The Clovis people encountered animals that we have never seen, the last of the great mammals of the ice ages. Mammoths and mastodons were common. Huge short-faced bears, bigger than grizzlies, may have been present in smaller numbers. Long-horned bison were plentiful. There were at least some ground sloths surviving, as well as tapirs, a giant beaver, horses, and other animals.
All of these—the Ice Age megafauna—disappeared rapidly right at the time when the Clovis people hunted their way east and south. For some time these hunters have been viewed as the human equivalent of a Chicxulub meteor crash, a destructive wave of humanity sweeping east in a way that strangely prefigures the European sweep westward thousands of years later. A more recent view is that a change in climate played a role in the extinctions. Tim Flannery, in his excellent book
The Eternal Frontier
, still argues for the rapid extinction of large mammals by the Clovis people, who, he points out, left no art that has been found and seemed to live in more rudimentary shelters than did the earlier Asian cultures from which they came. Flannery suggests that they put all their effort into the beautiful and deadly Clovis points. He estimates that they accomplished the extinction of North America’s ice age animals in three hundred years.
Whether or not he is right, it is clear that thirteen thousand years ago, the time when the Clovis people arrived, is the time when the animal ecology of North America changed. Brown bears, moose, and elk migrated from Asia. Gray wolves, a global Arctic species, replaced the larger dire wolf. The High Plains began to look something like they do today. Climate may have changed the vegetation, however, and the great herds of smaller, short-horned bison did not appear until the long-horned bison were extinct. The modern bison migrated from Alaska, and there is evidence that by twelve thousand years ago they were being driven to their deaths in herds.
The ancient American natives may have helped create the vast herds of bison that Europeans encountered, Flannery suggests, by their use of fire to create the kind of prairie that favored the growth of these animals in the millions.
The badlands of the Hell Creek Formation in Garfield County would have been the same, geologically, for the Clovis people as they are for us. They would have faced the same harsh environment we do when we hunt fossils. But the world around them would have been profoundly different. For ten thousand years the bison would have increased and the hunting cultures that depended on them would have visited the High Plains. One remarkable find near the town of Wilsall, about forty miles northeast of Bozeman, produced a spectacular accumulation of Clovis points from eleven thousand years ago that seemed to have been buried with a child of about eighteen months. The Anzick site, named after the owners of the land, also produced the bones of a second child six to eight years old. That child, however, died about two thousand years later, according to radiocarbon dating. Cultures changed during that time, but slowly compared to our own headlong rush. From New York, Los Angeles, or Bozeman for that matter, two thousand years of the Stone Age seem like a dreamlike stasis in which the land must have seemed eternal. From a camp in the badlands that same sense of being lost in time that moves at the pace of geology is almost reachable. But then the laptops come out at the end of the day, and with our dish antenna we connect to the world and to the impatience that speed brings. What would a Clovis hunter have made, not of our machines, but of our intolerance for delays of tens of seconds?
For thousands of years the people who hunted and quarried stone in Montana did so on foot, driving buffalo off cliffs to their deaths and setting up camps to butcher them where they fell. There are bluffs in Montana and other parts of the High Plains—buffalo jumps—with accumulations of buffalo bones at the base that indicate use of the same place to drive buffalo to their deaths over hundreds or thousands of years.
It was the arrival of Europeans, first the Spanish with the horse, and later the press of French and English westward in the United States and Canada, that changed everything. By 1492 the continent was populous and settled by many different Indian groups with distinctive languages and cultures. Many were agriculturalists, although not the Blackfeet or, later, the Sioux and Crow of Montana.
When the horse came, brought by the Spanish, life on the plains began to change, and the familiar culture of the Plains Indians, warriors on horseback in elaborate costume, began to emerge. Coronado visited the Wichita Indians in 1541. In the 1600s, fur trappers first introduced guns to eastern tribes. As white men pushed west, displaced and newly armed Indian tribes themselves pushed west. The historian Alvin Josephy writes that “by the 1740s, horses were possessed by almost every Plains tribe in both the eastern and western sections of the plains and as far north as Canada’s Saskatchewan River Basin.”
By the end of the eighteenth century, Josephy writes, just when Lewis and Clark were traveling through the plains, what we know from movies as the culture of the Plains was in full flower, with the war bonnets, lances, extraordinary horsemanship , and transportable tipi villages. These Indians were not farmers, they were hunters and fighters. The westernmost agricultural settlements were villages on the banks of the Missouri in the Dakotas.
Lewis and Clark entered what is now Montana in the spring of 1805. In the fall of 1804 the Lewis and Clark expedition stopped at a Mandan village in what is now North Dakota. The Mandans were agriculturalists and traders. In the spring of 1805 they left the Mandan villages. With Sacajawea, the wife of a French Canadian fur trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, they journeyed up the Missouri in six canoes and two pirogues. Stephen E. Ambrose writes in
Undaunted Courage,
his book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, that eight days into the trip “the expedition passed the farthest point upstream on the Missouri known by Lewis to have been reached by white men.” Lewis and Clark then passed above the badlands of present-day Garfield County with little incident. North of the river lay the territory of the Blackfeet, whom they did not see. Of the land to the south Lewis wrote on May seventeenth, just a few days before the party reached the Musselshell River, “the great number of large beds of streams perfectly dry which we daily pass indicate a country but badly watered, which I fear is the case with the country through which we have been passing for the last fifteen or twenty days.”
In the same entry he notes that Clark was almost bitten by a rattlesnake, thus picking out one of the salient characteristics of the land. Two days later Clark noted in his journal one of many encounters with a grizzly bear—they killed it, as they usually did—and a violent confrontation with a less predictable adversary. “Capt. Lewis’s dog was badly bitten by a wounded beaver and was near bleeding to death.” This incident has been little commented on by historians, but it speaks to the determination of beavers.
The expedition did not linger in this area or the Missouri Breaks farther west. They continued on to the headwaters of the Missouri, across the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific. On the way back in 1806, Clark and Lewis split up, and Clark and his party passed to the south of the Hell Creek area, traveling the Yellowstone River.
Lewis and Clark marked another major step in the advance of European Americans. Although their passage itself caused little damage, they were the tip of the spear, and behind them came the advance guard of white expansion—mountain men and traders. Jim Bridger, a mountain man celebrated for his wild and woolly ways, after whom the Bridger Wilderness in Montana is named, did not strike out into completely unknown territory in the pure entrepreneurial spirit that Americans prize so much. He first saw the land as a member of Lewis and Clark’s government-sponsored expedition. During the ensuing decades, few people, Indian or white, would have spent much time in the badlands of eastern Montana, except to hunt buffalo. And buffalo hunting would not reach the level of wholesale slaughter until the coming of the railroads, after the Civil War.
The government took a hand in bringing the West under the heel of civilization during the Indian Wars. The most famous battle of this campaign against the aboriginal inhabitants of the West was probably the fight at the Little Big Horn on June 26, 1876, eight days before the centennial Independence Day celebration. As every schoolchild knows, or used to know, the battle was won by the Indians, who had no chance at all in the larger war.
The Little Big Horn is southwest of Garfield County. In a recent book,
Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past,
Lowell Dingus, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, recounts the pursuit of Sitting Bull and four hundred Indians after the battle by Colonel Nelson A. Miles. The colonel followed Sitting Bull, through the Hell Creek badlands in the fall of 1876, struggling with rough terrain and impending winter. In November temperatures were already dropping to twelve below zero.
Sitting Bull was apparently attracted to the Hell Creek area because the hunting was good. The buffalo were still there, feeding on the short grass of the western prairie. Neither Sitting Bull nor the buffalo fared well in the end. Sitting Bull eluded Miles and crossed over into Canada. In 1881 he returned to the United States and later toured with Buffalo Bill Cody. He was eventually killed in the badlands of South Dakota on December 15, 1890, by Indian policemen who had gone to arrest him for leaving the Standing Rock Reservation. Two weeks later the army killed more than 170 Sioux, including women and children, at Wounded Knee.
The buffalo that the Sioux and other Plains Indians had depended on were gone as well. Most, of course, were killed by hide and meat hunters as the railroads crossed the prairie. This commercial killing had political support from some western generals and others who calculated, correctly, that without the buffalo, the Plains Indians could no longer resist. Plus it was a moneymaker.
Some of the last few bison in the badlands of what was to be Garfield County were killed for science. In 1886 William T. Hornaday was in the Hell Creek area on a mission to kill enough bison for a display at the Smithsonian before the animal completely went extinct and there were no specimens left. Hornaday was a reluctant hunter, motivated by science, and worked hard to save the buffalo from ultimate extinction. But he killed the requisite buffalo and the exhibit, when it opened in Washington, D.C., was very popular.
Other bison during the time they were flirting with extinction were killed neither for food, hides, nor science, but for sport. Hunters who shot the bison for pleasure and trophies decried the disgraceful market hunters at the same time that they rushed to kill a bison, before there were none left to kill.
Bison never went completely extinct, although they came close. The bison alive now represent another attempt to reconstruct the past. It is more easily done than the re-creation of dinosaurs, but still, there have been glitches along the way. There are a few pure herds that represent the DNA of the bison that covered the plains in 1491. But many other herds represent animals that have been interbred with cattle in the attempt to bring them back. Are they true bison? They are certainly good to eat, but for scientific studies, and for the emotional satisfaction of knowing that the animal you see before you is of the same blood as those that native Americans ran off a buffalo jump for thousands of years, you want the pure descendants.
With the buffalo gone and the Indians defeated eastern Montana entered a brief and uncharacteristic boom period, according to K. Ross Toole, in
Montana: An Uncommon Land
. From 1880 to 1886 cattle herds fattened on the free range in relatively mild years. The winter of 1886-87 was different. Toole writes that cattle outfits suffered catastrophic losses in this “hard winter,” some losing 75 to 80 percent of their herds. “January was bitterly cold,” he writes. “The hope was that February would see a thaw.”
But “temperatures at Glendive,” which is just east of Garfield County, “from February 1 to February 12 averaged -27.5 degrees Fahrenheit.” In March, after hot “Chinook ” winds, “in every gully, every arroyo, along the streambeds, and dotting the level plains were the rotting carcasses of thousands upon thousands of cattle.”
The open range disappeared with the coming of ranchers, who practiced cattle and sheep ranching of the sort now common here. Garfield County recovered in the 1890s and began to take on some of its current character, except, of course, that the Missouri had not been dammed, and Fort Peck Lake created, nor had the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, generally referred to as the CMR, been established.
THE DIGGING BEGINS
The first European-American fossil collectors arrived in the West in the middle of the nineteenth century. One early collector in Montana was Ferdinand Hayden. He found a duckbill tooth in the Judith River Formation, from the late Cretaceous, in 1854. This was during the Indian wars, and according to one historical account of the early paleontologists, he acquired an Indian name that suggested the hazards of paleontology at the time, “the man who picks up stones while running.”
Fossils were, however, well known to American Indians, so if he did have that name, the stones he was picking up must not have been obviously old bones. Dinosaur skeletons, and mammal and reptile and other skeletons, had been weathering out during the thirteen thousand years when the first Americans occupied the continent. And these early Americans had, of course, found the fossils and come up with their own interpretations, weaving the bones of mastodons, mosasaurs, and pterosaurs into legends of thunder beings and water monsters. Based on the discoveries of shells and other remnants of marine creatures in places that the inland sea had covered, many Indian tribes believed that the land they were on had been underwater at some point. Like paleontologists after them, they, too, had a reconstructed past in mind.