Looking back 25, 50, and 100 years in the Greater Yellowstone area.
BY FISCHER GENAU
One hundred years ago in the U.S., alcohol was illegal, all movies were silent, and women had just been granted the right to vote. Much has changed since then. The modern West has become a place of rapid progress, but hindsight in this storied region reveals a panoply of significant events, many of which render the present in a critically contextualized light. A quarter way through this 21st century, Mountain Outlaw is looking back 25, 50, and 100 years in the Greater Yellowstone area to remember where we’ve been—and perhaps better understand where we are and where we’re going.
1925: Montana’s Mass Exodus
In 1925, a wagon hit the road in eastern Montana adorned with a sign that read: “20 miles from water, 40 miles from wood. We’re leaving old Montana, and we’re leaving for good.”
While much of the country would be remembered around this time for the Roaring ’20s, Montana in 1925 saw a historic mass exodus. Thousands of homesteaders had moved West to work the land by the end of World War I, but drought, heat waves, and great clouds of grasshoppers wreaked havoc on their fields. After watching their crops wither, many of these would-be farmers limped back eastward. Between 1919 and 1925, approximately 2 million acres of land ceased production and 11,000 farms were vacated. Montana was the only state during the 1920s to lose population, and with the Great Depression on the horizon, the Montanans who remained were just getting acquainted with the resiliency they’d need to survive.
1975: Grizzly Bears Listed as Threatened Species
By 1975, grizzly bear range in the Lower 48 had dwindled to just 2 percent of the bruins’ historic habitat. Their population was at an all-time low—fewer than 1,000—and the federal government finally took action. On July 28, 1975, the grizzly bear was listed as a threatened species in the Lower 48, making it illegal to “kill, capture, harm, harass, import, or export a grizzly bear anywhere in the Lower 48 States, or to sell any parts or products of grizzlies in interstate or foreign commerce,” according to the rule published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Recreational hunting was still allowed but limited to 25 bears per year. Since 1975, grizzly bear numbers have increased to at least 1,923 in the Lower 48, according to a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service report, inspiring recent calls for them to be delisted as a threatened species, and subsequent rebuttals demanding this protection be upheld.
2000: Fires Rage in the West
The West’s wildfire season in 2000 was one of the worst on record. Roughly 1.1 million acres burned in the Northern Rocky Mountains during a year of widespread drought, causing Montana Gov. Marc Racicot to declare a state of emergency and President Bill Clinton to grant Montana a Presidential Disaster Declaration. The Bitterroot Valley fires accounted for half of the burned acreage in Montana and were the subject of perhaps the most famous wildlife photo in history: Taken by fire behavior analyst John McColgan and titled “Elk Bath,” the shot shows two elk seeking shelter in the East Fork of the Bitterroot River.
Wildfires in the Western U.S. in 2000 caused more than $2 billion in damages, killed four firefighters, and brought in firefighting teams from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. But this abnormally dangerous year would quickly become the standard. In the past 25 years, wildfire seasons have become more severe, illustrated by the new 10-year average of 7.2 million acres burned annually in the state of Montana alone.
Fischer Genau is a writer and filmmaker whose work invites us to look closer at the world around us and the world inside. He lives in Bozeman, but his heart still resides with the lakes of his homeland back in Michigan.
