Fort Peck’s vision for ‘endless’ buffalo prairie

FORT PECK — Fifty miles south of the Canadian border on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which spans over 3,200 square miles of rolling vistas and sagebrush across northeastern Montana, buffalo manager Robbie Magnan is watching a grassland ecosystem come back to life.

With just one other employee, Magnan spends his days managing more than 800 buffalo on 33,000 grassland acres at Fort Peck, home of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. The resurgence of bison after near total annihilation in the late 1800s is a blessing for Magnan. For nearly a century, Native tribes had no buffalo on their lands, but efforts to restore the keystone species have gained traction in recent years. As buffalo return to their native ecosystem that symbiotically evolved with their grazing, Magnan has noticed new sp