Hugh Sidey's America Where the Buffalo Roamed

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.