T
HE MISSOURI is running fast and muddy,
brimful with snowmelt and sediment,
driftwood and old leaves. I’m camped
with Wayne Fairchild, a Missoula-based
guide and prodigious student of the
river’s history. Two hundred and fourteen years
ago—to the day—Lewis and Clark passed this
spot, fighting water and gravity as they hauled
their loads upstream from eddy to eddy. Fairchild
knows every landmark of their journey—those
that remain, anyway. Many have been swept away
in the river’s frequent changes of course.
We’ve built a fire using driftwood that washed
up earlier this spring after an ice jam broke up-
stream on the Judith River. Lewis wanted to call
it Big Horn River, after the sheep on its shores,
but Clark named it instead after his future wife.
So many old names have washed away in theTo help answer these questions, APR has
partnered with the Smithsonian Institution
and the National Geographic Society, both of
which fund research at the reserve. To track
bison movements and grazing patterns, sci-
entists have attached tracking collars to the
reserve’s bison. To measure ecological bene-
fit, they are surveying vegetation, mammals,
and birds before and after bison introduction.
“We don’t know if it’s incremental or if there’s
some tipping point,” says Smithsonian conser-
vation ecologist Andy Boyce. “It may be 30 to
40 years,” he says, before we understand the
long-term effect of large-scale bison restoration
on the land.
In the meantime, the return of the bison to the
Montana prairie has brought more poignant, if
less quantifiable, impacts. George Horse Cap-
ture, Jr., stands in thick-soled shoes on a rise
overlooking a sweeping stretch of prairie. He’s
a prominent member of the Aaniiih tribe from
the nearby Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, tall
and slender, with ruddy cheeks and intense eyes,
his long black hair threaded with gray. He runs
two fingers along a waist-high, truck-chassis-size
rock in the grass. The stone is etched with
ancient carvings and inscriptions. “There’s
things that just baffle us,” he says, pointing at
the symbols—lines and circles, human figures,
horse and buffalo tracks. “This represents stories
that we don’t even know anymore.”
The silence on the prairie is striking. Stop to
listen and you’ll realize how much there is to
hear: the stringy call of a chorus frog, the flap-
ping of a butterfly’s wings, grass rattling against
itself in the breeze. Bison edge along a slough
nearby as Horse Capture speaks; cloudbursts
circle. The Plains tribes depended on bison for
food, clothing, tools, tepee skins. In 1888, soon
after the last buffalo were driven from the plains,
his tribe was removed to its current reservation.
The Aaniiih once numbered more than 10,000
people. By 1904, only around 500 members
remained. “We shared such a destiny, us and the
buffalo together,” Horse Capture says—head-
long in the path of Manifest Destiny. The first
time Horse Capture watched a herd of bison
released onto APR’s property, he found himself
reduced to tears. Since the last days of conquest,
the Plains Indians had prayed for the buffalo to
come back. “And when that gate opened, I wit-
nessed a prayer,” he says. “Sometimes it takes a
long time for prayers to come true.”
88 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC