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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Destinations Special: Summer Road Trips
Raising North Dakota
Horrible winters. A dwindling, aging population. Abandoned farms reverting to prairie grass. Perfect, says our writer.

By Bill Vaughn


	(Illustration by Jason Holley)

THIS WAS THE BEST MOMENT to walk among them, right after the crash and thunder of their annual orgy, when the bulls have fought and fornicated to happy oblivion and the cows are pregnant. Grasping a fistful of prairie grass like that shuffling caveman in Quest for Fire, I edged close enough to the herd of wild bison to smell the sweet musk on their shaggy coats. Though these behemoths seem ponderous and in their aprés-party torpor sleepy and docile, a panicked one-ton bull can accelerate to 30 miles an hour in less time than a quarter horse, as the beast's gored and flattened victims have discovered too late. Plus, you never know what might piss one off. Double plus, both boys and girls have horns.

So I retreated. But not before taking a hard look into the face of North Dakota's history, and what may be its future. I'd been hearing that much of my beloved old state—where I spent three gloriously wanton years as a teenager—is marching back into its past as the Indian population grows and the white population declines, bison herds are resurrected, and prairie grass replaces wheat. Imagine it: a vast chunk of America beginning to hum again with the romance and true grit of the frontier.

While I drove the 600 miles from my swampy ranchette in western Montana to the North Dakota state line, I concocted a heroic picture of myself on these brave new savannas, loping on my mare through stirrup-high bluestem waving narcotically in the wind, riding out to check on my own personal herd of bison. In this fantasy I looked like Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. Only I sat the horse better. In reality, I was looking for new digs, a climate healthier than the overpriced acres of buggy floodplain my wife, Kitty, and I owned. In my ancient Ford Bronco, I planned to crisscross North Dakota, searching the emptied, down-and-out spaces between its little cities for that sweet thing every American covets: a killer bargain in real estate. Some wild and abandoned place where we could afford to surround ourselves with a serious chunk of turf.

Prairie that looked just like this, I thought. On a golden autumn day on the bluffs above the Missouri River 25 miles upstream from Bismarck, it was easy to experience the illusion of the frontier; the riverscape was nearly identical to the one Lewis and Clark described. I wandered down a coulee, looking for an old ghost town I'd read about named Sanger, one of scores of vacant villages no one has the heart or energy to tear down, places amateur historians like to say are "mute testimony to nature's grim fury," or suchlike. Since no one else seemed to want Sanger, I figured maybe Kitty and I could grab it for a song. I pictured us quartering ourselves on the second floor of a former bank, say, or a hardware store.

At the bottom of the bluffs I made my way across a terrace plush with yellow grass as high as a prairie wolf's eye, mindful of the open wells and basements that riddle these old towns. I entered what looked like Main Street—or, rather, a game trail that used to be Main Street. From a window in one of the broken houses, a lace curtain flapped madly, like a cheap trick in a theme park, and was sucked back inside. Through the door of another house, a shadow fled across the bare laths of a sun-drenched wall. Something thumped and crashed, and there was a scritch of little feet. In the wind I heard voices singing. Or was this distant song only magpies yelling in a chokecherry thicket?

As the startling hush of night in North Dakota began to fall, I decided that Sanger would be perfect, if the price was right, and began planning our big move. Corral here, garden there, bison pastures on the terraces, beehives on the bluff. But the next morning I realized that my search for a little house on the prairie had just begun. As it turned out, the Nature Conservancy owned Sanger, and had a plan for its future, one that didn't include immigrants from Montana. Well, better the Conservancy than some rat bastard of a subdeveloper, I thought.

But who am I to cast the first stone?

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