His first major decision was to retain the ranch manager, Bud Griffith. Griffith had worked on the Flying D for the Sheltons and, before them, the California-based Irvine Company. “I loved the property and just felt, ‘Well, I’ll go work for Ted Turner and work for the brand as I always have, no matter who the owner is,’” Griffith said. But Griffith was stunned when Turner issued an edict that bison would replace the D’s thousands of cattle, a move that would make “the brand” obsolete. Turner said he would never sear a firebrand into the sides of his bison.
Further changes were already planned. Under decades of intensive grazing by beef cows, both by the Sheltons and Irvine Company, the Flying D suffered from a litany of impacts. Some sections of creek bottom were mud holes. Riparian areas and uplands were denuded of vegetation. The bison would be managed in such a way as to lessen these impacts. “I had never been around bison before and I didn’t know a lot about them,” Griffith says, chuckling at his own naiveté. “I had no idea what was going to happen next. I got the impression it’s just what happens when you work for Ted Turner. He keeps things hopping.”
Turner also ordered Griffith to tear down interior barbwire fences that he and other ranch hands had spent decades erecting and maintaining. Down, too, came power poles and lines, corrals, and outbuildings. Turner put a halt to irrigated hay production on an interior portion of the ranch. That portion of ranch had yielded upwards of 1.5 tons of hay an acre but had pulled water out of the streams. Collectively, this was perceived by some of the traditionalists on the ranch as an order to disavow tradition, to turn their backs on their own sweat equity and the codes of the cowboy way.
Turner wanted a free-ranging bison herd within the confines of the ranch, which meant he had to build a perimeter fence to contain his bison. But first he had to locate animals to buy. An old friend of his, Maurice Strong, whom Turner had met through his establishment of the Better World Society and connections to the United Nations, happened to own a ranch in Colorado. Strong recommended a man, Brian Ward, who had experience in the buying and selling of both bison and cattle. Together with Russ Miller, Ward tried to discreetly put word out that Turner was ready to buy some bison. It ended up being one of the worst kept secrets in the New West.
Several months after Turner’s first call to start buying, Ward helped facilitate the purchase of one hundred bison from the National Bison Range. They were seed stock. Ward was on hand to watch the first convoys of semi-trailer trucks arrive at the Flying D. As the doors were opened and the clanking of hooves could be heard moving down the metal runways, he remembers thinking to himself, realizing it was a massive understatement: “This should be interesting.”
Turner’s recolonizing animals charged out of the open metal doors and away from the semis. They got out a ways and stopped, looked warily toward their human liberators, and sensing no harassment, bowed their heads to eat. It was an inspiring sight and at the same time anticlimactic.
“I was so excited,” Turner says. “Part of me couldn’t believe it was happening. I had goose bumps.” He had similar feelings a few years later as he and Wagner sat on their mounts.
It had been well more than a century since the last bison was spotted in this corner of the Gallatin Valley. “I would love to tell you that we knew what we were doing, but in those early years, we were more or less making it up as we went along,” Miller says. “I know it sounds hard to believe but in terms of scale of land and size of the herds, no one had done with bison what Ted had in mind.”
To illustrate, Miller describes a recent dinner conversation with Turner. “Ted asked if I had any idea when I started with him over two decades ago how big all of this would become? I told him I had no clue. And he replied, ‘Neither did I! But hasn’t it been fun?’ To which I responded, ‘Absolutely.’”
In the early 1990s, during a tour across the ranch, I rode with Griffith in a bouncy pickup across the rutted dirt backroads of the ranch. The notes scribbled in my notepad are jumbled but they reveal the essence of the conversation. Griffith expressed dubiousness about Turner’s sanguine assertions about bison. He was not happy and didn’t believe the bison experiment would work. He stopped short of disparaging his boss, though he was careful not to give me the impression he was an enthusiastic admirer of the animals.
Bison could be unruly, were far less docile than the cattle Griffith was accustomed to, and were dangerous if one wasn’t careful in moving through their space. Bulls were known to gore a horse or rider if one ventured too close.
But Ted’s feelings about cattle were just as negative. He said they weren’t majestic and needed pampering compared to bison, that wildness has been bred out of them, that they were dumb and trashed trout streams by eating all the vegetation and turning streamsides into mud bogs. Neighboring ranchers said it wasn’t the domestic bovines that were the problem but how they were managed.
Accustomed to speaking his mind, Turner got himself in hot water with the livestock industry when he demeaned cattle. “The negativity erupted volcanically because Ted is very vocal,” Griffith said. “I went to Russ Miller and said Ted needs to back off with his harsh comments about the livestock community and his perception of cattle. We went to Ted, but Ted said, ‘I’m raising bison, not cattle, and look at it this way, every time they complain they’re giving us a lot of free advertising for what we want to do.’”
Such pugilism may have worked well in battles Turner waged against media rivals and drumming up publicity for his sports teams, but it didn’t sit well in Montana. One morning, Griffith found a bison that had been shot dead.
“Ranchers always talk about what they do on their land is nobody else’s business but their own, as long as they’re not hurting their neighbors,” Turner told me at the time. “Okay, I can live with that. What have they got against me? They’ve never met me. What have they got against bison? What I’m doing isn’t impacting them. How can they judge me if they don’t even know who I am?”
Jim Peterson, a cattle rancher from Buffalo, Montana, who oversaw the Montana Stockgrowers Association and later became president of the Montana State Senate, was not amused. “He [Turner] says things that make a guy with a cowboy hat on his head want to scream,” he said at the time. He later reflected back on the conflict: “I hate to use the word ridiculous, but it’s not far off the mark. Ted was the new biggest guy on the block. The approach we took as stockgrowers is, ‘This guy needs some firsthand education.’ We made an attempt to reach out to him and set him straight.”
The entire stockgrowers board arrived at the Flying D in spring 1994 and spent a day with Turner, Griffith, and Miller in the field—at Turner’s invitation. “It was more valuable than anything we did,” Peterson said. “And it was educational both ways. Ted had some romantic notions about bison, and he spoke passionately about why he thought they deserved to have a larger place in the West again. He said there seemed to be a bias against bison. We could respect that perception. At the same time, he made some pretty wild extrapolations about cattle. Depending upon what you want your outcomes on the land to be, animals need to be managed. Even deciding not to manage them, and I don’t care what anybody says, is a form of management.”
An oft-stated concern from neighboring property owners was that bison might break through the fences and get on their lands. Turner erected fences that kept bison inside the Flying D behind a perimeter fence and yet enabled elk, deer, moose, and pronghorn to move freely back and forth between the ranch and adjacent national forest and other public and private lands.
Some professors in the college of agriculture at Montana State University dismissively told students that Turner’s maneuverings with bison were merely experimental—the muses of a hobbyist—and predicted they wouldn’t last. The bison’s time, they lectured, had come and gone. So would Turner’s.
Turner was frustrated. Even though cattle culture was, at most, three or four generation
s old, people treated it as inviolate. Inside the Flying D, his expanding bison herd was left to wander unshepherded. Bison were indeed hardier than cattle, better able to withstand extreme weather, and they required less babysitting. They didn’t depend on the same levels of supplemental feed as cattle, and weren’t injected with hormones and antibiotics to help them grow and ward off diseases; they weren’t as vulnerable to coyotes, bears, and mountain lions. The females didn’t need help giving birth to calves.
By the mid-1990s, a growing herd of fifteen hundred bison had fanned across the Flying D. But they weren’t as benign as Turner had presumed; their grazing patterns weren’t uniform. They mowed down grasses on some hillsides but not others; they cut trails through the river bottoms and muddied some of Turner’s prized fishing areas. Despite all of their operational advantages, Turner realized that if he wanted to achieve a fuller range of desired effects, especially in terms of restoring the health of the cottonwood and willows lining the trout streams, his bison would have to be gently directed.
It meant putting back up some interior fences. When Turner did that, cowboys on call-in radio shows and in letters to the editor in Montana newspapers gleefully accused Turner of backpedaling. Stockmen sensed that Turner was vulnerable to a counterattack. Peterson and the stockgrowers invited him to speak at their annual convention in Billings. He accepted. Standing room only, it was among the best-attended cattle meetings in the history of the organization. Many came hoping to hear Turner eat crow.
Turner brought Fonda. Russ Miller advised them that they were entering a room with cattle producers carrying pent-up anger, not only for Turner’s earlier remarks but Fonda’s involvement with the anti-war movement. Fonda did not want to cower.
The introduction of Turner was made. Some in the audience sniggered. When he stepped to the podium, he immediately uttered a self-deprecating joke and shot from the hip with a confession: He had been partially wrong about some of his generalized assertions pertaining to bison and cattle. Both animals, he said, need to be husbanded with resource stewardship objectives in mind. As much as he hated fences, he acknowledged a few were needed. Up and down the smorgasbord of plant life that is the Flying D, he learned that bison would congregate, if left to themselves, around certain grasses and not others; they would gobble up “the dessert and not the dinner,” as he put it.
Turner also spoke to a perception. Montana, and the West in general, had a reputation of attracting wealthy outsiders who made no attempt to be part of local communities. He paid higher property taxes because bison were worth more. He spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each year locally buying equipment and supplies for his properties. He assured the room that he had no intention of being an absentee landowner. Any problems with his bison breaking through fences, he said, should be blamed on him. If people had complaints, his number was in the phone book.
He told them he knew that ranching is hard work and that raising cattle is just as legitimate as surrounding himself with bison. “But I must say,” he quipped, “that you’re missing an opportunity to make some good money. I’m betting on bison.”
Mea culpa delivered, he used the pulpit to speak of his own green values. He was determined that the Flying D and his other ranches would be left in better ecological condition than when he found them. And he expressed his wish to one day have wolves on his ranches. And, winking, he said he would welcome grizzlies as long as they didn’t eat any people. He confirmed that his ranch hands had been instructed not to shoot coyotes, and he had put a moratorium on killing rattlesnakes unless someone was in imminent peril.
He addressed all kinds of apocryphal rumors, including one that he allegedly gave federal wildlife managers the go-ahead to capture and loose troublesome wayward grizzly bears—“the meaner the better” on a corner of his property. According to these rumors, Turner welcomed man-eating bruins because they’d serve as a deterrent to any would-be trespassers.
As for his trout streams, he confessed that he had a “little beaver problem.” The rodents were eating all of the new willows he had planted as part of his riverside restoration. He had ordered some beavers trapped and removed. They would be kept away until the riparian corridor had sufficiently healed.
Like his cowboy counterparts, he told the stockgrowers that he enjoyed riding horses, hunting, and fishing. He said that Fonda had learned to hunt, and had shot a deer, helped clean it, and proudly ate it with friends. Turner espoused his affection for Montana, and suggested that he would run his own ranch his way, and not criticize others for having their own way of doing things. Afterward, as an expression of his contrition, he took out his checkbook and became a lifetime stockgrowers member.
“The thing I remember most, sitting at the table with Ted and Jane, was how nervous they were,” Peterson says. “They were outside their comfort zone and in the middle of the lion’s den. Everybody politely listened to what he said, and you have to remember that his bride was as controversial a figure as he was. I give him credit for being candid and straightforward. I wouldn’t call him disarming.”
Half of the membership told Peterson afterward that it had been a positive encounter and the organization needed to have that kind of communication more often. “A significant fraction of others were still mad and didn’t have their negative perception of Turner altered in any way. He had insulted their pride,” Peterson said. “A small vocal fringe said it was completely inappropriate to even have him in the room. Over the years, the level of tension hasn’t faded; nobody has forgotten those days. But I can tell you it was probably one of the most eagerly anticipated conventions we ever had. I give them both a lot of credit for showing up. Others wouldn’t have had the courage.”
Now, decades later, Peterson says that Turner has changed the way that cowboys think about bison. Observed Bud Griffith, “I know a lot of ranchers who don’t have the courage to admit when they make a mistake. Their ego won’t let them do it. Ted wasn’t afraid. What he always told me is that by being bold sometimes you’re gonna fail. When you do, be big enough to acknowledge it and be smart enough to learn.”
“Ted dreams large, but he is a realist. He’s highly attuned to the nuances of weather and climate,” Russ Miller says.
The arid West, with its low precipitation and humidity, represents unique ranching challenges. Where forty acres is often seen as the minimum amount of acreage needed to support a family east of the Mississippi, the geography west of the 100th meridian typically requires a full section of land—640 acres. Russ Miller says that in the Sandhills of Nebraska, where Turner has five ranches, it takes twenty to twenty-five acres to sustain a cow and calf. And at Turner’s Armendaris Ranch in New Mexico, ranching is conducted according to the adage of one cow per section per inch of rainfall, or approximately 120 acres per cow and calf.
“Ted is always calling in, inquiring about the depth of the snowpack and the amount of rainfall,” Miller says. “He keeps an eye on the soil and the grass. He’s not willing to cut corners and defer maintenance on infrastructure . . . He isn’t succeeding at ranching because of his money. He has common sense.”
Turner entered the commercial bison business because he wanted to prove it would be economically self-sustaining. “One of the common misperceptions about Ted . . . is that he’s so rich he doesn’t care about profit and loss with his bison operation. But let me tell you something about Ted Turner,” Miller notes. “He does not like to lose money, no matter what business he’s in . . . He always says that nothing lasts if it isn’t economically sustainable.”
When the Flying D ran cattle, it supported seven to eight thousand head. Now it supports around five thousand bison. Turner never has his ranches stocked to full capacity. He builds in a margin of error so that each year certain pastures are rested and others are allowed to recover, especially after years of below-average precipitation. And he makes sure there is enough grass available to feed the public wildlif
e that roam across the ranch, including an elk herd that fluctuates in size between sixteen hundred and two thousand. When Turner first took ownership of the ranch, there were only hundreds of elk on the property. The previous owners treated them as competitors with their cattle.
“Turner is dealing in large enough numbers—land acreage available to him and the size of his bison herd—in order to be more commercially viable than anyone else could ever hope to be,” says rancher and politician Peterson. Envy? Sure there’s a lot of that. It’s what makes him stand out and sometimes what turns him into a target for criticism. What matters is how he treats the land and nobody can take issue with him for that.”
Turner’s bison herd is now self-perpetuating. He hasn’t bought an animal in decades, although he has steadily increased his land holdings. “I know Ted cultivated a reputation for shrewdly negotiating media deals, but when it comes to buying land, and him knowing what its ownership meant to the families putting it up for sale, he’s always insisted that we be fair,” Miller says. “I don’t think I need to elaborate. It’s obvious. Land touches Ted at a deeply emotional level . . . He really does view stewardship—doing well by the land—as a sacred obligation.”
Turner is not a micromanager who hovers. He’s not like Steve Jobs was at Apple. His employees and colleagues don’t fear him. His genius resides within his uncanny knack—call it a sixth sense or maybe simple gut instinct—for finding the right people to help him carry out visualizations that sometimes, in the beginning, only he can see.
Three of Turner’s longest serving ranch managers in the West are Steve Dobrott, Dave Dixon, and Tom Waddell. Dixon, who today oversees Turner’s 13,343-acre Snowcrest Ranch on the Ruby River, is a veteran Montana ranch manager who had worked on the Flying D. Dobrott and Waddell are former federal and state wildlife biologists who oversee ranches straddling both sides of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. Dobrott’s charge is the 156,000-acre Ladder Ranch, and Waddell’s the 358,643-acre Pedro Armendaris Ranch. Add in the 593,000-acre Vermejo Park Ranch on the flanks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and well more than half of Turner’s holdings are contained in the state that calls itself the Land of Enchantment. All have bison.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 5