Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West

by Timothy Egan

  In the early days of settlement, the Indians demanded a toll of the wagon trains for passage through their lands. After the Great Die-Up, some Indians said the West itself had enacted a toll for the sin of wiping out the bison. And some cowboys started to tell the truth about what happened to land they all professed to love. In Great Falls, Montana, one day in 1923, the cowboy artist Charley Russell, a man whose work is still used to sanctify domestic beef, was the featured speaker at a booster-club luncheon. He had been a cattle herder during the Die-Up, but over the years, he became much more drawn to the original West. The room was packed for the great Western artist, whose image would later represent Montana in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, the only statue of a full-time artist in the Capitol Rotunda. After listening to the usual homilies about bringing life to the West, Russell walked to the podium. He usually worked with a little stick of beeswax as he spun his tales, fashioning a figure with his hands while he spoke. He looked out at his fellow Montanans. “In my book a pioneer is a man who turned all the grass upside down, strung bob-wire over the dust that was left, poisoned the water, cut down the trees, killed the Indian who owned the land, and called it progress,” said Russell. The audience was stunned. But he was not yet done. “If I had my way, the land here would be like God made it, and none of you sons of bitches would be here at all.”

  AT THE Denver stock show, the cattlemen were drunk on doom and gloom, but those with a sense of deep history said the shakedown they were going through at the end of the twentieth century was nothing compared with what had happened a hundred years earlier. There were jokes about raising Rocky Mountain oysters—cattle balls, thick with testosterone, especially good in the Livingston Bar and Grill. There were suggestions from the ranchers to try llamas and ostriches, elk and bison, and even some talk that the whole cow thing had been a fluke, and all they needed was a twelve-step program to shake cattle dependency.

  “What’s holding us back now is the traditional cattle rancher and the grip they’ve got on the government,” said Turnbull. “Were spending $110 million a year in tax money propping up and promoting beef.” And up north, in Montana, descendants of the last free-roaming bison herd were being gunned down by the hundreds in a government campaign to keep buffalo from ever wandering outside the square boundaries of Yellowstone National Park. The cattlemen had gone to court to enforce the bison killings; they feared that disease might spread to cows, a long shot according to many biologists. There was not a single documented case of the dreaded brucellosis going from Yellowstone bison to cattle. But in a part of the West where government by a single view of history still ruled, the wild buffalo had to die to keep the unwanted cattle supreme. More than a thousand wild bison were shot, almost a third of the herd, the biggest killing since Bill Cody roamed the land. The irony is that brucellosis was introduced to the northern Rockies by cattle planted in Montana at the turn of the century.

  But even as bison were being shot to protect domestic cattle, the cowboy-industrial complex was showing signs of age and weakness. In tourist haunts around Denver that used to make their money on cowboy-gilded images of a hard past, buffalo were ascendant. At the Fort, a restaurant of Old West pretensions and trading post trappings, fifty thousand buffalo entrees were sold in a year—nearly half It’s business. It had started as a novelty a few years earlier. People loved the meat. What’s more, they had a healthy appetite for stories about how millions of bison used to blot the range. Maybe the evolution to a New West would not be so hard after all. To the north, Ted Turner continued his Noah experiment, buying the Flying D ranch in Montana, evicting cattle from it, and bringing in a herd of free-roaming bison that now numbers nearly four thousand. They cost half as much to raise as cows, and produce four times the income. A correction was clearly underway, with wolves and bison and cutthroat trout and even prairie dogs allowed back into their old home. A group of Indian tribes—Assiniboine and Gros Ventre among them—got together and did the same as Turner. Within a few years, two dozen tribes had brought seven thousand buffalo back to their former habitat. But they were not hobbyists, the Indians who live on the poorest land in America; for them, the buffalo were a path to prosperity. Beyond the reservations and ranches, people started to look at the former bison range, more than two hundred million acres of public land given to stream-fouling, helpless cattle, and wondered why buffalo weren’t roaming in their place.

  As the stock show went on, cowboys came to look at Turnbull’s ostrich booth, and his meat samples went quickly. “Cattle eat seven pounds of feed to gain one pound of body weight,” Turnbull told the curious. “Ostriches put on the same weight with just three pounds of pellets. They do more with less because they digest their food so slowly.”

  A few months later, Turnbull got more good news. A fast-food restaurant in California started to sell ostrich burgers. At $5 they were more than twice the price of a Big Mac, but Turnbull could sense the tide was changing. Then ostrich showed up on the menu at a White House dinner. A restaurant opened in the Highlands Ranch area, specializing in food of the New West; the big bird landed there as well. Turnbull’s phone rang constantly. He spent the Front Range winter keeping his incubators warm and clean, showing off eggs the size of fruit bowls, nagging and feeding birds, and fixing up the place. One of his birds kicked him, but compared to a mule kick, an ostrich was better, he said. All around, the hundred-mile-long Denver megastate continued to close in, and Turnbull started to wonder if he was going to last, if maybe he might have to sell and move on like the cattlemen who had preceded him on this land. The winds were cold, as they always are in the meeting ground of mountain and prairie. The act of creation continued; birds got pregnant, eggs were laid—all of which made him optimistic. “To fail in this business,” said Turnbull, “you really have to do something stupid.”

  The accessories of mythology, the narratives to go with the day-to-day living, were still taking shape. New ostrich ranches, clearly in transition but uncertain how to act or what to call themselves, were emerging all over the West. They reflected the cultural confusion. One was called Beefbird, a place where white-faced Herefords stared out at the new long-necked tenants. Another was the Cowboy Ostrich, a bird and a horse sharing the ranch logo.

  Would bison never have been wiped out had the overland migration of 1843 to i860 been one in which wagon trains were trailed by oversized birds on leashes? Unlikely. Would the new towns of the old buffalo range, in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and New Mexico, have been any less lawless, any less full of shooters whose heads were stuffed with cheap whiskey, had the emigrants made their money selling ostrich steaks or slabs of emu to the miners rather than T-bones and burgers? Probably not. The towns rose and fell on the rush of the moment. There was always something to kill somebody over. Would the Great Die-Up of 1887, the ecological catastrophe of the open West, followed by the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, been easier on birds from Africa than it was on cows from England? Of course not. The mass death would only have looked more awkward. But after seeing Turnbull work his ostrich ranch, a hard job but not without some fun and a steady sense of renewal, I found it easy to close my eyes and see ostriches long-striding it across Monument Valley, and wonder how John Wayne and the boys would look riding herd on flightless birds.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Colony

  Butte, Montana

  He is the Copper King now, the Boss. Bill Murray, goofy, gangly, spindly-legged comedian, chaser of gophers, second banana to Rodney Dangerfield, sits in the owners box at Alumni Coliseum overseeing his empire. People wave to him and make funny faces. He winks and smiles and keeps that hurt, hangdog look even when nobody is looking. It is a fine night for baseball on the cusp of the Continental Divide. The ragged clouds that were stuck in a trench of the Rockies have moved up and over the mountains, exposing the brown and broken town of Butte in sunlight that seemed incongruous. Twilight is more forgiving. There is no better patch of green in all of Butte than the diamond atop the hill, where the
Copper Kings are playing Ogden, and the ale is home-brew. Of course, for more than a century, there was barely any green in Butte, and grass still won’t grow on the dead land that makes up some of the most poisoned ground in America. But that is a thought beyond the universe of baseball.

  Fly balls have more hang time here, more than a mile above sea level. For a power hitter, the Pioneer League is heaven; Cecil Fielder hit twenty dingers in 1982 when he was a Copper King for three months. Murray is looking for long balls from his Kings tonight and a good outing from one of his teenage pitching prospects, but little more. On game days, Butte is Bill Murray’s town. “Hey! Murray’s in Town!” is one sign on a railroad overpass. And draped across the stadium wall is a banner: “Murray’s March Through Montana.” When he visits to check on his team, he always does something nice, a gift to charity, a barbecue out along the first-base line, a good word to the local press, and a few jokes after a round of golf down by the slag heaps.

  Robber Baron, King, Tycoon, Big Daddy, the Man—in truth, nobody in this feudal town can even approach such a title anymore. The real Copper Kings are all dead, leaving their legacy throughout the West, the crippled towns, the rivers that will run red for another generation, the old men on respirators. And in Montana, more than in any other place, they left behind a psychic blow so harsh that it continues to dominate the state’s personality. This history is not easy to shake or replace, and harder still to inhabit; it hurts. Rockefeller, Hearst, Daly, Heinze, and Clark—they were Copper Kings. They owned Butte, and because they owned Butte, they controlled 40 percent of the world’s copper production. They owned the greatest copper mother lode the world had ever seen at the very time the world most wanted and needed it—when electric lights and telephones became as common to a household as front doors. They owned the nation’s biggest silver mine, one of the biggest gold mines, and nearly a million acres of timberland—and they cut freely on another million owned by the public. They had the biggest smelter in the world, just west of Butte, in Anaconda. They owned every major newspaper in Montana but one, and the power company, and the water company. They bought editors, archbishops, congressmen, senators. They even bribed grand jurors who were assigned to look into bribery. At one point, with the nation watching, they purchased a majority of the Montana Legislature—for a going rate of $10,000 per vote—in order to ensure a United States Senate seat for a Copper King. They had people they didn’t like hung from railroad trestles, or shot by national guardsmen, or held in jail without charges. Five times, federal troops marched into Butte, and martial law was declared more than a dozen times. The first major posting of Omar Bradley, the World War II general, was in Butte, on assignment to keep fellow Americans in line.

  But after more than a century it has come to this: Bill Murray, the only man left in Montana who can rightfully call himself a Copper King, has no more power than the ability to raise ballpark hot dog prices by a quarter or suggest trading a nineteen-year-old right-hander who still doesn’t have anything more complicated than a fastball. This is progress.

  Across the Bitterroot Range, south and west of Butte, another gimp-legged company town is holding a big parade, courtesy of It’s benefactor. Hailey, Idaho, used to be a railroad and livestock center. Basque shepherds drove their herds up into the Sawtooths in the spring and summer, and down to railheads in the valley at seasons end, sending more mutton out to markets from Hailey than any other place in the country. Much of the nations sheep production, for a time, was controlled by the little area just south of Sun Valley. Now the real estate around Hailey is more valuable as strutting ground for celebrities than grazing land for sheep. Hailey is a New West company town, and Bruce Willis owns it. The actor has a museum, a restaurant, a nightclub, numerous houses—entire blocks of the old town. He pays for the Fourth of July fireworks show, and the newspaper is full of comments on what a good man he is to keep the sidewalks clean and the museum open and the airstrip full of Lear jets. He and his wife, Demi Moore, send their kids to a local school. The parade moves through town, with an Old West theme, children and old-timers alike craning for a view of the movie-star owners. And there’s Bruce Willis himself, on horseback, waving, a big cowboy hat covering his shaven head, that smirk-smile of his, scarf and chaps. As for his power, Willis, a Republican, star of Die Hard movies where he fends off entire armies of terrorists, got upset like a lot of his neighbors at the prospect of southern Idaho becoming a dump for much of the nations nuclear waste. He helped to bankroll a ballot measure to stop the waste. In the election, he was outgunned by fellow Republicans who favor a nuclear presence. He could have learned something from the Copper Kings: they never lost unless it was planned.

  Compared with the old models, the new company towns of the West are relatively harmless. Ralph Lauren gets a thing for Jackson Hole. Bruce Willis picks up where the railroad magnates left off in Idaho. Bill Murray is a Copper King. The towns may be mere accessories for film stars and fashion designers, but at least the new lords do not have the power to shape thousands of lives, ruin millions of acres, or control destiny for decades. Butte is on life-support. The richest hill on earth, they once called it, and that was not an exaggeration. But it was wrung out so completely, and given over so thoroughly to the interests of the Copper Kings, that the town lives today—barely—as a moral at the end of a horror fable. Some still wait for it to twitch and rise. So they have built a ninety-foot-tall Virgin in the mountains, Our Lady of the Rockies. She is fluorescent-white, feet glued to granite, overlooking Butte from a perch eighty-five hundred feet above sea level. Mary is lit by floodlights, so people can look up and see her at night as they ask for the miracle of civic resurrection.

  Up in Helena, under the copper dome of the state capitol building, the governor of Montana, Marc Racicot, is giving a speech. He is young, a product of the timber-and-mining-company town of Libby, which has been in decline for thirty-five years. The governor is laboring to find some way out of a mountain of bad news: one of the largest corporate landowners in the state has pulled up stakes, closed It’s sawmills, and laid off hundreds of workers, having already logged off It’s most valuable stands of timber. Another big corporate presence, based in New York, has given up on mines that had kept several towns going in northwest Montana, the governor’s old boyhood haunt. People are leaving the state. Montana is down to one congressman for an area that is bigger than Italy, stretching 535 miles east to west, with a population barely half of the metro area of Portland, Oregon. The pattern runs through Montana, more clear than any major river: cut and run, mine and run, take and run. It started almost as soon as whites came to the West. The fur rendezvous, where mountain men would hold days of unbridled dancing, drinking, and fornicating around the central mission of buying and selling animal pelts, was more a clash of business empires than a swap mart for entrepreneurs. Montana trappers joined the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, the regional, homegrown group. But this soon fell to the biggest fur monopoly in the country, owned by John Jacob Astor of New York City. No sooner had beaver started to be trapped along the Yellowstone and the Missouri than Astor, the richest man alive, the one person in the country whose name was usually preceded by the word millionaire, was taking the biggest share of the profits from Rocky Mountain skins.

  So here is Governor Racicot, a Republican, trying to breathe hope into Montana, the pliant state. He knows it has a better side. But the insecurity, the beaten-down, held-down, controlled-from-afar sense has been there so long. It is as if the Copper Kings fathered a half million sons of futility. The choice, to most people coming of age, has long been: be a serf or flee. “None of us wanted to wear the copper collar,” the writer Ivan Doig once said of his days growing up in Montana. Doig left, as did so many native sons and daughters.

  “Montana now ranks forty-fourth in median income—right down there with Kentucky and Louisiana and below even Alabama,” the governor says in his speech. Below Alabama! That should rouse them in Cutbank and Lewistown and Miles City and Roundup.
“How long will we be satisfied with the Extraction Mentality? We need to add value to Montana products. And who will control our future: the people who live here, or people in far away cities …?”

  The person who wrote some of those words, Andy Malcolm, has an office under the copper dome and keeps a summer cabin on the Yaak River, in the corner of Montana where another corporate presence based in a distant state has leveled so much of the forest that only a handful of the big bears that have always lived there remain. “If you want to understand Montana, and much of the West for that matter, you have to consider the dominant way people here think about the outside world,” says Malcolm. “The view from Montana has always been: they’re trying to screw us.”