Profile: Cowboys Are Their Weakness

In Big Sky country southeast of Glacier National Park, where the grassy waves of the Great Plains crash into the Rocky Mountain Front, the fiercely independent — some would say ornery — Rappold clan has made a go of ranching since 1882. "It's a challenge every day to live here, whether it's the wind, the cold, or the bears," says third-generation Montana cattleman Karl Rappold, 53. He's been tested by megafauna and weather as well as by the prospect of natural-gas rigs and roads tearing up the Front. Nature he'll deal with; it's the cost of dwelling in one of the most pristine and species-rich regions in the Lower 48. But drilling? "Not on my heritage."

The Rappold Ranch, 7,000 acres of private land and 300 head of certiÞed Black Angus, borders the Bob Marshall Wilderness and is part of the last remaining area where grizzlies still venture down into the grasslands from the backcountry. The family has reached an understanding with the bears and doesn't put calves in the upper pastures during the spring, when grizzlies are newly out of hibernation and hungry. In turn, the bears haven't bothered their livestock since about '59, Rappold says.

He also allows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to do "carcass distribution": Wildlife biologists collect dead animals from feedlots and scatter them during the first part of May along the high pastures, to keep the bears up in the mountains. "Some people don't like that we do this," he says, "but my theory is that if a bear's full, he's not gonna look at my cows. We operate our ranch so that we can coexist with them."

In addition to grizzlies, the ranch hosts black bears, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and white-tailed and mule deer — "and that's just the hunting species," Rappold says. There are also wolverines, Canadian lynx, mountain lions, and wolves. With the exception of bison, every species of mammal that roamed the area when Lewis and Clark came through can still be seen here.

These lands are hospitable to animals because the weather is inhospitable to humans. Chinook winds, originating off the PaciÞc coast, shoot up over the Rockies and down the Front with the power to boost temperatures by 50 degrees in a matter of hours. "Highly strung people may begin to shake or Þdget; susceptible people may get headaches or suffer nervous disorders," says one early account of the winds' impact. When the chinooks don't intervene, winter temperatures can dip to 30 degrees below zero.

This is the country Rappold's grandfather chose to homestead. A German immigrant, Charley Rappold tended bar in Helena until he had a grubstake put together, then headed north with a team of horses, a wagon, and provisions, stopping only when he was a comfortable distance from other human beings. Charley arrived in October and didn't have time to build a proper shelter before the snow set in, so he shot some bears, draped their hides around the wagon, and slept between the wheels that first winter.

In the spring he took his ax into the mountains and used his horses to drag logs down to a little furrow along Sheep Creek, which was semi-protected from the elements. Charley's initial claim, signed by President Grover Cleveland, covered 160 acres. Once settled, he got a mail-order bride, then another after the first one died in childbirth.

Charley's son, Johnny, was every bit as tough. He was born and raised on the ranch, and by the time he died at 89 — never having left the area — nearly every bone in his body had been broken at least once. By most accounts he was the best hunter in the region, but he almost put an end to his storied abilities before they developed. At the age of eight, after a day tracking game, he let his rifle slip as he entered the cabin.

"The gun went off, and the bullet went through his mouth; it blew his gum apart and took out his teeth, went back of his nose, and lodged behind his left eye," says Karl. "There wasn't a doctor around, and by the time one finally came through, the bullet was so lodged in there that they just left it. My dad died with a .32 Winchester slug buried in his head."

Rappold grew up on the ranch as well, in a modest home adjacent to his grandfather's log cabin, whose roof is now splintered, bowed, and teetering on collapse. His only prolonged absences were weekends and summers during an eight-year stint riding saddle broncos and bulls on the rodeo circuit. He quit after his daughter and son were born. "It just wasn't worth the risk of getting killed on a bull anymore," he says.

Now he and his wife, Teri, run the ranch — his son, Johnny, manages the Boone and Crockett Club's Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Ranch just south of them — and still do all the cow work on their horses, "putting in a lot of 14- and 16-hour days." Rappold says he knows pretty much every inch of the Front. "I've spent a lifetime exploring it and still do to this day. I never get tired of riding over it on my horse."

Advocates for gas drilling in the area discovered the hard way that Rappold had no intention of maneuvering his horse around earthmovers, trucks, and drill pads. In one of the precious few environmental victories during the Bush administration, last year the Department of the Interior put oil and gas exploration along the 100-mile stretch of the Front on hold for at least four years, until a study of the area is complete. In announcing the suspension, assistant Interior secretary Rebecca Watson said, "The Rocky Mountain Front is important for wildlife...We need to step back and look at the issue on a landscape level to be sure we conserve our resources in a balanced way."

Watson's commonsense statement — a tempering of the department's hard-line attitude toward energy exploitation on public lands — was in no small part shaped by Karl Rappold.

In 2000, a Canadian company called Startech announced plans to activate its lease and drill in the Bureau of Land Management's Blindhorse Outstanding Natural Area along the Front. Conservation groups immediately organized to oppose the bid. Though a 1999 poll by the Great Falls Tribune found that, by a 2-to-1 margin, Montanans wanted the Front protected from oil and gas development, conservationists were ignored by state and federal officials.

At first the Rappolds sat on the sidelines. "There have been battles on this issue since the '80s," Rappold says. "We knew what was going on, but we were busy running the ranch." When he realized that his property was within view of the proposed project, however, his attitude changed. "All of a sudden it started to concern us; it was time to get involved." Teri, a former professional model with a sweet and generous disposition, began talking to women's groups and ranch wives. "I don't really like doing that sort of thing, but I got pretty good at it," she says. As a fourth-generation Montanan from the area, Teri's views about protecting the Front were respected.

When the Rappolds attended their first Bureau of Land Management scoping meeting, where the public was invited to comment on the Blindhorse drilling proposal, their allegiance to those who wanted the Front protected was sealed. "I told the meeting I'm not against natural-resource development," Rappold says. "But if we're down to the point where we need to destroy the Front to get a little dab of natural gas, it's time we started looking at new sources of energy." According to a 1995 study by the U.S. Geological Survey, there's barely enough natural gas in the entire Montana Overthrust Belt (an area that includes Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall Wilderness, in addition to the Front) to meet a month of the nation's demand.

Rappold isn't as skittish around environmentalists as some of his Montana counterparts. In 1998, in an effort to maintain the wild open spaces of his ranch for his descendants, he began talks with the Nature Conservancy and placed conservation easements — restrictions that prohibit areas from being developed, even if the land is sold — on more than 4,000 acres of rangeland. "It was a big decision to sign on the dotted line because it means the protection is forever — there's no going back." When he teamed up with the Nature Conservancy, Rappold lost a lot of friends, who felt he'd sold his soul to green devils.

"I never did understand why it was their concern," he says. "It's my ranch, my decision, and if my children and grandchildren want to inherit it, these are the terms. Maybe I'm arrogant, but I own this land, and this is the way it's going to be." In boots and a cowboy hat, Rappold stands at more than six feet, four inches. Though he has a disarming smile, when he's exercised about a topic, such as neighbors having an opinion about whom he should associate with or what he should do with his land, he tends to lower his voice and lean forward in a vaguely menacing way. (In conversations, he frequently commented that he wasn't "used to letting things bounce off.") If I were the one irritating him, I might prefer to stand just beyond arm's length.

Under the agreement reached with the Nature Conservancy, Rappold's property cannot be subdivided or used for open-pit mining (unlike most property owners in the Rocky Mountain West, the Rappolds staked their claim under the Þrst Homestead Act and so own the land's subsurface mineral rights). "I want my grandsons to be able to saddle up their horses and see the same things I do," Rappold says. "I don't want them to saddle up and ride around a housing development or gas Þelds or something like that." He adds, "To me, you can't go wrong protecting something in the way it was put. Men cannot go in and change Mother Nature's hand and think they can come back later and reclaim it; it doesn't work that way."

Rappold also wrote to the president of the Boone and Crockett hunting club, Bob Model, asking him to oppose the Blindhorse plan. "My main point was that the club had bought the ranch in memory of Teddy Roosevelt, that they're a conservation-minded group, and that allowing industrialized development didn't fit" with Roosevelt's conservation ideas. According to Rappold, it was the club's powerful members, many of whom are Texas and Oklahoma oilmen, who then carried that conservation message to President George W. Bush.

Founded in 1887 by Roosevelt, the Boone and Crockett Club focused initially on the protection of big game. Model is a strong supporter of Bush and was a guest — along with other leaders of hook-and-bullet organizations — at the president's Crawford ranch last April. "The club believes in responsible use," says Model. "There are places that need to be protected, and there are places that can be developed responsibly."

Model says that he's never met Rappold personally and that the club's views on resource development are determined on a case-by-case basis. Of the Front, he says that to be in favor of locking it up forever "is not something we can comment on at this point," but as for a temporary suspension of development to take a hard look at alternatives: "That's something we asked for and got."

When I ask whether Boone and Crockett Club members with ties to the oil industry inßuenced Bush on the issue of drilling in the Front, Model says: "Let's put it this way. We are proud we played a role in pointing out that probably they needed to reevaluate what they were doing on the Front. We were very pleased when Assistant Secretary Watson made that announcement."

Whereas some worked their connections to the Bush administration behind the scenes in making the case for protection of the Front, Rappold spoke his mind without cover. "It takes tremendous courage to stand up in an ultraconservative area, where the big push of the Republican Party is to develop and exploit, and say to his fellow ranchers and other agricultural people that he is aligning with environmentalists, that he doesn't want drilling here," says Rappold's friend Stoney Burk.

A country lawyer in Choteau, 20 miles south of Rappold's ranch, Burk is a Vietnam vet who wears a ßeece-lined corduroy jacket to work instead of a suit. He's an avid outdoorsman who's been hunting and camping along the Front for 22 years. When Rappold was named a "Wilderness Hero" in 2004 by the Campaign for America's Wilderness, Burk presented the award.

Burk says that no one individual can take full credit for the fact that the administration has backed off its no-holds-barred drilling strategy along the Front, but that Rappold's perspective tipped the balance in important ways. He recounts how, in 2004, he and several representatives from Montana conservation groups traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with their representatives. According to Burk, they had a good meeting with Senator Max Baucus (D), but former cattleman Senator Conrad Burns (R) wouldn't see them. They met with Burns's staff but left empty-handed.

A month or so later, Rappold was asked by a member of Burk's failed delegation to go to Washington and meet with Burns. Rappold said no, it was calving season, but after a long conversation Þnally relented. He traveled with two other ranchers from the Front; it was the Þrst time he'd been so far east. The group was initially told that Burns was busy and could not meet with them, but after a few minutes, Burns's chief of staff left the room and returned with the senator. "He knows my family because he used to be in the Hereford cattle business," says Rappold.

Everyone shook hands. The senator sat down at the table and stayed for nearly an hour. "We were his people," says Rappold. "We weren't environmental people. We were grassroots people from the Montana Rocky Mountain Front, the people who live and work there." Rappold told Burns they wanted the drilling leases bought out and swapped for less fragile land elsewhere in Montana, and future protection for the Front. "There ain't no other kind of protection than wilderness [designation] that will permanently protect it, and we ßat told him that," Rappold says. "I think what moved him was the fact that Montana ranchers took time out of the calving season to go back to Washington and say, ÔWe've got to stop this; we don't want it in our backyard.'"

Most involved in the Þght to save the Front call that meeting a turning point. Burns deÞnitely did not buy into the wilderness idea (he opposes more wilderness designations; in 1989 he had to apologize for questioning the patriotism of wilderness supporters). Yet in a press release his office put out after the meeting, Burns said that though he didn't "like the idea of taking these lands out of production," he was not averse to a swap-out of the leases — if funds could be raised privately. "There is a precedent for private groups purchasing land that is important to them from a conservation perspective," he said, adding, "I think it would be worthwhile . . . to explore these options." Startech officials have announced they would consider lease swaps or buyouts, and conservation groups are working to raise the funds necessary to purchase those leases.

Though drilling has been temporarily suspended, Rappold understands that in the current political climate he could have to reÞght the same battle in 2007, when the government starts a broader study of land use along the Front. He notes that in Montana "the word Ôwilderness' sends fear through people" because they worry that it's just land seizure by the federal government. Nonetheless, he is now advocating permanent wilderness designation for the mile-and-a-half strip near his ranch in which the Blindhorse area lies. The vulnerable stretch he's interested in would include part of the Lewis and Clark National Forest and bind it to the Bob Marshall Wilderness, uniting the habitat and forever foreclosing on industrial development. He adds, "This is wild country for the wildlife, and that's the way it's going to stay as long as I have any fight in me."

Rappold acknowledges that, in Montana at least, it matters who delivers the conservation message. "The U.S. senator is there to represent the people of Montana. It shouldn't matter whether I wear a cowboy hat or whether you are an environmentalist. But it does. That's why I guess environmentalists and ranchers make a good team." He adds: "Without environmental organizations, a handful of ranchers from the Front wouldn't have had anywhere to go. But environmentalists have the political knowledge, and we have the experience of the land. Together we made a powerful front to the BLM, U.S. senators, and apparently the president of the United States."