Garrison Dam and the Drowning of Fort Berthold

The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples had survived smallpox, military conquest, and forced relocation to a shared reservation at Fort Berthold in central North Dakota. By the middle of the twentieth century, the Three Affiliated Tribes had rebuilt communities there along the Missouri River bottomlands. The river had sustained their ancestors for millennia. Then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a dam.

Construction on Garrison Dam began in the nineteen forties, upstream from the reservation. When it was completed in nineteen fifty-three, the waters behind it began to rise, forming Lake Sakakawea, named for the Shoshone woman who had guided Lewis and Clark through this same region a century and a half earlier. The irony was not lost on the people being displaced.

The rising water inundated roughly one sixth of the Fort Berthold Reservation, with some estimates running as high as one fourth. Over one hundred fifty thousand acres went under. Nine tribal communities were submerged, including Elbowoods, which had served as the reservation's central town since eighteen ninety-one, containing the school, the hospital, the business district, and the tribal headquarters. Roughly ninety percent of the reservation's population was forced to relocate to higher, less fertile ground.

Tribal chairman George Gillette wept as he signed the taking agreement in Washington in nineteen forty-nine. A photograph of that moment became one of the most haunting images in the history of federal Indian policy. He said that the members of the tribal council sign this contract with heavy hearts.

The communities that once occupied the bottomlands are still there, beneath the surface of Lake Sakakawea. On clear days, when the water level drops, the ghost roads and foundations of Elbowoods become briefly visible again.