FORT BENTON, Mont. (CN) — The Missouri River flows mightily past Front Street and a row of shops in the tiny town of Fort Benton, Montana.
Just across the street from the big river, Christina Taylor sat on a bench outside the hardware store on a warm June morning and waved at a friend. She politely said hello — but a palpable tension hung between the two.
The residents of Fort Benton are deeply divided in their feelings about the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument.
Former President Bill Clinton signed an executive order on January 17, 2001, in the final days of his presidency to create the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. The Breaks area is part of the nation’s system of National Conservation Lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management.
President Trump earlier this year ordered Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review dozens of national monuments in America and determine whether they should be downsized, eliminated or remain as is. After Zinke, a Montana native, recommended that the Bears Ears monument in Utah be downsized, tensions again flared between factions on both sides of the monument debate in Montana.
Secretary Zinke said this week he will likely recommend to President Trump that the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument remain as it is — 377,000 acres of raw, mostly undeveloped federal land along the upper Missouri River where the Lewis and Clark expedition explored over 200 years ago. The expedition passed through the wide spot in the river bottom that became Fort Benton, the inward river post 2,900 miles upstream from St. Louis. Here, fur traders sold their goods to the new residents of the frontier, and it was here that the state of Montana was born.
The stances taken by the two sides of the monument issue reveal something deeper, Taylor said: do they or do they not support President Trump and his goals? When the monument was created, opinions seemed fairly split, with some people claiming the monument's creation was a federal overreach, while others applauded President Clinton for helping protect some of America's frontier wildlands that have remained largely intact since the Lewis and Clark expedition came through in 1804.
“The monument has pretty much divided the community among the people who really like it and the ones who don't want it,” Taylor said.
She said the monument was created without the full consent of local farmers and ranchers – many of whom have private land within the monument’s boundaries. Despite the monument’s 2001 creation, a plan to govern how the monument would be managed did not emerge until seven years later in 2008.
While monument opponents say it restricted how much federal land ranchers could use to graze cattle or how developers could pursue their oil and natural gas leases, the management plan dictates that those activities be maintained at their existing levels.
“We were promised nothing would be done until all the input was finished,” Taylor said. “That did not happen. People were waking up the next morning and finding that their private property was now in a monument.”
Along with its attributes for scenery, recreation and solitude, the land in the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument is well-suited for wheat farming, cattle ranching and natural gas development.