Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West Page 5

  His overall conservative agenda was built on a platform of repealing government social welfare programs, opposition to civil rights laws, eliminating regulatory agencies, and restoring the primacy of states’ rights. His reason for entering politics, he said, was to reduce the federal bureaucracy. “My aim,” claimed Goldwater, “has always been to reduce the size of government. Not to pass laws but to repeal them. Not to institute new programs but to eliminate old ones.”

  In less than ten years, he was running for president of the United States as a leader of that same states’ rights, conservative coalition. As the Republican presidential candidate, he lost big to Lyndon B. Johnson from Texas, but he succeeded in transforming the Republican Party and shifting its power center to the conservative West. The real beneficiary of his race would be a Hollywood actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan who won the presidential election of 1980. Within the party Goldwater became a national statesman, a revered figure, the architect of the new conservative revolution, and the forerunner of Fox News and the Tea Party movement. He was in demand as a fund-raiser for his fellow senators and became an elder statesman of his party. He was a member of the Armed Services and the Senate Intelligence Committees, and by the end of his career he was chairman of both committees. When someone had to tell President Richard M. Nixon that the impeachment hearings in the US House of Representatives were going forward and it would be best for the party if he resigned, party leaders chose Goldwater as their spokesperson.

  As a general in the US Air Force Reserve and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Goldwater frequently accompanied Air Force generals to the various secret military installations around Las Vegas. Las Vegas reporters noted that the men in military delegations often took a short official trip, looked at a few planes at Nellis, and soon changed into civilian clothes to visit the high-end casinos. Goldwater was a welcome presence at the highest levels of government and business. During the twenty-five years of Goldwater’s political career, the states of Arizona and Nevada had changed dramatically. The war in Vietnam, aerospace military contracts, enlarged military bases, and new Air Force installations accompanied by huge housing developments had brought a massive population shift to cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, as well as Los Angeles. Desert sprawl and uncontrolled real estate developments had built new fortunes. The five largest-growth counties in America were located in Phoenix and Las Vegas. Del Webb not only built some of the largest developments in both cities, but also owned the Sahara and the Mint and had points in other Las Vegas casinos. Housing development was as profitable as gambling. “Gaming” became a respectable occupation, and the casino complexes were publicly traded entities on the New York Stock Exchange. Goldwater’s political campaigns had brought many Arizona figures to Washington, among them Richard Kleindienst, his campaign organizer who became US attorney general, and his former legal advisor William Rehnquist, who became chief justice of the Supreme Court. (Senator Ted Kennedy was among those who voted against Rehnquist’s appointment to the Supreme Court because of his record in Arizona of denying voting rights to minority populations.)

  So it should not have been a concern in July 1978 when Senator Goldwater’s staff told him that two elderly Navajo women were sitting in his outer office waiting to see him. They did not have an appointment. Surprisingly, he refused to see them. And he looked concerned.

  *The bank loan was sought because Siegel could not borrow more money from the Lansky syndicate to pay the Del E. Webb Construction Company. Webb, a member of the Valley National Bank’s board of directors, became a “quiet investor” in several Las Vegas casinos, including the Sahara, the Mint, and part of the Sands. His company’s large planned communities, like Sun City, became a key ingredient in the population shift known as the Sunbelt Boom and the accelerating growth of Phoenix and Las Vegas. In Las Vegas suburbs, the Del Webb Corporation built the Sun City Summerlin retirement community, Henderson’s Sun City Anthem, and a seniors-only development in North Las Vegas, Sun City Aliante.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE LADIES FROM BLACK MESA

  Black Mesa is not black and is not a mesa. It is four thousand square miles of ginger-colored high desert, an elevated tableland in northern Arizona whose distinctive dark color comes from its mass of deep piñon and juniper trees. The name proved to be particularly appropriate because Black Mesa was also found to be made up of thick beds of coal.

  Until the 1990s Black Mesa was home to more than twenty-five thousand Navajo in the interior and eight thousand Hopi in cliff-top villages. The people of the two tribes intermarried, went to school together, attended each other’s social dances, and traded goods (Navajo mutton for Hopi corn). The tribes’ reservation boundary issue, the consequence of an ambiguously worded 1882 Executive Order Reservation, had been cleverly exploited in a series of bills sponsored or supported by Senator Barry Goldwater beginning in 1956.

  The two women who entered Barry Goldwater’s Washington, DC, office in July 1978 were there because of legislation he had sponsored and supported. They looked as though they had stepped out of one of his photographs of traditional Navajo sheepherders that decorated his office walls. They wore velveteen blouses, ankle-length cotton skirts with colorful tiers, and heavy silver squash-blossom necklaces around their necks. Their faces, framed by kerchiefs tied under their chins, were deeply tanned from lives spent outdoors.

  The senator’s receptionist asked for their names and addresses and the purpose of their visit. They looked at each other and paused. Roberta Blackgoat, who spoke excellent English, did most of the talking. Violet Ashke made occasional comments in Navajo. The receptionist asked if they had an appointment. They did not.

  Mrs. Blackgoat explained they had come all the way from Black Mesa, Arizona, to Washington to see Senator Goldwater. They were part of a multitribal demonstration called the Longest Walk, a walk and caravan of 220 automobiles that began in San Francisco in February and was joined by Native Americans from many reservations as they traveled across the country. They came to Congress to protest eleven pieces of anti-Indian legislation having to do with Indian water, land, and fishing rights, and the Navajo relocation under way on Black Mesa. It was July 1978 when they arrived, and the recent history of the civil rights movement and the Native American occupation of Alcatraz (1969–1971) had produced a new generation of Indian activists of all ages. The name, the Longest Walk, referenced the 1864 Long Walk of the Navajo, the notorious campaign beginning in 1863 during which eight thousand Navajo were rounded up by Kit Carson and the US Army and marched at gunpoint 350 miles across Arizona and New Mexico to a labor camp outside Fort Sumner at the New Mexico–Texas border, where they were imprisoned for five years. (More about the 1864 Long Walk later.)

  The purpose of the women’s visit was to discuss Public Law 93-531, also known as the Navajo and Hopi Land Settlement Act, a law passed in 1974 that Senator Goldwater and a freshman congressman from Utah named Wayne Owens had sponsored and supported. Roberta, like many others, believed that the legislation had been passed in order to open their lands to coal mining. When land settlements had been decided in the past—when Indians were making treaty claims to lands settled by white people—the courts and Congress always ruled in favor of money compensation and a grant of public lands to the Indians while allowing white residents to remain. The Hopi-Navajo law was the first time in memory and history that the land settlement required thousands of Indians of one tribe to move in favor of Indians of another tribe. The law had set in motion the relocation of more than twelve to fifteen thousand Navajo—no accurate count had ever been completed of the number of Navajo residents—in order to give their lands to the Hopi, who did not live there and had no plans to live there.

  Even during the congressional hearings, the legislation was controversial, and as Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota asked during the Senate hearings, “[Why are we] replacing human beings with livestock. I don’t like that.” The two women might also have mentioned that since
the coal strip mining started, their well water and watering holes for livestock were no longer drinkable for either sheep or humans.

  They did not say any of these things to the receptionist except to repeat that they needed to see Senator Goldwater. They also might have mentioned that during the same congressional hearings, Congress had been told that only eight hundred families would be moved. But after the law passed in 1974, the assistant secretary of interior who made those claims left the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to become vice president of Peabody Coal Company, and Peabody had opened a second mining site on Black Mesa. The annual tonnage made the Black Mesa strip-mining operation the largest in the country. When the relocation started, it was clear no one in Congress had any idea how many Navajo families were going to have to be moved or how much it would cost or how social services would be implemented. How could they? Goldwater had framed the issue as justice for the Hopi and a transfer of lands that were largely uninhabited.

  Two years earlier the government began constructing a barbed-wire fence that looped deep into Navajo lands for more than a hundred miles. Navajo families who lived on the wrong side of the newly named Hopi side of the fence had to move. The women knew that Senator Goldwater described himself as “a friend of the Navajo,” and they wanted to explain to him that land that they had lived on for generations was being fenced and given to Hopi. These were some of the reasons that they had made the long trip across the country to Washington to see Senator Goldwater.

  The receptionist explained that the senator would be unable to see them unless they had an appointment because he was booked solid with committee meetings, legislative markups, and floor votes. Mrs. Blackgoat nodded. “We’ll wait.” They sat down on chairs in the reception area. They were patient people. They were sheepherders. They knew how to wait.

  Throughout the day, many people—lobbyists, visitors from Arizona, and staff from other offices and committees—came and went. The two Navajo women left their seats in the outer office only to travel down the long marble corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building* to use the restrooms. They passed the time by gazing at his photographs of Arizona and commenting on the locations. Some of Goldwater’s famous collection of Hopi kachina dolls, gifts from wealthy donors, and Navajo rugs, a few of which went back to the “eye-dazzler” period, were on display in the outer office. Both women were weavers, using yarns carded from wool taken from their own sheep. (The eye-dazzlers came from the New Mexico reservation at the turn of the century when trader Lorenzo Hubbell gave the Navajo women brightly colored commercial yarns to weave in an effort to appeal to an eastern market.)

  In the afternoon, one of Goldwater’s legislative assistants emerged from the inner offices, apologized for how busy the senator was, and asked if he could help them. No, we’ll wait to see Senator Goldwater.

  At 6:00 p.m., the office closed. They left.

  The next day, Blackgoat and Ashke arrived as the office opened. They repeated the same conversations. No one could help them except Senator Goldwater. They asked for an appointment, but the receptionist repeated that she could not give them an appointment.

  The receptionist asked again for their addresses. Care of the Dinnebito Trading Post. Keams Canyon, Arizona. Yes, they both had the same address.

  DINNEBITO TRADING POST

  The Dinnebito Trading Post is gone now, but it was one of the trading posts where Goldwater had held his first Indian voter registration back in 1952. Later voter turnouts on the Navajo reservation had not been so kind to Goldwater. In the 1974 election, 90 percent of the Navajo vote went against him. When asked about it, Goldwater said that the Navajo had been lured to the polls by promises of free beer. The Navajo tribal chairman at the time, Peter MacDonald, said Goldwater’s remarks were “an insult to every Navajo who exercised the right of a citizen to vote.”

  In 1978 the Dinnebito Trading Post was a long one-story wooden structure that housed a general store, a pawn shop, display cases for Indian craft products, and a post office where Blackgoat and Ashke received their mail. The sign on Route 264 read:

  BLAIRS DINNEBITO POST

  RUGS CRAFTS JEWELRY

  NINE MILES

  The sign had no punctuation, and the dirt road leading into the reservation cut abruptly at right angles to Route 264. If you didn’t know the turn, you would miss it.

  The dirt road was so rough and rutted that people without a truck or a jeep with a high undercarriage had to drive much of the way on the shoulder. Two miles in, tall steel electrical transmission towers marched over the horizon, their fat cables drooping so dangerously low to the ground that it seemed a tall man could raise an arm and touch them. The steel towers and their high-voltage cables paralleled the road for about three miles, their lines forming a drooping canopy until the cables and the towers suddenly crossed the road and divided into two columns—one column heading in the direction of Las Vegas and the other toward Phoenix.

  In August 1990 I was at the trading post waiting for Roberta Blackgoat’s daughter. We had arranged to meet there on a Saturday because she said it would have been too difficult for me to find my way on my own to the Blackgoat sheepherding camp. An old weathered sign and a gasoline pump still stood outside. Three generations of Blairs had owned the trading post, and the latest owner, James Blair, told me that he commuted back and forth to his home in Cortez, Colorado, by means of the small plane tied down outside, anchored against the wind by four strong, taut wires. The Blair family had owned the trading-post license for years and had two other stores, one at Page, Arizona, near the Glen Canyon Dam, and another outside of Phoenix. In addition to selling dry goods and providing government services like the post office, Blair traded and sold Navajo rugs, chiefs’ blankets, saddle blankets, Hopi pottery, baskets, kachina dolls, and jewelry. Hopi carvers and Navajo weavers were lined up waiting to do business with him as I slowly perused a tray of pawned silver jewelry. Roberta used to sell her rugs there, Vicki told me later, but stopped because she didn’t like the price he offered. By then she was selling her rugs through a cooperative called Black Mesa Weavers for Life and Land.

  I paid $75 for a turquoise cluster ring pawned by “Nonobah Hariley of Chinle,” according to the tag, in order to continue to act like a tourist while reading the notices on the bulletin board outside the post office window about the relocation and the mandatory sheep reduction for all the residents of the Big Mountain area. Big Mountain was part of the stepped plateau lands of Black Mesa and, at seven thousand feet, its highest point. It was also the center for the greatest Navajo resistance where “outside agitators” were looked on with great suspicion. As a single person driving the roads of the reservation, I didn’t want to be seen as an “Anglo activist,” a category that Goldwater had spared no words in criticizing: “Anglo activists, most from outside Arizona, have adopted the Navajo as a social cause in recent years. These political and social engineers are still pouring kerosene on the old flames of tribal hatred and revenge. Most Indians and Arizonans have nothing but contempt for their invasion into what is totally an Indian issue. Congress became involved because of its trust or guardian responsibilities.” A number of US government marshals and Hopi police in big white sport utility vehicles had passed me on the empty reservation roads.

  The trading post took on the functions of a post office because it was an outpost of colonial government. The US government needed to have a legal means to officially communicate with the Navajo residents. The United States had been an internal colonial power for more than a century before the US Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, setting up tribal constitutions, tribal voting, and tribal councils—leadership forms that were compatible with Washington but did not necessarily reflect the cultural patterns of Indian life. The Hopi had elected their first tribal council in an election in which 70 percent of the voters stayed home. The Navajo Tribal Council had been assembled in 1922 when Standard Oil Company of California wanted oil leases on the reservation and needed a le
gally authorized signatory. According to Navajo tribal chairman Peter MacDonald, the BIA chose five Navajo leaders to make up the first tribal council to sign the leases. The energy companies stayed involved in the workings of the tribal councils, and the trading posts remained an important communications center for Anglo authority on the reservations.

  Vicki Blackgoat had told me that the mandatory sheep reduction was executed by means of government rangers and Hopi police showing up at dawn in livestock trucks. They would open corrals, herd the sheep into the trucks, and drive away, leaving the families devastated. Sheep were like money in the bank. The sheep reduction and harassment were a means to force them to move. When used by the American military in foreign countries, this strategy is called “low-intensity conflict.”

  When Roberta gave her address to Goldwater’s receptionist or spoke to his legislative assistant, it is doubtful that either of them could have imagined the landscape around Dinnebito Trading Post. Roberta Blackgoat’s Arizona sheepherding camp was twenty miles from the trading post, deep in the interior and accessible only by a spaghetti swirl of dirt roads, many no wider than a track and some barely discernible in the scrub. I waited for hours, but Vicki never showed up. I waited outside and finally saw the plume of dust from a car coming over the horizon.