West from a Rocky Mountain valley in Montana, I can identify with both Thoreau's pathos and Huffman's lament, and less clearly I can see what Plenty Coups meant when he said that after the historic period began for the whites, history ended for the Crows. Step out my door and I'm enveloped by a classic Western landscape that, at first glance, seems very little different from what the Salish and Kootenai saw here.The mountain valley and its sagebrush foothills haven't gone anywhere, and neither, in places, have the fescues and bluebunch wheatgrasses, the cottonwood and aspen groves along the river. But like all of us alive in this time, I inhabit an impoverished nature, an impoverishment made emblematic by the erasure of many of the great animals that once lived here. The bison herds that the early British traders describe frequenting this valley two centuries ago are entirely gone now.Considerable herds right to the end, but more and more sporadic in their appearances, until the last time or two it was almost magical, and they seemed rather like echoes of a past world than tangible beasts of the present. Soon the foothills no longer smelled like them, and their tracks no longer appeared along the creeks. Two winters' worth of snow melted their droppings into the soil, and magpies eventually hauled off all the lingering tufts of hair still snagged on the sagebrush. Their wallows gradually filled in with vegetation and disappeared. Their trails, which through the centuries had significantly shaped the very topography of the West, were appropriated by cattle, or deepened into gullies, or drifted in and became unrecognizable.Today, the only physical evidence that the great animals were ever here is the infrequent skull or scapula eroding out of a streambank. That, and accounts like those of the Snake River brigades and the oral memories of the native peoples, are about all that remain to testify that a century ago the Bitterroot Valley lay ...
