Review

Hi John,

    Thank you for the autographed edition of your novel, Buffalo Dreamers. I found it hard to put down, and I enjoyed it very much.

    The Buffalo Dreamers focuses on some Montana issues that aren’t going away soon and provokes important conversations. I am reminded of those conversations every morning that I see the bison on the hill across the road from our Fort Peck home (in a wildlife exhibit). And I am likewise reminded whenever I partake of buffalo meat at a native feast or celebration. Bison from Yellowstone and elsewhere replenish and revitalize native herds on all seven of our reservations now, I think, so perhaps the situation you write about has something of a happy ending. I am not sure the slaughter has stopped, but I think it has at least been minimized…

    Your book, I should think, still has traction with people (both liberals and conservatives) on and off the plains who have a distaste for heavy-handed government “problem-solving.” While free-roaming bison can destroy farmland and fences, and brucellosis  is still a problem with park bison and elk, there has been both better management by the government and less opposition from farmers and ranchers in the park vicinity.

    Schools in small Northeastern Montana towns are bleeding students and the small towns are dying. While American Prairie has courted native support by donating bison to Indian tribes, nothing has been said about what is going to happen to the natives themselves, who will eventually find all of the infrastructure they depend on disappearing along with the euro population of the plains. Nowhere in anybody’s propaganda is there anything about restoring Indians to the plains.

    As a teacher on and off the reservation in Northeastern Montana for almost 50 years, and a resident of Eastern Montana for almost 60 years, I have witnessed a lot of boom/bust, but despite that–and for a lot of different reasons–there has been a steady drain of population, but also a steady amalgamation of non-agricultural land. The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, which I live next to, encompasses nearly a million acres, and the burgeoning American Prairie Reserve now has almost 500,000 acres. The rest of the land is checkerboarded, much of it belonging to the Bureau of Land Management (which owns a little over 8 million acres in Montana), the forest service or the state. Most ranches in this neck of the woods lease very large tracts of public land. Reservations will soon be inhabited land-locked islands with no place for natives to escape to.

    As easy as it is for residents of the plains to blame wrong-headed environmentalists for what is happening in Montana and other plains states, that is not accurate. The real blame belongs to the industrialists of the early 1800s, who wanted to build railroads, sell machinery, build factories, and so on–they encouraged development of the Louisiana Purchase and deluded homesteaders who thought they were getting great agricultural land. Those settlers were also ignorant of the climate, the geographical state (high desert) and the absence of water. Most were gone off the land by the end of the Depression. Reservations were shrunk to make more land available for settlers. Machines began to displace human labor on ag land. However, whose fault these continuing problems are is probably irrelevant. We need to focus on solutions, and in order to find them we are going to have to rethink our priorities. How much ag land is necessary for America to be self-sufficient in food? If essential goods are to be transported across the great plains–on the two main corridors that pass through Montana, for example–how important is it to maintain essential services along those routes? If our borders are mostly semi-wilderness, how secure will they be? How can we protect the Mississippi River and its tributaries?  All of the water between the mountains of the east and west coasts is in them. There are a lot of questions that aren’t being asked. I think I’ll try to provoke some. 

    All my best,

    Roger

• This article is edited for privacy.