Alone with two generations of ghosts in Montana’s ancient seas

May 4, 1997

On an ancient sea floor under a sky as big as possibility we raced our sleds in the snow to the creek bed. Our antics were visible for miles in this giant, open land, but nobody was there to see. We were alone in the center of the nation.

We were in Carter County, Montana, about five miles west of the South Dakota border. You get there by taking 53 miles of gravel road called the Norwegian Cutoff from the CanAm Highway, which runs to Belle Fourche and Spearfish, South Dakota, and very near the geographic middle of America. This is the American Grasslands. The Short Grass Country. It is beyond the 100th Meridian and has been called the American Outback by Newsweek magazine. With 5,500 square miles and about 832 residents, Carter County, Montana, easily qualifies for the traditional definition of frontier — two or fewer people per square mile. It is a relatively short drive to the battlefield where General Custer’s blood flowed for hubris, and less than a day’s drive to Mt. Rushmore, an enduring icon for American pride and success. About the same distance to the southwest is Devil’s Tower in Wyoming where climbers have encounters of the cultural kind with Indian heritage. To the west of our sledding hill is Sheep Mountain, the most prominent of geographic and geologic feature in the area. It is a mountain of modest size, steep-sided and with a wide, flat top.

More than any feature, Sheep Mountain offers this place a sense of identity and pride. From the summit, where Indians left evidence of their visits, thousands of square miles are visible. As with a great telescope aimed at the edge of infinity, sight lines are so long the view is back in time. To the north are the Short Pine Mountains, a ridge where early residents of the plains were obliged to visit if they were to find enough lumber to build a house or a barn. In 1980, a fire brought an end to lumber gathering. In a modern Armageddon, the entire Custer National Forest burned. Scattered around and between are mud buttes, crazy homes to rattlesnakes and ants. In a particular strata of earth near the tops of some of the taller buttes, dinosaurs found their ultimate angle of repose.

It is a place of rugged romanticism, a place whose symbols have been borrowed by marketers and turned into something else. Millions drive Cherokee and Thunderbird automobiles to movies such as “Dancing With Wolves” and “Lonesome Dove.” There were and are cowboys here, and Indians, too. Before that were the animals of “Jurassic Park.” All have left plenty of evidence of their passing. For the savvy, arrowheads are relatively easy to find, cowboy paraphernalia lurks in dusty corners of abandoned sheds, dinosaur bones and teeth are there for the taking. A Styrofoam buffalo, used as a movie prop in “Dancing With Wolves,” stands distorted and puerile in a tractor shed on the ranch where we were sledding, a comical novelty to people who are as much a part of this land as the real thing.

Little imagination is required to visually validate the geologic theory that this land once was a sea bed. It looks like the bottom of an ocean, but it feels like being at sea in a small vessel; it is as powerful as it is beautiful, as uplifting as it is melancholy; capacious beyond human terms. While gazing off over many miles, a ravine big enough to hide your pick-up truck will be invisible. It’s all “rolling hills” at 60 miles per hour, but take a walk and you will find treachery in the form of cutbanks, canyons, ravines, cactus, quicksand, rattlesnakes and buttes. It’s easy to understand why they once would hang a man for stealing a horse.

This is ranch land. With 10,000 acres and a lifetime of hard work, you will survive, but you will not prosper. It is empty enough to be considered a good place for ICBM missile silos which only now are being dismantled. Locals never considered the missiles as much. Ground zero is a haughty notion when its -40 degrees and there are cows to feed. It isn’t that lofty thoughts are discouraged here, it’s they fall victim to the day-to-day effort called survival.

As the survival battle rages, waged by people who find themselves ignored, or worse, attacked. They are losing the economic battle, victims of a complicated agriculture economy that makes millionaires of the middlemen, paupers of the producers, and results in a withering of human life on the American Frontier. The price of calves this year was around $285 a head. Some estimate another $35 or $40 a head is needed to simply break even. The price of meat in the grocery store has not dropped accordingly. Somebody is getting rich and somebody else is being victimized. The ranchers know who is the victim.

Victims aren’t new to this country. The population of Carter County Montana is one-third its 1920 level. It looks to be dropping considerably. The sons and daughters of the region’s original settlers are aging now and are looking for a way to pass the ranches on to the third generation. For most it won’t happen. The ranches do not generate enough income to buy themselves. For some, the ranch must be sold to an outsider who will turn it in to a hunting camp or hideaway. The children can’t afford it, and the parents need the money for retirement.

The calamitous series of events unfolds daily. The best result often is the formation of family corporations that own the ranches but do not live there. A foreman is hired to keep an eye on a few cows as the place succumbs to a slow entropy while the children work in cities and towns, buying the same groceries they once produced. A disinterested America looks the other way. Some even encourage and applaud the decline.

Frank Popper is among those who appears to encourage the decline. An academic from Rutgers University in New Jersey, he recognized the difficulty of life in America’s Outback, and the country’s reluctance to give up any tangible riches. So unproductive is this turf, reasoned Popper in 1990, the land should be turned back to its completely natural self, a land the first mountain men found as they travelled up the Missouri River, a land teeming with buffalo and natural grasses, antelope, mule deer and even the wolf and grizzly bear. The planet is better served moving agriculture out of the Short Grass Country and off to someplace with warmer weather, more rain, less hardship and more production per acre.

The northern prairie could then serve as an American wildlife preserve, a big zoo where people like Frank Popper could gather up their families and travel out to learn something about wildlife, ecology, history and a romantic American heritage. Popper even had a name for it — Buffalo Commons.

An already angry West reacted to Popper’s ideas with the venom of a thousand rattlesnakes. Popper made the one great mistake: He understood the land, but he forgot to understand the people. He suggested that families with roots of three or four generations in one place give up nothing less than their occupations, their homes, their lifestyles and their heritage. Once done, the Popper family could enjoy a really neat summer vacation with the kids, and ecology would be served at the same. Where the ranchers would go or what they would do to make a living remains unanswered.

Imagine Frank Popper giving up his university position, selling his home and getting sent to live and work in a place for which he is completely unprepared, say a coal mine. He’d get angry at the slightest suggestion, and so did the ranchers of the Short Grass Country.

Popper might contend he isn’t the villain in this drama. He’s just the guy who gave it a name. He didn’t create the economic forces working to end two generations of American heritage, he just highlighted the issues and suggested a use for the land once the people had been forced away. That’s where he went wrong. Those are people out there who continue to represent a cherished American ideal. Popper should, we all should, be thinking of what we can do to preserve those people, to reduce their struggles, rather than dreaming of what we will do when they are gone.
Top photo and story by Doug Freed
Devil’s Tower photo by Michael Lewis