Cantankerous Cowman Gave Montanans Courage

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The following story originally appeared in High Country News, a fine biweekly environ. mental newspaper. Some of our readers may find Boyd Charter's language a bit on the strong side, but we figured that what the "Cantankerous Cowman" had to say was a whole lot more important than just how he chose to say it. (if this article whets your ap. petite for the kind of solid eco-information that High Country News is known for, you can order a year's subscription to the paper-for $12from High Country News, Box K, Lander, Wyoming 82520 ... and membership in author Kye Cochran's Alternative Energy Resources Organization -plus a year's subscription to the AERO Sun-Timescan be yours for only $10 per year from AERO, 435 Stapleton Building, Billings, Montana 50101.)

KYE COCHRAN: CANTANKEROUS COWMAN GAVE MONTANANS COURAGE

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Boyd Charter died August 26 at his ranch in the Bull Mountains of Montana. He and his wife, Anne, were longtime opponents of strip mining and founders of the Northern Plains Resource Council and of the Bull Mountain Landowners Association. The tribute to Charter whichfollows was written by Kye Cochran of the Alternative Energy Resources Organization.]

Boyd Charter had a straightforward value system. It went like this: You keep your word. You don't hurt other living things for sport or play or through meanness. You do what you can to help keep the earth and its inhabitants alive and happy.

In these times of people pushing "new and better" things to acquire and do, Boyd's values too often are equated with gullibility and stupidity, rather than the simplicity of truth.

When coal companies began sending representatives to eastern Montana in the early '70's to negotiate the buying-up of ranchers' land for strip mining of coal, they read Boyd wrong.

He used to tell of one encounter he and his wife Anne had with an acquisitive coal company representative who assumed that because Montana ranchers are hospitable to strangers, they are also ignorant and malleable.

"This fella didn't know that we had already sent some Montana ranchers down to Appalachia to find out from the people down there how the coal boys operated to weasel a person's land out from under him," Boyd said. "So we knew all their tricks. The Kentucky people told us how the company would send out a real slick talker, and he'd go about buttering up the poor unsuspecting landowner, being real friendly and telling him what a great place he had, and how his horses was so fantastic looking, why wasn't they on the race track, and how he'd never had such good coffee in his life, and did his wife really make these muffins, why, she ought to enter them in a contest and win a prize, and blah blah blah.

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