TWIN BUTTES - A monument to the reservation's past briefly got its head above water two years ago and then disappeared into the watery depths where it had been for decades.

Now, it's above water again, piercing through the softening ice north of Twin Buttes on a shrinking bay of Lake Sakakawea.

With the gloomy forecast for the water levels on Lake Sakakawea, the monument so long unseen will become more and more revealed over the next few months.

It will probably stay in sight for a good long while. It first appeared when the lake dropped to 1,808 feet elevation. It's reappeared now at 1,807 feet elevation, and the lake forecast is for 1,805 feet in April and down to 1,800 this summer.

For those interested in the history of the Three Affiliated Tribes and the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, the monument is worth seeing. It is a hike to get there by land.

It was dedicated in June 1934, the first bridge built across the Missouri River to connect both sides of the reservation.

It traversed old Highway 8 from Twin Buttes to Elbowoods, the town that was then the center of reservation government with its tidy white Bureau of Indian Affairs buildings, stores and school. The bridge saved river crossings, the more treacherous ice crossings in the wintertime and allowed ease for social interchange among friends and families.

The monument, a 12-foot high obelisk with a four-faceted pyramid tip, was erected on a hill alongside the portal opening to the bridge to mark the important structure.

Within a decade, policy makers in Washington, D.C., were making plans to build the Garrison Dam and flood the Missouri River beyond all recognition.

The dam was built, and 176,000 acres of reservation land - the majority of all land needed for the flooding - were acquired for the flooding and management of the dam.

The bridge was removed in the early 1950s ahead of the rising water, and re-erected and lengthened at New Town.

As the land went under the water, so did ranches, rodeo grounds, thousands of towering cottonwood trees and several communities on the reservation, including Elbowoods, one of the lowest and first to go.

It was a surprise to those who first discovered the tip of the monument jutting from the ice two years ago.

This time up, it looks quite a bit worse for the wear. Its sharp tip is crumbled, possibly from ice shearing up and down, or from exposure to the elements after all these years undisturbed beneath the water.

Lyndon Fredericks, a Twin Buttes resident, said there's a lot of interest in the monument, but it would take a good-sized operation to retrieve it. It's hard to tell with the ice still holding, but it appears much of it has been silted into mud.

"It's kind of like a marker to the past," Fredericks said. "This is really something. Most people never dreamed the lake would get this low."

In a way, it's more likely people dream of the prosperity that was lost, when the best land on the reservation became the bottom of a lake.

The weed-infested, eroded land that's reappearing as the lake disappears is no compensation.

The monument remains, though, accessible by hiking down the abandoned Highway 8 north of Twin Buttes and staying to the right, or east side of the bay. At the rate the lake is shrinking, the monument won't be in any water come summer, and then it's hard to say what will happen to it.

"Who knows how much longer it will last," Fredericks said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511, or lauren@;westriv.com.)