Summer 2004
Sovereignty

Crow Reservation

Opposite Sides of the Track

Story by Jessica Wambach
Photos by Noelle Teixeira

Dorrie Bulltail was 14 years old the day her mother and sister came to her aunt’s home on the Crow Reservation to ask if Dorrie wanted to go for a ride.


A train like this one hit the 1975 Pontiac carrying Regina Bulltail, Beverly Nadine Red Wolf and Chantina Red Horse at this crossing on Nov. 22, 1993, killing all three of them.

Always the more defiant of the two sisters, she decided to stay behind.

It was Nov. 22, 1993. Dorrie’s older sister, Regina, and her distant cousin Chantina were in class at Lodge Grass High School.

Her mother, Beverly Nadine Red Wolf, had been drinking and arrived at the school early in the morning to take Regina and Chantina out of class so that they could drive her the 35 miles to her home in Ranchester, Wyo.

After stopping to ask Dorrie to join them, Regina drove the 1975 Pontiac toward the main railroad crossing in the center of town.

Dorrie never saw them alive again.

A malfunction had caused the crossing gates to remain down even when a train was not approaching. Cars were backed up on both sides of the gate, waiting for access to the highway.

With her mother in the passenger seat and 15-year-old Chantina in the middle, Regina turned the car around. She headed out on a gravel road that crossed the tracks a mile south of town.

As they crossed the tracks where no gate controlled the crossing their car got stuck when, as they turned, a wheel caught on a rail that the family says protruded above grade.

Beverly, Regina and Chantina stayed in the car and tried

to rock it back and forth to free it. The Burlington Northern engineer said he saw the car move, but it stalled again, this

time squarely on the tracks. By the time he threw the emergency brake it was too late to even slow the train.

The women probably never saw the train coming.

Coming around the corner at 41 miles an hour, the southbound BN train struck the car, pushing it 500 yards down the track before it spun free.


Dewey Bulltail sued Burlington Northern for the wrongful death of his former wife and daughter. The tribal court awarded him and his family $250 million, but after years of court litigation and numerous appeals they eventually settled for $1 million.

Seventeen-year-old Regina was killed on impact. Her mother was dead before she arrived at the hospital in nearby Crow Agency. Chantina, who was smashed between them when the train hit, suffered massive head injuries and died in a Billings hospital the next day.

Regina and Dorrie’s father, Dewey Bulltail, was driving home from work. After seeing he could not get home by way of the main crossing, he headed south of town.

People who recognized his truck were able to stop him before he got to the crossing, but he saw the remnants of the car. He soon learned his daughter and his ex-wife were dead.

Dewey’s brother, Wales Bulltail, remembers his brother’s reaction.

“He told me it was something that words cannot explain,” Wales says. “There’s no words for it.”

And the words that Dewey offered his daughter Dorrie later that morning, telling her her mother and sister were gone, took days to sink in.

“Afterward my dad came over,” Dorrie says. “I thought he was just saying that they left town. I didn’t know until everybody started coming over to our house.”

It’s been more than 10 years since the accident. About once an hour, a train rolls down those same tracks, over that same crossing.

The Bulltail family is still recovering from that fateful day. But the sovereignty of the Crow Indian Nation may never recover.

A lawsuit heard in Crow Tribal Court ended with a $250 million verdict. But it also let loose a series of legal challenges that struck a body blow to the Crow tribe’s already limited jurisdiction over non-Indians on reservation lands.

It wasn’t the first time Indians had been killed at railroad crossings on the Crow Reservation, and it wouldn’t be the last. But the Bulltail family was stunned.

Nadine was 52 years old and she and Dewey had been separated for about seven years. Dewey to this day doesn’t want to talk about that time. But his girlfriend at the time, Mary Lynne Hobill, knows how much the family struggled.

“I think it’s been harder on Dorrie than anyone,” says Mary Lynne, who shares her home with Dorrie, now 25 years old. “I’ll never forget the first day that we went to the mortuary. She was in shock. When we went, Dorrie didn’t go in at first. And then when she did go in, and they brought her out, she got in the back seat of my car… She was white as a ghost. She was shaking so hard that the car was shaking. And I’ve never forgotten that.

“There is so much pain on the reservation that after a while it becomes a part of your life. But when you’re 13 years old, it’s not a part of your life yet. You haven’t gotten tough.”

Dewey seemed to be the tough one.

His cowboy hat shadows the face that shows the wear of his 60 years. But it can’t hide the pain that surfaces when he’s asked to talk about the accident that robbed him of his family. He can’t.

Mary Lynne remembers the double funeral held later in the week of the accident. When it was Dewey’s turn to kneel at Regina’s graveside and pray, she saw his raw emotion.

“That’s when Dewey really kind of broke down,” she says. “I think it was the hardest part for him.”

But shortly after that, the Bulltails tried to put it behind them.

“They never mentioned their names, never talked about them,” Mary Lynne says. “It was like they were just gone.”

Dewey and Dorrie moved out of Lodge Grass, first to Billings. Dewey’s brother Wales soon moved into the family’s old home, the house his mother had bought decades before. It sits about 400 yards from the railroad tracks, just north of where Nadine and Regina were killed.

Dorrie had nightmares and changed schools four times.

Slowly they let it fade away — until nearly a year later, when Dewey was approached by an attorney and sacrificed the pain of a haunting memory for what he thought would be some sort of justice.


Dorrie Bulltail was only 14 when an accident killed her mother and sister. She was a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Burlington Northern. Now 25, and with a child of her own, Hunter, the years and the pain have blocked out much of what happened.

The attorney told him that he thought the family had a good case for a wrongful death suit — something never before attempted in Crow Tribal Court.

“He was very angry. He knew why it happened — that it happened because of a bad crossing, and he thought that a lawsuit had to be filed in order to do something,” Mary Lynne says. “He loved his daughters, and it really hurt him when he lost Regina Ann. And I’m sure he still had feelings for Nadine.”

After a few months of deliberation, Dewey agreed to file a lawsuit, despite protests from some family members.

“There were others who thought the lawsuit never should have been filed,” Mary Lynne says. “They thought they should just let it go.”

To Wales, that wasn’t acceptable.

“There’s no value on human life,” he says. “But money is the white man’s God, you know? They hurt us. If we took one of their lives, it wouldn’t hurt them. If we took some of their money, then they would be hurt. That’s the way it is.”

Dewey and Dorrie were named as representatives of Nadine and Regina’s estates, along with Nadine’s three children from a previous marriage — Valerie, Randy and Casper Red Wolf. Due to disputes about who should be named as Chantina’s heir, her immediate family was not initially a part of the suit.

Because the accident happened on the reservation, Dewey never considered taking the lawsuit anywhere but to tribal court.

But Burlington Northern, which declined to comment for this story, immediately went to federal court in Billings, seeking an off-reservation trial. The court ruled that the railroad first had to exhaust its remedies in tribal court, since the accident happened on the reservation. In January 1996, the trial began in Crow Tribal Court.

The family had a long list of attorneys, most from Montana. Naturally, Burlington Northern brought in corporate lawyers from around the country.

“That saddest thing about that whole trial was that there were all these big shots from the railroad,” Mary Lynne remembers. “I thought they had a real bad attitude, like it didn’t matter.”

Despite the fact Regina had a blood alcohol level that made her legally drunk, most observers thought that the six-member jury would rule in favor of Dewey and his family.

But no one expected the decision announced after just a few hours of deliberation. Jurors awarded each of the five plaintiffs in the case $50 million for the lives lost.

It was one of the highest civil judgments to ever be awarded in the United States.

“The jury, when they came in with that huge dollar amount, I mean everybody was just shocked,” Mary Lynne says. “I for one was crying. I couldn’t believe it. But then the attorneys said to us right away, ‘We’re in trouble, because it’s too much.’ He said to us, ‘They’re gonna fight this tooth and nail.’”

And they did.

Burlington Northern didn’t wait long before issuing a press release. BN-Santa Fe Senior Vice President Jeffrey Moreland said, “We are shocked and astounded by the verdict, which we firmly believe is wholly unjustified and the product of proceedings that lacked any semblance of fundamental fairness.”

Railroad representatives argued, among other points, that it was unfair that some courtroom conversations were conducted entirely in the Crow language, a right reserved by Crow court regulations.

BN also claimed that the jury was unfairly selected and said several jurors were related to the plaintiffs. The family denies this, as does Ron Arneson, chief judge in Crow Tribal Court at the time.

“Their picking it apart in the white man’s way is saying ‘We want white men on the jury,’” Arneson says.

Arneson believes jurors were venting their frustration over the fact that 25 people had died at railroad crossings on the Crow Reservation within the previous nine years. He also felt racial tension.

“I knew the judgment was incorrect,” he says. “I also knew that the reaction of 150 years of history was in it.”

Arneson had the authority to reduce the award to a more “reasonable” amount. Many people suggested an award of $25 million, but Arneson didn‘t make the move.

“If I had it to do over again, I certainly would have done that,” Arneson says. “I was very upset. I knew it was extremely problematic. I knew I had the authority to change that amount, but to do that in Indian country as a white judge was impossible.”

In the press release, Moreland announced Burlington Northern’s intentions “to pursue vigorously an appeal to the Crow Tribal Appellate Court and, if unsuccessful there, to ask the federal district court in Billings, Mont., to set the verdict aside on the grounds that the tribal court lacked jurisdiction and that Burlington Northern’s due process rights were violated.”

Burlington Northern refused to post a bond while it appealed the case and the Crow appeals court refused to consider modifying the judgment until a bond was posted. The door was open for Burlington Northern to challenge the tribe’s jurisdiction over the case in the federal courts.

In an 1889 treaty with the federal government, the Crow tribe had agreed to let railroad tracks be built through reservation lands on the condition that the railroad transport Indians and any of their livestock or belongings anywhere on the reservation at their request for free.

Although Burlington Northern had long before ceased to meet its end of that bargain, railroad officials argued that the 75-foot right-of-way space that extended from each side of the tracks was their treatied land, and any event that took place within that space was under their jurisdiction. Therefore, they said, any suit should have been filed in a state court.


Crow Tribal Chairman Carl Venne believes there is no justice for natives in the federal court system and thinks the way to ensure the tribal court’s sovereignty is to have better-
educated judges.

Before Federal Judge Jack Shanstrom in Billings, the railroad brought a suit against the estates and Ron Arneson as the representative of the tribal court. In a harsh blow to the tribe’s sovereignty, Shanstrom granted an injunction that said Burlington Northern would not have to pay the $250 million judgment.

“That was the inevitable outcome,” Arneson says in retrospect. “Indians don’t have a right in federal court. The only place we’ve ever found any consideration is in the Congress.”

Still, the tribal court and the estates’ representatives appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed Shanstrom’s ruling and — upholding tribal sovereignty — said BN had to first exhaust all its appeals in tribal court.

The Crow Court of Appeals was slow to act. Two years after the verdict the Crow appellate court still had not heard Burlington Northern’s case.

“At the time, our court system was weak and the appellate court never convened,” Wales says.

But it was in the United States Supreme Court where Burlington Northern’s win was sealed.

Just before Burlington Northern v. Red Wolf reached the Supreme Court for consideration, the court had decided a similar case out of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

In Strate v. A-1 Contractors, the Supreme Court ruled that the tribe did not have civil jurisdiction in a suit brought against a non-tribal member involved in a car accident on a federally owned highway right-of-way on the reservation. The court said jurisdiction in civil suits against non-Indian defendants on non-Indian fee lands was held by state or federal courts.

In light of the Strate decision, the Supreme Court sent Burlington Northern v. Red Wolf back to the lower court for reconsideration.

The Crow tribe filed to join the suit, knowing a challenge to tribal sovereignty was at stake.

One of the attorneys for the tribe was Majel Russell, a Crow woman born and raised on the reservation who had been working for years in Indian law.

“All these cases actually sort of end up getting to the point that there’s damage to the tribe,” Russell says. “The Crow tribal appeals court should have gotten busy on the case. We could have fixed the case and not jeopardized any further loss of jurisdiction.”

But it was too late. Judge Shanstrom denied the tribe’s motion to intervene in the lawsuit and determined that the federally granted right-of-way Burlington Northern had on its Crow Reservation tracks should be classified in the same way as the state-owned right-of-way in the North Dakota case. The State of Montana, not the Crow tribe, had jurisdiction.

The Bulltail family felt the years and the emotion they had invested in the case had been for nothing.

The only positive result they claim came of it is they say all of the roughly 70 railroad crossings on the Crow Reservation were repaired.

“I think the jury originally came back with that big amount of money because they thought maybe the railroad would pay attention and do something,” Mary Lynne Hobill says. “They did fix the crossings. But the people that were left behind, they didn’t treat them right.”

Tribal members weren’t surprised. But they were frustrated. The debate about the proper way to stop the limitation of sovereignty in the federal court system continues because the Crow Reservation has been the site of several major sovereignty-limiting court cases.

In 1981, the Supreme Court decided Montana v. U.S., saying for the first time that the tribe did not have jurisdiction over hunting and fishing rights of non-Indians on fee lands owned by non-Indians on the reservation. The case stemmed from conflicts along the Bighorn River. The land under the water was held in trust for the tribe by the U.S. government, but the court said that the tribe could not prohibit non-Indian hunting and fishing along the riverbed, which was accessible at many points from land owned by non-Indians.

Four years later, the Supreme Court decided National Farmers Union Insurance Companies v. Crow Tribe. A Crow teenager had been hit by a motorcycle and injured on Lodge Grass school grounds and his guardian sued the school district, an extension of the state. The Supreme Court eventually heard the federal case brought by the school’s insurance company, which argued that the tribe lacked civil jurisdiction over the matter. The court agreed.

The Supreme Court decided Montana v. Crow Tribe just a few months after the Burlington Northern decision was rendered. It said that the state, and not the tribe, had the right to tax a utility company on fee lands leased from the tribe by a mining company.

These cases affect the sovereignty of reservations across the nation, but because they started in a Crow tribal court, their impact is personal there.

Russell points to a weak and dependent court system as the widening crack in Crow sovereignty’s shield.

“Sovereignty really depends on the strength of the tribal court,” she says. “You‘re going to have to have a professional court that provides a professional, unbiased judge.”

To do that, she says, will take a strong leader for the tribe, one who believes fiercely in Indian rights and sees the wisdom she does in the new tribal constitution of 2000, which calls for an independent court system.

“I still really believe that this document can empower the tribe,” she says. But she doesn’t see the right leader standing before the tribe.

Russell argues that Crow tribal leaders have amended or ignored the parts of the new constitution that address changes in the court system.

Tribal Chairman Carl Venne, who has been in office a little more than a year, denies any part in that. He says his vision is of a court system in which the tribal judges are better informed and must hold law degrees in order to run for judicial jobs. He eagerly awaits the next round of elections.

“For me there’s no real justice for Indian people in the federal system,” Venne says. “It’s scary to me as a native. What we have to do is create our own laws to create our own sovereignty. We‘re far enough along and educated enough to run our own business.

“The problem ain’t the Indian tribe. The problem is people responsible are not doing their job here. So as a leader, I can speak up. I’m here to build bridges between the non-Indian and the Indian communities in the state of Montana.”

Wales Bulltail agrees that leadership is the key to a solid tribal government that can prevent future jurisdiction limitations. He just doesn’t agree that Venne is building those bridges he talks about.

“It can be done,” he says. “It takes a good leader to do things like that. We don’t have that here.”

For the Bulltails, sovereignty has taken on a new and bitter meaning.

Regina Bulltail, 17, Chantina Red Horse, 15, and Beverly Nadine Red Wolf, 52, were killed when a Burlington Northern train hit their car. All three are buried in the Lodge Grass Cemetery. Above, center, is a hand-crafted stone that marks Chantina’s grave.
Photos of Regina and Nadine are courtesy of Dorrie Bulltail.

“The way I know when the train is coming is when the dogs start howling around,” Wales says. “Deep inside I’ve got a grudge against the train. We’ve got no use for it, and yet it keeps going through our reservation. It doesn’t give us any money or any type of service. And they think they have a right-of-way.”

For several years Burlington Northern tried to end the conflict with out-of-court settlements. But Dewey wouldn’t agree to any of it, until he decided to take his attorneys’ advice after the last decision.

Mary Lynne remembers lead attorney John Hoyt finally advising Dewey to settle.

“He felt that they didn‘t stand a chance, because it was Native Americans against the railroad,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘I think it‘s time to bail out.’”

Dewey finally signed the release papers for a $1 million settlement in 2000.

The years of attorney fees came to more than $500,000. The remaining money was divided six ways among Dewey, Nadine’s four surviving children, and Chantina Red Horse’s father, Casey Red Horse.

“They got $80,000 a piece. That’s nothing. It doesn’t take very long to spend $80,000,” Mary Lynne says. “The only thing they really accomplished was getting those tracks fixed. And that’s just not right.”

Arneson is saddened when he thinks of the effect the sovereignty limitation had on the Bulltail family.

“It just has put another arrow in their heart,” he says.

Today, Dorrie Bulltail has a 20-month-old son, Hunter. He’s just starting to speak. His first Crow word was iichíile. It means horse, Regina‘s favorite animal.

And it stirs memories.

“She was goofy. She liked riding horses… I was scared of them,” Dorrie says as she kisses the baby she wishes her mother and sister could help her raise.

“I’m losing memory of them,” she whispers.

Back to top

Last updated
9/18/04 1:42 PM


©Copyright 2004 The University of Montana School of Journalism | Contact Us
Table of Contents | About Us | Feedback | Links