A broad sunset aglow over a sea of grass. Photo © Larry Nygaard.

By Larry Nygaard
Forest Magazine, Spring 2002

Theodore Roosevelt called it “this land of vast silent spaces.”

Arriving from the East in 1883 to hunt buffalo, Roosevelt would have crossed many miles of mixed-grass prairie on the broad, gently rolling expanse of the Great Plains. Nearing the Little Missouri River, the train on which he was riding would have plunged headlong into a maze of canyons and sculpted clay ridges seamed with black lignite and inflamed with deposits of a red ceramic stone called clinker. It was a wild, rumpled landscape where bison and pronghorn roamed in grassy valleys and where deer and elk took to the shade of juniper trees on north slopes or settled into wooded draws.

One hundred years later, as I prepared to bed down for the night not far from where Roosevelt himself used to bed down at his Maltese Cross Ranch, I was alarmed by a slow, metronomic thumping that overwhelmed the evening silence and reverberated along the valley of the Little Missouri. Unable to imagine what on earth could make the ominous sound, I spent several sleepless hours in speculation.

The place was the Little Missouri National Grassland, a thirty-by-100-mile portion of badlands in western North Dakota managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The sound turned out to be the thudding of an oil well—the beating heart of our internal combustion society—located a few miles from where I made my camp. Roosevelt’s silence has been invaded, and with the thudding wellsק,400 of them on Forest Service land—have come the roads that service them, a network of almost 3,000 miles. Both the silence and the vastness of the spaces have been shattered.

The largest of our national grasslands, the Little Missouri encompasses over 1 million acres of badlands along the lower course of the Little Missouri River.

Both the river and the national grassland lie within the Williston Basin, a 200,000-square-mile geologic feature noted for its reserves of petroleum. The three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park are within the boundaries of the national grassland but protect a mere 70,000 acres of this region. Private inholdings, ranches and state lands complete a patchwork of ownership.

Thirty years ago you could hike between the north and south units of the park—forty air miles—without crossing a road. No more. The recently established Maah Daah Hey hiking and riding trail leads users across and along gravel roads in the course of its winding 120-mile route through the national grassland between the two units. Oil drillers, encouraged by the Forest Service, have built roads and destroyed wilderness qualities throughout the grassland.

In the forty-two years since passage of the Wilderness Act, North Dakota has not passed a comprehensive wilderness bill. Meanwhile, the acreage that was eligible for wilderness protection in the Little Missouri National Grassland dropped from 500,000 acres in the early 1970s to about half that in 1977 and has continued to plummet ever since. Wilderness advocates have identified seventeen roadless areas, roughly 6,000 to 24,000 acres and totaling 220,000 acres, that are still suitable for wilderness protection. These areas are scattered throughout the grassland, but a number of them are clustered, only narrowly separate from or contiguous with the national park, thus, so far, providing both core habitat and corridors for wildlife.

Forty years before Roosevelt stepped from a train onto the banks of the Little Missouri River, John James Audubon made a trip up the Missouri River from Saint Louis to Fort Union, eighty-five miles north of Roosevelt’s future ranch. Near Fort Union, he first sighted the animals that would bear his name, the Audubon bighorn sheep: “No one who has not seen the Mauvaises Terres, or Badlands, can form any idea of these resorts of the Rocky Mountain Rams, or the difficulty of approaching these animals.”

Audubon reports “wolves howling, and bulls roaring, just like the long-continued roll of a hundred drums. Saw large gangs of Buffaloes walking along the river … Abundance of bear tracks.”

A British trader named Culbertson later supplied him with the first known specimen of the black-footed ferret. The drum-roll bellow of bison in rut was replaced by the soulless thud of an oil well, but the bison is gone from the wild (it has been reintroduced and penned like livestock in the park) and with it the gray wolf and the grizzly. Black-tailed prairie dogs came under fire from settlers and ranchers, and the black-footed ferret disappeared. The wary Audubon subspecies of bighorn sheep, which the naturalist found so difficult to approach, was hounded and hunted and extinct by 1905.

If fragmentation can be halted, the varied habitat of the grassland can continue to support the considerable diversity that remains: mule and white-tailed deer, pronghorns, beavers, prairie dogs, coyotes, badgers, foxes, a few free elk and rare bobcats and mountain lions, as well as forty-four other mammals. Eighteen reptiles and amphibians exist, in spite of a cold, dry climate. Buntings, Baird’s sparrows, warblers, eagles, falcons, sandhill and whooping cranes and a rare, local population of sage grouse are among 200 species of nesting and migrant birds.

Conversely, road building increases insularity, creates corridors of disturbance, threatens the success of the sensitive Rocky Mountain bighorn (introduced to replace the Audubon), imperils habitat for black-footed ferret reintroduction and affords a toehold for invasive weeds.

Faced with entrenched opposition to federal wilderness by some ranchers, oil interests and, particularly, the state’s governor and U.S. senators, the Forest Service hasn’t recommended any portion of the Little Missouri National Grassland for wilderness protection in its new management plan.

Larry Nygaard is a Boulder, Colorado–based photographer and writer.

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