06/03 © Ronald L. Moody (2003)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Hunting Common Ground -
Wild River Region Tests Nation

Make the color-coded map big enough and the place looks like a winged dragon — green body east and west, yellow wings north to south, and a blue heart line for the river that runs through it. The cartograph stretches across more than 250 of the little black-line cubes that each mark a mile.

Out in the middle of Montana, WAY beyond pavement’s end, the rough badlands called the ‘Breaks’ of the upper Missouri River are wilder than a dragon — and a whole lot more real.

Reality includes the largest, most hunted National Wildlife Refuge in the lower 48, a big new, hotly contested National Monument next door to the CMR Refuge, a wild and scenic river and tens of thousands of acres of other public lands surrounding — all intertwined with private ranch and farm lands.

At first visit, the Missouri Breaks look desolate of human occupation. The people are there, however. The perception of emptiness is simply the land being so much bigger than the marks of human passing.

Visitors from the urban world will drive unheeding past the Breaks while searching the horizon for their first view of the wild west (should they ever, in the first place, stray onto one of the few state highways that touch the region.) Say “American West” to city folks and pictures of snow capped mountains typically come to mind; two hundred miles of harsh, stony sage prairies and endless ranks of pine jungled coulees each big enough to swallow a town are hard to fit onto a post card.

Tarry a while, however, and wildness will not elude you. The Breaks is not a subtle place bashful about its true nature. Yet, this is a landscape that pulls hard on people in their hearts at the same time its physical and economic hardship pushes them away.

For the American people, the importance of this wild country along the Missouri River lies not so much in physical nature as in its challenge to the ideas and values that define the character of the American people.

The Missouri Breaks have become a very large laboratory experiment in American governance, democratic citizenship and emotional relationship to the lands and waters that sustain us. If the map of the Breaks region was raised as a flag, it would symbolize the water, earth and sky of the United States every bit as much as the stars and stripes reflect the political geometry of the nation.

It’s all here in one big cultural socio-economic petri dish.

Any essential element of dispute that can be found in Eastern Seaboard debates over preserving marine estuaries are represented in the Missouri River riparian corridor. As the southern half of the Rocky Mountain West fights over the water of the Colorado River, the Northern half locks horns in a major interstate lawsuit over Missouri River flows. Want to fall out in a fight about grazing and wildlife? Breaks folks can do that in a heartbeat. You say you like to spice up your natural resource saloon brawls with energy development, Rolex ranches, wilderness areas, off-road vehicles, Native American heritage, high-pressure recreational use and 60-mph jet boats? Just come right on through the swinging doors.

The fact that the Missouri Breaks region is a world class hunting ground, as unique in character as the Serengeti or the Yukon, makes this great laboratory experiment relevant to the future of hunting in the modern world.

With the mid-century passing of champions like Aldo Leopold, Ding Darling and Nash Buckingham the American hunting community has fallen into a decline of unifying, energizing political leadership. Hunter leaders have been hard to find who are capable of forging landscape-wide outcomes in forceful but respectful relationships with agriculture and industry.

With the long-term shrinking of hunting into a constituency of the rich and elderly that is not likely to change.

The great Breaks experiment, however, has produced a hunting leadership in the form of small groups of local nimrods willing to get together and work in ordinary ways with other ordinary people.

Nobody will be impressed by the numbers involved but the opportunity is astonishing. And - hunters have a good history here. The classic American conservation partnership of public hunters, private landowners and good government worked in this place to bring back elk, big horn sheep, mule deer and antelope to landscaped emptied by 19th Century market hunting.

Modern conflicts trouble that partnership. People fear the unknowns of changing times, they don’t trust people “who are not like us.” Taking care of Number One typically means despising Numbers Two through Infinity.

Within the hunting community so little sense of citizenship remains that many nimrods are more angry at other hunters than they are at actual threats to their opportunity to hunt.

Like all skirmishes in the ‘great-battle-for-control-of-publicly owned-natural-resources’, the Missouri Breaks features as many different forces pulling people apart as there are people involved.

It is an eternal truth of political leadership that tearing people apart is a 100 times easier than pulling them together. Much current political control strategy and rhetoric, therefore, is centrifugal in nature — pushing people out and away from each other.

A recent hunter-inspired meeting in Great Falls, Montana, however, revealed that a centripetal force can still be generated to pull people toward each other. More than 60 people were in the room. Gathered in a circle were agency professionals from BLM, State Fish, Wildlife & Parks, US Fish & Wildlife, historians, biologists, administrators, and game wardens.

Around them were ranchers, farmers, bow hunters, gun hunters, bird hunters, canoeists, bird-watchers, recreationists, a county commissioner and a few folks who apparently just showed up because they cared.

All the usual social, cultural and economic fracture lines could be detected. The predictable divisive outcome didn’t happen, however. A sense of the situation developed among people that everybody was being sincere in their caring for the common ground— the Missouri Breaks.

The design of the meeting was focused on place rather than on policy or interests. Changing the shape of the table can make a difference.

Most instructive was how a sense of commonalty crystallized in people’s minds in reaction to a couple of participants who normally don’t get official invitations to policy forums. Two Montana Game Wardens who both are native sons of the Breaks region talked about ‘up close and personal’ feelings for “their Breaks.” But they spoke with the obvious sophisticated knowledge of land, wildlife and people that comes with being conservation professionals.

As they spoke, you could feel the shrinking of the perception in the room of government as an alien, hostile force. Growing in its place was a recognition of real people as public servants dedicated to the common welfare.

A hunter doesn’t have to be a Teddy Roosevelt to detect a faint path here that can be followed to better management of the nation’s publicly owned natural resources.