Missouri’s flood of change: The “river that scolds
all others” became the Milk; Sacagawea changed
to Crooked Creek, then changed back again. APR
bought land at Antelope Creek and now calls it
Mars Vista, after the Mars confectionery family, a
major donor. Through naming, through owning,
we impose our visions on the landscape.
Even five feet above its normal banks, the Mis-
souri is soundless. We watch it slip past as the last
light dies upriver. “Imagine going down this river
and seeing buffalo on the shore,” Fairchild says.
Imagine.
APR offers one vision of the future, its neigh-
bors another. Both are born of a deep love of
the landscape. Both also lean on a fleeting past.
Which moment do we wish to recapture? The
past of 1805: bison and grizzlies on the shore? Or
1905: cattle and fences and 160-acre homesteads?
It is a flickering target, our history—a racing
river, driftwood and foam, past and present rush-
ing eagerly into the future.
“I don’t know if we can return to times that are
gone,” rancher Lance Johnson had told me earlier
that afternoon on his deck overlooking the Judith
Mountains. Most of his neighbors are out-of-town
landowners now; he signed a grazing lease with
APR after billionaires from Texas bought a nearby
ranch and kicked Johnson’s cattle off their land.
So he knows that, even if APR disappears, he’s
going to have to try new things to survive.
“I understand,” he says, “that this world
is changing.” jHannah Nordhaus is currently a National
Geographic Society storytelling fellow.
Amy Toensing teaches at Syracuse University.
This is her 16th story for National Geographic.Buffalo roam at sunset
on APR’s Sun Prairie unit.
If the reserve is fully
realized, thousands of
these animals will once
again range across the
northern plains. “When
we’re done with it,” says
APR co-founder Sean
Gerrity, “it’s going to
last hundreds of years.”PRAIRIE DIVIDE 89