(pensive music) - [Stan] Next on "IMPACT."

A herd of bison is at the center of a fued over what animals belong on the public grasslands.

- The whole issue comes down to bison versus beef.

- I think it's ecosystem.

I think it's public access.

I think it's bison.

I think they all go together.

- [Stan] Plus, is the road behind this locked gate public or private?

We'll show you why the answer is more complicated than you might expect.

- I think the general public would also think that we know where all the county roads are and where they start and where they end.

And we do not.

- Coming to you from the campuses of Montana State University, Bozeman, and the University of Montana, Missoula, you're watching "IMPACT" for "Montana PBS Reports."

And those stories are straight ahead.

Stay with us.

Major funding for "IMPACT" comes from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

Funding also comes from viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

"IMPACT" is an editorially independent production of "Montana PBS Reports."

Coverage decisions are made by our team of Montana-based journalists.

For feedback, questions, or ideas, email us, impact@montanapbs.org.

(screen whooshes) Welcome to "IMPACT."

I'm Stan Parker.

Conflict over the public grasslands of North Central Montana has long brewed between the conservation nonprofit, American Prairie, and its ranching neighbors.

The most recent flashpoint in this feud has turned to whether the organization's bison are allowed to graze the public grasses.

Montana PBS's Matt Standal has been following this issue.

Matt, I saw some headlines over the summer that the bison were getting evicted from these federal lands.

Now it turns out they can stay.

Can you untangle a little bit of this for us?

- Yeah, a lot of back and forth here, Stan.

American Prairie has held these grazing leases in question for a number of years, but the Bureau of Land Management under the Trump administration decided to interpret the rules differently and said the bison had to go.

Now the issue's in the courts and a judge came back and put the brakes on that eviction order, so it turns out the bison can stay for now.

But as I learned, there's a deeper conflict here that likely won't go away no matter what the outcome of this court case is.

(screen whooshes) (tractor engine rumbling) It's mid-July on the Jacobs Ranch in Central Montana, and Lee and Perry Jacobs are baling hay to feed their cattle over winter.

(cows mooing) In the summer, ranchers like the Jacobs move their herds onto vast grazing allotments, thousands of acres of rich prairie grass leased from the federal government.

Lately, however, just who gets access to this valuable prairie land and what kind of animals belong on this landscape is at the center of a bitter political debate.

- The whole issue comes down to bison versus beef.

(birds chirping) - [Matt] I first paid a visit to the Jacobs Ranch in June and Perry Jacobs gave me a tour.

- Got a lot of equipment out right now.

Got one swather set here.

You can see the back end of the two balers over here.

This land over my shoulder is what we call the East Dry Fork Allotment that we share in common with American Prairie.

- [Matt] And sharing, it turns out, has been a difficult task for Jacobs.

(car whooshing past) American Prairie is a public-facing nonprofit working to purchase and conserve thousands of acres of grasslands, lands that have been used by ranchers for generations.

- I look at it as trying to steal something from us.

So yeah, I'm a bit contentious when it comes to American Prairie.

- [Matt] Jacobs is among a small but vocal group of ranchers who say American Prairie is trying to push them out by purchasing huge tracts of land here in Central Montana and replacing herds of cattle with the native animals that once roamed these lands, American bison.

- We have 940 bison on these acres in here in the county, and there's over 50,000 cattle in the county.

- [Matt] Scott Heidebrink is the landscape stewardship manager at American Prairie and helped me locate the controversial bison in question, a herd that is symbolic of this power struggle on the prairie.

- Yeah, the bison right now are just post-calving.

So most of our calves are on the ground now.

They're out grazing, nursing their calves, and soon here we'll roll into a rut starting in late July.

- [Matt] Heidebrink says American Prairie doesn't sell off or slaughter its bison herd, and there's a good reason for that.

Wranglers tag the animals, conduct periodic health checks, but largely leave them alone to promote conservation.

Select animals are donated or sold to Native American tribes, and a small number of hunters have been able to enter a special lottery to harvest them.

The public is allowed to access the majority of American Prairie's property.

- I think it's ecosystem.

I think it's public access.

I think it's bison.

I think they all go together.

- [Matt] American Prairie says it's all part of an ambitious plan to preserve this landscape on what they envision will someday be 3.2 million acres of connected re-wilded grasslands, bigger than Yellowstone National Park.

(birds chirping) The nonprofit first began buying ranches here in Phillips County in 2004 and is now one of the biggest property owners in Montana with over 160,000 acres of private-deeded lands and more than double that acreage in federal leases.

The idea has long been to link these private holdings with the upper Missouri Breaks National Monument and the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge to create the world's biggest prairie reserve.

- Our argument is that these lands are here for food production, which means you need a production-orientated herd, a herd like I said we have.

- [Matt] Perry Jacobs says the land in question should be used for beef.

(cow moos) And told me that many of her neighbors share that view, neighbors who did not want to speak publicly on camera.

(cow moos) However, American Prairie says much of its land is used for beef and partners with more than 30 neighboring families who run about 8,000 cattle on many of its leases, but Jacobs worries that cattle aren't in American Prairie's long-term plan.

- I believe that most ranchers here in South Phillips County have a strong desire to see their ranches stay in ranching, whether that goes to their own next generation or another next generation.

And I don't see that many of them becoming part of some billionaire's portfolio.

- [Matt] Ranchers like the Jacobs have pushed back against American Prairie, and for more than two decades deeply suspicious of its motives, angry the organization has raised hundreds of millions from donors they view as outsiders.

In January of 2025, federal officials took their side.

- Running bison or buffalo on federal land for grazing is not a permitted purpose under federal law.

- [Matt] After pressure by Montana's top elected officials, including Attorney General Austin Knudsen, the Bureau of Land Management formally rescinded six key leases issued to American Prairie for its bison herd, saying the law that divvies up these public grasslands offers no quarter for bison.

- Production livestock under the Taylor Grazing Act is defined as cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and burros.

That's it.

- No bison.

- No bison.

- American Prairie first started grazing bison in Phillips County in 2005.

So we started growing this herd of animals 20 years ago.

- [Matt] American Prairie CEO Alison Fox says her organization has been following the law for more than two decades.

And the only thing that has changed is how the BLM, under the Trump Administration, interprets it.

- The discrepancy is that they have produced a new definition for livestock that requires that those are production animals.

That is not in the Taylor Grazing Act.

That has not been in any of the rules and regulations that have come up in the last 90 years.

That is a new interpretation.

- I think the definition of livestock is important here.

You've been told that your livestock are no longer livestock.

- Yes.

- [Matt] American Prairie filed a series of appeals in the case saying that if they lost these leases, they might lose as much as a third of their herd.

And in September, a federal judge in Great Falls gave American Prairie the news they wanted to hear.

He wrote that bison are livestock and issued an order that allows the animals to stay put while the case plays out.

(birds chirping) If the ruling stands, it will provide a legal endorsement for American Prairie's vision for the future of the open range.

(bird tweeting) And that vision includes conserving more than just bison.

The organization hopes to support just about every wild animal Lewis and Clark encountered when they first explored these plains, even wolves and grizzlies.

- American Prairie is not going anywhere.

We've been around for 20 years, and our bison are not going anywhere.

- We would like to grow our bison program.

We would like to have our bison on hundreds of thousands of acres.

- I mean, they've made a lot of this stuff very well known what they want to do with the prairie out there.

They want to have their own little private Yellowstone National Park where Buffalo can run free and rich people can come and feel like they're experiencing the 1800s again.

- [Matt] Knudsen's office says it disagrees with the ruling and vows to keep on fighting while American Prairie says the controversy has helped it shore up more support for its cause.

Some people might look at this challenge that you guys have and say it's negative for American Prairie.

- We saw tens of thousands of public comments and the vast majority of those were positive.

"Let American Prairie continue to graze their animals to be good livestock managers on this land."

- Well, I don't want to be part of a bison reserve and that's not what my goal is.

- [Matt] But for Perry Jacobs, the conflict is about more than just bison and beef.

It's about what the future holds for two groups who seemingly have very different goals.

- So it really is us versus them.

It has been since the beginning.

It's challenging to figure out where there could be any middle ground.

- [Matt] For "IMPACT," I'm Matt Standal in Phillips County.

- While American Prairie's bison can keep grazing on federal land for the time being, it's still far from certain how long it will take for all the legal proceedings to conclude.

There are countless Montana back roads with complex access questions, with answers tangled up in history and old records.

In Madison County, for instance, when locked gates first appeared over the ruts of an old stagecoach route to Virginia City, it sparked a dispute that required dusting off the ancient county records to investigate.

As Montana PBS's Hannah Kearse reports, county officials there are now embarking on a proactive effort to define their roads and get ahead of future conflict.

- [Hannah] Eli Thompson has been driving Madison County's back roads since before he had his license.

- It was before I was old enough to drive and it was safer to stay off the road and keep from getting a ticket and everything.

And so we just came this way.

I used to work this side of Ennis on a ranch and it was closer to come up this road and come to Virginia City than it was to, where I couldn't legally drive on the highway.

- [Hannah] This is Bertha Kennett Road, also known as County Road 45.

It carves through the foothills of the gravelly range.

Once an early stagecoach route, it winds through chunks of private and public land.

But about five miles in from Virginia City, locked gates prevent the public from going farther.

Locked gates like this one behind me with chains and padlocks are at the center of a dispute over public and private roads here in Madison County.

- Still try to use it.

Parts of it you can't go on like what we used to do.

You used to be able to go all the way from Ennis over to Virginia City, and they're closing more of it all the time.

And I don't like to see them closing what is county road.

- [Hannah] While Bertha Kennett Road's access remains unresolved nearly a decade after this gate popped up, the county is working on the big picture.

In the fall of 2025, a working group made of county employees started assembling a county road inventory because, like most Montana counties, Madison County doesn't have a comprehensive map of its roads.

And there are dozens of roads in Madison County clouded in uncertainty with implications for public access and important county administration functions as well.

Madison County Commissioner Bill Todd says he did not expect this level of uncertainty when he took office in 2023.

- I naively assumed when I took office that we knew the answers to all of these questions, and I think the general public would also think that we know where all the county roads are and where they start and where they end, and we do not.

- [Hannah] Wagons once traveled this part of the Bozeman Trail, which today is known as Bertha Kennett Road.

Its history is detailed in records over a century old.

So we asked Madison County clerk and recorder, Paula McKenzie, to help us dive into these old records.

- You need to know the correct name of the road.

That's the biggest problem when people come in here looking for information on a particular road, they're calling it something that really isn't the name of the road, but people have called it that for years.

- [Hannah] That's the case of Bertha Kennett Road.

When it became a county road in 1897, an old mining claim reveals the county called it Toll Road.

And as we searched in large leather bound road books and thumbed through drawers of worn paper records, Bertha Kennett Road's story continued.

Landowners petitioned its expansion so ranch children could attend school and to better accommodate ranching operations.

And at various times, the county went through the public process of abandoning certain parts of it because surrounding landowners said they were no longer necessary.

- Well, you need to pay attention to what the county commissioners are doing.

These are petitioned roads and to change the roads, to open the roads, to close the roads, they have to be petitioned.

- [Hannah] But this locked gate just appeared here around 2017 without the county commissioner's official public process.

And the landowner who put this gate up argued Bertha Kennett Road was always a private road in a 2022 commissioner meeting.

- I've been part owner of this property for over 14 years and since then made it a mission because there was some questions came up of where this road went.

And I took it on personally to do very detailed research through everything I could find to try to find the answer to that.

I thought I had very conclusive evidence that this was always a private road and- - [Hannah] Making matters even more confusing, the county says it doesn't know the true course of Bertha Kennett Road because generations of drivers have left behind two sets of worn ruts that it could be.

And now there are gates on both.

So for the county to open this road, two things have to be figured out.

Is the road public, and which one is the road?

The county says the road is public, but that the records do not clarify which path was the original course.

Today, Bertha Kennett Road is rugged in the summer, cutting through sagebrush fields with pockets of timber that Thompson says elk like.

In the winter, Thompson used to go snowmobiling on the Ennis side of this road.

- Been traveled by a lot of the people that's lived around here for a long time.

It's used quite a little bit for hunting.

- [Hannah] Just beyond the locked gates and old mining claims, over 3,000 acres of BLM land sits.

But Montana County roads are not the only roads where public access disputes are surfacing.

Carter Morley, with the nonprofit Public Lands and Water Access, or PLWA, says he's currently tracking about 80 active public access issues across the state.

- PLWA, our mission statement is to maintain, restore, protect, defend public access to public lands and waters of Montana.

So if someone puts a gate on a county road or a public road or blocks you from utilizing your stream access right, anybody can get ahold of us and we'll investigate that and we're to defend that access for today's generations and tomorrow's.

- [Hannah] Access disputes on public roads are nothing new.

PLWA has been involved since the 1980s.

- PLWA, a couple sessions ago, pushed the legislature to change the fine for blocking a county road.

It used to be $10 a day, which there's lots of people that can afford that now of $10 a day.

Now it's $100 a day, but to our knowledge, it has not been levied a single time.

- [Hannah] And public access isn't the only thing at issue when it comes to defining county roads.

When Madison County hired Clayton Marxer as the weed district coordinator, he noticed the county lacked a lot of information about its roads.

- Started to become clear to me within the first few months of my job that there wasn't a real clear central database of the county road information or a verified map.

As the weed district, we are legally bound to maintain or manage the noxious weeds on all county rights of way.

It's pretty hard to do when you don't know what the rights of way actually are.

- [Hannah] So Marxer helped kickstart the working group to try to work proactively on the issue.

Each member of the County Road Inventory Working Group deals with county roads in different ways.

- So, you know, Clayton wonders how far this particular county right of way goes and where it goes, whether it's meandering off of where it originally should have been.

Or Cody has a question about public access for a proposed subdivision or GIS has a question because the public has a question.

And so then it comes up to our office to say, "Well, do you have anything on this?"

Or, "You know, here's a few things we know how does the law apply to the few facts that we know?"

But then inevitably it turns into, "Well, we kind of need to know a little more.

Let's find a few more facts."

- [Hannah] Most of Montana's counties have some ambiguous county roads.

It's for a wide range of reasons, unique to each road.

Records can be incomplete and conflicting, and it takes time to follow the clues.

- Sometimes throughout history, it's that got flooded, so this was a better route and they just started moving and that created another prescriptive easement potentially.

So it just depends on what kind, you know, the questions ask are how'd this road come to be?

(chuckles) What kind of road is it?

It may be a county road, but what kind of county road?

- [Hannah] The county records of Bertha Kennett Road mentions landmarks like Bertha and Kennett mines, but the county says placing those is even difficult.

- Mining claims and relying on mills that don't exist, or they did, but there's no wreckage or anything lying around, that's when you get back into the memory stuff.

And the number of people that remember their granddad talking about this from the 1860s, they're disappearing.

- And the number of people who had a granddad who was here in the 1860s is rapidly diminishing.

- [Hannah] Madison County has some of the oldest roads in the state, and it has a lot of records on what was happening in the area more than a hundred years ago compared to many other Montana counties.

- Counties that I do work in, I'm literally dusting the dust off the books.

(chuckles) But like you go into Madison County and there is so much information.

That road review committee did loads of work.

They got input from the public.

I just don't think anything ever happened with their work and it's unfortunate, right?

And it's wonderful that there's like a newfound push, a new initiative from a diverse set of county employees that's pushing for this.

That's awesome.

That's great.

I wish other counties had resources to do that.

You know, oftentimes when I'm talking to clerk in a court, they just tell me that there's not enough money or resources or time or what have you to get it done.

- I want to recognize people have done work like this before, it just wasn't verified and it was not maintained and kept up.

And one of the purposes of what we're trying to do is create that central catalog of county roads and map, so a database and a map, and then also maintain that into the future so that when all of us are gone and somebody else comes in, there's not this giant question mark over all these different roads.

There is a definable verified source that they can go back to and look.

- [Hannah] Thompson did some of that work.

At 79 years old, he has spent most of his life in the county and he knows it better than most.

He says he will continue to pay attention to how the county is handling roads like Bertha Kennett Road.

- If they do their job and follow through, then it's okay.

But if they continue to do like what they've been doing and not following through on the roads, then it's not okay.

- [Hannah] For "IMPACT," I'm Hannah Kearse.

- Madison County approved a draft county road report in the summer of 2026, but more work is still needed.

Now the county is thinking about taking the novel step of bringing in outside help to finalize the status on dozens of roads that are proving tricky.

(pensive music) That's all we have for you on this episode of "IMPACT."

You can find all our previous episodes on our website, or on the PBS app for your phone or smart TV.

I'm Stan Parker, and from all of us here at Montana PBS, thank you for watching.

(contemplative music) Major funding for "IMPACT" comes from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.

Funding also comes from viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(screen whooshes) (gentle music)