These lands are treasures

EDORA, N.D. -- While the rest of the world was preoccupied with leaking oil wells, drunken celebrities and feuding politicians, we'd been following the Old Red Trail across those wide-open spaces of my childhood, known as North Dakota, a trail early explorers had marked with an occasional smear of red paint, guiding trappers and traders seeking the Promise Land.

For us, this was a nostalgic step back. We were looking down the same lonely pathway that had guided my grandfather and other settlers more than a century ago as they moved west into the Indian territories and gold fields. It was this trail that the military had followed earlier, establishing fortified relay stations approximately every 30 miles, or about a day's travel by horse. Along the way, the Native Americans, resenting the taking of their lands, began to object. The military's arrival marked the beginning of the Sioux Wars with the July 1864 killing of several hundred Native Americans and the destroying of their homes and winter supplies at a lonely place known as Killdeer Mountain.

Standing high atop a rainbow-tinted ridge, we found ourselves in a mysterious elsewhere, looking over an ethereal world in which wild, unforgiving land filled with steep mountains and impassible ravines stretched beyond the horizon. This remains hard, brutal country, the land of prairie dog and antelope, the final refuges of the American bison. It is an inhospitable land where winter temperatures plummet to 50 degrees below, with unbroken wind screaming out of the Arctic. The dry lands receive less than 12 inches of rain a year, and summer days often sizzle well past 100 dry degrees.

It was near where we stood that our future 26th president looking down on the Little Missouri River flowing north from the Elkhorn Ranch, then a working ranch, became aware of the rapid loss of those natural resources - the forests, water, wildlife and soil, those places of beauty that helped make this such a great nation.

It was here, as Theodore Roosevelt rode his horse through the grasslands that he began to build the concept of establishing the national forest and park system.

As a sportsman, he was appalled at the wanton destruction of wildlife and land and forests. Here he conceived the concept of preserving national treasures for the future generations, not as a so called "tree hugger" but a conservationist in its true meaning, the wise use and protection of the natural world.

Roosevelt threw his weight behind such environmental leaders as George Marsh, John Wesley Powell and the Boone and Crockett Club. Among them, too, was Gifford Pinchot of Asheville, the nation's first professional forester who had been managing the Vanderbilt properties before taking over the U.S. Forest Service and establishing the basic management rules under which today, within our national forests, limited and managed hunting, fishing and grazing are permitted.

As we walked back to the car, the throaty warble of a western meadowlark echoed from amid the desert grasses. Ground squirrels scurried close by. From the river below came the soulful calling of wild geese.

Word was floating about of a rich precious-metal strike not too far from the ranch. It was time to move on.