EPILOGUE
A few months after Charlie’s death, Roger began investigating in earnest the conflict surrounding the Yellowstone buffalo. He brought to it the same intensity, sense of justice, and gift for compromise that he brought to everything he took up—and the conflict increasingly seemed to need someone with the last trait. The winter of 2003–4 brought the worst killing of Yellowstone buffalo—281 in all—since 1996–97, when the slaughter of over one thousand bison first forced the issue out in the open and spurred the founding of the Buffalo Field Campaign.
In the summer of 2004, when the pain of Charlie’s death had started to fade, Roger flew back to Yellowstone to attend a three-day seminar on the history and biology of bison, given at the Yellowstone Institute in the Lamar Valley. He also met with the Buffalo Field Campaign’s founder and executive director, Mike Mease, who walked him past the Duck Creek capture facility just west of Yellowstone, where DOL agents rounded up migrating buffalo, only occasionally tested them, and sent them on to slaughter. That same day, Roger spent a couple of hours with Karrie Taggart of Horse Butte Neighbors of the Buffalo (HOBNOB), a group of pro-buffalo homeowners in one of the public land areas outside of Yellowstone where the park’s bison migrated in spring. She spoke of how much she enjoyed seeing the buffalo grazing in their neighborhood in the spring, and how little she appreciated the DOL hazing that went on in her own front yard.
Roger had lunch at a West Yellowstone café with the National Park Service’s Rick Wallen, a bison biologist at Yellowstone who was disturbed by the fate of the bison and the cattle industry’s entrenched opposition to the animal. “Elk have all the rights of wildlife species,” he told Roger, “but buffalo are managed like livestock. We worry that even if we solved the brucellosis problem, they’d [the Montana Department of Livestock] still go after the buffalo. But Wyoming is not a zoo. The bison need land outside of the park as a vital part of their natural habitat.” The area’s cattle ranchers, Wallen told Roger, “could make the income they needed through conservation easements”—taking federal and often state tax credits for putting private land in public trust so it will remain natural and undeveloped. Wallen praised the Buffalo Field Campaign for forcing the Montana Department of Livestock “to be accountable,” but complained that the group failed “to support any feasible solution.”
Three months later, things began to look up. In November of 2004, the Buffalo Field Campaign hailed the election of Democrat Brian Schweitzer as the new governor of Montana, sharing their enthusiasm on their website: “Governor-elect Schweitzer has expressed his disdain for the way things are going now, and we look to him to keep his word and put a stop to the atrocious treatment of the buffalo.... Schweitzer, a farmer and rancher, said that management should be guided by ‘science, not hyperbole,’ and that the DOL is ‘ill-equipped to manage buffalo in Montana.’”
Shortly after Schweitzer’s victory, Roger wrote to Dr. Thomas Linfield, Montana’s state veterinarian, introducing himself merely as “someone researching the issues concerning the bison herds of Yellowstone National Park.” Among other questions directed at the contradictions in Montana’s bison management policy, Roger suggested to Linfield that Montana had not lived up to its 2000 commitment to start vaccinating Yellowstone bison against brucellosis, and he asked why the Montana Department of Livestock continued to slaughter male bison, even though the Greater Yellowstone Interagency Brucellosis Committee, the Jackson [Wyoming] Brucellosis Symposium, and the National Research Council had all concluded that male bison do not constitute a brucellosis transmission threat. Why had Montana taken no steps to reduce the brucellosis in other migrating wildlife, such as elk? Linfield stonewalled.
It was obvious that a great deal of diplomacy was going to be necessary. The political and wildlife management issues were complex, and so were the jurisdictional ones; at least five state and federal agencies, all jockeying for position, were involved in the federally funded Interagency Bison Management Plan. But the real and invisible enemy was the increasing defensiveness of a vanishing culture. Between 1987, the year Frank and Deborah Popper formulated the idea of the Buffalo Commons to revitalize the Plains States ecologically and financially, and 2002, almost two-thirds of those states’ counties declined in population. In fact, the cattle industry, whose exaggerated fear of brucellosis was the chief animus against the Yellowstone buffalo, was itself a vanishing proposition. Most of Montana’s total cattle production—about 2.5 percent of the nation’s beef—is in the eastern part of the state, far from Yellowstone, and much of that production is subsidized by American taxpayers. In seventeen Western states, according to a nine-month investigation by the San Jose Mercury News in 1999, the cattle industry is propped up by more than $100 million a year in taxpayer subsidies; in those states, livestock grazes on 254 million acres of national forests and federal land—an area equal to California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho put together—at a subsidized cost of about one-tenth the grazing fee for private land. This remarkable discount is enjoyed by “Rolex ranchers,” like the hotel mogul Barron Hilton and the brewing company Anheuser-Busch, for whom cattle are Western window-dressing, not business.
In any case, as the San Jose Mercury News investigation says, “It’s not as if the Americans need the meat. Only 3.8 percent of the nation’s beef cattle graze on federal lands.”
Cattle, unlike buffalo, graze land to death. They are environmentally unfriendly in the extreme, especially in dry Western states. As John Morning, the director of watershed protection for an environmental group called Forest Guardians, put it in the Mercury News, “One very small, politically powerful industry is destroying our land. But the salt in the wound is that we’re paying them to do it.” Thomas Power, a University of Montana economist, called it “cowboy socialism. It’s a romantically based, phony attempt to protect something from the past that no longer exists.” And in the process, one might add, killing something from the past—buffalo—that still does.
Working in the shadows, Roger continued trying to plot a middle ground where the State of Montana and the cattle interests could save face and the buffalo could save their hides. Although he admired and supported the Buffalo Field Campaign, which continued its tireless protection of the Yellowstone bison and invaluable surveillance of the Montana DOL, Roger was troubled by the group’s inflexibility on the issues. The BFC repudiated the brucellosis threat as a legitimate issue. It opposed all schemes to vaccinate the buffalo, on the grounds that any vaccination would compromise the buffalo’s wildness. It envisioned expanded range land for the buffalo.
Increasingly, Roger felt like a solitary realist caught between intractable idealists and cattle-culture fundamentalists. On Thanksgiving Day, 2004, he wrote to Mike Mease: “I totally support the BFC and consider you to be heroes.... However, I don’t feel that all BFC positions will help you to achieve the goals you desire. While it would be wonderful to turn back the clock and allow bison to reclaim their historical range, it isn’t going to happen.... Brucellosis is both an issue and an excuse for Montana’s cattle ranchers.... To weaken [the other side’s] hand, we must move in the direction of reducing the incidence of brucellosis in the herd to where their brucellosis arguments simply lose credibility.” Mease didn’t respond. Roger pressed onward, determined to focus on, and find funding for, the search for a bison-specific brucellosis vaccine and more accurate “non-kill” screening tests.
Meanwhile, despite the new Montana governor’s stated preference for science over hyperbole, over the winter of 2004–5 the Montana legislature was cooking up even more ways to demonize the Yellowstone bison. The House proposed putting the cattle-friendly U.S. Department of Agriculture in charge of the Yellowstone buffalo and the eradication of brucellosis, while the Senate introduced a mind-boggling bill that would neuter all buffalo leaving Yellowstone, then ship them to Indian reservations to start new herds with them. Even the bill’s sponsor recognized its absurdity, yet it passed its third reading in the Senate and was sent to the House in February 2005.
In the United States Congress, the Yellowstone buffalo had found more friends, but not quite enough of them. A bipartisan amendment to the Department of Interior Appropriations Bill to “prohibit the use of funds to kill bison, or assist in the killing of bison, in the Yellowstone National Park herd” lost two years in a row, by twenty-one and thirteen votes. On May 18, 2005, the authors of that failed amendment, Representative Maurice Hinchey (D–NY) and Representative Charles Bass (R–NH)—as always, the buffalo had to look to the Northeast for support—introduced the Yellowstone Buffalo Preservation Act. It sought to end the hazing, capturing, and killing of Yellowstone bison, to expand their range outside the park, and to restore sole jurisdiction inside the park to the National Park Service.
Around that time, however, a couple of things happened to prove that Montana’s campaign against the Yellowstone bison had grown sufficiently reckless that it was no longer a threat to animals alone. On May 6, 2005, just after midnight, a semi-tractor trailer carrying twenty-two tons of peat moss hit a small herd of bison crossing Highway 191 a few miles outside of West Yellowstone. During daylight hours, road signs and volunteers from the Buffalo Field Campaign alerted drivers at bison crossings, but at night it was a different story. The buffalo that Montana DOL agents had hazed back into the park during the day had predictably recrossed the highway at night—this time almost invisibly—to return to federal lands in Horse Butte and near Hebgen Lake. The driver wasn’t hurt, but the collision killed six bison, whose corpses lay scattered over the highway.
The second thing that happened was that the Buffalo Field Campaign took a clear photo of a private helicopter, chartered to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, hazing buffalo at an illegal altitude of roughly thirty-five or forty feet, in flagrant violation of federal air regulations. Roger began writing letters and sending the photo to the Federal Aviation Administration and the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, and, although it would take another year, the Flight Standards District Office in Helena finally got the message.
By June 2005, Roger had at last done enough research and amassed enough evidence to sit down and compose a long letter to Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana. It was almost exactly five years since Charlie had first come into his life, almost two since he had left it. Roger identified himself in the letter as “neither a cattle rancher nor an environmental activist,” but simply as “an individual who has but one objective: to do what I can to facilitate a resolution to the Yellowstone bison brucellosis issue.” In one measured paragraph after another, Roger put the brucellosis threat in correct scientific perspective, but did not dismiss it; he encouraged the governor to help fund research into more advanced testing methods; he advocated commonsense solutions like restricting grazing in the contested areas to steers; and he advised returning bison management to the appropriate wildlife agency. “If you wish to quickly solve most of Montana’s bison-related public relations difficulty, this management change should be a top consideration.”
The letter ended with a few more forcefully delivered points. Regarding the DOL’s chartered helicopter, he wrote, “I must caution you that some of these operations have been conducted in a dangerous and clearly illegal manner, well within the prohibitions contained in Federal Aviation Regulation §91.13, Careless and Reckless Operation. The State of Montana has no right to endanger lives and property on the ground, nor condone the dangerous and illegal operation of aircraft.” As for the deaths of bison crossing Highway 191, he told the governor, “I am certain you agree that Montana cannot put human lives at risk by overprotecting a few cattle. But that is exactly what Montana is doing.”
“Thank you for taking the time to consider my suggestions,” he concluded. “. . . I wish you the wisdom to resolve this issue in the best interests of all concerned, which includes the bison of Yellowstone National Park.
“Sincerely, Roger Brooks.”
He printed out the final version and signed it. He dropped his pebble in the pool. He’d give the governor a couple of days before sending copies of the letter to the Montana media. The governor, he thought, would almost certainly have to act on the last two points. In any case, the governor would have to wonder who this guy was, a man with no apparent affiliation, this guerrilla fighter in the war to save the Yellowstone bison, taking rather deadly aim at Montana’s irrationality from his hiding place.
While Roger waited for a reply, during the winter of 2005–6, 970 Yellowstone bison were killed by state and federal agents, more than the total number killed there during the previous eight years combined. Another forty died when the state of Montana authorized its first buffalo hunt in fifteen years. It held a lottery to award fifty licenses to kill fifty bison that had wandered outside Yellowstone. To make it more challenging than the previous hunt, guides would no longer lead hunters right up to the buffalo. One license winner from Billings added a challenge of his own: for the hunt he bought an 1895 Winchester rifle, the same type of gun once used by Teddy Roosevelt, and insisted on hunting on horseback, just like the old days. Nonetheless, Joe Gutkowski, a man once named by Field & Stream magazine as the toughest man in the west, complained that the hunt was “still another parklike hunt,” adding, “I want to see them allow these buffalo to migrate all over public land.”
AS CHRISTMAS 2006 APPROACHED, it had been a year and a half since Roger sent off his letter to Governor Schweitzer and the media, and he had not heard back from anyone. Roger Brooks took a deep breath and, like a buffalo in a snowstorm, he put his head down and kept moving forward.
For more information on the Yellowstone buffalo situation:
Roger Brooks
Rogerandcharlie@aol.com
The Buffalo Field Campaign
Ms. Suzanne Lewis, Superintendent
Yellowstone National Park
PO Box 168
Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190
(307) 344-2002
suzanne_lewis@nps.gov
Governor Brian A. Schweitzer
Office of the Governor
Montana State Capitol Building
PO Box 200801
Helena, MT 59620-0801
(406) 444-1311
(406) 444-5529 fax
For more information on the restoration of the Great Plains:
Great Plains Restoration Council
PO Box 1206
Fort Worth, TX 76101
(817) 838-9022
greatplains@gprc.org