Tribal Control

(NEW TOWN, N.D.) — When oil prices skyrocketed recently and exploration crews began arriving on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, the activity was a mixed blessing to the Three Affiliated Tribes (Arikara, Hidatsa and Mandan). With 40 percent unemployment and few sources of income other than tribal or federal jobs, many tribal members looked forward to the increase in jobs and royalties. However, the companies left dynamite lying around, cut fences and disrupted the lives of the people.

Jimmy Barr, Squatter

(BELFAST) — Short guy, this Jimmy Barr. Thirty years old, cocky, given to drunkenness, he will go out of his way to irritate an enemy, and he has several thousand of them, all well armed and patrolling his neighborhood day and night. Unemployed, has been since 1969, probably will be in 1989, if he is still alive. Plays the horses, but not so well. When I first met him, he had a tip on Nameless Pixie, a hound running at Belfast’s Dunmore track, but Jimmy doesn’t bet on the dogs. Nameless Pixie paid three to one.

Bachman’s Warbler

(RED HOOK, N.Y.) –It might have become another snail darter case, the celebrated imbroglio between an obscure fish and a Tennessee dam. The endangered creature in this instance was an elusive South Carolina swamp bird whose buzzlike song is heard more often than its flitting yellow-and-green shape is seen. The threat to Bachman’s warbler was not a dam but a proposed logging operation that could have decimated its nesting ground in Francis Marion National Forest. The issue, however, was familiar: should the possible extinction of a rare form of life extinguish an economically important undertaking.

Voices: The Founding Father

(HOLY TRINITY, AL.) — In the shank of the new century, lean Tom Benson is eagle-beaked, impetuous, sprung from Niagra University. Spectacled, he wears black fedoras. Ascetic, he has a lecher’s grin. A smooth white knob hums in his left ear: He is deaf, or nearly so. He lost his hearing at three, from diphtheria. The fever scorched the nerve. Some days his world is like a great seamless bubble. Some nights he lies in bed dreaming up at the moon. Benson knows this: He won’t go down to Wall Street. He tells a priest at Niagra he is thinking of joining an order. He doesn’t want the Jesuits or Vincentians. He wants a group just starting out, one that will seize his talents. The priest tells him of a man named Judge working down South. This Judge is gathering associates in a spot called Holy Trinity, Alabama. Letters are exchanged. A meeting takes place on one of Judge’s trips north in a Victorian sitting room in a retreat house in Stirling, New Jersey. Benson is led in. Judge is waiting. "I think he must have been studying me right off to see how much I loved God. That’s what he’d ask you: ‘How much do you love God?"’ A month later Benson leaves for Alabama. It is September 1928.

(LONG BEACH, CA.) - The storage tanks of Rachelle Laboratories, Inc. stand like grain silos along the Terminal Island Freeway in Long Beach, California. They are filled with hundreds of tons of Chlorachel, a Chlortetracycline animal feed additive which Rachelle markets for livestock and poultry.