First Battle Begins Over Drilling Policy
WEATHERMAN DRAW, MONT. — The artists never signed their names, and for centuries their sandstone gallery remained hidden from all but their tribal descendants who wandered these windy sagebrush steppes.
That obscurity is about to end, as one of the nation’s richest oilmen, who also is a major contributor to the Republican Party, has been given permission to search for what he believes could be a pool of 10 million barrels of oil buried here.
These bluffs 70 miles southwest of Billings, where enigmatic images of animals and men have weathered as much as 1,000 years of prairie wind, are quickly becoming the backdrop for the first battle over the Bush-Cheney energy strategy.
Emboldened by the federal plan’s emphasis on easing access to domestic reserves on millions of acres of public land, the oil and gas industry is eyeing areas like Weatherman Draw in hopes that protracted battles over wildlife and archeology will be a thing of the past.
Just 12 days after the inauguration of President Bush, federal authorities here granted an oil exploration permit to billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, whose empire ranges from telecommunications and railroads to part ownership of the Lakers and Staples Center, and who donated more than $300,000 to Republican causes in the past four years.
Affecting an obscure and largely unpopulated 4,268 acres of south-central Montana, the decision by the Bureau of Land Management turned few heads. But 10 Native American tribes, the Sierra Club and the National Trust for Historic Preservation are launching a nationwide campaign to stop the drilling within a half-mile of indigenous art that qualifies for the National Register of Historic Places.
They fear that easier access to Weatherman Draw will attract vandalism and abuse. And losing this battle, they contend, could mark the beginning of a wholesale rollback of gains achieved in the Clinton administration, which removed vast stretches of public land from commercial exploitation and human intrusion.
The opponents of drilling have appealed the decision by the BLM, which is scheduled to issue a ruling today. Both sides have threatened to continue the battle in the courts, where the case will be closely watched by the industry and environmental movement.
“I think it really represents what Bush wants to do in the West,” said Kirk Koepsel, northern Plains regional representative for the Sierra Club. “These are the things the [Vice President Dick] Cheney energy plan has in mind to do. They both worked for oil companies, and oil companies want to have access to every acre of federal land in the West.”
Oil and gas interests in Montana and the rest of the West now openly talk of persuading the administration to reverse decisions such as a 1997 Forest Service ruling that set thousands of acres of the northern Rocky Mountains off-limits to exploration.
“I think it will help as far as bringing a more balanced approach,” Gail Abercrombie, executive director of the Montana Petroleum Assn., said of the Bush plan. “It’s not going to be tomorrow. I wouldn’t even say it would be a year or two.”
For Anschutz Exploration Corp., the BLM permit for Weatherman Draw represents little more than long overdue relief. “We went through about four years of permitting, which is about 3.9 years more than a permit takes,” said the company’s land manager, Todd Kalstrom.
“We understood this was a sensitive area, and we wanted to work with the people in the area.” But, Kalstrom added, he found the Native American response “vague and without any clarity.”
Kalstrom, in fact, warned the BLM that “Anschutz’s patience has ended” in a letter he sent to the agency in August 1999. Calls to Anschutz Exploration Corp.’s parent company for comment on the issue were not returned last week.
Application Kept in Limbo
Anschutz acquired two existing leases to mineral rights in 1994, two years after the BLM began procedures to protect rock art found on the site. It would take five more years for the BLM to declare Weatherman Draw an “Area of Critical Environmental Concern,” a designation that places substantial obstacles to drilling.
In the meantime, the BLM kept Anschutz’s drilling application in limbo--even while acknowledging that he had valid rights to drill because his acquired leases predated the bureau’s tighter regulations.
In the end, the BLM drilling permit imposed only minor conditions, including a ban on disturbing Native American rituals still held in the area and the protection of mating sage grouses, a prairie species whose population is rapidly declining as a result of human disturbances.
But the BLM will allow drillers to reopen a long abandoned access road. Motorized access is the bane of sacred sites and wilderness areas because it opens them up to thieves, vandals and poachers.
Under the permit, the road could be open and drilling underway as early as mid-June.
The Native Americans whose oral histories refer to the valley as a place of peace are enraged. At first reluctant to attract attention to an area they consider sacred, they have joined a national campaign to save Weatherman Draw. Drilling here, they say, is like sinking a well in front of the Vatican or in the midst of religious sites in Jerusalem.
“I was told a story by Yellowface,” said Howard Boggess, a Crow oral historian who showed the site to a reporter. “He said go up the Yellowstone [River] and follow the Clark [Fork]. There’s a valley there that’s the valley of peace. We have no war there.”
Boggess is convinced Weatherman Draw is that valley.
It is not an easy place to find on a map, and once located, Weatherman Draw does not give up its secrets readily. A small change in the light angle can hide images--of shields, animals and human figures--that stand out boldly in other conditions. Some images lie in the shadowed under face of sandstone slabs that lean like scattered dominoes in the sandy soil.
Archeologists--as well as Native American leaders themselves--are largely baffled at the meaning of the symbols, which they count as some of the best examples of indigenous rock art on the high Plains, and the only polychromatic ones in Montana.
“We don’t know exactly what it was for, but it was a special place,” said Crow tribe member Burdick Two Leggins, who saw the site for the first time with a reporter last week.
When the pioneer Weatherman family first passed through in the late 1800s, they scrawled their family name in several places close to pictographs that were not revealed to the public until 1992.
But other emblems closer to a paved road have been more widely familiar since the 1930s, and have suffered extensive damage from gunshots and graffiti. As a result, enigmatic circles and wedges lie hard by more prosaic scrawls that say “Bob,” “Kikki” or “Lonnie Schwend, May 1963.”
Crow and Comanche leaders who trekked to the site recently fumed that the Anschutz project would open the more hidden sites to similar vandalism. .
Anschutz agreed to keep workers from the art sites, but bristled at BLM’s suggestion to post a 24-hour guard during drilling, suggesting that the cost be shared among the company, tribes and Sierra Club.
‘This Is a Living Spiritual Center’
Tribal representatives, meanwhile, cringe at the image of guards and fences around a sacred site. They say the obscurity afforded by wilderness has protected the area better than any modern sentinel could.
“This isn’t just some place on a hill; this is a living spiritual center. The church is alive here,” said Jimmy Arterberry, a Comanche preservation leader who traveled to the site from Oklahoma. His tribe, which branched off from local Shoshone groups, traces its heritage through the valley as well.
For their part, environmentalists view the BLM permit restrictions as weak concessions from a bureau eager to satisfy the new Washington philosophy on public land.
“I think what was happening is the BLM sensed a shift in policy and decided to move forward on this,” Koepsel charged.
Tom Lonnie, the BLM’s deputy state manager for Montana, who will issue the appeal decision today, denied any such shift.
“It’s a decision that takes a lot of review and a lot of consideration,” Lonnie said. “It wasn’t being stalled by anyone as far as I know. The change in administration had nothing to do with approval of this well.”
Still, the record on the Weatherman Draw case reveals a BLM divided over its duty to promote profitable use of federal land while protecting its cultural and wildlife heritage.
For instance, Kalstrom and others close to the decision acknowledged that his company “worked closely with BLM officials” and “mutually decided” to tailor the company’s original proposal for exploration and production in a way that would avoid a costly and time-consuming environmental impact review.
As a result, the bureau undertook a less stringent environmental assessment on a proposal that deliberately avoids the issue of what happens if oil is found.
That segmentation of the long-term plan for Weatherman Draw means that if Anschutz finds oil, the real battle may be just beginning.
At best, Anschutz geologists foresee pumping about 10 million barrels over 20 years--an amount equal to about half a day of U.S. consumption, according to the Department of Energy. If no oil is found, Kalstrom said, “We walk away.”
Opponents don’t like the odds. “Once they get going, you can’t stop them,” said Crow activist Two Leggins. “When you’re dealing with the sixth richest man in the country, the amount of influence and power he has is enormous.”
Two Leggins and others find it particularly ironic that Philip Anschutz is an avid collector of Western paintings, currently exhibiting his private collection of Western art on a nationwide tour. They have appealed to him to recognize the value of their simple rock images and walk away from Weatherman Draw. In the meantime, they plan to bring the issue to the attention of people viewing the exhibits in Chicago, Omaha and Washington, D.C.
“This is like a gallery out here, a natural museum,” said Two Leggins. “Michelangelo, they put his art in museums and put a price on it. These things are priceless.”
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