CHAPTER 1
Under Montana's Big Sky

When I asked my friend Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of microbiology at Stanford University near San Francisco, why he had bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, he told me how it had fitted into the story of his life:

"I was born in New York state and then moved to Rhode Island. That meant that, as a child, I knew nothing about mountains. While I was in my early 20's, just after graduating college, I took off a couple of years from my education to work on the night shift in a hospital autopsy room. For a young person like myself without previous experience of death, it was very stressful. A friend who had just returned from the Korean War and had seen a lot of stress there took one look at me and said, 'Stan, you look nervous; you need to reduce your stress level. Try fly-fishing!'

"So I started fly-fishing to catch bass. I learned how to tie my own flies, really got into it, and went fishing every day after work. My friend was right: it did reduce stress. But then I entered graduate school in Rhode Island and got into another stressful work situation. A fellow graduate student told me that bass weren't the only fish that one could catch by fly-fishing: I could also fly-fish for trout nearby in Massachusetts. So I took up trout-fishing. My thesis supervisor loved to eat fish, and he encouraged me to go fishing: those were the only occasions when he didn't frown at my taking time off from work in the laboratory.

"Around the time that I turned 50, it was another stressful period of my life, because of a difficult divorce and other things. By then, I was taking off time to go fly-fishing only three times a year. Fiftieth birthdays make many of us reflect on what we want to do with what's left of our lives. I reflected on my own father's life, and I remembered that he had died at age 58. I realized with a jolt that, if I were to live only as long as he did, I could count on only 24 more fly-fishing trips before I died. That felt like very few times to do something that I enjoyed so much. The realization made me start thinking about how I could spend more of my time doing what I really liked during the years that I had left, including fly-fishing.

"At that point, I happened to be asked to go evaluate a research laboratory in the Bitterroot Valley of southwestern Montana. I had never been to Montana before; in fact, I had never even been west of the Mississippi River until I was 40 years old. I flew into Missoula airport, picked up a rental car, and began to drive south to the town of Hamilton where the lab was located. A dozen miles south of Missoula is a long straight stretch of road where the valley floor is flat and covered with farmland, and where the snowcapped Bitterroot Mountains on the west and the Sapphire Mountains on the east rise abruptly from the valley. I was overwhelmed by the beauty and scale of it; I had never seen anything like it before. It filled me with a sense of peace, and with an extraordinary perspective on my place in the world.

"When I arrived at the lab, I ran into a former student of mine who was working there and knew about my interest in fly-fishing. He suggested that I come back the next year to do some experiments at the lab, and also to go fly-fishing for trout, for which the Bitterroot River is famous. So I returned the next summer with the intention of spending two weeks, and I ended up staying a month. The summer after that, I came intending to stay a month and ended up staying for the whole summer, at the end of which my wife and I bought a house in the valley. We have been coming back ever since, spending a large part of each year in Montana. Every time I return to the Bitterroot, when I enter it on that stretch of road south of Missoula, that first sight of the valley fills me again with that same feeling of tranquility and grandeur, and that same perspective on my relation to the universe. It's easier to preserve that sense in Montana than anywhere else."

That's what the beauty of Montana does to people: both to those who had grown up in places completely unlike it, like Stan Falkow and me; to other friends, like John Cook, who grew up in other mountainous areas of the American West but still found themselves drawn to Montana; and to still other friends, like the Hirschy family, who did grow up in Montana and chose to stay there.

Like Stan Falkow, I was born in the northeastern U.S. (Boston) and had never been west of the Mississippi until the age of 15, when my parents took me to spend a few weeks of the summer in the Big Hole Basin just south of the Bitterroot Valley (map, p. 31). My father was a pediatrician who had taken care of a ranchers' child, Johnny Eliel, afflicted by a rare disease for which his family pediatrician in Montana had recommended that he go to Boston for specialty treatment. Johnny was a great-grandson of Fred Hirschy Sr., a Swiss immigrant who became one of the pioneer ranchers in the Big Hole in the 1890s. His son Fred Jr., by the time of my visit 69 years old, was still running the family ranch, along with his grown sons Dick and Jack Hirschy and his daughters Jill Hirschy Eliel (Johnny's mother) and Joyce Hirschy McDowell. Johnny did well under my father's treatment, and so his parents and grandparents invited our family to come visit them.

Also like Stan Falkow, I was immediately overwhelmed by the Big Hole's setting: a broad flat valley floor covered with meadows and meandering creeks, but surrounded by a wall of seasonally snow-covered mountains rising abruptly on every horizon. Montana calls itself the "Big Sky State." It's really true. In most other places where I've lived, either one's view of the lower parts of the sky is obscured by buildings, as in cities; or else there are mountains but the terrain is rugged and the valleys are narrow, so one sees only a slice of the sky, as in New Guinea and the Alps; or else there is a broad expanse of sky but it's less interesting, because there is no ring of distinctive mountains on the horizon—as on the plains of Iowa and Nebraska. Three years later, while I was a student in college, I came back for the summer to Dick Hirschy's ranch with two college friends and my sister, and we all worked for the Hirschys on the hay harvest, I driving a scatterrake, my sister a buckrake, and my two friends stacking hay.

After that summer of 1956, it was a long time before I returned to Montana. I spent my summers in other places that were beautiful in other ways, such as New Guinea and the Andes, but I couldn't forget Montana or the Hirschys. Finally, in 1998 I happened to receive an invitation from a private non-profit foundation called the Teller Wildlife Refuge in the Bitterroot Valley. It was an opportunity to bring my own twin sons to Montana, at an age only a few years younger than the age at which I had first visited the state, and to introduce them to fly-fishing for trout. My boys took to it; one of them is now learning to be a fishing guide. I reconnected to Montana and revisited my rancher boss Dick Hirschy and his brother and sisters, who were now in their 70s and 80s, still working hard all year round, just as when I had first met them 45 years previously. Since that reconnection, my wife and sons and I have been visiting Montana every year—drawn to it ultimately by the same unforgettable beauty of its big sky that drew or kept my other friends there (Plates 1–3).

That big sky grew on me. After living for so many years elsewhere, I found that it took me several visits to Montana to get used to the panorama of the sky above, the mountain ring around, and the valley floor below—to appreciate that I really could enjoy that panorama as a daily setting for part of my life—and to discover that I could open myself up to it, pull myself away from it, and still know that I could return to it. Los Angeles has its own practical advantages for me and my family as a year-round base of work, school, and residence, but Montana is infinitely more beautiful and (as Stan Falkow said) peaceful. To me, the most beautiful view in the world is the view down to the Big Hole's meadows and up to the snowcapped peaks of the Continental Divide, as seen from the porch of Jill and John Eliel's ranch house.

Montana in general, and the Bitterroot Valley in its southwest, are a land of paradoxes. Among the lower 48 states, Montana is the third largest in area, yet the sixth smallest in population, hence the second lowest in population density. Today the Bitterroot Valley looks lush, belying its original natural vegetation of just sagebrush. Ravalli County in which the valley is located is so beautiful and attracts so many immigrants from elsewhere in the U.S. (including even from elsewhere in Montana) that it is one of our nation's fastest growing counties, yet 70% of its own high school graduates leave the valley, and most of those leave Montana. Although population is increasing in the Bitterroot, it is falling in eastern Montana, so that for the state of Montana as a whole the population trend is flat. Within the past decade the number of Ravalli County residents in their 50s has increased steeply, but the number in their 30s has actually decreased. Some of the people recently establishing homes in the valley are extremely wealthy, such as the brokerage house founder Charles Schwab and the Intel president Craig Barrett, but Ravalli County is nevertheless one of the poorest counties in the state of Montana, which in turn is nearly the poorest state in the U.S. Many of the county's residents find that they have to hold two or three jobs even to earn an income at U.S. poverty levels.

We associate Montana with natural beauty. Indeed, environmentally Montana is perhaps the least damaged of the lower 48 states; ultimately, that's the main reason why so many people are moving to Ravalli County. The federal government owns over one-quarter of the land in the state and three-quarters of the land in the county, mostly under the title of national forest. Nevertheless, the Bitterroot Valley presents a microcosm of the environmental problems plaguing the rest of the United States: increasing population, immigration, increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality, toxic wastes, heightened risks from wildfires, forest deterioration, losses of soil or of its nutrients, losses of biodiversity, damage from introduced pest species, and effects of climate change.

Montana provides an ideal case study with which to begin this book on past and present environmental problems. In the case of the past societies that I shall discuss—Polynesian, Anasazi, Maya, Greenland Norse, and others—we know the eventual outcomes of their inhabitants' decisions about managing their environment, but for the most part we don't know their names or personal stories, and we can only guess at the motives that led them to act as they did. In contrast, in modern Montana we do know names, life histories, and motives. Some of the people involved have been my friends for over 50 years. From understanding Montanans' motives, we can better imagine motives operating in the past. This chapter will put a personal face on a subject that could otherwise seem abstract.

In addition, Montana provides a salutory balance to the following chapters' discussions of small, poor, peripheral, past societies in fragile environments. I intentionally chose to discuss those societies because they were the ones suffering the biggest consequences of their environmental damage, and they thus powerfully illustrate the processes that form the subject of this book. But they are not the only types of societies exposed to serious environmental problems, as illustrated by the contrast case of Montana. It is part of the richest country in the modern world, and it is one of the most pristine and least populated parts of that country, seemingly with fewer problems of environment and population than the rest of the U.S. Certainly, Montana's problems are far less acute than those of crowding, traffic, smog, water quality and quantity, and toxic wastes that beset Americans in Los Angeles, where I live, and in the other urban areas where most Americans live. If, despite that, even Montana has environmental and population problems, it becomes easier to understand how much more serious those problems are elsewhere in the U.S. Montana will illustrate the five main themes of this book: human impacts on the environment; climate change; a society's relations with neighboring friendly societies (in the case of Montana, those in other U.S. states); a society's exposure to acts of other potentially hostile societies (such as overseas terrorists and oil producers today); and the importance of a society's responses to its problems.

The same environmental disadvantages that penalize food production throughout the whole of the American Intermontane West also limit Montana's suitability for growing crops and raising livestock. They are: Montana's relatively low rainfall, resulting in low rates of plant growth; its high latitude and high altitude, both resulting in a short growing season and limiting crops to one a year rather than the two a year possible in areas with a longer summer; and its distance from markets in the more densely populated areas of the U.S. that might buy its products. What those disadvantages mean is that anything grown in Montana can be grown more cheaply and with higher productivity, and transported faster and more cheaply to population centers, elsewhere in North America. Hence Montana's history consists of attempts to answer the fundamental question of how to make a living in this beautiful, but agriculturally non-competitive land.

Human occupation of Montana falls into several economic phases. The first phase was of Native Americans, who arrived at least 13,000 years ago. In contrast to the agricultural societies that they developed in eastern and southern North America, Montana's Native Americans before European arrival remained hunter-gatherers, even in areas where agriculture and herding are practiced today. One reason is that Montana lacked native wild plant and animal species lending themselves to domestication, so there were no independent origins of agriculture in Montana, in contrast to the situation in eastern North America and Mexico. Another reason is that Montana lay far from those two Native American centers of independent agricultural origins, so that crops originating there had not spread to Montana by the time of European arrival. Today, about three-quarters of Montana's remaining Native Americans live on seven reservations, most of which are poor in natural resources except for pasture.

The first recorded Europeans to visit Montana were the members of the transcontinental Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806, which spent more time in what was later to become Montana than in any other state. They were followed by Montana's second economic phase involving the "mountain men," fur trappers and traders coming down from Canada and also from the U.S. The next phase began in the 1860s and was based on three foundations of Montana's economy that have continued (albeit with diminishing importance) until the present: mining, especially of copper and gold; logging; and food production, involving raising cattle and sheep and growing grains, fruits, and vegetables. The influx of miners to Montana's big copper mine at Butte stimulated other sectors of the economy to meet the needs of that internal market within the state. In particular, much timber was taken out of the nearby Bitterroot Valley to provide power for the mines, to construct miners' houses, and to shore up the mine shafts; and much food for the miners was grown in the valley, whose southerly location and mild climate (by Montana standards) give it the nickname of "Montana's Banana Belt." Although the valley's rainfall is low (13 inches per year) and the natural vegetation is sagebrush, the first European settlers in the 1860s already began overcoming that disadvantage by building small irrigation ditches fed by streams draining the Bitterroot Mountains on the valley's west side; and later, by engineering two sets of large-scale and expensive irrigation systems, one (the so-called Big Ditch) built in 1908–1910 to take water from Lake Como on the west side of the valley, and the other consisting of several large irrigation canals drawing water from the Bitterroot River itself. Among other things, irrigation permitted a boom in apple orchards that began in the Bitterroot Valley in the 1880s and peaked in the early decades of the 20th century, but today few of those orchards remain in commercial operation.

Of those former bases of Montana's economy, hunting and fishing have shifted from a subsistence activity to a recreation; the fur trade is extinct; and mines, logging, and agriculture are declining in importance, because of economic and environmental factors to be discussed below. Instead, the sectors of the economy that are growing nowadays are tourism, recreation, retirement living, and health care. A symbolic landmark in the Bitterroot Valley's recent economic transformation took place in 1996, when a 2,600-acre farm called the Bitterroot Stock Farm, formerly the estate of the Montana copper baron Marcus Daly, was acquired by the wealthy brokerage house owner Charles Schwab. He began to develop Daly's estate for very rich out-of-staters who wanted a second (or even a third or fourth) home in the beautiful valley to visit for fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and golfing a couple of times each year. The Stock Farm includes an 18-hole championship golf course and about 125 sites for what are called either houses or cabins, "cabin" being a euphemism for a structure of up to six bedrooms and 6,000 square feet selling for $800,000 or more. Buyers of Stock Farm lots must be able to prove that they meet high standards of net worth and income, the least of which is the ability to afford a club membership initiation fee of $125,000, which is more than seven times the average annual income of Ravalli County residents. The whole Stock Farm is fenced, and the entrance gate bears a sign, MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY. Many of the owners arrive by private jet and rarely shop or set foot in Hamilton, but prefer to eat at the Stock Farm club or else have their groceries picked up from Hamilton by club employees. As one local Hamilton resident explained to me bitterly, "You can spot coveys of the aristocracy when they decide to go slumming downtown in tight packs like foreign tourists."

Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2005.