A couple of months ago, at the Best Western in Billings, a rancher called the front desk with a summons. She ran an outfit two hours east and wanted to meet for coffee if I could make it before nine. I asked for an address, but she said open-range cattle couldn’t be found on a map. Instead she recited the directions, like a passage of scripture she’d memorized:
… continue in an easternly direction about twenty-six miles until the road turns from pavement to gravel to mud. After you pass under two 500KV powerlines, you will cross three cattleguards. Turn off the road and drive between the house and the corrals, past the Dead End sign, cross another cattleguard in a private road, past the No Trespassing sign, and continue about 3/4 of a mile to a second cattleguard. DO NOT CROSS IT. Turn left onto a hill near a fence line (it is changing drainages) and proceed in a northwesterly direction, roughly parallel to the REA line for 2 1/5 miles.
The small sedan I rented in Denver wasn’t cut out for off-roading on rutted sagebrush, but when I hinted at this concern there was little empathy on the other end of the line. “If you’re going to come all the way out here, you might as well get the experience.”
The road, still gravel, en route to open-range cattle country in Montana. (All photos by the author.)
I finally arrived at her estate closer to ten and she heated up a pot of coffee on the stove. As I fussed with my tape recorder, she started, by way of small talk, to interview me about my research and travels, some of the impressions I’d formed. Her eyes swerved when I mentioned I was a grad student at Rutgers. “Do you know Frank Popper?” she asked. I shook my head. “Well,” she said, “he wants to turn this place over to the buffalo. Kick us all off our land.”
She was referring to the Rutgers professor who, with his wife Deborah Popper, wrote a scholarly article in 1987 titled “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.” The essay advocated for what is often called the “Buffalo Commons” thesis: that turning the shortgrass prairie into an enormous nature preserve would yield “more social benefits than the unsuccessfully privatized Plains have ever offered.” The idea created quite a stir in this part of the country, and more than thirty years later, my host was still angry about it. She was invested in these “privatized Plains” in more ways than one—the environment itself, she told me, is a “physical wage.” I assured her I didn’t know the Poppers, and she let me roll tape.1
I first arrived in Montana a few years ago to study fossil-fuel extraction in the American West, and I’ve spent almost as much time on the road as in the archive. The towns come few and far between, and my ambitious plan to collect oral histories with energy workers, indigenous communities, and ranchers took me to all sorts of nooks and crannies in the high western plains.
A strip mine in Wyoming.
I’m constantly reminded of the promises and perils of recent history. The historian Jennifer Mittelstadt describes the sensation of “stepping into it” when you’re “entering the history you’re writing” and the still-evolving story gets “piled up and on top” of you. There’s a constant worry that every new vote or policy development will force a last-minute rewrite; that historical actors will talk back and tell you that you’ve got everything wrong.2
This summer, my final excursion, was born less of necessity than the fear that I’d somehow missed something. But I realized over the course of trip that what I really sought was the West itself. I’d spent too much time living and writing outside the West, first in New Jersey and then in Chicago, and I needed to finish my work where it began. This was my last chance to measure up a place I’ve spent several years living simultaneously inside and outside of, my journals cramped with notes about its minerals, buttes, and vegetation. This was the last time I could “step into it.”
Before I got to Billings I spent a few weeks making my way north on I-25 through Colorado and Wyoming. My first stop was at the Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne, to re-inspect the papers of a few different politicians. One night, when I got to the Historic Plains Hotel, the bellhop told me the elevators were built coffin-small to stop cowboys from taking horses up to their rooms. Of course, in 1989 the people of Cheyenne were instructed by their mayor to embrace the tall tales of the “Old West” and exhibit outward signs of their (white) “westernness” to entertain tourists, so make of the bellboy’s story what you will.3
Bedtime in Cheyenne.
A few days later I was at the West’s best-kept spaceship, the American Heritage Center in Laramie, where I’ve looked through a trove of political reports, company records, and environmental action plans. My favorite find was a geologist’s field guide to fossil-fuel prospecting, which the author intended to publish as a textbook; the manuscript includes hard-learned tips for young professionals in the energy business, like “always shut a rancher’s gate” and “give a rancher a fair price for water, and you’ll live longer.” These are the sorts of barbs and jokes about white settler violence that you’ll find traded in just about every venue of the energy business. I keep track of most of them in a research notebook.
The spaceship shape of the American Heritage Center in Laramie, Wyoming, is designed for the prairie winds.
After a half-day’s work, I found a bottle of coal slurry buried in the file papers of Gale McGee, a Democratic congressman from Wyoming in the 1970s. When I turned it upside down, the sediment stuck to the bottom. This caused quite the stir once everyone in the room considered the potential damage if it broke; the archivists seized it and cataloged into a more appropriate collection. The bottle was a memento from a huge push in the 1970s and early 1980s to pump coal through pipelines by mixing it with water, and even turn coal into synthetic oil and gas, via a process called “coal gasification.” There was a lot of political talk about it, and a lot of money that traded hands, but it ultimately didn’t pan out.
I’ve gained access to two strip mines in the course of my research, but only one, say, by the proper channels. These Wyoming mines are some of the largest in the world, and historians often get the same cold-shoulder treatment as contemporary muckraking journalists. (Suspicion is another obstacle to recent history). These trips, though, helped immeasurably to make sense of the source material, and allow me to talk face-to-face with miners. Before my first visit to a strip mine, I took three weeks, studying fragments in the archive, to write up a description of the labor process. After one visit to a mine, I revised the excerpt and cut the prose in half. At another mine, I tried to convince the guide to let me drive one of these machines for the experience of it. He wasn’t, however, much of a conspirator.
The final stop took me north to Billings, where I planned the last-minute interviews and oral histories. The old headquarters of the Montana Power Company, an arch-villain for so many ranchers I spoke to, remains in the center of town, but now it’s a place where hipsters eat burgers and sip IPAs. I researched in the company’s archives by day and drank inside its headquarters by night.
I debated taking one last trip to the Montana Historical Society in Helena, or the University of Montana archives in Missoula, which would’ve effectively retraced my first research trip four years ago. But I decided to head east instead to the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations. The archives at both are unprocessed, so they take time to get through, but I’ve been told entire boxes will sometimes show up that you missed before. I kept my camera in my pocket for most of the last leg, since there is a lot to see on the reservations, and a lot of kept knowledge, that’s not mine to share.
On the Crow reservation, across from the ridge above the river, where Custer made his “last stand” in a genocidal war at the Battle of Greasy Grass (Little Bighorn), is an open-face sculpture of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho galloping horseback, reminders that the vast open range of the mythic American West is human-made, a violent legacy of settler colonialism.
The Indian Memorial at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, by Oglala Sioux artist Colleen Cutschall (Sister Wolf).
Before I got back in my car, I wondered the statues that might be erected to tell the history of fossil-fuel extraction, which is, after all, part of the same “legacy of conquest” in the West, yet another colonial endeavor and exercise in subjugation. How will we memorialize the strip mines and the coal slurry? What kind of remembrances will we need?4
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- Frank Popper and Deborah Popper, “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust,” Planning Magazine (Dec. 1987).
- Jennifer Mittelstadt, “Stepping into It: Lessons Learned from Entering the History You’re Writing,” Journal of Policy History 24 (2012): 135–54.
- On the Cheyenne’s mayor 1989 plea, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, “Seeing and Being Seen: Tourism in the American West,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West ed., Valier J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
- Nick Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso, 2019); Dana Powell, Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
