repopulate it with the wildlife of bygone days.
Imagine: the plains as they looked in 1805, when
explorer Meriwether Lewis climbed to the top of a
similar bluff just east of here. “The whole face of
the country was covered with herds of Buffaloes,
Elk & Antelopes,” Lewis wrote in his journal.
And then, in outrageously short order, the
animals were gone. Historians estimate there
were tens of millions of bison—the term is
interchangeable with buffalo—when Lewis
and fellow explorer William Clark traversed
the northern plains; by the mid-1880s, fewer
than a thousand remained. Other prairie crea-
tures—grizzlies, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep,
wolves, swift foxes, black-footed ferrets—saw
similar declines as settlement spread west. The
migrants slaughtered wildlife for cash and sport,
built fences and roads that fractured the ani-
mals’ habitat, trailed livestock that competed for
forage and spread disease, and broke the prairie
with their plows in order to farm it. Once broken,
it takes decades, even centuries, to fix.
But here on the plains’ western edge, where
the climate is unforgiving and the boom-and-
bust farming economy is equally remorseless,
swaths of prairie remain largely unbroken. In
2000 a group of conservationists identified this
region as critical for preserving grassland bio-
diversity. In 2001 one member of that group, a
spare, soft-spoken biologist named Curt Freese,
teamed up with a Montana native named Sean
Gerrity to form the American Prairie Reserve,
or APR. Gerrity, a kinetic former Silicon Valley
consultant with an unruly mop of white hair,
says the idea was to “move fast and be nimble,”
in the manner of a high-tech start-up. The group
would use private money to patch together
3.2 million acres, or 5,000 square miles, of privatePRAIRIE DIVIDE 75