Montana Wildlife Restoration Members

Montana’s Wildlife Legacy featured
in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Back from the Brink

Book details exploitation, rebirth of Montana’s Wildlife Species

By Ben Pierce - Courtesy of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle


Download Article in Adobe PDF - Pages 1 & 2

When the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived in Montana during the summer of 1805 they discovered a diverse country teeming with an abundance of wildlife species - elk, deer, beaver, antelope and other game animals - would be hunted and trapped to near extinction.

In a story of remarkable recovery, Montana’s wildlife species bounced back from the brink. Today the Treasure State enjoys an abundance and diversity of wildlife not seen for more than generation. But it didn’t happen without a lot of hard work.

“Montana’s Wildlife Legacy: Decimation to Restoration,” a new book by Harold Picton and Terry Lonner, details the exploitation and subsequent rebirth of Montana’s wildlife species.

“This is a history of Montana’s people and their wildlife resource,” Picton said Monday. “We have to realize that we have more wildlife in MOntana now than we have had in 130 years. And that is accident.”

As word of Lew and Clark Expedition’s dramatic discoveries trickled masses of frontiersman and trappers flooded into the Western Territories. During this period Montana’s wildlife served as not only a food source, but as a form of currency. Pelts were the prize of fur traders from David Thompson’s Northwest Company, the American Fur Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company and others.

In the 1820s and 1830s, globalization was a big factor,” Lonner said. “The demand for those hides was coming from Europe.”

Buffalo hides were sold to market for use as coats and beaver pelts were a popular fur for hats at the time. Many other species were trapped and sent east. During the 1890s, more than 300 elk were trapped in the Yellowstone area and transported to zoos and wildlife parks.

The decimation of Montana’s wildlife species during this period was unprecedented. In 1874, 12,000 antelope hides were shipped from Bozeman to eastern markets, nearly eliminating the population in the Yellowstone Valley. Millions of bison that wandered the plains were slaughtered to near extinction, as were beaver. Elk numbers in Montana dropped precipitously. By 1910 some estimates put the state elk population at fewer than 5,000 animals confined to the region around todays Bob Marshall Wilderness and Yellowstone National Park.

As shocking and widespread as the devastation was, it cannot be wholly condemned. The idea that the abundance of Montana’s wildlife species could be seriously impacted was simply unfathomable at the time. Much more played into the downfall of Montana’s wildlife than fur trading or overharvest.

“The horse came to Montana even before Lewis and Clark,” Picton said. “The great buffalo horse culture of the Indians — going from on foot to horses — there is a lot of technology involved there. Rifles and transportation, the riverboats where particularly important coming as far as Fort Benton.”

Following the fur trade era, Montana’s mining boom of the mid- to late-1800s brought another wave of settlers to Montana’s landscape.

“Wildlife provided the capital for the settlement of Montana in the fur trade and buffalo hide,” Picton said, “and then after gold was discovered, wildlife provided the food source.”

Because of Montana’s isolation and difficulty of establishing agriculture, miners and their families were desperately reliant on Montana’s wildlife as a food source for the majority of the year. During the winter months the flow of outside goods was stalled until trade routes reopened.

The movement to restore and conserve Montana’s wildlife began in the midst of the devastation, more than 30 years before the national conservation movement began. Montanan’s first raised concerns about the state’s wildlife in the 1860s at the territorial capital in Bannack.

“Teddy Roosevelt gets a lot of credit for restoring wildlife and he deserves that credit for establishing the Forest Service and all that, but Montana was 30 years ahead of him,” Lonner said.

Across Montana sportsmen’s clubs were established. These clubs tended to be social in nature, but from them sprang a conservation and hunting ethic that remains alive and well in the state today.

At the turn of the century, sportsmen’s groups began working with Montana Fish and Game to protect and restore wildlife populations. Initial efforts to establish game preserves — while noble in intent — failed to have the desired impact because of a lack of understanding regarding the biology of the game species they aimed to protect.

In the early 1900s, sportsmen from Butte began raising funds to back the idea of transplanting wildlife. For $5 a head, 25 elk trapped in the Gardiner area and transported via the Northern Pacific Railroad were released near Fleecer Mountain in March 1910. The success of this transplant led to increased interest. In 1912, 540 elk trapped around Gardiner were transplanted to different parts of Montana.

“There were no sponsors,” Picton said. “It was just people interested in wildlife.”

As the success of the transplant operations began to bear fruit, sportsmen’s groups, state and government agencies, area universities and law enforcement joined efforts in undertaking a massive transplanting effort that helped reestablish Montana’s wildlife.

“The $5 investment scraped out of sportsmen’s pockets almost 100 years ago has paid major ecological and economic dividends for citizens of the 21st Century,” Lonner and Picton write in “Montana’s Wildlife Legacy.”

Today, Montana enjoys one of the most diverse populations of wildlife found anywhere in world. The state boasts the highest number of hunters per capita with one in five adults partaking in some form of hunting.

“Montana is number one as a stronghold for wildlife,” Lonner said. “We have a diversity of landscapes and species … from Glacier (National Park) all the way to the plains that is richly diverse. Montana is even more rich and abundant in inland wildlife than Alaska.”

Picton and Lonner said that “Montana’s Wildlife Legacy” represents the culmination of their careers as wildlife biologists. The book is highly visual featuring a plethora of historic photos, graphs and diagrams to illustrate the rebound of Montana’s wildlife. The book represents the only complete record of all the big game animals that were trapped and transplanted during the restoration process.

“The thrust of this (book) is education, not just for kids, but for everyone,” Lonner said. This is to keep the flame burning. The question is whether wildlife is an amenity? Is it aesthetic? Is it essential to our tourism and economy? Is it a backup food source in dire times? In my mind, wildlife and Montana are synonymous.”

“Montana’s Wildlife Legacy: Decimation to Restoration” By Harold Picton and Terry Lonner is published by Media Works and is available at local book sellers for $29.95. For more information about the book and Montana’s Wildlife, visit www.montanaswildlifelegacy. com.

Ben Pierce can be reached at bpierce@dailychronicle.com and (406) 582-2625.