Niagara: A History of the Falls (48 page)

Moses built few parks in underprivileged areas. In the thirties, he built 255 playgrounds elsewhere in New York City, but only one in Harlem. And when he built the six-and-a-half-mile highway known as the West Side Improvement, which ran the length of Manhattan, he covered all the unsightly railroad tracks except in the section that ran through the black district.

Moses entered the field of slum clearance when urban renewal was the gospel of the day. With the best of intentions, city fathers everywhere were trying to restore the cores of their communities through massive projects that removed the buildings from entire city blocks and replaced them with vast apartment complexes. In New York City, Moses plunged into this war on “urban blight” with his usual enthusiasm and drive, but also with the callousness of an elitist. What was urban blight to the upper classes was home to thousands. But Moses cared not a whit for the old-time neighbourhoods, the corner stores, the small apartments that the people who didn’t live there called tenements. Moses got the job done efficiently and with dispatch, but at great human cost. These vibrant blocks, which gave the residents a sense of community, were bulldozed down and replaced by ugly and faceless brick boxes. Thousands of other citizens, displaced by Moses’ big expressways, also got short shrift – forced to find new homes, often at double the cost. These people were lied to; Moses’ spurious offer of equal accommodation wasn’t worth a nickel.

This, then, was the background and the personal style of the man who now proposed to seize 1,383 acres of the 6,249-acre reservation of the Tuscarora Indians. This would form part of the great reservoir, which, like the one across the river, would act as a gigantic storage tank for water that could in peak hours be used to supplement the flow from the conduit and drive the big turbines at the foot of the cliff.

The Tuscarora were an Iroquoian afterthought. The great League of Five Nations was formed in 1451, before the white man arrived to settle in North America. The Tuscarora were latecomers. Driven from their homes in what became North Carolina, they moved north. In the eighteenth century they were accepted into the league, but never as full members. The Oneida gave them land on a temporary basis. Later, the Seneca gave them 640 acres, which they were able to supplement by purchase and grant, on the site of what became Lewiston, New York. As the population of the Falls area grew and new factories sprang up, many Tuscarora men took jobs in industry while the women hired out as domestics. Others farmed.

Moses, with his scorn for ordinary people, especially those of a different skin colour, wanted a good chunk of the Indians’ land because he did not wish to disturb the white residents of Lewiston. The taxes that the whites paid would be lost if their land was expropriated; moreover, it would be hideously expensive to purchase the homes and pay the owners for the move. The Indians lived in simple houses and paid no taxes, so very little would be lost. As Moses was certain that their land would go cheaply, the total costs of expropriation, he estimated, would be far less.

In Moses, the Indians were up against a powerful antagonist who was prepared to go to the Supreme Court, if necessary, and to use every available trick to get what he wanted. Moses hated to lose. But, as it turned out, the Indians were just as intransigent. The three principal Tuscarora leaders, all mild-spirited farmers, were equally ready to fight every inch of the way for their rights. Clinton Rickard was the self-educated founder of the Indian Defense League of America. He had made himself an expert on Indian laws and treaties and considered the Tuscarora a sovereign nation. His eldest son, William, was emerging as a tribal leader. Harry Patterson, chief of the Bear Clan, was a lifelong farmer and former basketball star who, with his six sons, still tilled the rich soil of the reservation, growing crops of fruit, berries, and grain. Elton Greene (Black Cloud) was head chief of the Tuscarora and sachem of the Land Turtle Clan. He had learned English at the age of eleven and in his youth had gone on the road as a vaudeville performer and musician. He had been a Baptist preacher and was a licensed carpenter as well as a farmer. He had a dry wit and a good sense of public relations, cheerfully donning Plains Indian head-dress and beaded jacket and wielding a peace pipe for photographers when the occasion demanded it. (“Do you want me to look mad?” he asked one newspaperman at the height of the battle with the power authority.) Greene was on a first-name basis with most of the civic officials, legislators, and members of the press.

In their two-year struggle with the power authority, the Tuscarora held one high card – the collective guilt of white society about what it had done to the aboriginal peoples since the days of Columbus. The press tended to be on the side of the Indians, running features on Greene and explaining the native attitude toward the land. “We think that our land is very sacred,” Greene would declare. “The Indian loves nature. He loves trees. He loves everything that grows.… The way we see it, money evaporates, but the land don’t.”

The land “is not ours to dispose of,” Chief Rickard emphasized. “We are only its custodians.” This aboriginal view of land as something that cannot be sold or bartered, being held in common by all like the air and the water, completely escaped Robert Moses. He didn’t understand it, would never understand it, and didn’t believe it. The attitude of the Tuscarora baffled him. Why did 634 Indians need 6,249 acres, anyway, especially when much of the land was not being “used”? Moses was convinced that everything had a price. If necessary, he was prepared to pay whatever it took to get a piece of the reservation.

But not at the outset. His plan was to move swiftly and quietly to get the land at rock-bottom prices. In January 1957, even before he got the FPC licence, he made his first move. William Latham, a power authority engineer, knocked on Clinton Rickard’s door and asked permission to put a survey crew on the reservation. Latham explained, smoothly, that the authority did not want the land; the survey was solely for the purpose of determining the depth of the soil to bedrock. It would in no way interfere with the Indians’ way of life.

Rickard wasn’t fooled. “We knew they had an eye on our land,” he said later. The Tuscarora council unanimously denied the authority permission to put surveyors on the reservation.

That September, Rickard’s suspicions were realized when the Niagara Falls
Gazette
carried a map showing that the authority planned to take 950 acres of the reservation. The chief’s council shot off a strong letter of protest to the secretary of the interior, the FPC, and the president himself, without result. “The braves are whooping it up,” Robert Moses, in jocular vein, told a meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

In November, a second map was published showing that the state now wanted 1,220 acres of Indian land for the reservoir. The Tuscarora also learned at the last moment that the FPC was about to hold a hearing on the matter. With less than a day to spare, Greene, Patterson, and Rickard rushed to Washington. The commission and the state power authority tried to stop them from testifying because, having had inadequate notice, they had no lawyer. They were finally allowed to speak on the understanding that this would be their only opportunity. Being placed at a disadvantage, the Tuscarora hired a Washington attorney, Arthur Lazarus, Jr., to represent them.

The hearing was adjourned to Buffalo. There, the town of Lewiston urged the authority to use only Indian land for the reservoir. The authority upped its requirements to 1,383 acres. Moses, in a vague statement, indicated he might be prepared to pay as much as a thousand dollars an acre for Indian land. In February 1958, in an open letter to the Tuscarora couched in blunt, almost insulting terms, he made clear his belief that the authority had the law on its side. “This essential work, already unduly delayed, can and must proceed immediately,” Moses wrote. “While we have understood your reluctance to part with land, we cannot delay longer.… We have no more time for stalling and debate.…”

“He’s bluffing,” said Greene. The Indians held fast and posted No Trespassing signs on the reservation. “To us the land was priceless and could never be sold,” said Rickard.

But in April, Governor Averill Harriman gave approval to expropriation. A group of legal experts, workmen, and surveyors appeared at the reservation accompanied by thirty-five Niagara County deputy sheriffs, fifty state troopers with riot equipment, tear-gas bombs, and sub-machine guns, and a number of plainclothes detectives. Some two hundred Indians formed a barrier in front of the trucks. Three were arrested for unlawful assembly, a curious charge, since they were on their own land, and one that was later dismissed.

With the entire Iroquois confederacy now pledging support, the Tuscarora stood their ground, preventing the surveyors from working. On April 30, a federal court decision suspended all expropriation proceedings but still allowed the surveyors to have entry to the land. The authority then tried again to deal with the Indians but was rebuffed. “We will not sell at any price,” said Greene. Women and children continued passive resistance, blocking the surveyors’ transits, but a court order on May 8 finally convinced them it was wiser to yield.

Moses now boosted his tentative offer to a firm $1,100 an acre. When that was turned down, he produced one of the glossy brochures for which he was noted, “smacking more of Madison Avenue than the Niagara frontier,” in the words of the
New York Times
. In it, Moses tried to give the impression that most Tuscarora wanted to sell their land and were being blocked by a “small number of recalcitrants.” Moses dangled a proposed $250,000 community centre in front of the Indians, displayed in an artist’s double-page rendering in his brochure. The Tuscarora weren’t interested. One suggested, facetiously, that the power authority might follow the white man’s original policy of distributing beads and trinkets.

Meanwhile, Moses’ men moved onto the reservation to begin cutting trees and clearing timber and buildings, using the time-tested technique of acting in advance of legal authority. The Indians moved quickly to get a restraining order. A long and complicated court battle was just beginning. Neither side was prepared to give an inch. In June, a federal court judge ruled that the Indians couldn’t stop expropriation. But in July they successfully appealed, and all work on the reservation stopped.

Moses now moved to discredit the Indians and their use of the land. In September he sent a wire to a colleague, Thomas F. Moore, Jr., to dig out facts about the band that he could use against them:

“Do we have the basic facts about the Tuscaroras – for public consumption. Apart from the rhubarb about condemnation and pre-Revolutionary and pre-states rights of the noble red men? I mean acreage they have, living conditions, land, cultivation, how much we take, how much we offer, what they could do with cash, what they work at, etc. I don’t want a lot of mawkish sentiments manufactured by the sob sisters and other S.O.B.s, it would be a hell of a thing if we had to move the reservoir to cemetery and taxable farmland.”

A week later, the Supreme Court gave the Tuscarora a breathing-space by ordering a conditional stay on condemnation proceedings until it could hear an appeal by the Indians challenging the validity of the authority’s FPC licence. Moses promptly issued a public statement accusing the Tuscarora of a “fanatical effort to shove the reservoir over onto private property.” His timetable for construction would be badly skewed, he said, unless he could build a power line across the reservation. “We have been shunted about and jackassed around from court to court and judge to judge,” he said. The courts allowed him to expropriate eighty-six acres of Tuscarora land as right-of-way for his power lines.

The Supreme Court rejected the Indians’ appeal, but the Tuscarora got a second reprieve when the U.S. Court of Appeal ruled that the state had no right to take any more land unless the FPC first found that the expropriation would not “interfere” with the reservation. Moses threatened to stop the whole project, a decision that would have thrown 2,726 men out of work. “Disaster threatens the Niagara Falls area,” a front-page editorial in the
Gazette
cried. “The greatest economic crisis in the history of our community is imminent.”

Moses was now hinting at an unpalatable alternative, designed to arouse public opinion further against the Tuscarora. If he couldn’t get their land, he said, he’d have to expropriate land from the town of Lewiston and city of Niagara Falls. That would cost an additional $15 million, wipe hundreds of acres off the tax rolls of the two communities, and force the relocation of 282 homes and two cemeteries.

In November 1958, the FPC opened its hearing to decide whether the flooding of the Indian land would interfere with the purpose for which the reservation was intended. Both towns appeared, taking the side of the power authority. Moses came up with a series of experts who testified that the land was virtually worthless and that, because it didn’t amount to much, the Indians had no right to stand in the way of progress.

To Moses the idea of land standing idle – not being
used –
was scandalous. Again, he showed no understanding of aboriginal attitudes. He went so far as to have aerial photographs made showing the location of outhouses on the reservation. As Rickard later put it, “the SPA lawyers decided that the extent of a people’s civilization was determined by the number of flush toilets they had. The whole testimony was an enormously expensive attempt … to belittle our Tuscarora people.… Robert Moses and his henchmen very clearly demonstrated their race prejudice and contempt for Indians. What they were trying to impress upon the FPC was the assumption that since this Indian community did not amount to anything, it had no right to stand in the way of the whites who wanted the Indian land for their own purposes. They respected only power and wealth and might, we had none of these. That such a seemingly insignificant people would stand up to Robert Moses and fight back was the thing that infuriated him most of all, as his hysterical press releases only too plainly revealed.”