

Entering Valier

The Town Council meeting last night was immediately preceded by a preliminary Valier Local Government Study Commission. It’s supposed to determine which of three “forms of government” the town would like. Presently it’s “Commission Executive.” (Four commissioners and a voteless mayor who manages.) The main change recommended was merging the town’s two wards into one, since the population is shrinking, it becomes ever harder to find people to serve as commissioners, and the whole town is fairly mixed as to prosperity, history, desires, and so on. (75.9% in favor when surveyed.) There was strong support for keeping the nonpartisan elections (93.7%) which is in line with the county and also previous practice. People want their elected officials to get training for the very complex and layered issues and therefore an ordinance is recommended requiring that all elected officials attend classes.

That’s the official story. Unofficially, on the level of gossip, three prominent citizens are moving away: one for a bad reason, being caught in an FBI pedophile sting; one for a neutral reason, moving to be closer to work; and one because of increasing discomfort, partly caused by drifters. Her house is in an area where floaters tend to try to squat, between a drinking establishment and blocks of wheat bins once owned by the government and now clustered on the land of one individual but owned by various grain farmers who separately own the bins according to their needs — some only one, and some more. There are no alarms or lights and poison use is liberal in order to eliminate vermin. In such a shielded but easily accessed place near the highway, it’s not hard to imagine “poisons” in the form of drug sales to finance adventures.

A Memoir about Valier, MT. and the east slope of the Rockies

In the beginning I only idly wanted to write about Valier, but was a little wary. The town is hostile to Ivan Doig, whose memoir “This House of Sky” is one of the “ten best” on lists of literary scholars and popular readers in other places. This is a strange phenomenon that’s also true of James Welch, Jr. on the Blackfeet rez and was true of Wallace Stegner in Eastend, Saskatchewan, until they realized they could make money from his reputation. (The book is “Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier.” (1962), in which the town is called “White Mud,” because of a deposit of white clay quite famous for its use in porcelain.

Stegner’s boyhood was just north of here on both sides of the 49th parallel.

Both Doig and Stegner wrote the same story again and again, Doig drifting towards a popular and sentimental fiction style; Stegner becoming more essayist, environmentalist, and universal. Welch was far more inclined to try new subjects, but his readers didn’t like it. Readers, or at least publishers’ understanding of them, are highly conservative and resist anything new or different. “The Indian Lawyer” (1990) offered insight into what he’d learned on the Montana parole board and “The Heartsong of Charging Elk” (2000) explored the French love of Native Americans, but readers cling to “Fools Crow” (1986), a traditional 19th century tale. It remains to be seen whether “Winter in the Blood” (1974) will be read on account of the movie version.

This is a traditional “feathers and horses” story with a strong moral spine.

These three writers are all dead and their books are decades old. Have the rules changed enough to allow writing about Valier? One woman leaned into my face and spat, “If you EVER write about me or my family, I will KILL you!” Why so emphatic? What’s at stake? Nothing less than survival, which they are convinced depends upon reputation. They believe a reputation is something that can be controlled. If you watch Masterpiece Theatre very much, you’ll soon acquire this mindset. It is a Brit bourgeois understanding of culture, dependent on prosperity.

When one drives through Valier, many of the houses and yards seem bright and tended, esp. if one doesn’t go up and down all the streets. Darrell Kipp, when he went through Valier on the way to the Great Falls airport, used to drive up and down all the streets, trying to understand White Town. It remained a mystery to a boy who grew up in Blackfoot, for a long time the terminus of the Great Northern Railroad, so a concentration point for writers and anthropologists, people who wanted to drive up and down the rez. As an adult, Darrell’s house was more elegant inside — good furniture, fine paintings — than most in Valier. The yard was shaping up. It’s yards that obsess Valier — they don’t necessarily want fences, but they want lawns and landscaping as indicators of propriety.

Someone in our quiet little conversation last night said they had noticed that the people who were constantly besieging the town council with complaints and demands tended to have moved to town about the same time I did — 1999. I suppose it was a recession, but I lose track since there is always a succession of recessions. There’s supposed to be a study somewhere. I came from the city, but these tended to be retirees moving in off the ranches and farms that were formed in their youth. Or industrialization in the form of giant machines made their homesteads redundant. Some of the houses followed the people into town.

As the oil industry shrinks and reshapes itself, responding to the world economy and to earthquakes caused by frakking (there was one, very small, north of here a few weeks ago), the Hutterite boys who went to make their fortune on the Bakken are likely to be filtering home, quite changed. What will that do? The Hutterite communities are more involved in Valier than the town thinks. Their schools are managed by ours.

When I inquired about the town’s archives, I was told that most of them have been shifted to Helena. I wonder how much care has been taken of what must seem insignificant to them. But some boxes remained here and among them might be a very interesting period during which Valier was technically not a town because the state had required something the town didn’t supply. They managed to regain their status.

The webwork that ties this town into a potential book is a kind of vascular system of irrigation with its head in the Rocky Mountains where the snowload diminishes yearly. The end is not here in town, but far away by railroad and ship until it reaches nations that the US can control by bargaining with its vast store of grain, more powerful than the threat of bombs, more powerful even than bargaining based on response to disease. Famine is the ultimate, most ancient, killer.

Grain storage bins right in town.

This isn’t just a little town that’s always in the throes of family feuds or mercantile arrogance or entangling fees and regulations. It is a source of life-blood that we are beginning to understand is threatened by experimental grain seeds, climate change, political gridlock at every level, and the constant hydraulic-like pressure of diseases on plants, animals and people, some — like pesticides — ironically turning against our families with cancer and miscarriage. The planet is a sheet of relationships looped together like the fragile fabric of sheer stockings, easily rent and "run" into what the Brits call “ladders.” Going down.

There’s a Finnish man old enough and big enough that he can speak the truth. Last night he was frank: we are all at stake, but only a few will address the problems. They ride on the efforts of others and don’t even admit it. How can they NOT know what is at stake? Their own lives.

VALIER LIBRARY GROWS

The front entrance overhang makes a bit of shelter.

“Valier Library” is a bit of a misnomer since Valier exists as a hub to the much larger service area of people stretching out for tens of miles in every direction, even across county and reservation lines, into the lives of more people than use the banks, the churches, the schools, or maybe even the irrigation system that is the lifeblood of this little ag town.  Last night I attended a meeting of the Valier Library Board to consider an addition to the pre-existing library, a graceful but now bulging architect-designed building on the highway.

The members of the board present were Mary Brooke, Liz Makarowski, Ray Bukoveckas (Chair), Nancy VandenBos and Steve Kincaid, representing a cross-section from ranching; grain industry; part-time Glacier Park employee; a recently retired manager; and the son of Cecille Kincaid, who was the librarian here from 1970 to 1987.  These are sober, attractive, conservative but progressive people -- good listeners and planners as well as readers.  They appreciate and support Cathy Brandvold, who came to the East Slope four decades ago after growing up in Moorhead.  She is far from being any kind of hick or ignoramus.

In summer the entry becomes a patio.

A good library these days is always in a state of trade-offs and flexibilities, so the plan for the library must be the same.  One push-pull is between adults and children, which in part means balancing books against computers, but then again there needs to be a counterweight to the reflexive and addictive computer games.  Kathy says she acts more like a mom than a traditional shushing librarian, so part of her work is enticing the kids off to activities that require reading in disguise (art projects, mostly).  That can lead back to the computers from a different angle: to find things out, to look for ideas, to explore examples.  She keeps the lid on excess noise and doesn’t tolerate bullying or vulgarity.  

Most of the adults used to old-style quiet might appreciate a little more of it.  During the school year the quiet times expand and even moms have more time to read.  But the truth is that in today’s world most adults have so many obligations that they don’t have time to attend classes or even book clubs.  Writers are so commercially driven that they demand impossible fees, but even local writers or experts don’t draw more than a few friends.  Still, there are comfortable places to sit and read.  A few people are either a bit isolated or in cramped housing situations and appreciate the friendly atmosphere.  The library is also a good place to park a family member while business elsewhere is conducted.  The Hutterites come to borrow Christian books a box at a time, connecting themselves to the larger community.

But adults can also be problematic.  We have our funky freaks the same as any library anywhere.  Drunks or junkies are not welcome and know it, but there are always a small number of people whose wheels are not quite turning.  And then there are those who think that if they do illicit explorations on a computer, no one will know, which is why the computers are situated so the librarian can see the screens.  Anyway, this librarian doesn’t stay behind her counter.  For one thing, she never begrudges getting up to help people who are baffled or new to technology.  This is no elitist salon for the privileged and entitled.

Bill Grant, the architect presented with the challenge of responding to all this, already knew that he was making an addition to another person’s work -- sort of like marrying someone with a pre-existing family.  I knew Bill’s work from his very successful addition to the Valier Catholic Church but also from his work for the Piegan Institute, truly inspired buildings for their Immersion Schools that combine usefulness with beauty.  They are the product of careful listening and even active participation in that community, so that he really understood the flow of activities, the rhythm of the day, the adaptation of spaces to events.

Piegan Institute's Cuts Wood Blackfeet Immersion School in Browning

Bill is married to Anne DesRosier, a member of a highly gifted early Browning family that has stayed pretty much on the reservation and has not held itself aloof but always been part of the life there.  Anne is completing a master’s degree in environment and history in Missoula. Mary DesRosier, MD, her sister, serves Heart Butte but sometimes lives in Valier.  The DesRosiers came about the same time as the Scrivers and the DeVoe Swanks, who started with a gas station in Browning and generations later have become a regional construction empire.  At first glance Bill seems like an immigrant from back east, but part of his reason for coming here was local, just over the Canadian border.

These are among his ancestors:  “Charles Alexander Magrath conducted foundation surveys of the Northwest Territories from 1878 until 1885. He joined Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt and Elliott Torrance Galt in their western industrial enterprises as a surveyor, later becoming Elliott's assistant and Land Commissioner of the North Western Coal and Navigation Company.  He was also the first mayor of Lethbridge, Alberta, which has a major street Mayor Magrath Drive named after him.”   “Magrath has been called "The Father of Irrigation in Southern Alberta.” (Magrath and Galt compare to the Conrads or Paris Gibson on this side of the border.)  

Engineering is one thing: practical considerations of materials and design that consider cost, durability, maintenance and so on.  Architecture responds to that, but is also a work of inspiration, aesthetics, and the human elements.  The clearest element of this is Grant’s inclusion of scissor-beams to keep the addition from just being a box, but rather relating to the existing cathedral ceiling and central fireplace.  The more the architect is included, motivated, and insightful, the better the results.

Snowfalls can come in any month of the year.

  

One early thought was the need for more shelving.  Then there was a concern about an ADA computer station and an ADA restroom -- even an ADA entry!  Not a lot of people arrive in wheelchairs, but we are an aging population.  Again, people wished for a meeting room or a place to be separated from hub-bub.  A key consideration was relocating the service desk/office so that the librarian could constantly scan the whole space.  There are laptops that can be taken to quiet corners.  All the furniture is constantly moving.  Crafts and food projects need collapsible tables.  Daylight, heat, and cold are key considerations.  What seemed at first to be practical, like a concrete floor that was mess-tolerant, later was realized to be impractical on Valier soil, which constantly moves, expanding and contracting so that it cracks all slabs enough for ants to find their way in.  Bill’s many years of local experience with materials and work crews makes him a major resource, quite aside from design.

Eave mobiles made from beads and forks.

The key aspect is still the library’s function as a hub.  Cathy told me that the kids have become so attached to the place that twice now children have made their way to it as a place of safety.  One was a child accidentally locked out who came for help, and another was a child who misunderstood the family agenda and got left behind.  It was after hours but under the overhang of the front door he waited patiently on the bench until his folks spotted him from the highway.  Everyone understands that a bank is a regional service.  Not all of us grasp that a library is a kind of bank that stores a wealth of knowledge, ideas, inspiration, and relationships almost like family, including the famous characters in books.

A QUIET DEAL IN ROBARE

It happened sometime between 1884 and 1897.  This little story is about “Major George I. Steell” (b. 1837, d. 1916), Hiram Upham, Joe Kipp, a man named Barron, and Robare, the town “too wicked to persist.” It is entwined with the beginnings of the irrigation system that feeds from Birch Creek on the reservation out across Pondera County.

Robare was a little settlement just south of Birch Creek as it emerges from the Birch Creek Flats.  You can see a sign pointing to its original location just west of Highway 89 as you approach the Birch Creek bridge from the south, but the last remnants of it were washed away by the ’64 flood.  Formed by the reservation boundary that was Birch Creek and the policies of Methodist Indian Agents who wanted neither liquor nor Catholic missions on the reservation, it therefore featured both church and tavern, side by side, each with its own kind of spirits. 

"Major George I. Steell"

Steele had actually been the Indian agent, twice but briefly both times, declaring he would clean out this nest of thieves.  He was a strong Republican and in those days, as now, tried to present themselves as virtuous.  Yet he knew Robare well enough to make deals in the bar, “Deadwood” style.  He owed his status to T.C. Power and George Bird Grinnell who drew on Back East liberal intellectuals with political connections but little real knowledge of Indians.  Grinnell was not above either whitewash or blackening as suited what he thought were the right goals.

Steell’s English mother and Scots father immigrated to Quebec where Steell was born and raised.  Looking for his life, he went from New York to Boston, to St. Louis, and up the Missouri to Fort Benton in 1857.  For seven years he worked for the American Fur Company in Helena.  Then for Matthew Carroll in Fort Benton, where he and Carroll were what Jack Holterman, historian, calls “merchant princes.”  That is, they were linked to C.A. Broadwater and T.C. Power who dominated both wagon trains and politics.  He was one of the first commissioners of Choteau County.  In 1869 he went back to Ticonderoga, NY, and married Eva Treadway, a sign that he was secure enough to want to start a family, but within months of reaching Montana, she died.

Steele (who evidently had no military status or service) went to Salt Lake City for a few years, then returned to ranch in 1875 on the Sun River and the Missouri.  In May of 1877 he married Annie Dias, a Blackfeet.  (Other places her name is given as Last Calf.)  This is probably how he acquired a ranch in the foothills above what became Swift Dam.  That year he served in the territorial legislature and also in 1879.  In 1884 he participated in the constitutional convention and in 1890 he was appointed agent of the Blackfeet.  By then his ranch had moved downstream along Birch Creek to near Dupuyer. 

The controversies of Steele’s time included the usual mingled assets and corruption by suppliers, the Great Northern Railroad’s constant “taking” of timber, hay, and right-of-way, the scandalous Willow Creek School, rumors of mineral riches in the mountains, and alcohol.  But these headaches, which became literal, he treated with morphine to the point where the agency doctor said he was incoherent most of the time and he would only talk to the Indians through a little peekhole he cut in his door.

His friend J. W. Schultz also had back pains which he eased with “grass” as well as morphine.  Schultz said that once the two of them played Ouija with prospector Dutch Louie Meyer and made the Ouija board tell Meyer where there was gold in the mountains.  There was, but not much.  In this way they discovered how good the gold strike was without investing money or effort.  A more exciting story by Schultz is that Steell, called “Puhpoom” or Thunder because of his temper, had a powerful black stallion that was stolen.  Schultz cleverly and heroically stole it back.

Steell, like Grinnell, felt that the tribe should sell “the east half of the Rockies” to the government.  Hill proposed moving the tribe to Dakota.  The east slope and the rez were both in the crosshairs of Republicans v. Democrats; fur and whiskey trading vs. livestock and grain ag; respectability vs. opportunism -- all pushed hard by the industrial revolution with its drive for cross-continental railroads and hunger for copper.

In 1897 Steell's agent career ended, after an interlude during which a harsh reforming Army captain tried to stamp out Blackfeet culture.  All through this time Steell was friends with Joe Kipp (who was always everywhere) and the two of them took a delegation of “chiefs” to Washington, D.C.  Then the collaborators -- with two other prominent citizens, Barron (possibly an ancestor of a Valier sheriff) and Hiram Upham (patriarch of a talented family) --were in the habit of gathering in a Robare bar to speculate and do a little trading, though Steell had a reputation as a despiser of alcohol, of which he had little need since he was a drug user.  In the bar the movers and shakers dabbled in water rights, that other dangerous liquid.

Joe Kipp sold some land and his water rights to Anna M. Steell, George’s wife.  She operated her place, which included the Carroll homestead, until 1905 when she sold it to the Conrad Irrigation Company, a predecessor of the PCCRC.  Interviewed old-timers said Anna irrigated it for timothy hay.  A photo of her ditch taken in 1919 shows Swift Dam with the ditch intake for Anna’s place.  It appears that she and George ran separate cattle herds on the rez, but that Anna’s cows were herded by Indian Agency employees.  Grazing vs. plowing was another dynamic but both needed irrigation.

In the time period around WWI -- 1909 to 1925 -- settlers and immigrants were coming and going.  Some seriously underestimated their ability to take root and thrive.  The CIC went broke, and so did its successors.  The irrigation works fell into disrepair until the next surge of settlement after WWII.  Edgar J. Steell, George’s son, testified that the original Steell ranch was “up at the mountains” and then moved 15 miles downstream from Swift Dam in 1898.  The ditch took water to Sheep Creek, then from that stream to Dupuyer Creek, and then to the Conrad holdings.  Thus PRCCR claims those water rights.

A law called “The Statute of Frauds” allows for a settler on public lands to sell land and water rights to someone who immediately moves there and uses them, making the deal orally without written record -- just a handshake.  But the squatter needs to have made improvements like fences and buildings.  Kipp, Barron and Upham were not improvers of land.  But they did “take out” (dig) a ditch in 1884 to irrigate on Birch Creek Flats, perhaps thinking of reselling the water.  In the 1892 survey, the surveyor Paul Bickel called it “the Kipp and Upham Ditch” and reported gardens and crops growing there.  Anna M. Steell and Raphael Moran acquired the water rights in a written document, properly recorded and dated in 1897.  A neighbor and relative to Steell by marriage, Charles P. Thomas, testified that the ditch was taken out in 1873 and used for irrigation every summer afterwards, but then it fell into disuse until Lewis Carroll’s father redeveloped the area in the 1940’s.

R. to L.:  Heart Butte, Feather Woman Mountain, Major Steell's Backbone Mountain.  Truly.

The mix of opinion, bar deals, written registration, use and development, unreliable witnesses, Indian rights and female ownership reveals the unstable legality of the headwaters of Birch Creek.  It’s tempting to bring another Lewis Carroll’s book, “Alice in Wonderland,” into this story.  But I keep thinking of the modern parallels, with Cut Bank dives taking the place of Robare saloons.

(Sources for this post include the Michael F. Foley Indian Claims Commission Docket Number 279-D and a far rosier account at  http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/h/a/l/Douglas-G-Hall-1/WEBSITE-0001/UHP-1506.html)

THE SOURCE AND SUSTENANCE OF VALIER

In this country the economic base is capitalism.  Land IS capital.  The value of ag land depends on crops and crops depend upon water.  The right to the use of water is also an asset that can be recorded and manipulated in the form of bookkeeping and a system of law.

Valier was created by the forebears of the Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company and is sustained by the PCCRC -- not tourism, camping, pretty yards, or dust-free streets.  Not even lack of chickens.  Nor does history as the open-range ranch originally claimed by the Conrad Brothers have much to do with today’s prospects, though it’s the most romantic story -- save for the little-known history of those dynamic teenaged brothers during the War Between the States.  (See April 28, 2005 on this blog.) 

Ivan Doig's novel about the boom of building Swift Dam.

Natural resources create settlement and value in several ways:  first the actual value of the resource (in this case water);  second, the value of the created structures and the value of the labor necessary to extract the resource and manage it to delivery (which creates a boom); third, the value of the services -- materials, machines -- necessary; and finally the value of goods needed to create and sustain households.  Valier was created in two ways: the boom accompanying the construction of the dams, reservoirs, and canals; and -- what continues today -- the long commerce resulting from homesteading that used the water.  The water is used three ways: for crops, for livestock, and for human habitations.  Small town businesses are derived from these primary values.  This also applies to developing wind and oil.

I went down to the Canal Company to look at maps.  The big main one of “everything” is under glass on the wall.  It reveals the following:

1.  The New Miami Hutterite Colony, which can be seen at night across Lake Frances, if you know which lights to look for, is NOT a shareholder, though it’s the nearest to the lake.  Their main operation is swine.  Their sewage lagoon once broke, flowing into Lake Frances.  (Many jokes.)  Birch Creek Colony and Kingsbury Colony have historical relationships to PCCRC, partly because the colonies bought ranches with pre-existing water rights. Midway Colony, and Pondera Colony are also in the county.

Swift Dam and reservoir

2.  There are three dams:  Swift Dam which is the historical key to the irrigation system, and the two dams at the opposite ends of Lake Frances, one of them by the Lighthouse Restaurant.  Swift was originally earthen but after the flood destroyed it, the dam was rebuilt as concrete.   Leading out of Swift Dam are two major branches, one that goes out northeast along the Two Medicine River and one that goes out southeast much farther south, towards Conrad.  This latter is “Canal B” which is in litigation, challenged by the Curry ranch.

Birch Creek Headworks

3.  Surprisingly, to the east and south of Valier there are few “shareholders,” meaning irrigators.  One big cluster of irrigators is along Birch Creek north of Valier and out towards Cut Bank.  The other big cluster surrounds Conrad.  It might be that higher ground prevents water from flowing that way, or it might be that the land was not part of the Conrad holdings which were the origin of the Pondera Canal Company.  It may be that most of the unirrigated land went into CRP and so remains unirrigated.

4.  The irrigation systems vary a lot once they leave the main canals, mostly responding to the shape and size of the owned plot.  Long skinny plots can’t use pivot sprinklers.  Some are better suited to flood irrigation.  Others use some other kind of system, like a web of ditches.  This makes an interesting map of interlocking squares and circles (pivot sprinklers).  To the east the map extends past I-15 to the next section road.

This bear was headed for the Lighthouse restaurant.

5.  There are 7 “ditch riders” who are responsible for monitoring and maintaining their "reaches".  Originally they rode on horseback, but now go out in pickups and ATV’s.  It probably won’t be long until they are at least partly replaced by drones overflying the ditches, but there will always be times when a person is the only option.  As a joke, a wandering grizzly cub is listed as a ditch rider!  His photo is there with those of the humans.

http://ponderacanalcompany.com/about-pccrc/maps-and-photos/

There are at least four major issues facing this company and therefore impacting Valier: 

I.  The Blackfeet Compact

In Montana water claims are based on the headwaters and earliest use.  The Blackfeet Reservation is the location of Swift Dam which impounds the main irrigation water for the company.  The tribe has not in the past asserted their right to the water, but now they do.  They have the money for irrigation and the intent to develop as would not have been historically possible.  This will seriously diminish the water available for the Company.   Rep. Rob Cook and Sen. Llew Jones secured 14 million dollars in funding through the Montana legislature to help mitigate impacts of the Blackfeet Compact on PCCRC.   Current tribal conflict and the split tribal council means that this compact may be endangered.  PCCRC's Board and their representatives will be closely watching and working with the delegation as the Compact is introduced and moves through Congress.  So will the Blackfeet.

The Blackfeet attitude is affected by the 1964 breach of Swift Dam.   The original dam at this location was constructed around 1910, with a height of 157 feet.  There was little or no legal process.  The Conrads were not in the habit of asking permission.  This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed and sent a 30-foot wall of water down the creek bed. The nearby dam at Lower Two Medicine Lake also failed, and at least 28 people were killed.  I have never heard of lawsuits or insurance claims in spite of these deaths and the immense loss of property.  At the time of the flood (I was here) there were rumors about failure to maintain properly.  Lately there has been interest by student film makers about the tragedy, but not the technicalities.  Fiction writers like Sid Gustafson also address this event.  

The current concrete-arch structure was completed in 1967, with a height of 205 feet, and a length at its crest of 573 feet. The reservoir is also contained by a secondary earthen dike with a height of 53 feet and a length of 457 feet, also completed in 1967. The dams and reservoir are owned and operated by the local Pondera Canal and Reservoir Company.  You can monitor the operational dials and switches on their website.

Swift Reservoir has a maximum storage capacity of 34,000 acre-feet and normal storage of 30,000 acre-feet.  Recreation is restricted to hiking in the area, with a parking area that requires Blackfeet Nation permission.  One would also need a tribal fishing permit.

Gene Curry

II.  Curry legal challenge

http://ponderacanalcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/legal.pdf

This is a combination of challenges that go back to the original allotment, follows through various transactions, and is affected by historical use.  Curry owns land west of Valier in an area known as the Birch Creek Flats. Curry acquired the land beginning in 1988 when he purchased property referred to at the hearing as the Keil property. The Keil property is locally known as the Carroll property as well. In 1989 and 1990, Curry purchased adjacent land known locally as the Ryan property or Crawford property.

In short the Curry “ranch” -- which includes a feedlot at the edge of Valier and the Valier gas station/liquor store/C-store -- is claiming that they are being shorted on water to which they are entitled.  The case is in “water court” and is decided by a “water master.”  This case is an interesting illustration of how the “capital” of land ownership can be leveraged by pushing for a larger share of water and by investing in local business.  Cheryl Curry attends many town council meetings.

III.  Global weather change

The ultimate source of the real value of the Pondera Canal Company is the snowpack on the east side of the Rocky Mountains.  Every year there is less of it.  This is partly because of changing patterns in the high airstreams and partly because warmer weather means more water falls as rain and runs off instead of storing as snowpack.  A few years ago people here flatly denied there was any such thing.  Now they just get quiet.  As much outspoken emotion is expressed about these issues, there is even more contained by denial, unseen but powerful.

IV.  Frakking

If priming or waste water were to contaminate the aquifer from which Valier draws its well water, it would be a disaster.  But if the wastewater were to somehow enter the canal system, it could be a crop killer, possibly making the land unusable.  That’s a stretch, but stranger things have happened.

Emotional factors from history enter into these geological factors.  Plans were repeatedly made and funded for irrigation on the reservation but never came to fruition though canals were dug by Blackfeet, often by hand with a wife working alongside her husband, and sometimes compelled by an agent who would not issue food commodities unless the people worked.  (See the Foley Report.)  This is part of the successful lawsuit against the US for negligent and predatory management of the assets of the Blackfeet people.  Part of the reason for the tribe's poverty is failure to develop their land with effective irrigation.

As it turns out, there is another fascinating but overlooked story about the origins of PCCRC irrigation rights which I’ll address in another post.  It’s about an Indian agent who went native, the ever-resourceful Joe Kipp, and Robare, the wicked little town destroyed by the ’64 flood.  No Conrads were present.  Valier did not yet exist.

VALIER: A SMALL BOAT IN CHOPPY WATER

Valier is a town that the last census shows is 509 people, 234 households, and 138 families.  Many of the families are interrelated and date back to 1913, when a Belgian priest, cooperating with the Great Northern Railroad and the Conrad Brothers irrigation project, came as a village group for the economic advantage of all concerned.  Before that the land had been the Conrad Brothers’ Block Hanging 7 ranch, capitalizing on open range, first sheep, then cattle. 

About a fifth of the population is under 18 and still at home.  Another fifth are 18 to 24 and fewer than a fifth between 25 and 44.  Almost a third are 45 to 64 and a little more than a fifth are over 65.  I doubt that the transient workers who bunk in Valier were counted by anyone, though the popular idea (no count available) is that rentals are impossible to find and that we’re missing out on a boom.  I see empty houses, but they aren’t necessarily fancy.
  

The school claims that it can’t find teachers because there is no housing for them.  They mean no housing that teachers would accept, because they expect what they would find near a city.  The move throughout Montana is to school-owned teacher housing, like that in Heart Butte.  At the same time the once-usual arrangement for a minister to live in a church-owned home has fallen out of favor because taking advantage of the housing bubble by accruing equity was one way for a minister to improve his or her fortunes.  This is no longer true, but most churches have sold their parsonages.  Anyway, these days small town ministers find they can only be supported by a cooperating group of congregations in various towns, so how would they know where the parsonage should be?  Would it be seen as an advantage or a burden to the hosting town’s congregation?  Ministers are now much less invested in providing a force for good in the whole community -- there just isn’t enough time or gas money.  No priest or pastor lives in Valier.  (I am retired.)

But the biggest problem of all these high prairie shrinking towns is infrastructure, most crucially the water system, the basic stems of which were installed as long as a hundred years ago when the technology for sewer lines was basically asphalt-saturated cardboard.  Legally required standards for sewage lagoons are rising and remedies are expensive.  Towns must send elaborate samples for testing and if they do not, or if the samples show below standard results, there are penalties.  

e. coli

Valier’s lagoon, which was recently expanded in hopes of a growing population, has been failing the tests.  The diagnosis was that the water was freezing (temps go to sub-zero), so the “bugs” weren’t digesting microbes.  The solution suggested is floating covers ballasted with tubes of sand and buoyant with forced aeration.  The state has given the town an exemption from penalties based on the intention to do this.  Of course, it will have to be paid for.  The present Mayor and town council have been pretty resourceful about getting grants and loans, but ag-acculturated people here are wary both about any debt and about any government body.

In fact, this is dry land farming country where some farmers have no wells, so must truck water from the city source.  They pay city rates for the water but there is no cost to the town for trucking it home to their cisterns.  The first sound I hear on waking is heavy trucks with water tanks going up my street to a hydrant.  The town’s wells have been low in recent years, so -- after some difficulty -- another well and a new water tower were added at considerable cost.  This was in part a response to an engineering firm that made a pitch for the necessity.  The clinching argument was that if the school were to catch on fire there was not enough water in the system to put it out. (A few years ago some local high school girls pushed a dumpster against the school wall and set it ablaze.) The new Mayor Elect claimed that the construction of the water tower was so deficient that it would fall over, but he was merely a citizen then.  (Of course, he will continue to be merely a citizen until January 1, 2014.)

The rising town fees, combined with the contentious national atmosphere, have put our teakettles a-boil.  To the rescue came the Mayor Elect, whose platform was to throw the criminals and exploiters out, though he had no proof that anyone was either committing crimes or taking advantage.  (IMHO, if he was saying this he is vulnerable to lawsuits for libel, but the idea plays well.)  When this man first came to Valier from Conrad, his idea of how to solve the water shortage was to refuse to sell water to any ranch, farm, ag business or rural housing.  No more trucking water.  He never grasped the economic dimension.  Of course, none of those people vote in city elections.  In an atmosphere where people are urged to plant xeriscaped yards and watering lawns must be rationed, he has built an elaborate garden with automatic sprinklers around his new house.

The basis of a successful economy in Valier is profitable farming and ranching.  Because of the dependence on irrigation, the foundational business in town is the Pondera Canal Company, which built, owns and maintains Lake Frances, the canals it feeds, and Swift Dam, which is the source of the water.  Swift Dam is on the Blackfeet reservation but in Pondera County, not Glacier.  Now you know why Heart Butte is on the rez but in Pondera County -- it is so that Swift Dam will be in Pondera County because of the Pondera Canal Company.

This structure gave way on June 10, 1964, after heavy rains caused flooding on Birch Creek. The dam collapsed, sending a 30-foot wall of water down the creekbed, killing dozens.  (Several people have become interested in this story.)  Swift Dam was never properly authorized when built by the Conrad Brothers, who were notorious for their cavalier attitude towards regulations, particularly on the reservation.  The rumor at the time the dam broke was that it because of poor maintenance, but I never heard about lawsuits for the many deaths and damage.  The Curry family, which owns several Valier businesses -- including the sole gas station -- but lives outside the city limits, has sued the Canal company in Water Court.  http://courts.mt.gov/content/water/wc2006-01  I don’t think there’s a decision yet. 

Ice Fishing Shacks on Frozen Lake Francis

Migratory Birds on Lake Frances in Fall

Water use rights are granted by “first use” and upstream location.  Irrigation of the reservation land contiguous with Pondera County has never been allotted according to the law because no one on the rez side was using it.  Now, however, with advent of pivot post irrigation, it is wanted and needed on that side.  This is such a hot issue that it could easily end up triggering violence.  Clearly, when all is sorted out, the Pondera Canal Company probably will be entitled to much less water, which means that some farming will be much less profitable and some will go bankrupt. 

Valier's water comes from wells, not the lake.  Valier is a small boat in this storm surge and the victims, as usual, will be the people quietly living here in a Fifties sort of illusion, hoping the fees don’t go up too much, working so hard and long that they have no time or energy to show up for town meetings, and constantly suspecting that all the corrupt political things they see on television are absolutely true and coming closer.  Many are aging or have health issues.

The Town Hall and Office.  

These trees have been removed because they were undermining the building,

 but it caused a firestorm of public protest.

The council will have decisions to make that involve more and bigger issues than ever before.  Delicate negotiations and a head for legal matters will be vital.  Luckily, the mayor has no vote and no power to do more than implement as directed by the council.  A town is a co-operative, with every voting member being responsible for outcomes, even legal liability.  Whatever the penalties, we will all pay them.  Yet the first reflex of most people is to pull back, gossip in an ineffective effort to find out what’s going on, and accuse individuals when it all goes wrong.  They obsess about what they understand: dust, potholes and chickens.  The rest is just too hard.