“The nights were cold, and, if you woke up… you would hear the coyotes. … You could sit in the front of the cabin, lazy in the sun, and look across the valley. … You remembered the elk bugling. … You remembered how this country...
Located on the eastern flanks of the Highwood Mountains of Central Montana is the sprawling Strand Ranch, home to one of the last big working cattle operations in the state. Set on 30,000 contiguous acres — half of which are protected in a conservation easement...
It was called the Great American Cattle Drive, and as Sharon Moore remembers it, 300 head of longhorn out of Fort Worth, Texas, traversed more than 1,400 miles across six states to arrive six months later to her hometown of Miles City, Montana. It was...
I have always loved the open prairie grasslands and coulees that form typical habitat for sharptails, Huns, and pheasants — Big Sky Country defined. An enormous swath of it lay spread out before me one cloudless September morning, running all the way north from the...
A chorus of crickets hums in the background as farmer Jody Manuel describes his latest experiment. The organic Petite Crimson lentil plants that he’s standing among reach his knees and are as thick and green as the top of the Amazon rainforest. He crouches to...
One of my favorite driving expeditions in Idaho is to follow the Salmon River from the Stanley Basin downstream to Challis. On this trip, the abundance of hot springs and mountain views are accompanied by an undeniable sense of nostalgia, a reminder of what the...
Once you’ve seen mountain sheep in their native habitat — the high passes above timberline that catch early snow and hold summer’s light — sheepless pastures seem profoundly empty. It’s the same with the scoured badlands, where bands of prairie bighorns, spooked by an intruder,...
From Wounded Knee to the Gallows: The Life and Trials of Lakota Chief Two Sticks (University of Oklahoma Press, $24.95), co-authored by Philip S. Hall and Mary Solon Lewis, sheds new light on the aftermath of the Battle of Wounded Knee (also called the Wounded...
One night it will just pass Plain in the firelight. That thing you’ve been Hunting for so long, Suddenly right in front of you, Unafraid. As if everything, The cunning traps, The dogged trailing, Was all just for show. Some elaborate ceremony Of the inevitable. And now this No desperate chase, No revelatory Final showdown, Just a gentle meeting of eyes, A...
More than 150 years after Nelson Story’s famous Texas-to-Montana cattle drive, cattle rustlers still roam the American West, and traditional ranchers still brand their calves to identify their herd and safeguard their livelihood. The practice of rope-and-drag branding, with irons in an open fire pit...