A crazy tale

In Montana, private property rights are sacred, and several generations of family residency are oft-cited by locals to claim even greater privileges.

So it’s a crazy tale that a group of wealthy nonresident landowners succeeded in sabotaging Sweet Grass County ranchers Rick Jarrett and Alfred and Dorothy Anderson’s efforts about six years ago to have a wind farm built on their land.

“It was a modern-day range war in a warming West — a fight for power in its most elemental form,” wrote Amy Gamerman, author of a newly published book on Jarrett and the Andersons’ struggles and the forces involved.

“The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and A War Out West,” hit bookstores Jan. 7. The story is a raw, intricately detailed and often-disturbing examination of one moment in the state’s history that nevertheless says a lot about Montana’s past and the forces coalescing to rapidly change the present.

The book also provides greater insight into a story that largely flew under the media’s radar — with the exception of coverage in The Big Timber Pioneer — revealing how time to delve deeply into a tale can produce a richer, more nuanced story in an age when quick turnaround for publication online to generate “clicks” is too often emphasized.

The players

Opposing two wind farm proposals across a span of about 20 years were some deep-pocketed nonresident landowners. They cited concerns about noise, health hazards, devaluation of their property, the large wind turbines marring the viewshed and the blades’ potential for killing raptors.

Texas oil and gas billionaire Russell Gordy owns the 44,000-acre Rock Creek Ranch I, LTD, just one of several large ranches he has purchased. Gordy bought the Montana property in 2002 for $40 million, according to Gamerman’s reporting. On the property he built a 17,000-square-foot lodge at a cost of $15 million, complete with a helicopter landing pad, trout pond and two separate homes for his sons.

Although a NIMBY (not in my backyard) when it came to the wind farm, Gordy had no problem drilling for coalbed methane and fracking for oil on undeveloped Bureau of Land Management property in Colorado. He also owns surface and mineral rights on lands, including 37,644 acres in Illinois he leased for a coal mine.

“This was land he wasn’t afraid to mess up,” Gamerman wrote.

To the north, Whitney MacMillan, an heir to the agricultural giant Cargill, owned the Wild Eagle Mountain Ranch, LLC. When he died in 2020 he was America’s 128th-richest man with an estimated net worth of $5.1 billion.

Millionaire Las Vegas criminal defense attorney David Chesnoff, and his wife Diana, owned a slim section of Yellowstone River frontage. Chesnoff made a name for himself defending celebrities and other influential people.

The locals

Jarrett and Anderson, on the other side of the clash, were longtime locals; Jarrett’s great-great-grandfather homesteaded in the region in the 1880s.

Anderson’s father, Alfred Sr., bought two sections of land — one in Sweet Grass County and the other in adjoining Park County — in 1950. Alfred Sr. came to the U.S. as an infant with his Norwegian ancestors, settling in Wisconsin. At age 14, he rode the train to Big Timber, arriving in 1905. Together with his schoolteacher wife, Cora, they saved up to buy the property.

“I just came to have almost a sense of awe about these ranchers, how hard they work, how uncomplaining they are, how self-reliant, how there is just a tradition of self-reliance that is in some ways, very alien to me,” Gamerman said in a telephone interview from her Connecticut home office, surrounded by aeronautical, historic and road maps of Montana.

For Jarrett and Anderson, the wind farm was a way to create a new source of income, supplementing their struggling cattle, sheep and farming incomes. Jarrett had tried other ways to pay the bills, including an attempt at farming pheasants for bird hunters and hosting families for working ranch vacations. Neither panned out.

Hanging on

Yet both families hung on to their land, making do with what they had. Ranching was in their genes, even as many neighbors died or sold out, noting somewhat regretfully the prices they were offered by landowners like Gordy were too high to turn down.

To understand why the Jarretts and Andersons were so attached to their land, Gamerman said she looked at the story of how their ancestors arrived in the region.

Why were they traveling to Montana at such great personal cost, leaving lives that were so well established in other parts of the country? she questioned. “Why were they going literally out into the unknown this way?

“What you see is that a big driver has always been this incredible wealth of natural resources.”

The surplus of wind between Big Timber and Livingston is the natural resource that prompted wildcat wind energy developer Marty Wilde to first approach Jarrett about a wind farm. It was Wilde’s research on the wind supply that prompted proposals from corporations willing to invest in the wind farms.

Nurturing a hunch

Gamerman first became interested in the story by an off-hand comment Gordy made while she was interviewing him as a contributor to the Wall Street Journal writing a 2017 story for the real-estate section on his ranches. His remark about a neighbor proposing to build a wind farm across the fence from where Gordy was considering rebuilding a hot springs resort along the Yellowstone River stuck with her.

Two years later, out of curiosity, an online search revealed the lawsuit. A call to Jarrett’s attorney, two-time Democratic candidate for Congress Monica Tranel, was serendipitous. Tranel provided a copy of the court transcript for a three-day hearing.

It was dense reading, but Gamerman was hooked.

“I can’t believe this all happened,” Gamerman said. “Each one of these people who’s involved in this conflict is this extraordinary, larger than life figure. Each one of these people could be their own book.”

For months Gamerman contemplated investigating the story further as the subject for her first book, but she was plagued by doubts, including that she still had three of her four children living at home. How would she find the time?

After finding a young agent to represent her book proposal, Gamerman made her pitch to different publishing houses. Some were skeptical she could get the wealthy landowners to talk. There was also skepticism among the New York publishing world regarding a story about the West, she noted, a region the East Coast doesn’t pay attention to, for the most part. The hit television series “Yellowstone” may have helped seal the deal, bringing the fictional tale of a well-to-do Montana rancher, played by Kevin Costner, to a national and international audience.

Five years ago, Gamerman signed a book deal with Simon & Schuster. After that, the book would “consume” her life.

“I sensed it was going to be a good story, but it was so much more than I could know at that time,” she said.

Visit to Big Timber

Gamerman made her first in-person attempts to learn about the story’s varied characters in February 2020 by visiting Big Timber. By then, court proceedings had snuffed most of the life out of Wilde’s second attempt to build a wind farm near the base of the Crazy Mountains.

In addition to phone calls, letters and personal introductions, Gamerman relied on patience to eventually talk to most of the key players, which she felt was important to the story.

“The thing that I realized I really had to do was to get inside the heads of each of these remarkable, complicated people and see the West through their eyes, to see the Crazy Mountains through their eyes, and to understand the unique set of life events that have brought each one of them there,” Gamerman said.

Luckily, early on, Jarrett’s daughter, Jami Moody, took Gamerman under her wing. At the time, Moody and her husband were running sheep on property in the Boulder Valley. She also worked for the county.

“She was really central to all of this,” Gamerman said. “I have no doubt there were moments in the last five years where she regretted that decision, or questioned it at any rate, but she never looked back. I don’t know that there would have been a book, or would have been much of a book, if she hadn’t made that decision.

“I’m in awe of Jami, I really am,” she added, calling her “whip smart” and a hard worker who “doesn’t take shit from anyone and doesn’t complain.”

Moody is just one of the women in the book that Gamerman called “pretty formidable.”

Broad view

Gamerman doesn’t confine the story just to this Davids vs. Goliaths struggle. Instead, she also delves into the deep history of the region bordered by the Crazy Mountains and the Yellowstone River and how the land has shaped these people and their complicated, varied and sometimes contrasting and competing interests.

After Gamerman’s first visit to Big Timber for the book, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down all travel. So, she tunneled into background research, scanning old newspapers, combing homesteader and explorers’ journals. She also researched Native American history and the Crow Tribe’s ceremonial, historic and religious ties to the mountain range and the region where the story is set, including how the federal government renegotiated the tribe’s treaty several times to substantially shrink the size of the Crow Reservation.

“It’s impossible to understand a lot of what’s going on today out west without understanding the past and what led us there,” Gamerman said.

“What I found with the Crazy Mountains was: No wonder they all care about this place so much,” she added. “There is something very special about this place.”

Her history research went as far back as the end of the last Ice Age. About 12,600 years ago, mammoth hunters buried their dead child on a hill near the base of the Crazy Mountains, the oldest known human burial site in North America.

“That just kind of blew my mind,” Gamerman said. “There is some almost other-worldly magnetism, like some kind of geographic charisma about this place, and I wanted to get at that through every way that I could.”

Devil in the details

The author’s research also included deep dives into the proceedings of the Public Service Commission, which was key to understanding how NorthWestern Energy negotiated payments for wind farm electricity.

“These public service commissions are the most obscure, boring, little agencies that are making these tremendous decisions that are going to affect generations of people to come,” Gamerman said. “I think I read that as of 2020, there were a total 201 PSC commissioners in the United States. So 201 people making decisions about fossil fuel energy and renewable energy and how you’re going to get your electricity.”

NorthWestern Energy, Gamerman wrote, was no fan of wind energy because the company could make more money from its coal-fired generators in Colstrip. Although being forced to buy renewable power by the Montana Legislature, Gamerman found the company didn’t make it easy on developers when it came to setting rates and conditions.

NorthWestern also “inserted a few poison pills into the wording of Crazy Mountain Wind’s contract,” Gamerman wrote. “One was that the wind farm had to be built and operational within 18 months, an absurdly tight deadline, given the many steps that go into financing and building a wind farm. Even NorthWestern’s own representatives admitted that getting a project from bid to completion took at least two years.”

The PSC also hampered the wind farm, and others proposed afterward, by saying it didn’t qualify under the state’s Community Renewable Energy Program (CREP), which required NorthWestern to buy 65 megawatts of power a year from local renewable sources, because nonresident financing was involved, Gamerman wrote. The company also dodged penalties tied to not buying from CREP providers, thanks to the PSC waiving the $1.2 million annual fine.

“The commissioners gave NorthWestern a decade’s worth of passes,” Gamerman wrote. “By 2018, there was widespread consensus that the CREP program was a failure, and that the most significant renewable resource in NorthWestern’s portfolio was its Get Out of Jail Free card.”

Gamerman’s research also revealed how deep-pocketed interests can influence public opinion. One energy company behind the second wind farm went on a charm offensive, donating to local causes and showing up at county commission meetings to put a public face on an international corporation. The company’s payments to the county, if the wind farm were developed — estimated at $10.6 million — were also an incentive.

On the other side, opponents to the wind farm took to social media that created a “daily churn of rumors and inaccuracies,” Gammerman wrote. A fake Facebook page was even created by a Seattle-based lobbying and media relations group to amp up local resistance to the development, she noted. The consultant hired to create the Crazy Mountain Neighbors Coalition had been the communications director for the PSC. The landowners opposed to the wind farm also sued the Sweet Grass County Commission for writing a letter of support for the development.

Changing scenery

Some locals who read prepublication copies of the book are worried about “other weird shit going down in the neighborhood,” although they asked not to be identified. One called the gentrification of the rural area, as wealthy landowners move in, a coordinated “cancerous spread” moving to the north and involving a conspiracy of state organizations, politicians and even federal employees.

As evidence, they point to the 2017 silencing of a Livingston-area Forest Service district ranger who challenged landowners’ claims that the agency had abandoned historic trails in the Crazy Mountains.

The East Crazy Inspiration Divide land exchange has been touted as a way to end the trail controversy. The deal would consolidate public Forest Service and private lands allowing easier public access. As part of the exchange, a new trail would be built for the public.

The deal is still undergoing internal review by the Custer Gallatin National Forest’s new supervisor, Matt Jedra. At the beginning of December, an agency spokesperson said a final decision was expected within a few weeks to a month and would include appraisal amounts that conservation groups had requested.

Skeptics of the exchange have pointed to the ultra-rich Yellowstone Club’s involvement as reason to question the deal, as well as the consolidation of prime private property at the base of the mountains that could lead to further high-end development.

Billionaire David Leuschen is a member of the Yellowstone Club. In 2012 he bought the 8,448-acre historic Lazy K Bar dude ranch located along Big Timber Creek — the only public access point to the Crazies on the east side. The $9 million purchase included Crazy Peak, venerated by the Crow Tribe as the place Chief Plenty Coups foresaw, during a vision quest, the coming of Euro-American settlers, their cattle replacing bison.

The land deal was small compared to the creation of the Switchback Ranch that Leuschen had spent decades sewing together — six different properties combined into a 57,000-acre ranch spread from Montana to Wyoming, Gamerman reported.

Maybe not so coincidentally, in 2021 the Yellowstone Club bought the nearby Marlboro Ranch, renamed the Crazy Mountain Ranch, touting a “private membership experience set on 18,000 extraordinary acres.” The ranch will be an “incredible setting” for an 18-hole golf course, Adirondack-style lodge with 16 luxury suites, a spa and fitness center, two indoor tennis courts, an events barn for gatherings and a lakeside chapel. Membership is by invitation only, according to the ranch website.

In October, New York Magazine published a story on the east side Crazy Mountain land exchange with the subhead: “A group of billionaires is maneuvering to secure acres of prime public land in Montana for personal use. Can anyone stop them?”

“The United States is privatizing its natural wonders from Southern California beaches to Rocky Mountain streams,” Ben Ryder Howe wrote for the magazine. “Investors buy up a valley or mountain, fence it off, shoo away the public, and charge rates only the wealthy can afford. Nowhere is this more in evidence than Montana, where former livestock ranches across the state have been converted into fishing and hunting clubs. Montana has been luxurified, from the skyrocketing cost of paying outfitters to shoot a bull elk to the carving of the state into recreational ranches the size of major national parks.”

Gamerman’s book on “The Crazies” outlines more of the forces at work in Montana, while this story can only touch on a few. It’s a tale of power and political abuse once believed relegated to the state’s history books — the Gilded Age battle at the end of the 19th century between the Copper Kings of Butte and Anaconda. As anyone knows, however, history has a way of repeating itself.

“I don’t want to sound pessimistic, but maybe there is a new cycle of dispossession that is happening now,” Gamerman said. “I would never compare what a ranching family is going through to what a Crow family went through. There’s no comparison between them. And yet, there you see a thread.”