A couple of weeks ago I attended a “Wilderness Symposium” held in Rapid City. The four presenters represented a wide variety of concerns and beliefs, about proper uses of public land. But it was not only a question about public land use that attracted me, it was specifically a question about the Indian Creek Draw area and a proposal to designate that area as the first wilderness area within a national grassland, the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. This issue interests me particularly because this Wild Idea Buffalo company ranch holds a winter grazing allotment that includes that area. We fenced that area, and more, for buffalo, and that fence benefits every ranch that borders it and every rancher that has a summer cattle grazing allotment. Here’s the catch. From that symposium I learned that no two people can or will define wilderness in the same way; and, as I have not yet read the Indian Creek Wilderness Proposal, I cannot now comment on its definition of and concerns for wilderness. I do, however understand that neither theories nor the reality of wilderness are simple issues.
On the 27th of this month we will turn out our allotted number of buffalo to the Big Corral Draw and Indian Creek Draw units of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands. Last year about this time we did the same thing, and we had a little fanfare and celebration on that occasion because it was the first time that buffalo had grazed that area in a very long time, a hundred and twenty years, maybe longer. This year will be simpler, in a lower key. One of us will open the gate, and we will point the herd toward it. When the lead animal, usually a cow, sees the gate, we will watch them go through; then one of us will close the gate, and we, too, will go home. The buffalo will be free to ramble over twenty two thousand essentially no road acres. For all intent and purpose this is a wild herd.
So back to wilderness we go. Is wilderness an untouched, natural vastness? Is it possible for a wilderness to be used by enterprising human beings without its being destroyed? Can it be to some extent entrepreneurial? If so, to what extent would be feasible? Can wilderness support the grazing of cattle and privately owned herds of buffalo? Can we have bears and wolves and mountain lions in an ecological balance with everything else that would be normal and natural in a prairie badlands/grasslands such as that found in the area of the Indian Creek Wilderness Proposal? Can wilderness sustain the variety of interests that people desire for the uses of the public’s land: rock hounds and fossil hunters, prospecting and/or mining, hunting and grazing, habitat for wild horse herds and for large four-footed predators, and snowmobile and cross-country ski trails? How nice it would be if defining wilderness on public lands were neat, clean, and simple; but it is not. It will never be so long as people spout theories of wilderness without definitions or if they arrive at a definition and cannot establish a plan of action by which to make theory and definition a reality.
By the time you read this article, the Wild Idea Buffalo herd will be contentedly grazing, producing meat from grass and water, on their traditional homeland and being totally oblivious to the hue and cry of people wondering what it is all about. And I am proud to be a part of the plan of action that brought about the possibility for buffalo to re-inhabit, for part of a year, these lands on which they now stand.