have shown that it is not tropical rainforests or arctic tundra but rather temperate grasslands that are among the most quickly declining ecosystems on the planet. In North America, grasslands have the inglorious label of “the most endangered ecosystem.” It feels good to be in the middle of one of the largest intact stretches of mixed-grass prairie left in the world.
I once chose these grasslands over the woman I loved. It wasn’t a sudden choice, rather an accumulation of days, weeks, seasons, and years that taught me to get in my car and head to the prairie. A slow burn that led me to value a familiar place above all else.
Finding a neat line of rocks with multicolored red and green lichens that form a circle, I recognize a teepee ring. I feel satisfied that my campsite selection was appreciated by those with deeper bloodlines and far greater knowledge of the area than mine. Flat skylines extending in all directions show rolling treeless prairie, with a small patch of hills to the east known as the Little Rocky Mountains, a fine vantage point from which the Gros Ventre could watch out for raiding Assiniboine and Cree tribes. Perhaps it was near a bison migration route, so they could watch and wait for the seasonal movement of the herds from southern Saskatchewan south to the center of Montana, an annual cyclical movement pattern back and forth between summer and winter that had become entrenched, dictated by topography, water, and forage. Following the same path year after year, herds moved north from more mild wintering grounds in perfect timing with the spring green-up of the Saskatchewan prairies.
I think of the infinite magnitudes of bison described in the journals of Lewis and Clark and later painted by George Catlin in the 1830s, a time when 25–40 million bison roamed the plains and were the mainstay of regional native tribes, before disease, firearms, and uncontrolled hunting reduced the giants to fewer than a thousand individuals by the 1880s. I had last seen one of those remnant animals in Yellowstone National Park, walking in the open valleys between forested peaks, far from the center of their vast Great Plains home. The last herds were always in fragments, lost from the core.
Now the grasslands seem silent and empty without them. When Lewis and Clark traveled along the upper Missouri, they encountered the now-extinct plains grizzly and Audubon’s sheep. Wolves still coursed over the prairie chasing elk and bison. Whispers in conservation circles of bringing bison back here evoke feelings of guilt, mixed with hope. Guilt, because of what we have done and that we still need to only whisper. Hope, because beyond regret, there is a selfish and at the same time selfless sense of purpose in righting a wrong accomplished through greed and mistaken assumptions of infinite magnitudes. A sentimental common thread that has continually driven many conservationists to action in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. I think of the group of extremist ecologists who want to go further: to replace extinct North American mammoths, Camelops camels, and Haberman horses that were unable to withstand the Holocene megafauna extinction period caused by environmental change and human hunting. As replacements, they call for introduction of African elephants, dromedary camels, plains zebra, and other surrogate species in a process called “Pleistocene rewilding.” By doing so, they would dramatically shift the timeline for conservation from two hundred to ten thousand years ago, making current efforts to reintroduce bison and wolves seem mundane compared to their proposals for elephants and lions.
To find justification for their mad plan, one has to look no further than the pronghorn antelope, the swift trademark of the western plains with speed that today seems an evolutionary misfire in excess. But nature is never overly generous without necessity, and it is easy to envision how now-extinct American cheetahs forced the pronghorn to such speeds. After a lifetime of nature documentary scenes of African cheetahs chasing Thomson’s gazelles across the Serengeti, I quiver at the thought of seeing a similar scene play out with pronghorn on the Great Plains.
• • •
The sun finally breaches the horizon, sending out stark white light that bleaches away the oranges of morning. I walk down to a nearby water tank to wash my face. There is the familiar smell of fresh cow manure and exposed dirt. The trampled ground is sparsely covered with grass and sage tufts, grazed by cattle to the smoothness of an old river bottom. Surrounding the tank, brown fluffy prairie dogs sit hunched over, balls of fur warming in the morning light. Clouds the color of gray sagebrush drift overhead. Cold clumsy mosquitoes fly into my hair.
A prairie dog cries. Mother to son? Son to sister? Family. Do others listen as well: the badger, the coyote, or the owl? Owls typically hunt at night, but I have seen a great horned owl leave its day perch in a Russian olive tree to swoop down on an unsuspecting prairie dog, squeezing tight and puncturing with sharp talons, forcing wheezy cries and a stream of urine from its prey, lingering on the ground for a few seconds before struggling to fly back to its perch with the two-pound meal.
It is not by chance that prairie dogs are here. They seem to hate vegetation more than an inch tall, or anything else that could obstruct their view of an approaching predator. To the distress of golf course managers and cattle ranchers, they thrive on land where intensive mowing or grazing has reduced grasses almost to bare dirt. The close ancestral relationship between prairie dogs and bison as grazing partners likely created a mosaic of prairie dog colonies across the landscape linked to the migratory pathways of bison. Colonies of hundreds of thousands of individual prairie dogs once overlapped those migratory pathways, permanently occupying both the summer and winter ranges while their larger partners moved along.
When Lewis and Clark ventured onto the plains from the Missouri River that flows just below me out of view, they often took note of the guinea-pig-sized mammal. At one point stopping long enough to experiment:
CLARK—FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 7, 1804
Discovered a Village of Small animals that burrow in the grown (those animals are Called by the french Petite Chien) Killed one and Caught one a live by poreing a great quantity of Water in his hole we attempted to dig to the beds of one of those animals, after digging 6 feet, found by running a pole down that we were not half way to his Lodge. . . . The Village of those animals Covd. about 4 acres [1.6 hectares] of Ground on a gradual decent of a hill and Contains great numbers of holes on the top of which those little animals Set erect, make a Whistleing noise and whin allarmed Step into their hole. we por’d into one of those holes 5 barrels of Water without filling it. Those Animals are about the Size of a Small Squ[ir]rel . . . except the ears which is Shorter, his tail like a ground squirel which they shake & whistle when allarmd. the toe nails long, they have fine fur.
Prairie dogs, along with magpies, were among the only living things Lewis shipped back to President Jefferson in 1805 from Fort Mandan, where the expedition stopped for its first winter. Despite the long trip, prairie dogs were robust enough to survive from North Dakota to Jefferson’s desk at Monticello. Jefferson kept one prairie dog as a pet for a time before passing it on to Charles Wilson Peale’s museum in Philadelphia, where it lived out its days as an attraction symbolizing the novel and unknown American West, then was stuffed as a curiosity for decades more, and finally was lost in a fire.
• • •
For all their interest in prairie dogs and other wildlife, Lewis and Clark never observed a black-footed ferret. Indeed few European explorers had seen them other than as pelts used by indigenous people. Spanish explorer Don Juan de Oñate was perhaps the first European to describe the species in 1599 while exploring the future southwestern United States: “It is a land abounding in flesh of buffalo, goats with hideous horns, and turkeys; and in Mohoce [center of the Hopi nation near present day Walupi, Arizona] there is game of all kinds. There are many wild and ferocious beasts, lions, bears, wolves, tigers, penicas, ferrets, porcupines, and other animals, whose hides they tan and use.”
Although Oñate could have been describing bridled weasels or other weasel species known to exist in the region, ferrets were likely present in the area. People of the Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Crow, Hidatsa, Mandan, Navajo, Pawnee, and Sioux nations have all used black-footed ferret hides in the making of skins for
