North of the Hi-Line towns of Chester and Shelby, the wheat runs flat toward Canada until three dark buttes stand up out of it: West Butte, Middle Butte with its high knob called Gold Butte, and East Butte. Together they are the Sweet Grass Hills, an island range rising close to three thousand feet above the plains, a few miles south of the border in Toole and Liberty counties. Molten rock pushed them up from below and cooled underground, and the ice sheets that scoured the plains around them never fully covered their tops. They are the most prominent range in north-central Montana, visible for miles across the prairie, which is part of what they have always meant.
The Blackfeet name, as the state's own roadside sign spells it, is Katoyisiks, the Sweet Pine Hills; the English name is a near miss. In Blackfeet tradition Old Man made them from rocks he carried, and some of the people's oldest stories are set on them. They lie within the traditional territory of all four nations of the Blackfoot Confederacy, and the Chippewa Cree and the Aaniiih or Gros Ventre hold them sacred too. People go up into them to fast and pray, as their families have for generations beyond count. The government surveyors who mapped a railroad route through the country in the 1850s wrote them down as the Trois Buttes.
Sold and staked
In 1888, with the bison gone and hunger on the reservation, the Blackfeet were forced to sell the hills to the United States along with much of their remaining land. Gold had already turned up on East Butte, found by Alfred Bragg around 1884, and placer miners worked the gravels below Gold Butte long enough to found a small camp of that name. The Great Northern Railway acquired claims in the 1890s. Very little gold ever came out.
In 1992 Lehmann and Associates and Manhattan Minerals proposed the first large corporate mine in the hills. The tribes objected, and so did many others across Montana, and the Bureau of Land Management, which manages the public parcels, studied the proposal through environmental impact statements. In 1995 the bureau, working with the Assiniboine, Blackfeet, Chippewa Cree, Gros Ventre and Salish and Kootenai and the state preservation office, recognized the hills as a traditional cultural property eligible for the National Register for their place in tribal history. In 1997 Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt withdrew nearly twenty thousand acres of federal minerals in the hills from mining claims for twenty years. In 2015 the area was closed to oil and gas leasing, and in December 2016 the mining withdrawal was extended to April 2037.
The fight left questions it did not settle. The Blackfeet in Canada, whose ancestors used the hills as much as anyone's, were left out of the American consultation, and neighbors worried that protecting sacred ground would mean limits on their own private land.
Going there
Most of the Sweet Grass Hills is private ranch land, with public parcels scattered among the ranches. County gravel roads circle the buttes, and the best way to see them is from those roads, with the wheat in front and the hills going blue in the evening. Ask before crossing private ground, and if you come on a stone circle, a cairn or cloth tied in a tree, leave it as it is: it is somebody's prayer.