Historically, it is the land of the bison. But the land across
which these powerful herds once thundered has been transformed. We
know it today by such names as Montana, Wyoming, Dakota, western
Iowa, and Nebraska--but it is really buffalo country, the land of
the big sky rivers. This book is a tale of two rivers, a history of
the majestic Missouri and how it was once wedded to the
Yellowstone. Though quite different today--one dammed into
reservoirs, the other unregulated with a semblance of
wildness--they were once linked ecologically, geographically, and
historically. Then in the twentieth century, Euro-Americans
dismantled many of these connections and attempted to uncouple the
streams. Viewing the rivers and their surrounding lands as a living
system, Robert Kelley Schneiders focuses on four components within
the Upper Missouri bioregion--the Missouri River valley, the
Yellowstone River valley, Homo sapiens, and bison--to show the
significance of their interaction over the past two hundred years.
To frame his story, Schneiders goes back to the nineteenth-century
journals of fur traders and settlers, and in the record of flora,
fauna, floods, and human activity he finds evidence of rapid and
disruptive change. Bison once had the greatest influence on the
land, and Schneiders depicts an original bison and Indian trail
network on which were overlaid the first forts and towns and then
the railroads, highways, and reservoirs that reconfigured the
region forever. Schneiders explains how these geographical
constructs interacted with larger demographic and economic trends
in the twentiety-century West, as dams and their resultant
reservoirs enhanced the federal presence in the Dakotas andeastern
Montana. He describes human encroachment on the rivers and tells
why the Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri but spared the
Yellowstone. The engineers and their backers have so completely
engineered the Missouri that few people today think of it as
anything other than water. But we can reestablish our bonds to the
river if we decide to let it flow once again, argues Schneiders.
Removing the dams on the Missouri is the first step toward
reasserting localism and grassroots democracy. In what was once
buffalo country, a dormant ecology awaits rebirth. A major work of
environmental history, "Big Sky Rivers offers a challenging vision
for the future of the Upper Missouri bioregion.
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