Montana Sportsmen & The Hunter’s Ethic

Jim Posewitz | Founder, Orion – The Hunter’s Institute

When asked by a stranger to describe Montana, where does your mind go?

For most of us our mind goes to the things we value most and we try to communicate that to whoever poses the question to us. For most of us, it’s places that are wild. We go to the Bob (the Bob Marshall Wilderness), where the grizzly and elk have survived now and are prospering. Or we go to the Yellowstone River, where we have 600-plus miles of free flowing river, undammed—the longest in the lower 48 states. And so, we tend to describe Montana by bringing forth the things that we value.

The problem is, for the most part we don’t know how those values were passed into our custody.

Initially when America was settled, we were a nation without a conservation ethic. When de Tocqueville studied democracy in America early in our history he said, “The Americans themselves are insensible to the wonders of nature. They march across the continent changing the courses of rivers and draining the swamps.”

So how did we find a conservation ethic? Well the story is largely that of the American hunter.

The American hunter is probably the party most responsible for introducing conservation to America. One of the primary spokespersons for conservation, one of the early doers of deeds, was a guy by the name of Theodore Roosevelt. He came to the West in 1883 as a young New York State Legislator, aged 24, with the desire to hunt big game, and in his own words, “though I had not much hope in being able to do so.” He came to the West because he was fascinated by Western history and he wanted to be a hunter.

We all know the history of Montana. We tell our history often starting with Lewis and Clark. They came up in 1805. They described Montana and its wildlife resources that for variety and abundance exceeded anything the eye of man had ever looked upon. Seventy-one years later, we celebrate our nation’s first centennial in 1876. We observe it in Montana by shipping 80,000 buffalo hides down the Missouri River from Fort Benton; Marcus Daly took his first mining claim in Butte that year; Theodore Roosevelt entered Harvard as a freshman; and Custer bit the dust on the Little Bighorn all in the same year.

Seven short years later Theodore gets off the train in Little Missouri, North Dakota, and he tries to find one buffalo to kill. He hunts for days. He hunts amid the rotting carcasses of the great slaughter, gets up on Little Cannonball Creek, tributary to the Little Missouri that enters Montana territory, and finds and shoots a lone buffalo. In his excitement he does a war dance around the falling beast.

The last of millions.

He comes back to the West and enters the cattle enterprises of the open range grazing period and he hunts throughout Montana, Wyoming, British Columbia, and the Dakotas in 1886 and 1887. The winter that year was harsh and it took out his cattle venture. He has met during that period George Grinnell, Gifford Pinchot, and other conservation-orientated thinkers, and in 1887 he goes back to New York and in December of that year hosts a dinner that turns out to be the foundation of a sportsmen organization to introduce the sportsmen code and begin addressing the restoration of wildlife to North America.

For the next twelve years they work on legislation at the federal level to protect Yellowstone bison and start to protect the land estate that we were giving away to the robber barons and land grabbers of that era. In 1901, following McKinley’s assassination TR becomes the president. During his presidency, this want-to-be-hunter, and now by this time accomplished hunter, begins setting aside land for conservation.

His first message to Congress is on conservation.

During his presidency he sets aside 230 million acres of land for conservation. It was 9.9 percent of America. In Montana it was most of our National Forests. It was Glacier National Park. It was the National Bison Range in Moiese. From that seed, the message, the necessity to conserve wildlife begins to spread throughout the nation. In 1908 he calls all the governors to Washington and asks them to form state conservation organizations. At the time the Montana state organization was already seven years old.

So at any rate that begins conservation in American and it began around the hunter’s fire.

The minute he leaves office, land grabbers and the corporate robber barons start to undo his reforms. He tries to salvage his reforms by re-entering the presidential race in 1912. And the Republican Party purges him because of his penchant for reform, because of his trust-busting activities, and his conservation of lands. In response to that he forms the Bull Moose Party to run for president as the third-party candidate, and his campaign chairman was Joe Dixon. Joe Dixon was the U.S. Senator from Montana at that time and he later becomes the Montana governor.

So this is in many ways a Montana story.

The landscape these guys hunted, the landscape in which they watched the demise of this great natural resource that again, Lewis and Clark described, in variety and abundance exceeded anything the eye of man had ever looked upon. And we reduced it to a one-liner that Theodore Roosevelt wrote down in 1885 about a ranch man who had ridden a journey of a thousand miles along the Milk River, so basically from Medora, North Dakota, to the foot of Glacier National Park. And Roosevelt quoted, “to use the ranchman’s own words: I was never out of sight of a dead buffalo nor in sight of a live one.”

We had taken in 71 years’ time that resource as described by Lewis and Clark, and reduced it to a wildlife boneyard that covered the Northern Plains.

So Roosevelt takes his shot at restoration. Restoration and conservation begin. And all of it began around a club organized to introduce the sporting code to hunting; and to begin the restoration of wildlife to North America.

The restoration process kind of gets knocked off the rails when America hits the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl Era of the Dirty Thirties. The economic depression causes hardship and the Dust Bowl was the result of very poor land policy involving homesteaders, once described as an obligatory act of poverty. Dust bowls blew of the Northern Plains and in 1934 one dumped twelve million tons of soil on Chicago, covered New York, covered Washington, D.C., and covered the decks of ships 300 miles off shore.

So we had an environmental disaster of continental proportions and a collapsed economy.

We also had another Roosevelt in the White House. That was Franklin. Franklin Roosevelt calls the first North American Wildlife Conference. And it was a conference of Rod and Gun Clubs and hunters and anglers from all across America. Seven Montanans went to that conference and they were all hunters and anglers. That conference was in 1936. In that year they formed the National Wildlife Federation. And those seven Montana guys started the Montana Wildlife Federation. They held their first meeting in Helena’s Placer Hotel and at that meeting Governor Elmer Holt came to give them comments. And his comment was, “I’m surprised to see all you hunters here from Eastern Montana. Because we know there’s no game out there.” Of course, that was true in 1936.

So today, 75 years or so out from that event we have deer in our cities, bears in our orchards, and goose dung on every golf shoe in Montana.

That was not an accident. It was the product of hunter-based conservation programs beginning in the time of Theodore Roosevelt, energizing in America’s worst hard times, and passing legislation that taxed hunters and anglers for the restoration of big game, all game, to North America. They also formed non-profits in that same era. In 1937 Ducks Unlimited formed and set the pattern for other groups to follow. In 1983 the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation forms here in Montana. So it was this conservation ethic of the hunting community that began the restoration process and invigorated it through the Dirty Thirties.

When the environmental era of the 1970s dawned, there was one environmental lobbyist in the entire Montana State Legislature. That was Don Aldrich of the Montana Wildlife Federation. His son is now president of the Montana Wildlife Federation. But in that period of the last 1960s to mid-1970s Montana experienced a conservation Camelot. We rewrote all our natural resource law, passed a new Constitution and basically embedded wildlife’s interests into mine land reclamation and water allocation. We addressed a proposal to turn North Eastern Montana into the power plant of the nation. To do that they wanted to divert a third of the Yellowstone River, which would have, of course, doomed it as far as its capacity to keep supplying that water is concerned. But that whole project was defeated and it sort of introduced us to the environmental years.

Now history always comes with lessons. In 1912, as I mentioned, Theodore tried to get back into the presidency but was denied access by those who wanted to return to resource exploitation without restraint. Now we’re exactly a century out from that and we have just experienced a legislative session where the very same pressure was put on our environmental and conservation laws. In fact, the governor had to veto many of them or our laws would have been severely diminished. But what we learned in 1912 that we can apply in 2012, is that if hunters and anglers cling to the conservation ethic that was embedded in us from the days of the commercial slaughter of our wildlife, and take that energy and apply it to continued conservation focus on all the things that we do in our environment, we will be well served.

As I mentioned, the Dust Bowl years were probably the worst of the hard times this nation has experienced. We had an environmental disaster of continental proportions; we had a huge economic disaster. And if you see a parallel in 2012, I’d say it’s pretty obvious. We have economic struggles, but now our problem is global in proportion. Now we have to address the health of the planet itself. And I think the lesson we can learn from how we handled the 1880s through the 1970s can be applied in contemporary times.

We have the capability to creatively address the environmental crises that your generation faces.