The Native Home of Hope

Authenticity is not a fad when it comes to sense of place,  but use - or should I say misuse – of the word has become one.

This will pass, and when it does the attributes of authenticity of place will remain by definition nearly temporal.

My personal story begins as the only son of an only son, born at the tail end of five generations of Rocky Mountain ranchers who gradually migrated during the hundred years before I was born from the Central to the Northern Rockies.

Our ancestral ranch is where I learned sense of place, e.g. the smell of sage brush, new mown hay, and rain on a dirt road, as well as the sound of a Meadowlark and the colors of Yellowstone Cutthroat in the Henry’s Fork.

But it is also where I first learned about myths: including myths about rugged individualists, the cowboy errant Knight and other stereotypes of the West that I see fleeting across the eyes of people who want to hear my story.

I didn’t read Wallace Stegner until I came across his incredible essay in my early 30s entitled, Sense of Place.  This is where he coined that term and I still recommend to anyone seeking an understanding of authenticity.

It was my daughter, then in her third year of college, who brought me to Stegner in more depth.  Having heard my story, she knew that the breadth and depth of his writings would resonate.  It is such a gift to be understood.

One of my favorites is a book of essays written over a span that covered my first two decades entitled, The Sound of Mountain Water.  The first was published the year before I was born, the last in the collection as I turned 21.

The namesake essay in the book is a lyrical description about my native Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho and its famed Henry’s Fork including this resonate memoir from his first visit there in 1920:

“I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river…”

It is a myth though that the west was settled by rugged individualists.

While that characteristic was prevalent, in several of his books, Stegner supports, as he does in one of the essays in The Sound of Mountain Water, that “cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves” the American West.

When all but two lines of my ancestors crossed the Rockies, to be followed by the remaining two within a decade, there were fewer than 90,000 people inhabiting 750,000 square miles (twice the area of Western Europe.)

There were fewer than 70,000 along the Rockies, nearly all living in what are now New Mexico and Arizona.

Even after the Gold Rush and the arrival of 11,000 Mormons by 1850, the entire West when my ancestors settled there was less than 1% of the US population at the time.

Ranches required an average of four square miles or 2,500 acres, so to avoid isolation and provide safety and shared resources, much of the West was settled on what is called a “village and square model.”

It’s also why early jurisdictions for governance there relied more on river basins and watersheds for boundaries.

Predominately, during the fifty years prior to 1890 as the West was won ranchers lived in settlements near craftsmen, artisans, granaries and supply depots and commuted out to their land and livestock.

Sometimes historians also refer to this as a “village-farm system.”

Much of what is depicted in novels and movies about the West as well as that depicted by many of those who profess to be westerners today is synthetic.

Pure and simple, the West evolved to what it is today through a sense of commons that revolutionized the sense of land and water ownership.

The myth of rugged self-reliance became evident during the 1930’s Great Depression.

Groups such as Mormon leaders felt their recently evolved welfare program would be sufficient and pressed by partisans expressed that somehow the new federal program which emulated it would create sloth and dependency.

But the Mountain states where Mormons were then centered became the largest per capita users of the federal aid program.  Mormon leaders marveled at the public works projects completed by those receiving it as a condition.

Given their history, they shouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Apparently, they had forgotten that it is trust that led to economic development of the West, just as a new study has found in a study of survivors of Atomic bombs that trust enabled them to rebuild from that trauma.

Today, a small group of regressives in the West are pushing to let special interests get their hands on public lands for mining and drilling, backed quietly by Wall Street interests who have over the decades, raped the West in similar fashion.

They are dismissing economic analysis, which I have written about previously, showing that rural counties adjacent to public lands have outperformed others and that counties where resource exploitation occurs ultimately fall much lower.

But it was not the various gold, silver and copper strikes in the early west that provided sustainable growth.

It was grass.

In part, it was this unique, resilient, drought tolerant wild grass that led my ancestors who had settled in 1860 along each side of the Utah-Idaho border to relocate to the northern extreme of the Upper Snake River plain to create new homesteads along the Henry’s Fork.

Famously framed by the Continental Divide, Yellowstone and the Tetons, this area of my origin is the culmination of a hundred mile stretch that is no more than 70 miles wide at its widest narrowing to 20 or 30 miles where I was born.

The sides of this valley range to 10,000’ framed by the Lost River and Lemhi ranges stretching down from the Sawtooths and on the east by the Caribou, Snake River and Teton ranges.

My ancestors were following an old stagecoach supply route between Utah and the mines in Montana which, beginning in the late 1870s, was becoming the path of a slowly emerging railroad eventually to supply tourists to Yellowstone.

But above where the Henry’s Fork joined the South Fork to form the Snake River, settlers such as my ancestors were surprised to find the landscape covered not by sage brush, but waist high, wild bluegrass from the river to the Tetons and north to forests of the Centennial range.

The area had already been transited by trappers and then a cattle company but it was still available to homestead.  But they still followed the modified “village-farm and ranch” model adapted from when their parents cross the Rockies in the mid-1840s.

My ancestors found that the western side of the Henry’s Fork was even better adapted to ranching.  They had modified the village-ranch model but settled this new area as they had others in the West through cooperation.

Together, they marked off land, built bridges and roads, created reservoirs and irrigation canals, established granaries for the poor, created cemeteries and erected school houses.

Tough, independent and self-reliant – certainly – but with an even greater commitment to cooperation, the commons, public education and the welfare of those less fortunate.

By the time I was born in 1948, a hundred years after ancestors began settling the Rocky Mountain west,  rich potato farms had replaced the bluegrass in our nook of Idaho, as they have the ranchland on the west side now thanks to pivot irrigation systems.

The West is always changing.  Although I haven’t lived there since the 1970s, I travel along the Rockies each summer on road trips with my grandsons and daughter. 

Much more dramatic than the subtle land use changes since my youth are the demographic and psychographic changes.  Much of Idaho has been inhabited by in migration that seemingly seeks to replace the real Idaho by making it a refuge for the synthetic West.

I don’t mean the Aryan Nation which was expelled fifteen years ago.  Places in Idaho are exurbs such as Coeur d’Alene.  While whites represent only 8% of the population growth in the past decade, they represent 73% of the flight to exurbs.

Most seem to be chasing myths created when misinformation is re-harmonized to fit worldview.

It is complicated but emblematic.  The best way to understand why my homeland now seems foreign, click to watch an episode of the phenomenal PBS America By The Numbers program entitled Our Private Idaho.

As a fellow North Carolinian once wrote, “You Can Never Go Home Again,” and that is sad.  But the West will keep changing.

But as Stegner wrote, the West is also “the native home of Hope.”  My hope is that it will once again claim its authentic roots.

Yellowstone As Metaphor

Because I am representative of both sides, I am eager to read a book due to be released this summer entitled, The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict.

It is a study of old west belief systems such as those held by my great grandparents, grandparents and parents who forged ancestral ranchland where I was born along the Idaho edge of Yellowstone.

It also concerns the overlapping “new west” concern for protecting and restoring habitat and wildlife.

But while the data is both quantitative and qualitative, Yellowstone is used as a spiritual metaphor for how Americans approach moral disputes overall.

My Idaho roots stretch back to territorial days a dozen years before the creation of Yellowstone as America’s first national park, straddled a few decades later, when my my ancestors who began settling the Rockies in 1847, forged the horse and cattle ranch of my youth along the park’s western border.

By the time I came along the Bowmans had pushed large populations of Grizzlies back into the park and equally proximate Targhee National Forest, almost eliminating wolves and subduing the resulting over populations of beaver. 

But ranchers back then had an innate grasp of ecological balance, and most were early conservationists, if not considered early environmentalists.  Today those camps have become tribes who see the other as enemies.

In my experience, the battle there is not between old west and new west but sterilized, extremist versions of each who refuse to listen to one another.

In other words a microcosm of what’s gone wrong with America.

In a quote in The Economist recently, Dr. Jeff Hardin a devout Christian and zoologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison put it succinctly while noting that “Many partisans subscribe to the post-Enlightenment idea that giving people lots of facts ought to be enough to convince people.”

Guilty as charged.

But today and maybe always according to Hardin, “most of us hold our beliefs in a tangled ball of yarn.”  “Tug on one thread, and people fear that their very identity is under attack.”

I don’t have much patience for some of today’s ranchers who see the rebalancing of populations of wolves, Grizzlies and bison as surrogate agents of the federal government.

But environmentalists can also fail to accept or inform opinions with new information, such as this report in High Country News, revealing that reintroduction of wolves is not a panacea in Yellowstone and that some ecosystems once altered may never recover.

Last month, a jury in my native Fremont County, Idaho convicted a hunter of illegally killing a Grizzly bear and it reminded me that in the 1840s when most of my ancestors settled in the Rockies, the historic population outside of Alaska of 50,000 Grizzlies between the Pacific coast and the Mississippi River had already been pushed back into what are now the plains states.

Settlements back then required hunters such as my great (x3) grandfather Thomas Graham to protect against Grizzlies.

He was killed by one in November 1864 while protecting another ancestor and livestock in Northern Utah about 28 miles from the Idaho border.

But until recently, the last known Grizzly in Utah were seen in 1923, the year my father was born.  Today, they no longer exist in six western states, including California the “Golden Bear” state, where they had been driven out by 1922.

By the time I was graduating from BYU in 1972, only a few hundred were in existence with a concentration in and around Yellowstone including Targhee National Forest near our ranch.

There were several hundred verified sightings in our nook of Idaho between 1965 and 2000.  Male Yellowstone Grizzlies can range more than 300 square miles, far more widely than other populations.

Between 1974 and 1979 when I was marketing Spokane, scientists tracked Grizzlies in and around my native nook of Idaho along the border of Yellowstone to document clashes with livestock such as cattle and sheep.

It was a lot less than ranchers believed but it only takes one encounter to inflame fears.  The truth is that raising livestock on rangeland is inherently risky for many reasons and predators such as wolves and Grizzlies are easy scapegoats as is the fear of disease from bison.

But thanks to endangered species protection, Grizzlies in and around Yellowstone are now back to a sustainable high of 700 or more Grizzlies.  Nor do they stay put, ranging five times the distance our ranch was from Yellowstone.

It may be time for delisting and based on the recent conviction turning the species over to state management, at least in Idaho where a management plan has long been in place.

In my native Fremont County nook of Idaho, ranchers, farmers, conservationists, settlements and sportsmen also have a proven track record of reaching compromises to protect the famed Henry’s Fork River, from which Grizzlies scoop up their share of native Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout.

But environmentalists are distrustful, giving too much credibility to the relatively small group of vocal ranchers who refuse to accept the importance of ecological balance or even sit down to listen even if to agree to disagree.

There are solutions but just as with the innovations of the Affordable Care Act, they come from admitting that some parts of alternative views are with merit, while acknowledging that something one might have disagreed with is actually working.

Our way out of gridlock is to put those with extreme either/or views on the sidelines and to return to the practical middle ground that is part of what made this country so exceptional.

The Carolina Roots of My Native Rockies

The Appalachian Mountains that divide the eastern part of North America and form the western part of my adopted state of North Carolina, come to an end in Mississippi.

It is there, in the Northern Highlands of that state where the southern tip of the deciduous Flatwoods dissect the rich soil of the Black Prairie from the high rolling hills, amid deep densely wooded ravines and rivers of the Red Clay Hills that my great x 3 grandparents, Tom and Sarah Ann Graham, put down roots in 1825, but not for long.

Thomas Bradford Graham was from Kershaw District, the first inland settlement in South Carolina, along the spine of the Occaneechi Path, a corridor of Native American trading paths stretching from Virginia to Georgia (passing through Durham, North Carolina where I live) along where the fall line breaks between the rolling hills of the Piedmont and the Low Country.

His parents were Scotts-Irish and probably unrelated to the Irish Quakers who followed the road blazed up from Charleston to settle along the Wateree River in Kershaw, after their ship bound for North Carolina was blown off course.

He had migrated over the Appalachians with his family led by grandfathers.  Both were veterans the War of 1812, one with McWillie’s 2nd Regiment in the South Carolina Militia and the other with the 2nd Brigade, 5th Regiment, 1st Company detached from the 1st Orange County Regiment of the North Carolina Militia.

That was when Durham, where I live, was a part of Orange County.  When I relocated here from my native Rockies,  part of me was obviously coming home, preceded here by my great x 4 grandparents Thomas Bradford and Mary Miller and my great x 5 grandfather David Miller, both of whom were natives of this part of North Carolina.

Sarah Ann McCrory was from Tennessee, the daughter of a North Carolina Revolutionary War hero, a veteran of six major engagements.  He had also served for a time at Valley Forge as bodyguard to General George Washington and was briefly taken prisoner-of-war near his son-in-law’s birthplace by Tarleton’s Raiders during the Battle of Camden.

The old soldiers were now stranded across the Alabama line from the young couple.

Tom and Sarah Graham’s new home place near DeKalb was midway between the relatively new settlement of Tuscaloosa and the newly-created town of Jackson, up the ridgeline-trace from Natchez to make the state capital more centrally located.  The land had been recently ceded by the Choctaw Nation.

Eight years before my newlywed ancestors settled there, Mississippi had become a state following the lopping-off of Alabama.  As they settled into their new home, Colonel Davy Crockett had just survived the sinking of his flatboat,across state, on the Mississippi River and was readying his first run for Congress.

Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836, a few years after legends began to evolve such as the one that he - “Kilt him a b'ar when he was only 3.”  But within a decade my ancestors left Mississippi for the Rocky Mountains where my great x 3 grandfather’s true story does involve a bear, but a mammoth Grizzly Bear.

The party which included Tom’s parents and my then three-year-old great-great grandmother Amanda probably crossed Mississippi to the river on the wagon route that is now route 16 or possibly across what became Old Route 80 and is now Interstate 20.

Either way, they would have caught a paddle-steamer up the Mississippi River from Vicksburg or two or three other ports.  They possibly rode the sleek, 60-ton, light draft Maid of Iowa.

It specialized in carrying passengers and cargo past the De Moines rapids to a settlement where Mormon converts were gathering at the time at that part of Illinois across from the little jag where Iowa cuts off a corner of Missouri.

There my ancestors joined one of several trains of wagons heading up the Des Moines River on what was to be the first leg of a 1,400-mile journey west into the Rockies.  The Grahams only made it 36 miles upriver before forced to winter over near Farmington, Iowa where I stopped along a cross-country trip last year.

Tom’s wife Sarah Ann and other relatives died there.  He stayed two years and then he and little Amanda and her brothers and sisters continued west.  As they crossed the Missouri in 1852 near Council Bluffs, they hooked on with a train of 64 wagons and a few hundred others headed west along a route blazed five years earlier by four other of my ancestors.

Tom often carried Amanda on his back as he walked beside their wagon, which by then had switched from horses to oxen, because her feet were bleeding.  They arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake in September and settled near along the Rockies at the mouth of Mill Creek Canyon, but again they didn’t stay long.

In 1859, Tom and by then 15-year-old Amanda headed 80 miles further north up into Cache Valley, among the first to settle Fort Mendon snug against the towering Wellsville Mountains.

Located at what was then the best entrance to the valley from near the border with Idaho, Mendon is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the valley.  Nine miles east, on the other side of the valley, tight against the Bear River Mountains lies slightly younger Logan, home of Utah State University, where my lawyer-daughter first attended college.

On a cross-country trip in 2011, I crossed the valley at this point on scenic route 30 as I traveled between the Pacific Northwest to connect with I-80 East in Wyoming.

Route 30 highway crosses the “Big Slough” of the Little Bear River just northwest of what would have been Fort Mendon and 20 miles south of where, two years later, my “Bowman” ancestors would settle Richmond and then Hyde Park.

The “Big Slough” holds significance.  My great x 3 grandfather, Tom Graham, left the fort in search of firewood there one day in the fall of 1864.  He was with young A.P. Shumway, Amanda’s husband, when he was, as is well documented by several researchers and authors, attacked and killed by a giant grizzly bear who was itself then hunted and killed.

While A.P. was bringing around the horse-drawn wagon, Tom had exchanged his rifle for an ax and while wading into some willows had stumbled on to the very entrance to the grizzly’s den.  If he saw it coming, Tom’s last view nay have been of a 12 inch long, 8 inch wide paw with huge protruding claws.

A grizzly stands about 6 foot tall and three feet wide and even at 700 lbs. can run 30 miles per hour.  Even though he was reportedly renowned as a bear hunter, he had appeared unarmed where they would be their most fierce and protective.

People in the tiny fort were shook, but none more than A.P. who had discovered Tom’s body.  As is documented, Tom was seen as invincible and described in his early fifties as “a man of prodigious strength and courage…tall, rawboned, with a pair of heavy wide shoulders tapering to a flat slender waistline…”

He would tease folks by taking a rattlesnake by the neck and spitting tobacco juice in its mouth to kill it.  Much like my uncle Louis Davis did from the bumper of his pickup when I was young, Tom could sit eight feet from the door of his log cabin and spit tobacco juice through the latch hole.

As has been true in my family for at least six generations, he was also very good with horses.

None of these feats were a match for a grizzly and Tom’s body was taken back to Salt Lake City for burial.  In my family, we grew up with an appreciation for grizzlies.

Grizzly Bear population declined from 100,000 across North America when Europeans arrived to less than 50,000 when my great x 3 grandfather’s remarkable life came to an end after spanning 2,500 miles of the continent.

The Grizzly population was near extinction by the 1970s when I was in college and became a protected species because of the unique role these bears play in stimulating ecosystem services.

Now through protection, Grizzlies have been coaxed back to 700, nearly all in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem where I was born and the conservation challenge is the threat to their food sources and how to limit conflict with humans.

Now in recovery, one of the areas where grizzlies most like to range is again from Yellowstone across into my native Fremont County, Idaho, two hundred miles north of where my great x3 grandfather had that fateful encounter along what I often term the fault line of my youth.

They are drawn across the Targhee by the migration pattern of the 2,000-strong Sand Creek elk herd as it moves back and forth passing near our ancestral ranch traveling from winter feeding grounds along the creek to their home in the Park in spring, summer and fall.

Since the 1880s, this nook of Idaho has been known grizzlies, drawn even more by the distinctive Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout native to the Henry’s Fork River as they are to elk, deer and moose there.

Another 50,000 Grizzlies across Alaska and northwest Canada, 30,000 alone in Alaska where I lived in the 1980s.

I have a feeling that despite his unfortunate encounter, Thomas Bradford Graham would be impressed as I bet will be my grandsons, his great x 5.