Until one gets on the mountain (west) side of the area, there's really more field than forest, so what they will see when they get there will look rather like this:
It won't take long to green up before snow comes. In fact, fire has been the friend of the ecology so long as the people were nomadic and could remove family and home for a while.
According to the Dawes Act that re-assigned ownership of the rez into individual family land acreage, though it was strongly resisted by the People, there was an effort to "give" people land they knew. The old people chose to stay close to the mountains where the foothills provided game and water. Young progressives and mixed-bloods went to the flats to raise grain in the modern industrial way. The community of Heart Butte is named for the bit of mountain they are next to, but the Spotted Eagle fire took its name from an early group whose leader was Spotted Eagle. Here he is:
This appears to be from McClintock's "Old North Trail," which is an invaluable photographic and written account of the People around 1900 until WWI. There are still many Spotted Eagle people in Heart Butte. A "spotted eagle" in terms of animals is a young golden eagle. In fact, Joe Spotted Eagle, who was part of the Bundle Opening circle that Bob and I knew in the Sixties, also went by Joe Young Eagle. Rather strangely, if one googles for "spotted eagle", you're likely to get images of a manta ray with a barbed tail with the same name.
This is a long story, pretty thorough, that tells a wild story about Floyd Comes at Night's narrow escape. The trouble in a small impoverished community is that people don't have computers, telephones, radio that picks up KSEN (the emergency station) and so on. Floyd didn't have enough gas to get to Browning so he just went as far as he could. Then the car radio could get KSEN and he ran the radio until the battery was exhausted. Luckily, he didn't have to run the heater.
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