Tracking the DM&E's big dream: Chapter 6

The Powder River country, which before the 1870s was thick with buffalo, elk and deer, and the land east of it, through the Black Hills, was once dominated by the 10 tribes of the Lakota nation, or what whites referred to as the Sioux nation.

The celebrated warrior Crazy Horse, of the Oglala band, led hunting parties into the Powder River Basin, as did the great chief Sitting Bull and the warrior Gall, both of the Hunkpapa tribe. All three would meet one day at a river in Montana that the Sioux tribes called the Greasy Grass, now known as the Little Bighorn.

The proposed DM&E route runs southeast out of the Powder River Basin, avoiding the rough terrain of the Black Hills. Driving through them, it's easy to see why the route avoids the hills. At their highest elevations they are thick with pine trees, high bluffs, deep draws and ravines, and sheer cliffs. At lower elevations, the hills soften and roll over and into one another.

The history of the railroad in this part of the country dates back to the 1870s when the Northern Pacific began laying tracks in Powder River country. This was a violation of a treaty that ceded the Powder River area and the Black Hills, which the Lakota people considered sacred land, to the Indians.

It was the discovery of gold, not the railroad, that eventually prompted the U.S. government to renege on its treaty and push the Lakotas out of the tree-covered hills they called Pa Sapa and onto reservations.

From the southern edge of the Black Hills, the proposed DM&E route runs through the tiny South Dakota communities of Edgemont and Oral and then angles northeast toward Interstate 90 and U.S. 14.

The line would skirt the northwest corner of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where the battle of Wounded Knee was fought and where many descendants of Crazy Horse's Oglala tribe live.

Although the line would not run through the reservation, opponents of the DM&E project contend the Lakota tribe could end up playing a role in the fight against the project if the Surface Transportation Board approves it.

They point to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which stipulates that the Lakotas have the right of first refusal on all publicly-owned land in South Dakota and Wyoming east of the Missouri River and west of the Powder River.

That is a region once ceded to the Indians but later taken from them during the Black Hills gold rush. DM&E opponents, including the South Dakota chapter of the Sierra Club, maintain that in accordance with the Fort Laramie treaty, the railroad must get permission from the Indians before laying new tracks.