Writers on the Range has a simple two-part mission. One is to engage Westerners in talking to each other about issues important to the region. The other aim is to entice readers to look forward to these fact-based opinions, with the hope they’ll then want to keep their local journalism outlet alive and flourishing.

Our opinions this year covered a wide range: avalanche deaths that might have been prevented, by Molly Absolon; Ben Long’s profile of Diane K. Boyd, whose innovative career studying wolves in the wild covered four decades; Zak Podmore’s description of how dead pool is a strong possibility for Lake Powell. We’re happy to report that Megan Schrader of the Denver Post said that Long’s and Podmore’s opinions were among the paper’s most-viewed columns.

But it was what happened to wildlife in the state of Wyoming that garnered the most response from readers, who wrote letters of outrage or made our opinion go viral on social media. Wendy Keefover of the Humane Society of the USA was involved in both.

Her first opinion column, published in April, revealed that in Wyoming coyotes can be legally killed—though in this case the animal run over by a snowmobiler was a wolf.

We know a wolf suffered this assault because the snowmobiler showed off the dazed and muzzled animal at a bar, where it was photographed splayed out on the floor. Many readers were appalled, especially as the penalty for what amounted to torture was a minor fine.

The second column by Keefover was written with Kristin Combs of Wyoming Wildlife Advocates, and it covered the sudden death of grizzly bear 399, Wyoming’s most famous bruin.

Starting in 2004, this prolific mother bear raised 18 cubs amidst the millions of visitors and residents of Jackson Hole and Grand Teton National Park. Her death, after colliding with a car, resulted in an outpouring of grief. The writers’ opinion calling for greater protection for grizzlies was shared on social media by more than 20,000 readers who visited our website on the first day it appeared.

We’re also pleased to report that a Writers on the Range column helped quash the state of Utah’s plan to allow a 460-foot telecommunications tower in the heart of Bears Ears National Monument. In his opinion, Mark Maryboy, former delegate to the Navajo Nation Council, blasted the state’s proposed tower as “a spear in the heart of the monument.” The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance told us that Maryboy’s column, which ran widely in the state, was a “major component” in the tower’s defeat.

A more recent column, by Jennifer Rokala, head of the Center for Western Priorities, was shared by many readers. Rokala insisted that no matter what exploitation the Trump administration planned for public lands, conservationists would fight back. As a reader put it in a letter to the editor of the Aspen Daily News: “You’re providing factual and great journalism that inspires and gives hope.”

We were inspired by several columns about Westerners trying to change the world, including Katie Klingsporn’s profile of a Wyoming principal, Katie Law, who never gives up on students at Arapaho Charter High School. Law was rewarded by seeing 14 students graduate this year, the largest class in the school’s history. Why did she work so hard? “I want to see these students succeed, and I’m going to do what it takes.”

There were other columns about extraordinary people or the novel ways writers understand the West, including Dave Marston’s piece about Amory Lovins, who insists that the energy gap can be closed, and others by Rebecca Clarren, Shaun Ketchum Jr., Rick Knight, Jacob Richards and Laura Pritchett.  Marston, the publisher of Writers on the Range, also revealed his struggle with bipolar mental illness.

Each of our writers—who are paid—is eager to start a conversation because they care about the West, and in particular, the public land that makes this region unique. And we suggest never skipping a column by Grand Canyon educator Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff, who can’t help noting the many foibles of tourists.

For example, whenever a hiker asks her on the trail: “Was the hike worth it?” Woodruff confesses she’d love to answer: “No, turn around now!”

Betsy Marston is the editor of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, the independent nonprofit opinion service that seeks to spur lively conversations about the West. She lives in Paonia, Colorado.

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A trio of bull bison — each a ton on the hoof — fed on bunchgrass. I watched my son’s eyes grow wider as one of the bulls approached our truck, as if it might want to rub off its winter coat on the fender.

Not long ago, the Bison Range visitor center would have given my family a history of the place by focusing on Theodore Roosevelt, America’s 26^th president and founder of the National Bison Range. Now, that story is getting a much-needed makeover.

TR still captivates the American imagination, as demonstrated by the recent Ken Burns miniseries on PBS. In particular, Roosevelt has been lionized by conservationists. He helped rescue American wildlife from extinction after the market-hunting bloodbaths of the 1800s, created the first national wildlife refuge, and signed the Antiquities Act that enabled the creation of national monuments.

More than any other elected official in U.S. history, he made conservation a household word. Americans were so grateful we carved his face on a mountain.

But that ignores the rest of his legacy. Roosevelt was also a white supremacist who believed that whites were meant to rule the world. His views on race warped his policies, both foreign and domestic. It’s easy to dismiss this dark side of Roosevelt as reflecting the norm for his era, but he was behind the times even in his times.

This contradictory man was someone who knew birds by their songs and wrote bestsellers about the beauty of nature. Yet he also threw around racial slurs and used pseudo-science to justify his racist policies.

So, what are we to make of this today? Is TR a hero for being a trustbuster, savior of the Grand Canyon and the egret? Or did he set destructive policies for a century to come? Perhaps both are true.

Case in point: The huge bison that thrilled my son. Before 1776, tens of millions of bison roamed North America. But by the time Teddy Roosevelt was a young cowboy in the Dakotas in 1883, only a few hundred animals still lived in Canada and this country, somehow avoiding the mass slaughter that accompanied Manifest Destiny. After Roosevelt shot one of the last lonesome bison, the death is said to have sparked a change in him, spurring him to become a conservationist.

But there is more to that story. Indigenous people had created deep cultures of conservation that predated Columbus. In Roosevelt’s day, tribes were desperate to save the bison and their way of life. It was Indigenous people, such as Sam Walking Coyote and Michael Pablo, who helped rescue a small herd of bison from Saskatchewan, and brought them back to the Flathead Reservation.

President Roosevelt also wanted to restore bison, and as president in 1908, he created the National Bison Range by taking 18,500 acres out of the Flathead Indian Reservation. But this action ignored the wishes of the Salish, Pend Oreille and Kootenai people, who had been forced to live there since 1855. What’s more, the bison refuge was run not by the tribes, but by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which mostly inflated Roosevelt’s role in the story and dismissed those of Native Americans.

But history has written a new chapter. Congress in 2020 moved to return management of the Bison Range to the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, and this May, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland visited the Bison Range to take part in a celebration of that long-awaited change.

The return of the Bison Range to the Tribes is a “triumph and a testament to what can happen when we collaboratively work together to restore balance to ecosystems that were injured by greed and disrespect,” said Haaland at the ceremony.

It has taken decades, but a historic wrong has been righted. All we had to do was look honestly at history and one of our conservation heroes.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director at Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana

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