New West Network

My Page: Hal Herring

NEW WEST BOOKs

Simply put, Hal Herring's new book, Famous Firearms of the Old West (Hardcover, TwoDot, $24.95) is a collection of stories about 12 guns that shaped the history of a region.

But while the firearms, owned by the likes of Geronimo, Wild Bill Hickock and Western gunman Tom Horn, are the fulcrum of the book, the masterful storytelling -- of the hands that held them, the battles that revolved around them and the historical context in which they fired -- is what makes the book sing.

As Herring, a NewWest.Net contributor, writes himself in the preface, the guns "exist now as windows into the men and women who fought -- righteously or not -- and died, or were willing to die, with them. What they conjure up can be a powerful magic."

That "powerful magic," captured by one of the region's best storytellers, is what sets this book apart.

In the following excerpt, Chapter 9, Herring tells the story of Tom Horn, one of the West's most famous bounty hunters, and his Winchester Model 1894 rifle. -Courtney Lowery [more]

Energy and Environment

On a 160 acre parcel near Meeker, Colorado, Shell Energy Corporation is trying to efficiently extract the hydrocarbons from a layer of rock known as the Mahogany Shale. It's been tried before, many times, dating back to when cowboys noticed that if you used certain dark rocks in your fire ring, they'd catch fire. But Shell is taking the effort to a new level, spurred by record energy prices, accommodating federal land managers, and a willingness to radically evolve the technologies for extracting fossil energy from the earth.

It will take ten to fifteen years to discover if the experiment will produce economically viable amounts of oil and natural gas, or if the EROEI – the energy returned on energy invested- will balance out, but the technologies involved in the experiment are so new that in the course of operations, some entirely different process may yet reveal itself, drawing the elusive genie of energy from the thousands of square miles of ancient seabed algae.

Shale oil conjures images of vast, highly destructive mining processes, and of the massive, government-subsidized projects that came to a crashing halt on so-called Black Sunday, May 2nd, 1982, when cratering oil prices led Exxon pull out of its operations in Colorado.

The Shell experiment, though, is very different. [more]

Energy Development

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer kicked off Saturday’s symposium on oil and gas development with a talk that focused on the strength of Montana’s economy -- a strength not entirely based on oil and gas revenues, and one that might provide the bastion to keep the energy industry from, well, basically, treating us all like we were Wyoming.

As wildlife biologists, consultants, and policy makers told their stories of energy development in Colorado and Wyoming, a pattern emerged of citizens extremely worried about the current impacts to land, water, and wildlife, and what would be left behind when the boom was done (in 20 to 35 years) but unsure of how to demand change. [more]

Pragmatic Move, or Sell-out?

Trout Unlimited, one of the nation's largest and most active conservation organizations, is considering pulling itself out of the debate over public access to America's rivers and streams.

A proposed TU resolution states: “Involvement in stream access disputes is divisive and a distraction from the mission. …. The proposed amendments would prohibit TU involvement or participation in disputes that pit claims of public stream access against claims of private property rights.”

For some anglers, that move will be seen as cowardice, others will see it as a decision to fight other, more important battles with full-troop strength, without alienating crucial allies. Almost no one, not even within Trout Unlimited, will be pleased with the debate, or the subsequent answers, in part because both are indications of just how difficult it is to accomplish any kind of wildlife or fisheries protection in a world swollen with human beings and their conflicting needs, beliefs, and desires.

Trout Unlimited’s Chris Wood says that the issue of public access to rivers and streams has become an energy sink for his organization, and one that alienates the very landowners that are critical to the efforts to protect and restore fisheries. [more]

New West Feature of the Week

Bernie Nowack, a Wisconsin logging contractor turned real estate investor, came to Montana ten years ago to hunt elk and fell in love with the place. He bought a ranch near Philipsburg, and now owns, by his own estimate, some $9 million to $10 million worth of land in the state.

But his hunting dreams have run into a snag, one that infuriates many of the wealthy out-of-state landowners who are transforming the rural landscape of the Big Sky state: even though he owns a lot of property, he has to enter a lottery for a non-resident hunting license if he wants to pursue game on his land.

“I’ve invested all this money, and a lot of time, and I can’t even get a tag to hunt on my land - not even a deer tag," Nowack said, speaking from a cell phone in Eagle River, Wisconsin, where he had just returned after hunting Montana’s big game season. "I feel like I pay the same land taxes as any ranch owner who lives there, and all I’m asking is to be able to hunt on my own land. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Nowack is more baffled than angry. “It’s only my opinion, you know. But I feel like the state is losing out because of this. As a property owner, I’m losing out. I wish they would take a new look at it.” [more]

Hunting on the Range

The term “amenity ranch” is a part of the modern vocabulary of the West, and the mind’s eye is replete with a thousand slick ads in a hundred different magazines: a huge log mansion, picture windows warmly alight, a trout river flowing majestically with towering snow-covered peaks beyond. The fields are lush and green. The scenes of western agriculture as we have come to know it are absent from the vision.

But as land prices in the most scenic and still accessible parts of the west reach astronomical levels, a new breed of amenity ranch buyers is emerging, casting about for land far from the luxury hotspots like Jackson Hole or Big Sky.

This new breed has been priced out of those places, and many of them don’t seem to care about that. They don’t need ski-town ambiance, wealthy neighbors, or even rushing streams full of native trout. They just want the commodity that is perhaps the fastest disappearing one on earth -- big private spaces, clean air, a place to hunt big game and upland birds and waterfowl. [more]

Planning in the West

Editor's note: This story is part of a series on Planning in the West, underwritten by the Orton Foundation in conjunction with the PLACEMATTERS06 conference taking place Oct. 19-21 in Denver. For the full series, click here.

It is a dream shared by millions, many of them coming to the end of successful careers in the rush of city and suburb, the endless juggling of money and family, the stress of the deal and the commute. The dream is of a western river like Montana’s Yellowstone, and a home within sight of the place where a clear ripple of shoal water falls away to a deeper green, and a trout rises to a passing caddis fly. Real estate ads across the west are full of the promise: this river, this creek, these trout and these magnificent cottonwoods, can be yours. Sink your gaze into the river, wade its waters born of high country snows, cast your fly on a sun-splashed afternoon. Awaken each morning to the timeless whisper of the water among the stones.

Such a dream does not come cheap. Land along almost any blue-ribbon trout stream can run to $500,000 an acre or more. There is, apparently, no shortage of people willing and able to pay that price. Trophy homes, along with hundreds of lesser structures, dot the banks of the Bitterroot, the Madison, the Yellowstone, and most of the other major rivers of Montana. In many places, where fishermen and boaters once passed grazing cattle and sagebrush and rimrock, the ambiance has changed forever. Irrigated lawns glow green in the dun-colored grasslands of late summer. Huge picture windows reflect the sun. The feeling that a river trip is an adventure – a feeling that is the basis for many a river outfitter’s business—has been replaced with a dose of the suburban, exactly what many a guided client, and many a resident fisherman, has come to the river to escape.

Two great floods, in 1996 and 1997, made blazingly obvious the consequences of unrestrained riverfront development along the Yellowstone. A task force was convened. The science was clear. But ten years later, even as some Montana counties have moved to protect their rivers, essentially nothing has been done for the Yellowstone, and the longest undammed river in lower 48 may yet be reduced to a fortified, house-lined channel.
[more]

Books & Writers

Montana writer Tom McGuane lives on a 3,000-acre ranch in the Boulder River Valley, not far from the old post office at McLeod. On the drive south along the river, the vast wall of the 10,000 foot Beartooth Plateau dominates the eye, until you've become accustomed to it, and can relax in the intense green of the foothills, thickets of aspen glowing, amid stands of darker lodgepole. Snowmelt fed creeks, buried in low growing willows, are everywhere on the hills like an anatomist's diagram of the vascular system of the earth. If it seems like a long way from the smoky bars of Livingston and postcard scenes of the Yellowstone where the legendary wildness of McGuane and his friends played out in the 70's and early 80's, stamping an entire generation's perceptions of the place and the state, that's because it is. [more]

Boone and Crockett

One of the greatest and most rare qualities of living in a place where the endeavors of mankind do not hold sway over every square mile of country is the very real presence of mystery and the unknown. In a place like the Bitterroot Valley, a person can look up from the fantastic level of distraction of Highway 93 and see recesses in the mountains where none has set foot in years; perhaps there are perched valleys and black timber northslopes that have never known the track of a man, where a fisher hunts red squirrels its whole life with no awareness of the changes happening in the valley below. Look into the mountains, and you are looking into a place where a great mystery is unfolding, every second, that has absolutely nothing to do with you or anybody you know or ever will know. It is the other. If a tree falls in the forest, and there is nobody around to hear it, it makes the same noise as if you were right there under it.

When I first learned of the finding of the bighorn sheep ram whose skull is shown in these pictures, this is what it brought to mind. Out there, things are happening, things that we will never see or know of, unless by chance. [more]

Montana's Ultimate Fighting Experience

Kalispell's Majestic Valley Arena was the host for a Saturday night cage brawl and beer drinking fest that, judging by the sold-out tables ($300 tables, no less), floorseating and a rowdy crew in the bleachers, was a success for everybody. The crowd, (and a fairly dangerous looking crowd it was) young and fit and extremely intense, was enthusiastic but self-controlled (not always a given), and the fights in the cage were fast-moving and violent. There were a few cowboy hats in the audience, but it was a long, long way from rodeo.

In the center of the rodeo arena stood a tall, round cage, black mesh fence enclosing a floor about fifteen feet in diameter. The rules for the fights that would happen in the cage were few -- no biting or eye-gouging, no fish-hooking with a thumb in the corner of the mouth or nostrils, no knee strikes or kicks to the head of an opponent on the ground. Artists of the takedown were asked not to "spike" their opponents to the canvas, intentionally sending them down like an arrow onto their heads or necks. [more]