To tell you the truth, I hated growing up in sagebrush country. Southern Idaho, through my adolescent eyes, looked all gray-green and hopeless. I saw no future on that sagebrush sea, no way to build a life that didn’t include work boots and low wages, hard winter winds and hot summer fires.
My friends agreed. We saw sage land as good for nothing but relieving the frustration of living in it, with guns, dirt bikes, and cheap beer. Or, as a convenient place to dump junk, like old couches, broken stoves, and dead dogs. We saw sage land as wasteland. And we weren’t alone.
Those hapless pioneers who first stumbled through the high desert on the Oregon Trail weren’t exactly charmed by what they saw. One called it a “hideous world . . . marked by the graves and the bones of dead men.”
By the Twentieth Century, America’s attitude toward sagebrush hadn’t much i...
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