northern Montana in the 1870s. LaTray, 47, wears
a long black braid over her shoulder, silver hoop
earrings, vest and kerchief, and square-toed cow-
boy boots. Her parents lost their ranch when she
was a girl; she left Montana in the 1990s to study
microbiology in Seattle and then to train horses
in Texas. “It took me 20 years to come back,” she
says, “but I did,” buying 250 acres that remained
in her family’s hands. LaTray makes her living
running cattle on her partner’s property now. “If
you sell your land, you sell your future,” she says.
We’re winding along a ridge on one of APR’s
newest properties, the 46,000-acre Two Crow
Ranch, which abuts the Charles M. Russell refuge
on the south side of the Missouri River. I ride shot-
gun; Two Crow’s former manager Danny Maag
sits in the back. There are no bison here yet, only
cattle. They look up dimly as we pass; they seem
small and tame when compared with APR’s bison
across the river. Two Crow extends as far as the
eye can see along the wrinkled, coulee-slashed
hills of the Missouri Breaks that border the river.
They look as if you took the plains and crumpled
them, like a car in a pileup. It’s rough country.
“I can show you where a horse closed my eye,”
Maag says. “I can show you where I almost got
shot.” We pass a tumbledown homestead tucked
into a ridge. Local lore holds that the owner used
to hire ex-convicts to help at the ranch, but that
some went back to jail because it was nicer.
All this to say, there have been generations of
people who made a life on this land in the years
since Lewis and Clark first traveled up the river.
On fences all along the roads near APR, locals
have strung up banners printed with the image of
a father and son clad in cowboy garb, silhouetted
against a sunset: “Save the Cowboy, Stop Ameri-
can Prairie Reserve.” LaTray has placed many of
these signs herself. “I think the prairie reserve’s
endgame is to depopulate this area,” she says.
APR’s efforts to restore ecological resilience, she
fears, threaten the cultural resilience of the peo-
ple who live here. “There’s a lot at risk,” she says.
In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act,
which gave settlers title to 160 acres of federal
land if they were able to “prove up” on the prop-
erty by building a house and planting crops.
But 160 acres weren’t enough in the short-grass
prairies, so Congress doubled it, then doubled
it again to 640 acres for livestock. Today many
ranchers feel they need to own thousands of
acres and lease thousands more on nearby
public land to make ends meet, and keepingand public grassland along the Missouri River,
acquiring ranches from “willing sellers” at mar-
ket prices. It would remove the cattle that grazed
the land, stock it with 10,000 or more bison, tear
out interior fences, restore native vegetation,
and create the conditions in which the region’s
lost wildlife could return and thrive. Grassland
biodiversity requires abundance, Freese says.
“You’ve got to think big.”
In the 19 years since, the group has raised
$160 million in private donations, much of it
from high-tech and business entrepreneurs. It
has acquired 30 properties, totaling 104,000
acres, and more than 300,000 acres of grazing
leases on adjacent federal and state land. The
properties are all strategically located near two
federally protected areas: the 1.1 million-acre
Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and
the 377,000-acre Upper Missouri River Breaks
National Monument. Think of the refuge and
monument as the trunk of a tree, Gerrity says.
In buying nearby properties, “we’re trying to
expand the girth of the tree,” adding branches to
the trunk and enhancing the movement of wild-
life between river systems and grasslands. Bison
are an integral part of that restoration. APR now
runs more than 800 on three of its properties.
Gerrity estimates the total cost to buy 500,000
acres of private land and endow it forever will
be upwards of $500 million—half the price of a
professional football stadium, which has a rough
shelf life of 20 to 30 years. From 2009 to 2017
alone, more than a million acres of native prairie
were converted to cropland in the seven counties
surrounding APR.
“Species are blinking out,” he says. “Habitat is
going away. There’s a really short period, maybe
20 to 30 years, to do some really big stuff, and
then the opportunity is going to be gone. We’re
swinging for the fences here.”
It’s an audacious vision. It is also a very con-
tentious one.
W
HEN IT RAINS in central Montana,
the dirt roads turn into what the
locals call “gumbo,” a slick clay-
mud that often is impassable. It
is, mercifully, drying out as Leah
LaTray steers her pickup down a track snaked
with deep ruts, clods of mud winging out from
the wheels. LaTray’s great-grandfather, Mose
LaTreille, was a cowboy of French and Native
American heritage who came with the cattle to
76 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC