Lessons in Capitalism From Beer Frontier

The first clue is the empty Budweiser 12-pack box lying flattened on the shoulder of the road. Then, quickly, the garbage gantlet along northbound State Route 87 piles up--empty cans of Colt .45 and bottles of Coors Light and Busch.

Dead ahead: Whiteclay, a dilapidated speck of a border village atop a bleak northwestern Nebraska ridge. Whiteclay, home to four stores that sell an astonishing $3 million worth of beer each year--the equivalent of 4 million 12-ounce cans.

Whiteclay, population 22. But you’d never know it by looking.

By noon, cars crowd the dusty roadside. Beer trucks rumble in to deliver payloads. An old man hunches on a curb, a 16-ounce malt liquor at his feet, watching the world pass. Up the street, gloomy young people walk the two-mile no-man’s land that straddles the Nebraska-South Dakota border. Flag them down, and they glare and turn away.

Each day they double, even triple, Whiteclay’s population. They come by car and by foot from just north, just inside South Dakota--from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a 5,000-square-mile expanse that is home to 15,000 Oglala Lakota Sioux and one of the nation’s highest alcoholism-related mortality rates.

But Pine Ridge, home to the storied tribe of Crazy Horse, is, by tribal law, dry. So its drinkers pour over the state line into Whiteclay, an odd little monument to capitalism and opportunism on an empty expanse of prairie. For many who seek beer, especially those without cars, there’s nowhere else to turn.

How did this location come to be? What made it a convenient catchall for recriminations about race and regional authority, about legality and morality and Indians and alcoholism?

“It’s not a place. It’s not a town. It’s a spot to drink,” says Patricia Wilkinson, a member of Hands of Faith Ministry, a shelter south of town where some of Whiteclay’s drinkers seek help for their spirits and habits. “Nobody,” she says, “claims Whiteclay as theirs.”

It has, however, become an embarrassment.

Tribal officials say drunken-driving arrests can top 1,000 annually on the stretch between Pine Ridge and Whiteclay, also the site of a restaurant and a junkyard. On its side, the Nebraska State Patrol says it lacks staff to patrol its jurisdictional fringes more stringently. The town, unincorporated, has no police of its own.

Other places that serve the Native American trade aren’t within walking distance, says Sgt. Martin Costello, the State Patrol’s alcohol and tobacco enforcement officer; people come, buy and leave. “Whiteclay, they don’t have to leave,” Costello says, “so they just stick around all day.”

And that, says Wesley Yellow Horse, means street fights, drunken people sleeping it off in junked cars and young men and women doing anything for beer money--hocking valuables, panhandling aggressively, even prostituting themselves.

Yellow Horse, 42, once frequented Whiteclay’s stores and streets. Today, after years in and out of prison and rehab, he stays away. He has friends, though, who don’t.

“If it wasn’t so close, it probably wouldn’t be that bad,” Yellow Horse says. He sighs. “But then there’d be another town. People want to drink, they’re going to drink.”

Many demand that Whiteclay simply be shut down. But what happens there is entirely legal--and sadly common on the edges of America’s reservations. Whiteclay is simply the most concentrated and noticeable.

“You can go into North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota and the southwestern states and see similar horror stories,” says Frank LaMere, a Winnebago Indian from eastern Nebraska who wants the town shuttered.

“Indian people grow up hearing about the things that happen in those border communities,” says LaMere, who came across Whiteclay in 1997 and was appalled into activism. “Whiteclay existed in my mind long before I had ever visited there because I kept hearing about it.”

Nobody seems able to pin down how Whiteclay was born, and it is strangely absent from many regional histories. Locals say it was once known as Dewing and had a reputation as a “wild Saturday-night town.”

The region, never big on temperance, was quite wild in the decade before the railroad arrived in 1885, when soldiers were living in nearby Ft. Robinson and the remnants of the first fur-trading groups still populated this prairie.

The cattlemen who ranched the region kept it lively, and the Germans and Scandinavians who settled the towns between 1850 and 1900 brought alcohol as part of their culture.

But they and the railroad also brought “civilization” to towns like Chadron, Rushville and Gordon, which wanted to attract “decent folk” and families. That meant churches and rules and ordinances. About that time, the tribe was forced out of Ft. Laramie and, by 1878, onto Pine Ridge.

Alcohol is not a traditional part of Lakota culture. Historians say the fur traders probably first gave whiskey to the Oglala Sioux.

“The first time it was probably just, ‘Sit down, let’s have a drink.’ Isn’t that the normal social thing to do? It was a big, big mistake,” says Donald E. Green, a regional historian at nearby Chadron State College.

Today, substance abuse and economic stagnation are particularly high. Liquor stores dot non-lndian towns, and nearly 44% of Shannon County. S.D., site of much of the reservation, fell below the federal poverty level in the last U.S. Census. There is little industry, and unemployment is rampant.

What’s more, those who lack transportation are crippled: Northwestern Nebraska, always empty, is getting emptier; towns are often 20 or 30 miles apart.

“There’s not a lot of opportunity around here,” says Jane Morgan, executive director of NEPSAC, a detox center in a gray-paneled house in Gordon, 20 miles southeast of the reservation. It treats up to 17 people each month, nearly all Oglala Sioux.

For Mildred Reeves, 78, Whiteclay represents family business. Her store, H&M;, opened in 1952 and is named for her and her late husband, Howard, who grew up here. She still works a few hours each day, sharing shifts with two employees and selling more beer than anything else.

“Nobody should be on our backs like this,” says Reeves, who also owns a bar in Rushville, 20 miles south. “We don’t sell it to them when they get out of hand. We’re not doing anything wrong, or we’d be in jail.”

There are occasional brushes with the law. In December the state suspended the Arrowhead Inn’s license for 15 days for allowing alcohol consumption inside the store and selling beer to an intoxicated person. Owner Don Schwarting, who did not return phone calls, has criticized the scrutiny of Whiteclay.

But many say such penalties fall short.

“There are tavern owners across the state of Nebraska who get their licenses jerked for selling cigarettes to an underage buyer. Why do we have a separate set of laws for tavern owners in Whiteclay?” LaMere says.

To Reeves, that’s unfair. She goes up to Whiteclay to close every night--alone. She never feels uneasy; she considers her customers decent people.

“It’s their lifestyle,” she says. “It’s the last frontier, and I love the way people live.... They just like what they’re doing -- spending most of their time down in Whiteclay. It’s going to go on whether I’m there or not.”

America made the decision to accept the sale of alcohol -- with both its beneficial and detrimental effects -- when Prohibition ended in 1933. And Reeves’ outlook is basic business sense: Go where your market is.

But when the market is made up of poor Indians, activists say, legal doesn’t necessarily mean right.

For one thing, state taxes from beer sales in Whiteclay--$156,000 in 1996--never get near South Dakota or Pine Ridge, where they could fund treatment programs. And many Sioux view Whiteclay’s beer sales as “economic racism” on Nebraska’s part.

“We’re paying for all the suffering and all the grief. Nebraska is basically making the profit,” says: Robert Ecoffey, an Oglala Lakota and Pine Ridge superintendent for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

To fight Whiteclay’s alcohol, 100 activists including police, health care workers and tribal leaders have formed a “border tiyospaye,” using the Lakota term for extended family or community.