by Jim Noles
But before Mount Rushmore graced South Dakota’s quarter, the departed Borglum faced one more battle for his work of art. In fiscal year 2004, the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee considered the slate of prospective designs for the South Dakota quarter. As the CCAC’s annual report noted, “Committee members liked the artistry of the Mount Rushmore image, but were concerned about the appropriateness of this theme in light of Native American opposition to the monument’s creation.”
Charles E. Rushmore, on the other hand, would likely have supported the quarter design wholeheartedly. Although he went on to have a successful career as an attorney with the Wall Street law firm Rushmore, Bisbee & Stern (and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on at least one occasion), he always appreciated his connection to Borglum’s masterpiece. In fact, before he died in 1930, he donated $5,000 to the cause—reportedly the largest single private donation the project ever received.
41
MONTANA
Where the Buffalo
Roam (Again)
On December 26, 2006, the first of Montana’s 513.24 million new buffalo came to life as they jangled out of the Denver and Philadelphia mints’ stamping presses and fell into the machines’ collection boxes. Admittedly, “came to life,” might be a stretch, as the buffalo in question (technically, American bison) were actually those depicted on Montana’s state quarters. Furthermore, they were not even images of a live buffalo. Instead, they depicted the hollow-eyed and horned visage of a bison’s skull.
Nevertheless, enthusiasm reigned in Montana for the state’s newest buffalo coins, officially launched at a ceremony in Helena on January 29, 2007.
“This quarter captures the sense of our history, our culture and the truest sense of the allure of our ‘Big Sky Country,’” declared Governor Brian Schweitzer. He occasionally referred to it as the “Charlie Russell design” in homage to Charles M. Russell (1864–1926), the Montana-based cowboy artist whose signature work many believed inspired the image.
Some of the governor’s enthusiasm might have been based on his knowledge of irreverent designs that had not made the cut over the course of a statewide design solicitation held during the summer of 2005, such as a three-wheeled ATV charging up a mountain, or the legendary “Pork Chop John sandwich,” a breaded, fried pork sirloin sandwich invented by John Burklund of Butte, Montana, in 1924.
In the end, more serious contenders included the three other finalists: “Bull Elk,” featuring a bull elk standing on a rugged rock formation; “State Outline,” showing mountains tapering to the eastern Montana plains under a rising sun; and “Big Sky with River,” prominently featuring a river emerging from a mountain range. Following an Internet poll of 30,000 votes (not including the 20,000 votes that a Bozeman-based teenage hacker reportedly cast for the bull from his home computer), the bison skull prevailed by netting 34 percent of the vote, thereby encouraging Governor Schweitzer to give the nod to that design.
Despite the plebiscite, Schweitzer’s decision showed no small amount of political courage. According to the Helena Independent Record, the governor’s own mother publicly favored the design that depicted the sun rising over a Montana prairie.
“My mom, she’s a person of the prairie,” Schweitzer offered in explanation.
Mrs. Schweitzer’s opinion aside, the buffalo design’s success was mirrored by a quieter triumph for the species playing out on the prairies of eastern Montana—but whose genesis could be found across the state line in South Dakota at Wind Cave National Park.
Wind Cave National Park was established on January 3, 1903, making it the nation’s seventh-oldest national park. In 1912, Congress set aside land adjacent to Wind Cave to form the Wind Cave National Game Preserve (an area that was later incorporated into the larger park in 1935). The following year, the New York Zoological Society, in coordination with the American Bison Society, dispatched fourteen bison (six bulls and eight cows) from the Bronx Zoo to the preserve. At the time, there were scarcely 1,000 bison left in the wild, and the society hoped to nurture the buffalo’s struggling presence in the American West. Six additional bison arrived from Yellowstone National Park in 1916.
Eventually, Wind Cave’s bison herd grew to contain between 350 and 400 animals. In time, it gained renown as the only genetically pure herd on federal lands in the United States, and for two decades, it was an important source of bison for relocation elsewhere in the West to repopulate other preserves, parks, and refuges.
Concerns about brucellosis, however, terminated Wind Cave’s ongoing redistribution of bison in 1943. Brucellosis, a contagious disease caused by a nasty species of bacteria, causes abortions, infertility, and lowered milk production in cattle and bison and is transmissible to humans as undulant fever. In people, the disease causes severe flu-like symptoms that can last for months or years and cannot always be treated successfully. In short, the prospect of bison spreading brucellosis to the cattle herds of the Great Plains sent cold shivers down the spine of many a rancher.
Two years later, testing confirmed that 85 percent of the park’s herd was either reactors or suspect. Several vaccination and eradication programs followed. It was not until 1986, however, that brucellosis was eradicated from the herd. With the quarantine lifted, redistribution of the bison could—and did—resume.
On October 17 and 18, 2005, even as the Montana Quarter Design Selection Committee was mulling over designs for the state quarter, the park’s annual roundup again took place. Park staff, with the assistance of two helicopters, rounded up 293 buffalo and eventually culled 153 from the park’s herd. Of those, 117 were dispatched to the Intertribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC); another twenty headed for a South Dakota ranch run by The Nature Conservancy.
The remaining sixteen, however, endured a 500-mile truck ride to an expanse of grassland south of Malta, Montana, the county seat of Philips County. There, the American Prairie Foundation (APF) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) hoped the bison would become the nucleus of a successful return of free-ranging, genetically pure bison to Montana. Although the APF reports that 500,000 bison can now be found in North America, only about 19,000 bison, or 4 percent, live in fifty conservation herds. Furthermore, because of decades of crossbreeding cattle with bison, fewer than 7,000 of today’s bison are non-hybridized. In short, the APF’s plan for Montana—to establish a free-ranging herd of genetically pure bison—was ambitious.
APF’s bison arrived at their new home shortly after midnight on October 21, 2005. As the trucks’ tailgates dropped down, the sixteen bison stepped gingerly down the ramps and into the cold, rainy night. For the first time in 120 years, the hooves of a bison stepped on Montana soil.
A few weeks later, the bison were released from their holding enclosure onto a larger expanse of 2,600 acres. In time, the herd’s range may expand even more, as the APF already owns or leases grazing rights to 60,000 acres of land in the area. Meanwhile, the herd’s numbers are already increasing. In April 2006, five new baby bison were born on the reserve and in October 2006, a second echelon of twenty bison arrived from Wind Cave National Park. The herd marked the end of the minting of the Montana state quarter by bearing seven more calves in April 2007. Today, the Montana herd consists of forty-five healthy animals—with more on the way.
Plans for the APF’s project in northeastern Montana are even bolder. Spurred by visions of a vast expanse of unbroken mixed-grass prairie, the foundation’s leadership speaks in terms of “bringing the African Serengeti to America’s backyard” and creating a home where the buffalo—and also other indigenous wildlife, such as elk, antelope, and bighorn sheep—can roam.
The plan is not without its skeptics. Some local ranchers and farmers in Philips County, for example, harbor fears about a brucel-losis outbreak. Others question whether the APF’s well-intentioned efforts will shoulder many of the region’s already struggling family-owned farms and ranches out of existence. Still others worry about the influence of so much land being controlled by one organization, particul
arly in a corner of the country that values rugged individualism as highly as Montana’s ranchers and farmers do.
Nevertheless, the APF so far controls two 30,000-acre tracts, with plans for obtaining 250,000 acres (nearly 400 square miles) over the next four years. The APF’s ultimate goal is even more grandiose: to piece together between 3 and 4 million acres across eastern Montana, an expanse of land that would be bigger than even Yellowstone National Park’s 2.2 million acres.
The APF’s preserve would be centered, coincidentally, on the 1.1-million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, named after the artist many credit for inspiring the Montana state quarter bison skull design in the first place. And as far as the subject of the state’s quarter design is concerned, the APF and the WWF could not be happier. “The bison is a superlative symbol for Montana’s quarter,” said Dr. Curt Freese, managing director of the WWF’s Northern Great Plains Program. “This majestic animal once roamed in immense herds over the state’s prairies and mountain valleys, and, after a close brush with extinction a century ago, wild herds of bison are roaming once more in eastern Montana.”
42
WASHINGTON
Profiles in Courage
On Washington’s state quarter, a king salmon breaches defiantly out of water that, in the distance, laps against a shoreline stand of evergreen trees. The date 1889 denotes Washington’s year of entry into the Union; the inscription “Evergreen State” reminds one of the state nickname coined (pardon the pun) by newsman and real estate pioneer C. T. Conover.
In the background of that scene, U.S. Mint sculptor Charles Vickers engraved a profile of snow-capped Mount Rainier rising grandly to the heavens above. The “episodically active” volcano—called Tahoma, or “mother of all waters,” in the language of the region’s Native Americans—soars to 14,411 feet in the Cascade Mountains. Its snow-capped peaks are visible from the dry high plains of eastern Washington to the verdant San Juan Islands in the west.
Mount Rainier does more, however, than simply provide a magnificent profile in its own right. For those in the know, its history reflects other profiles as well—profiles in courage both physical and moral.
Take, for example, U.S. Army lieutenant August Valentine Kautz. Kautz, who was German-born and a 1852 graduate of West Point, was stationed at nearby Fort Steilacoom. Intrigued by the mountain looming in the fort’s backyard, he hired a Nisqually Indian guide named Wahpowety and, with a collection of companions, set off in July 1857 to scale the still unconquered (by white men, anyway) mountain. For a man who had already been twice wounded in battles with local hostile Indians during the Washington Territory’s Indian Wars of 1855–1856, it was an audacious undertaking.
For six days, Kautz and his party forged through forest and thicket, picking their way up the slopes of the mountain before making a final push for the icy summit. Two days later, Wahpowety, stricken by snow blindness, gave up. Kautz’s companions faltered as well. Undaunted, he pressed on alone, only to finally give up 400 feet from the summit. It would be another thirteen years before anyone else climbed as high.
In those intervening years, Kautz had other opportunities to display his mettle. During the Civil War, he rose from the rank of captain to the rank of major general and ended the war leading a division of United States Colored Troops into Richmond in April 1865. After the Civil War, he served on the military commission that tried the Lincoln assassination conspirators, commanded the Department of Arizona, and served throughout the Western frontier and California, ending a nearly forty-year military career in 1891.
One of Kautz’s most memorable fights, however, was a legal one. In the early stages of the territory’s Indian War of 1855 to 1856, when the Nisqually chief, Leschi, battled efforts to move his and other local tribes onto reservations, a band of Nisqually and Klickitat warriors ambushed and killed A. Benton Moses, an officer in the territory’s militia, on October 31, 1855. Moses was the U.S. surveyor of customs for the port of Nisqually and a highly respected local citizen; his death shook the territory’s white settlers to the core.
The following August, negotiations ended the war at the Fox Island Peace Council, where the Indians obtained concessions concerning their reservations’ locations. Leschi, however, was still a wanted man, and when a relative betrayed his location, he was captured and charged with murder for Moses’ death in November 1856. In response, Leschi argued that not only was he not present at Moses’ ambush, but regardless of such facts, the death occurred between lawful combatants during a time of war. Buoyed by such defense arguments, Leschi’s first trial ended in a hung jury.
Determined to try again, the territory’s prosecutors kept Leschi confined at Fort Steilacoom until the following March, when Leschi was tried a second time. This time, however, he was not allowed to offer his “time of war” defense—a fatal hindrance to his case. On March 18, 1857, Leschi was sentenced to hang. Ezra Meeker, a hops farmer who sat on Leschi’s first jury, recorded his last statement to the court.
“I do not see that there is any use of saying anything,” Leschi declared. “My attorney has said all he could for me. I do not know anything about your laws. I have supposed that the killing of armed men in war time was not murder; if it was, the soldiers who killed Indians were guilty of murder, too. The Indians did not keep in order like the soldiers, and, therefore, could not fight in bodies like them, but had to resort to ambush and seek the cover of trees, logs and everything that would hide them from the bullets. This was their mode of fighting, and they knew no other way.”
Ironically, in the wake of his trial, Leschi found some of his strongest supporters among the ranks of those same soldiers, among them August Kautz. In the spring of 1857, Kautz was nursing both a bullet wound in his leg from an encounter with Indians the previous year and the memory of a close friend killed in the conflict. Nevertheless, his conscience was troubled by the prospect of Leschi’s impending execution, so during the chief’s confinement at Fort Steilacoom, the two struck up an unlikely friendship.
Seeking exonerating evidence, Kautz rode out onto the prairie to the place where Leschi reportedly ambushed Moses and, putting his West Point cartography training to use, sketched out a map demonstrating that Leschi could not have been present at the attack. Kautz’s map could not be considered during Leschi’s appeal; nevertheless, it convinced Kautz of Leschi’s innocence. In fact, many think that Kautz was author of the anonymously published broadside, The Truth Teller, that circulated throughout the territory immediately thereafter and urged Leschi’s release.
If Kautz was indeed The Truth Teller’s author, it was a brave position to take in a territory where many still feared and resented the local Indians. After all, Seattle itself had come under attack during the recent war and had to rely on the gunfire of the U.S. Navy ship Decatur to beat back the attackers. In short, it was not surprising that some 700 settlers rejected Kautz’s pleas and urged the territorial governor, Fayette McMullen, to proceed with the hanging.
McMullen bowed to the settlers’ increasingly angry demands and, on February 19, 1858, Leschi was hanged outside of Fort Steilacoom. The army, still convinced that he should be treated as a prisoner of war, refused to let the execution occur within the fort’s stockade. For his part, Leschi went to his death both stoically and steadily, pausing only to receive last rites from a priest.
A dozen years after Leschi’s execution, another party of adventurers challenged Mount Rainier’s slopes in a bid for its summit. This time, their ranks included General Hazard Stevens, Philemon Van Trump, and Edmond T. Coleman. Guided by a Yakima Indian, they followed a trail blazed to the final inclines by a settler named James Longmire. Longmire’s trail allowed the three men to get in position for a final ascent on August 17, 1870. The ensuing climb took Stevens and Van Trump (Coleman dropped out) slightly under eleven hours to reach the summit. Although Indian legends spoke of the mountain having been climbed in earlier days, Stevens and Van Trump were the first men known to have conquered t
he scenic peak.
In the end, there was no little irony in Stevens’s accomplishing what Kautz failed to do thirteen years earlier. Stevens’s father, Isaac Stevens, was the first governor of the Washington Territory and, as such, was the man responsible for the Indian treaties that sparked the armed resistance of Leschi’s tribe. But like Leschi and Kautz, Hazard Stevens was a man whose bravery eclipsed even the ascent of Mount Rainier. When the Civil War broke out, he joined his father—who had just finished two terms in Congress—in volunteering for military service.
By September 1, 1862, the elder Stevens had reached the rank of brigadier general; his son Hazard was one of his aides-de-camp. On that day, however, the Stevenses found themselves in the fight of their lives in Chantilly, Virginia, when the Confederates attempted to cut off the Union Army’s retreat from the Second Battle of Bull Run. Rallying his troops, Isaac Stevens grabbed the regimental banner of his old command, shouting, “Highlanders, my highlanders, follow your general!” A Confederate bullet to the brain killed him instantly. His son Hazard, standing nearby, fought on until he succumbed to a pair of wounds himself. By the following spring, Hazard Stevens had recovered enough to lead a successful assault on Fort Huger and earn the Medal of Honor. He was destined to end the war as one of the Union Army’s youngest brigadier generals and, after returning to the Washington Territory, to conquer Mount Rainier.
One hundred and thirty-seven years later, as Washington celebrated the release of the state quarter on April 11, 2007, U.S. representative Jim McDermott took the podium in Seattle and, invoking the image of the endangered salmon that shares the quarter with Mount Rainier, recognized that, “as money, this beautiful Washington State quarter has a value of twenty-five cents. But its value will be priceless if this coin inspires us to save our wild salmon and stop global warming.”