TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 11KB | 234 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 53

HUGH SIDEY'S AMERICA

Where the Buffalo Roamed


Plagued by hard times and harsh weather, the Great Plains may
be stumbling back to a frontier existence dominated by prairie
grass, solitude and wandering beasts

By Hugh Sidey


    On the surface there is not much about Bill Mathers to bring
to mind Augustus McCrae or Woodrow Call, the gritty cattle
drivers of the epic novel and television mini-series Lonesome
Dove. Too much civilization has piled up in the corners of
Mathers' face and body.

    But more than a century after the time of that story,
Mathers rode their trail, sank his roots into their grasslands
and adapted to the big weathers and financial buffetings of the
Great Plains. Storms natural and political have raged there
forever, and another is blowing this summer. Mathers will
survive as he always has, with hard work, shrewd calculation.
He and those like him may be the future of this vast and
troubled land, which seems to be stumbling back in time toward
a recast frontier where grass will be king, some buffalo may
actually roam again, and man will be in the minority.

    Mathers, 66, has seen the land ravaged by the plow, the
water sucked from the aquifers and wasted, the oil and mining
industries nose-dive, and the children of the plains rush for
the rural exits. He was in the Montana legislature for 20
years.

    In the end, Mathers believes, land governs almost everything
else. "You work with the land," he says. "You can't work
against it." The big sky does not intimidate him; it entices
him. Mathers is undaunted by solitude or the prospect of tiny
clusters of civilization tied by the endless reaches of
shortgrass in the 10 states between the Rockies and the 98th
meridian. The Great Plains form one-fifth of the land mass of
the lower 48 states -- and an even greater portion of the
nation's legend and romance. Sitting Bull warred and wept on
the plains. General George Custer wandered there with the
Seventh Cavalry, his pack of greyhounds, and his band playing
the march Garry Owen, then galloped to his dreadful rite of
immortality at Little Big Horn. Sixty million buffalo were
mindlessly slaughtered on the cinnamon land swells. When the
plow came, the Dust Bowl was born.

    Mathers decided in 1951 that the Texas Panhandle, where he
grew up, was too crowded and expensive for cattlemen. He headed
north "for cheap grass," to the border of Rosebud and Custer
counties, just above Miles City, Mont. Mathers did not trail
a herd a thousand miles across the powdery plains, fending off
Kiowa and Comanche, or ford the snake-infested Nueces River.
Instead, he put 200 Herefords on the Santa Fe Railroad, climbed
into his blue Oldsmobile and rolled smoothly up Highway 83. He
was there in two days. (Lonesome Dove's McCrae and Call took
months.) Mathers bought up old homestead land for $5 to $8 an
acre, quit trying to plow and plant wheat and barley, and
gently coaxed back the grass, which now ruffles in the restless
wind, somehow surviving where the nation has its coldest
winters and hottest summers.

    Mathers estimates that at one time there were between 125
and 150 homestead families on his 50,000-acre spread, each
trying to live with a few cows and sheep and harboring vain
hopes that crops that sprout so effortlessly in Illinois would
do the same in semiarid Montana, which gets less than 15 in.
of rain annually. They are all gone now, tiny homes fallen in,
schoolhouses vanished, everything blown away by the same winds
that lofted the sandy soil as far as the Atlantic seaboard in
the 1930s. A few of the homestead titles are held by
descendants. Mathers sends lease payments to places like
Florida and California.

    In a way, Mathers is part of a re-creation, edging back
toward an open and exhilarating country that was swept away by
bad government policy and greed. Homesteading was a tragedy in
most of the plains, pitting small farmers against the
relentless weather. It was no contest. But then the government
compounded the problem -- and still does -- by offering crop
subsidies, and those who broke the soil became manacled to a
marginal existence. Some still hang on, but time runs against
them.

    There, in simple narrative, is the core of the anguish and
the argument and the hope of the Great Plains with its menacing
beauty. In such a huge land the conditions vary enormously, and
so do the opinions on what to do. Grasping this giant nettle
may in the end be impossible, but a number have tried.

    Some years back, Robert Scott, of the nonprofit Institute
of the Rockies in Missoula, proposed the Big Open, a
15,000-sq.-mi. chunk of struggling central Montana that would
be linked cooperatively by public and private owners into a
wildlife range for 300,000 buffalo, deer, antelope and elk. His
figures suggested that on the average, the 3,000 people living
there would make more tending to tourists and hunters than from
ranching and farming. Writer Douglas Coffman, who helped Scott,
saw even more: a chance to recapture a bit of the original
American heart, something brave and wild. Coffman, who is
writing a novel about the return of the buffalo -- the
fulfillment of a prayer in an old Indian song -- even tracked
down the site near Jordan, Mont., where the Smithsonian's
William Hornaday in 1886 found the last of the wild bison. He
killed 25 of them, took skins and skeletons back East to mount.
Those shaggy monsters roamed the National Museum of Natural
History along Washington's Mall for almost 75 years.

    Most of the Montanans in the Big Open area were more angered
than romanced by Scott's proposal. They would rather endure as
is than be herded by the government. "Some of these ranchers
can live with a zero net income for 10 years and still not live
in anguish," says Scott.

    Bill Mathers, not at all a typical resident of the Big Open
region, took it all in, said little, bought more land,
increased his commercial herd to 3,000 and granted hunting
rights on his holdings. Easterners in big mobile homes arrive
each year and stalk elk and deer that glide over the hilltops
like sandy clouds. The hunters get state approval for a few
days, bag a trophy, then rumble back home feeling as if they
have been with Lewis and Clark.

    Philip Burgess, of the Center for the New West in Denver,
looked out from his urban redoubt on the edge of the plains and
declared the advent of an "archipelago society." Modest to
small cities are sprinkled across great washes of sparsely
populated land, the tiny towns nearly dead, ranches getting
bigger. The surviving communities are oases that offer services
and cultural amenities for the surrounding areas. Mathers
foresaw that intuitively when he arrived 40 years ago. Except
for a short spell at first, he has lived in Miles City and
driven to and from his ranch 25 miles away.

    But of all the studies and proposals, the one by a couple
of New Jersey intellectuals has raised the greatest storm out
on the plains. Frank Popper, head of Rutgers University's
urban-studies department, is a land planner who has poked his
way down the neglected and withering trails of the plains for
20 years, wondering if a new frontier is struggling to be born.
His wife Debora is a graduate student in geography. They swept
up the entire region, from Texas to Montana, in their analysis.
Their language was apocalyptic ("largest, longest-running
agricultural and environmental miscalculation in the nation's
history"), their images devastating ("dreams, drought and
dust") and their predictions frightening ("a wasteland, an
American empty quarter").

    The Poppers' good sense was to get rock-solid data. Their
genius was to see and understand the grim trend. Their audacity
was to propose a solution and give it a bumper-sticker name:
Buffalo Commons. Their good fortune was to be near New York
City, which still tingles from the memories of its rich sons,
like Theodore Roosevelt, sent west a century ago for thrills
and toughening. The national media reveled in an
honest-to-goodness cowboy story.

    The Poppers identified 139,000 sq. mi. as poor and emptying,
and they suggested that through a consortium of public and
private owners and institutions, the world's largest game
preserve be created and woven around those areas that are still
viable. Government payments would be used to idle the marginal
land and support owners for as long as 30 years while they
planned a new life. The cost? "Billions," acknowledges Frank
Popper, "but less than the current subsidy programs."

    Out on the plains, Buffalo Commons is called Poppercock and
worse. At least four Governors have denounced it. Bodyguards
were furnished for the Poppers this spring when they went
onstage in Nebraska to further explain their idea. But the
Poppers did win support from other academics, some in the
plains. Vine Deloria Jr. of the University of Colorado, an
Indian activist (he's a Sioux) and author (Custer Died for Your
Sins), feels that such a scheme might help break the cycle of
welfare and subsidy checks that have held many Indians in
serfdom for decades.

    The irony is that the "new truths" of the plains are as old
as the crumbling diaries of the first explorers. Those early
wanderers lumped the plains into something labeled the "great
American desert." In 1931 Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb
wrote, "East of the Mississippi, civilization stood on three
legs -- land, water and timber; west of the Mississippi, not
one but two of these legs were withdrawn -- water and timber
-- and civilization was left on one leg -- land. It is small
wonder that it toppled over in temporary failure." The Poppers
simply confirmed Webb.

    But putting visions on a seminar blackboard and bringing
them into reality in this nation (which is low on money) and
at this time (when the people in a single congressional
district number more than the 413,000 in the Buffalo Commons
area) are dramatically different things. The commons idea is
a stranger in the departments of Agriculture and the Interior.
If George Bush had heard of the concept, he would have posed
with a buffalo. He hasn't.

    If nothing else, the debate has rallied the plainsmen to
search for new ways to deal with the realities of decline --
less water and oil; fewer minerals, people, towns. It has also
revealed that a remarkable number of plains residents, like
Mathers, have for years been adjusting to the inexorable
rhythms of the land.

    In 1959 Roy Houck was ousted from his Missouri River
bottomland to make way for the Oahe reservoir. He moved to the
plains northwest of Fort Pierre, S. Dak., and put his purebred
cattle on grass. They were devastated in the 1966 blizzard, and
so Houck decided to experiment with buffalo. Today he has 3,000
head that seem to thrive in the cold and the heat. Houck
slaughters a thousand bison a year and sells all the meat he
can produce. Bill Mathers doubts he will ever switch to bison.
But as he stands on Horse Creek Butte and looks at his land,
he won't rule it out totally. The land in the end will decide.