THE Rail Bridge that Custer Died For

 

BNSF railway bridge over the Missouri. Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In the 1870s, General George Armstrong Custer marched west to subdue the Lakota people, who were trying to hold onto their way of life and rights against a United States that had no respect for them. He protected survey crews that marked out the route of what would become the Northern Pacific line through central North Dakota.  In a sense, Custer lost his life, and the Native people lost lost their land and freedom so that the line and the bridge could be built. The bridge is a living symbol, if not a memorial, to to those tragedies in addition to the economic prosperity it made possible. It is the quintessential North Dakota object, an embodiment of our history, the good, bad and ugly from beginning to the present. To erase it is to erase history itself.

The line had been stopped on the eastern bank of the Missouri River in the new town that would later become Bismarck due to the Panic of 1873, but also Lakota that refused to consent to U.S. government demands on the western side.  It is one of the great crimes of our history that a nation founded on government by self-determination refused to let indigenous people do that for themselves. By 1881, Sitting Bull surrendered to life on the Standing Rock Reservation, just a year before the bridge that still stands was pushed across the river. Even though only the piers remain of the original, they are still significant witnesses to history.
 

Original piers and old bridge deck replaced in 1905 Wikimedia Commons

 I think of friends I used to know who supported tree sitters trying to save trees in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s.  They would build a platform high in the trees to prevent it from being cut down. I think of doing the same for this bridge, even though it would be a lost cause. We live in an age when government works in the interest of industry and its rights, often ahead of citizens' rights. What about the rights of a community to something they have lived with and loved for generations?

 A community that has lived with something as part of its community for so long should have some say in what happens to such a significant structure.  The land and liberty taken from Native peoples echoes into the present as something more is being taken, as things eventually always are, when economic interests trump those of average citizens. I and others feel the bridge, part of the viewshed of the region, is being wrongly taken from us. It is a bit ironic that the descendant of the company that pushed the bridge across ill-gotten land, (though not the same or anywhere near as devastating or even comparable), tearing it out is taking something new from new people in a new age. The most cynical move by BNSF is that they haven't even tried to design something that would be aesthetically similar. Instead, they seek to replace the magical riveted lines of 19th century industrial design with flat brutalism, showing that sheer economics is all they care about.

Hopefully there is an 11th hour move to save the bridge and ensure that it remains part of the community as a biking and pedestrian bridge. Once it is gone, it is gone forever.