We live in a land of accidental monuments. Mostly they were erected in the beginning of the last century and were not intended to mark the passage of great events. They were intended to be the beginnings of something. They dot the landscape in the form of leaning or tumbled down buildings surrounded by tree groves dying of thirst. Sometimes there are moldering corrals of rotten boards brought in by trains that no longer run. Sometimes the county road that once led to them is still passable. Sometimes those roads have been over taken by what was pushed aside to construct them. Often there is only a depression that marks the root cellar where precious vegetables were stored for the few years that the dream survived.

The story of the monuments that haunt this land is long and complicated. It involves immigrants, droughts, blizzards, and Federal Government programs that ignored the nature of the land. It is a story that has been romanticized in every medium and whose true impact has been largely ignored. But there is not room here to tell that story. It is too sad to squeeze into a few paragraphs. The story I want to tell is simpler. It's a couple dozen lines about last night.

Twenty years ago we built a cabin. With a little help we buried a water line and electric cable from an existing well to a concrete foundation we'd formed and poured and finished in the warmth of a couple spring days. On that foundation we built a floor and laid up fresh milled logs that joined together in a nifty way that sealed the wind on the outside and the clean fresh pine smell of the new wood on the inside. We nailed shake shingles on the roof, plumbed the bathroom, and installed the finest windows and doors we could afford. When we finished it was new and bright and as full of promise as a yearly colt. We were young and assumed that mortality was real.

Bear Butte was framed in the backdoor by design and from the tiny front porch you could see the finest sunsets in the world. It was a clever human structure that stood defiant in a land of constant wind, crushing snow, and violent fluctuations of temperature. But from any window, if you knew just where to look and if you looked closely, you could see the monuments of other human structures that once stood just as defiant.

It's been twenty years and the cabin still stands but the promise has faded. There have been complications and no one lives there now. But last night, on a rare visit, those shake shingles kept an icy rain off my back one more time. The old wood burner strained to care for me like no one has cared for that cabin in years. The wind came up around mid-night and I could feel it slipping through the joints that had been so tight when the wood was yellow with youth. I rose to stoke the fire and it dawned on me that every dream of the future is new and unique. I came to realize once again that I am a creature of The Great Plains and, perhaps more so than any other place on earth, that time is the sandpaper of life and our monuments are built by the unsuspecting.

by Gervase Hittle

Because I have retired from academia does not mean I have quit reading or have walked away from literature. Not by a long shot, folks. I am almost always reading at least two books, usually one fiction and one non-fiction.

In the non-fiction category I recently read two books on buffalo: The Time of the Buffalo by T. McHugh and Dale F. Lott's American Bison: A Natural History. These are two books to read if you want to learn something real about the American bison and the environment of the Great Plains. Both books cover a lot of ground, ranging from the genealogical history of the buffalo to a proposal for the restoration of the wild, as opposed to the domesticated, buffalo. Both books are well written, albeit in different styles; both are well researched and contain thorough bibliographies and indices. Both are good reads with easy to comprehend narrative presentations and a sense of humor.

Aside: without humor the seemingly capricious and often comical actions of animals, the vastness, space and violence of nature on the Great Plains would be so overwhelming as to render this area almost uninhabitable by human beings. Humor mitigates hardship; irony generates an edge-like humor. The American bison, once thought to be the enemy of peace and progress, was brought near to extinction by a "right thinking," non-native population. The last laugh is yet to come; still a long way off because the irony is only now being realized. A good author gets this and McHugh and Lott are good authors.

Later this month the buffalo on this ranch will be turned out to winter pasture on the U.S. Forest Service managed grasslands, year number two of unfettered, undisturbed grazing in the natural habitat on which these animals deserve to be. We relish the opportunity to turn them out on the winter pasture. Hell, we draw straws to see who gets to open the gate. Open the gate and get out of the way; the herd is on the move. Moving back to where it was when we came on the scene. Irony? "Buffalo were carried to near extinction by fear and utility. Then other attitudes saved them from total extinction and gave the species its present hoofhold on the future….its future will be decided by private attitudes of the future and by the politics that determine which attitudes are implemented. In America today all wild things and wilderness always hang by the slender thread of individuals giving a damn." (Dale F. Lott, American Bison, p. 184). And that, my friends, is where each and every one of us enters the picture-"individuals giving a damn." No joke.