Home, Home on the Range Finally Takes Center Stage

‘In my book, a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water and cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress. If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it, and none of you S.O.B.s would be here at all.’

--Montana artist Charles M. Russell,to a group of Great Falls citizens who threw a celebration for themselves in the 1920s.

The white men called it “next year” country.

Next year the rains will come, the prairie fires (or locusts or grasshoppers or blizzards) won’t. Next year the price of wheat will be up, taxes down. Next year the bank will be paid off, the truck will be paid up, the cows will pay for themselves.

That’s the American West: Next Year Country.

Except this year.

This year North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Washington are celebrating their 100th birthdays, and they’re having a rip-roarin’ party stretching most of the way from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean.

Wyoming and Idaho have caught the spirit, too, because next year marks their centennials. If you missed the huge barbecues, cattle drives, rodeos, fairs, powwows, fishing tournaments, parades, dances, and the 101 other festivities this year, Idaho and Wyoming promise encores in ’90.

Centennial celebrations are milestones measured long ago in much of the rest of the nation. Virginians, Floridians, even Missourians, may wonder: Why all the fuss?

Well, the West has always been America’s young upstart, the shirttail relative of the Establishment East, the antebellum South, the Spanish Southwest, the conservative, agrarian Midwest.

But in the 1980s, the West has come of age and come into its own. It has a cachet sought by CEOs as well as collegians. Everywhere you look, from Hollywood’s movies to Detroit’s cars (Mustang, Cherokee, Dakota, Bronco) to Ralph Lauren’s and Calvin Klein’s designer denim fashion, the West is in .

Ask Bill Cody, the 76-year-old grandson of Buffalo Bill. “When I was born, granddad was one of the most famous men in the world,” said Cody, a look-alike for the old showman. “Even today, I go to Singapore, Greece, Europe--hell, even Sri Lanka--and the locals know about the West because of Buffalo Bill.”

Although Thomas Jefferson never saw the West, the third President heard the siren singing in the lonely wind there and he had a vision. He traveled only as far as Harper’s Ferry, W. Va., but imagined the fledgling United States stretching from the Potomac to the Columbia River, south to the mouth of the Mississippi, and north to the headwaters of the Missouri.

“All eyes, all hopes, are now fixed on you,” Jefferson wrote in January, 1803, to James Monroe, urging him to be his special envoy to France and negotiate the Louisiana Purchase. “On the event of this mission depends the future destinies of this republic.”

Monroe pulled it off. For $15 million, the United States acquired the entire 830,000-square-mile territory claimed by France in the New World.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Bernard De Voto described it as one of the most important events in history.

“Not only did it double the area of the United States, not only did it add to our wealth resources of incalculable value, not only did it provide a potential that was certain to make us a great power, not only did it make equally certain that we would expand beyond the Rockies to the Pacific . . . it also provided the centripetal, unifying force that would hold the nation firm against disruptive forces from within,” wrote De Voto.

Even before his diplomats had sealed the deal, Jefferson had secretly asked Congress for $2,500 to cover the cost of dispatching an expedition up the Missouri River and on to the Pacific “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the United States.” The reason was a red herring, innocuous so as not to alarm the British or Spanish who still held enormous tracts in North America.

But it was excuse enough for Army Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, co-commanders, to leap at the opportunity to chart a map marked “Unknown.”

Lewis, who grew up on a farm called Locust Hill only 10 miles by straight gallop northwest of Jefferson’s Virginia estate Monticello, called the chance to explore the West “a darling project of my heart.”

Young Albert Gallatin, an immigrant from Switzerland who had a good head for numbers, was Jefferson’s treasury secretary and therefore responsible for paying the venture’s bills. Lewis and Clark remembered by christening a river after him.

Today the Gallatin name is attached to many Western landmarks, including a Montana county and the Bozeman airport. Gallatin’s oldest living descendant, Beatrice Gallatin Beuf, 82, lives just over the Montana border in Big Horn, Wyo.

Nothing Was Paved

“When my father bought this ranch in 1911, we traveled by train from New York to Sheridan, and there were hitching posts on Main Street and nothing was paved,” she recalled. “We were met at the station by a wagon pulled by four horses, their tails tied up in mud knots. It took us four hours to travel 13 miles.”

Beuf’s ranch reaches into the Big Horn Mountains, where she still rides her Arabian mare every fair day. It was she who was asked to sit next to Queen Elizabeth II, when the monarch dined in Big Horn on a 1984 private visit, and regale her with stories.

“This is a place where the glamorous days of the cowboy are just over your shoulder,” Beuf said. “You’re not choked in with people troubles. Here your troubles are big ones: drought, too much snow, a wind that can carry you away. Here we live with the great realities of life.”

After Lewis and Clark came the mountain men. The traders followed, paddling up the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers. As the buffalo massacres decimated the herds, cattlemen from as far away as the Rio Grande and even the Clyde in Scotland saw the potential and shrewdly staked out giant ranches.

When gold was discovered, miners stampeded for Dakota Territory by the thousands, enterprising merchants hot on their heels. Finally, with the 1862 Homestead Act promising 160 acres to anyone with a strong back and the means to claim the land, sodbusters followed.

Indians Viewed as Obstacles

Jefferson’s vision of Manifest Destiny marching across the continent became reality after the Civil War. The only obstacles in the path of America’s westward migration were the Indians.

Less than 100 miles to the north of Beuf’s ranch, scattered over gently rolling Montana prairie like tumbled rocks, are dozens of small granite markers barely visible in the tall buffalo grass.

The tombstones above the Little Bighorn River commemorate the defeat and death of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, and approximately 260 men in his 7th Cavalry, on a scorching Sunday, June 25, 1876. The only venerated survivor of Custer’s Last Battle was a claybank gelding horse named Comanche, who lived another 15 years and is now on display, stuffed, at the University of Kansas.

Custer believed he was fated to be the hero of the Indian Wars. Despite his failure at the Little Bighorn, he was.

A half-century after Sitting Bull’s and Crazy Horse’s brutal triumph over Yellow Hair unleashed the white man’s wrath and signaled the end of aboriginal life as it had always been, a Sioux holy man remembered:

“Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us.”

Black Hawk, speaking to poet and historian John Neihardt on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1931, continued:

“But the Wasichus (white men) came, and they have made little islands for us and other islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu ; and it is dirty with lies and greed.”

Treaty-writers in Washington, D.C., promised the Indians millions of acres of reservation land “for as long as the grass grows and the water flows.” Then most of it was stolen.

Today, Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) persists in his quest to restore to the Sioux 1.3 million acres of Black Hills land the courts have determined were illegally seized by President Ulysses S. Grant under threat of starvation.

‘Heart of Everything’

To the Lakotas, the name the Sioux call themselves, the Black Hills are wamakas og’naka i’cante --”the heart of everything that is.”

To Wallace McRae, third-generation rancher along Rosebud Creek in Montana, boss of Rocker Six Cattle Co., and neighbor of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations, his land, too, is the heart of everything.

“When my grandfathers got to eastern Montana in the 1880s, it was still frontier but it was ‘civilized,’ ” said McRae. “Gosh, we had a railroad. And the Army, after Custer, had made it safe for ‘human occupation.’ The buffalo were pretty well cleaned out and the land was ready for livestock.”

McRae’s paternal grandfather arrived in Miles City and declared: “I’m no longer a Scotsman, I’m an American,” and dropped the “a” in MacRae. His maternal grandfather, a MacKay, did the same.

“Tradition is part of why we stay,” said McRae, a published cowboy poet. “We’re very fierce about it now. No matter how difficult things get, we won’t leave here.”

‘Tend to Be Stayers’

McRae, 53, ranches with his son Clint, 27. He says true Westerners “tend to be stayers. We don’t do the things we do for economic remuneration. If we can eke out the bare minimum we need, we’re willing to sacrifice to stay here.”

McRae sees the West as a dream place--a Camelot--for many Americans.

“There’s a feeling out there of wanting to get away from it all--smog, crime, drugs,” he said in an interview. “We’re constantly fleeing from our own urban industrialized excesses, but the getaway places are getting fewer and farther between. Montana is still one of those places.”

University of Colorado law professor Charles Wilkinson agrees, even though he’s watched Westerners fight over convoluted water rights statutes and Indian and public land laws.

“I think the West is the last best place, but a place of the imagination for most Americans,” he said. “They want to be able to visit the West and know it’s there but they don’t necessarily want to live here.”

Farming, Mining Threats

Today, threats to the West are many. Some see increased mining in Montana, overgrazed Bureau of Land Management leaseholds in Wyoming, the plowing under of millions of acres of wetlands in the Dakotas, and the below-cost timber harvesting in Washington and Idaho, as permanent scars.

Ed Marston, an East Coast transplant who’s now publisher of High Country News, a bimonthly environmental newspaper based in Paonia, Colo., is one of those concerned.

“For those of us who came here from out of the region, we initially saw the rural cronyism and hurting of the environment, but basically we thought the place looked untouched,” said Marston, who left New York in 1974. “Only now do I see how trashed it has been, and realize that the losses have been going on for over a century.”

A. B. Guthrie Jr., author of “The Big Sky” and considered by many to be the West’s premier living writer, penned the forward to the centennial book “We Montanans.”

“In us,” he wrote, “is some of the spirit of the mountain man, some of the expectation of the prospector, some of the cowboy’s liking for boots, choke-bore pants, a big hat and a horse. Some of the endurance of the homesteader, a bit of this and a bit of that, and perhaps deep and dormant in those of us without trace of Indian blood, a guilty sorrow at the treatment of the red man. All of what we are we owe to our forerunners.”

Remember Forebears

And so, except for the Indians who lost so much, the citizens of six states are celebrating throughout 1989-90. As they party and pray, they frequently pause to remember their pioneer forebears, and to gaze around at the land that anchors them.

“The same distances please our eyes, the same heights lift our spirits, the same streams invite our rods and the same fields our guns,” Guthrie continued in “We Montanans.”

“The same sun puts squints in our eyes, and the same winds scour our faces, and we answer to sight and sound and prospect as they did.”