Grandmother of Green: Anne Charter honored on Earth Day -- Billings Gazette

Published April 21, 2008

Story by LORNA THACKERAY

Photo by JAMES WOODCOCK

Of The Gazette Staff

society at a traditional coming-out party - modest by local standards, but with a guest list of 200 and an orchestra.

 "I am ashamed to admit that this was not the greatest day of my life, and when it was over, I breathed a sigh of relief," the matriarch of one of Montana's leading conservation families wrote years later in her memoir, "Cowboys Don't Walk."

The greatest day of her life, she said in a recent interview with The Gazette, was many years later, Oct. 25, 1942 - the day she married her dream cowboy, Boyd Charter.

There were many great days to follow and no regrets about exchanging the family mansion in St. Louis for a home on the Wyoming range and later for Montana's Bull Mountains

"That's what I was looking for," the tiny gray-haired lady said. "I found what I was looking for, including the cowboy."

 Asked how she weathered the transition, she doesn't even pause for reflection.

 "I never thought of it as a hard life," she said. "It was a simple life. It never seemed hard to me."

 The Charter family bought a ranch in the Bull Mountains about 40 miles north of Billings in 1948, worked unrelentingly and quietly raised their four children. Life on the surface rolled on gently from season to season for more than two decades. The family was unaware that not far below them, well within range of a giant dragline bucket, lurked the Fort Union Coal Formation.

Coal was king in those days, with massive strip mines springing up in Wyoming and southern Montana.
By 1972, advance men for coal companies started paying house calls on Bull Mountain ranchers.

"They were just going to move in and we'd have nothing to say about it," she said recently, an indignant edge to her voice. "Coal is the dirtiest story of the country."

The coal men came to each ranch family separately, Charter said. They told each one, falsely as it turned out, that their neighbors had signed on and if they didn't they would be left an island in the middle of a strip mine.

"They wanted to divide us and keep us apart," she remembered. "Fortunately, we didn't believe anything they said."

 Boyd made a few phone calls and learned that neighbors were not signing up, but that they had been told he was, she said. That's when local ranchers formed the Bull Mountain Landowners Association. Boyd and Anne Charter were founding members.

Anne was elected vice chairman and her duties included publicity and strategizing against efforts to turn their ranches into strip mines. She was even called to testify before Congress, an adventure she wrote about in her book.

While fighting their own battle, members of the Bull Mountain Landowners Association learned that similar groups had formed in other parts of Montana's coal country. At a meeting in Billings, conservation groups and ranchers decided they needed an umbrella organization.

The Charters became founding members of the newly formed Northern Plains Resource Council in 1973.

"The problems of individuals became the concern of all of us," she wrote in her memoir. "We began to grow beyond ourselves and became strong in the doing. As we grew, we took on many issues relating to air, water and people."

Membership grew rapidly, and Northern Plains and its members began demanding reclamation and environmental regulation.

"We were concentrating on getting the best federal and state reclamation laws possible," Anne said.

Boyd died in 1978. Anne continued what she considered their work.

On Tuesday - Earth Day - Northern Plains will honor Charter with a 95th-birthday celebration at its new eco-friendly office, Home on the Range, on South 27th Street from 5 to 8 p.m.

Charter speaks of Home on the Range and the "green" concepts employed in its construction with the pride of a grandmother. "I'm really strong on thinking you have to have role models," she said. "It's practicing what we preach. It's not only talk - you've got to walk the walk."

Green is her color for the future. "We should be good stewards of the earth that God has given us," she said. "We have to live in harmony with the earth and to do what we need to get rid of all artificial, mechanical and nonrenewable fuels."

Asked if she ever thought Northern Plains Resource Council would ever become the major conservation force it is today, she answered, "No."

"But as it got bigger, it didn't surprise me," Charter said. "Anything good just grows of itself."