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Past Month's Moccasin Telegraph
August 2004
| 8/26/04 | A year ago here in Montana we were suffering week after week of 90 to 100+
degree days, and rampant wildlifes had most of the state covered with a thick blanket of
smoke. What a difference this year! Here it is, late August, and I’m looking at fresh snow on the peaks. Here in southwest Montana, we’ve had rain and cool temperatures every day this week, and it feels more like October. Even the southwest facing mountain slopes, that ordinarily would have cured out a month or more ago, still have a greenish cast. We really lucked out on the weather front this summer, as things started out pretty grim in April and early May, but then it finally started raining in later May and has continued at regular intervals since. The Climate Prediction Center is calling for another mild winter, and I have little illusion we’re out of the long-term drought cycle, but this summer has been a most welcome respite. We’ve taken advantage of the situation with several explorations around the state, any one of which provided ample fodder for a Moccasin Telegraph column. Something always came up to prevent my producing it until now, though, so they’re going to get rolled into one. And that’s OK, because our ventures have further cemented my opinion that Montana is really at least three separate areas, that don’t particularly share much in common. <update; ahh, as suspected, the first trip resulted in a column’s worth itself, so further installments will follow> Our first August venture (actually including the last couple days of July, also) was a tour of the Big Open in eastern Montana.  That’s the vast swath of country north of the
Yellowstone and south of the Missouri Breaks, from Roundup east to around Circle.
That’s a big chunk of sparsely settled country, and with the exception of a brief
interlude in the teens and twenties, it’s never supported very much in the way of
human population. From 1911 through 1917, homesteaders flocked into the area, presumably
expecting to create an agricultural utopia. During that period in the area around Ingomar,
there were roughly 2500 homestead filings per year. Those were generally wet years, quite
similar to this summer, I suspect. Still, I also suspect that misgivings had to enter a
lot of those folks’ minds not long after arrival at their chosen 320 acre plot. Range
science has evolved since then, and the accepted wisdom as far as stocking rates in that
neighborhood is that you’d better plan on around 50-100 acres per cow/calf pair for a
ten-month grazing season. For the remainder of the year, you’d better plan on having
some hay put aside. Obviously, that sort of productivity doesn’t even come close to
supporting a family on 320 acres, and the predictable mass exodus that occurred when the
rains ended in  the
twenties would have undoubtedly taken place even if things had stayed green. A considerable number of those failed homesteads forfeited back to the government were never claimed by anyone else, and remain as vast areas of Bankhead-Jones lands on the area maps. A few entrepreneurs with the resources to do so accumulated enormous amounts of land, though, not only via the homestead bust but through the depression years of the twenties and thirties. Some of those giant ranches are still in operation, although in many cases still subsidized by capital from other ventures. That seems to be a recurrent theme in ranching. I’ve read the histories of some of Montana’s showcase operations, like the Flying D and N Bar ranches, whose owners and stockholders were constantly trying to attract new capital, with mixed success. Interestingly, both those operations have sold to wealthy capitalists (again) within recent years. I recently toured the Sun Ranch, one of the showcase ranches of southwest Montana. Owner Roger Lang, who made his millions in the tech boom of the 90's, joked that his California friends say that for an endless money pit, nothing beats a sailboat. He begs to differ, and feels nothing tops a ranch in that regard. And incidentally, many of us wildlife-involved locals feel the Sun Ranch is a model of wildlife-friendly yet economically viable ranching, and if you'd like to book a stay at their Papoose Creek Lodge, let us know. Perhaps the overriding lesson here, is that if you want to be a rancher, it doesn't hurt to have an alternate source of income. With that said, Roger is doing a bang-up job. Old West or New, one of the mores of western behavior frequently violated by newcomers, is that you don’t ask a rancher how many acres he  has.
It’s just bad form, similar to asking somehow how much money they have, although
I’ve also noticed some urbanites like to establish that supposedly private matter
early on in a conversation. In any case, in most areas the common unit of ranch
measurement is acres. In the Big Open, though, it tends to be sections (a square
mile, 640 acres). Not a few of the ranches still in operation there run into hundreds of
sections. Even so, it’s a hard country to eke a living from, and when you come on one
of the very widely scattered ranch headquarters, the usual dwelling is a mobile home,
often with a set of barns and corrals that might date back to the sheep industry that
flourished for a time in the thirties and forties. For a variety of reasons, the sheep
industry is pretty well gone away, and anymore cattle are the predominate species, at
least if you disregard pronghorn antelope. Personally, I don’t disregard native wildlife, and in fact the primary reason I embarked on the Big Open venture was to scout for a trophy-class antelope. There are herds of antelope just about everywhere you look out there, although finding one of the caliber I’m after requires looking over thousands of ordinary ones. In fact, we had much greater success with our other objective. My companion on the trip is a rockhound, and had a book along that listed some probable locales to find fossil  remains of sea life dating back to when the area was under water. We struck
out on a couple of those spots, but found others where the ground was literally covered
with fossils. Further reading on my return revealed that the Native Americans highly
regarded these fossils, believing them to hold power for granting success in buffalo
hunting. Many of these “buffalo stones” are baculites, which are the fossilized
remains of squid or octopus tentacles. If you use your imagination a bit, some pieces do
possibly bear resemblance to live bison.Any connection with fossilized amphibians is open to speculation, but buffalo are making a slow but sure comeback in the Big Open. There’s a handful of bison ranches, and it’s likely that bison from Yellowstone, once guaranteed brucellosis-free via a quarantine program (administered by FWP, and in its early stages currently), will be released in the Missouri Breaks. In fact, I’ve already had an encounter with free-ranging bison in the Big Open! While antelope hunting a couple of years back, I’d climbed to a bluff and was glassing the surrounding country. A couple of ravines over, a man and woman were butchering an antelope they’d harvested. Suddenly the woman became agitated, and pointed down the ravine at something out of my vision. The guy ran for his rifle, and both were visibly disturbed. I couldn’t imagine what had their attention, when suddenly several bison charged up out of the ravine. When they saw the antelope hunters, they hit the brakes, and it was kind of a Mexican standoff there for a few seconds, until the bison gave it up and thundered back down the coulee and across the flat below off to points unknown. Seeing those buffalo running across the prairie gave me a thrill that ordinary beef cows never produce. Those buffalo just belong in that country, although reportedly these were escapees from a ranch on the lower Musselshell, quite some distance away. The owner is reportedly less than fastidious about fence maintenance, and his buffalo had been seen as far away as Forsyth, the better part of a hundred miles away! Naturally, this was not endearing him to other area ranchers…. Still, there’s vast unfenced areas out there where bison would prosper with little or no conflict, not to mention maintenance. As a capitalist venture, well…. I don’t foresee anyone ever becoming fabulously wealthy off any sort of agrarian ventures in the Big Open, but selling buffalo hunts is something I have considerable  personal experience
with, and a lot of folks are really taken with the idea, as am I! And for that matter,
there’s ranchers in New Mexico that are getting up to $4000 for trophy-class
antelope, and that’s just the landowner payment. The total cost (for lodging &
guide service) is $6500! The commercialization of wildlife is a contentious issue, and
certainly has potential for abuse. I don’t want to see folks who don’t feel like
spending that kind of scratch on a speed goat left with no hunting alternatives, but
somehow I don’t foresee that happening. As I mentioned earlier, there’s hundreds
if not thousands of ordinary antelope for every one that might make the record books, and
if you’re just looking for meat, there’s plenty of ranchers who don’t mind
seeing their antelope herds reduced, and will let you on for the asking (or are in the
Block Management program, which coordinates sportsman access to private land). But anyway,
if a landowner can get four grand for an antelope….!! Let’s see, that’s
roughly equivalent to the net income from say, 80 cows! And, it requires no capital
investment or labor whatsoever to produce. Now you tell me which makes more sense….. |