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Sweet Grass By Heidi Long
The sun climbs over the Sweet Grass Hills each morning in an explosion of light; Sunburst, a small town directly to the west, is aptly named. Rising 3,000 feet above the Montana plains, these three main buttes stick out like giant dorsal fins at sea. The area receives twice the annual rainfall of the surrounding flatlands; the runoff flowing into creeks and coulees providing havens for elk, deer, coyotes, rabbits, pronghorn, even moose and allegedly grizzly. And cattle. In a state that boasts more cows than people (roughly 3:1), the Sweet Grass Hills area takes that
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statistic to the extreme. It’s tough to tally folks when they live so far apart you can barely see their homes on the horizon. Neighbors count on each other in matters of life, death and livelihood. Each spring bands of Sweet Grass ranchers schedule their branding operations to coordinate with friends and neighbors in a tradition of communal support and social networking that echoes a centuries old tradition. Maggie Nutter grew up here at the base of West Butte, the tallest (6,983 ft) of the three flagship buttes that define the area. She’s a fourth generation rancher whose
great great-grandfather, John Kiehlbauch, immigrated from Germany with his brothers and ran a hardware store in Tinsdale, SD before settling in the Sweet Grass Hills in 1904 with his wife, Marie. Gold mining was winding down after a surge of 400 miners poured into the area by 1886. The Sweet Grass Hills Treaty of 1887 ceded nearly 17.5 million acres of the Northern Montanan plains to the US government and divided the remaining 6 million into three separate reservations (The Blackfeet, Fort Peck, and Fort Belknap). Gold Butte, a mining town with a post office until 1945, is now an abandoned site with scarce evidence of it’s once booming existence. Near West Butte, famed Montana artist Charlie Russell operated the Lazy KY Ranch with a partner.