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the ranch. The siege of an extremist camp might have turned ugly, but the death of seventy people at Waco, Texas, three years earlier in a raid on the Branch Davidian complex there was still fresh enough that what followed was a long, nonviolent siege—eighty-one days.
    The siege stayed in the news intermittently, although there was only one death. An FBI agent died in an automobile accident when he ran off one of the unpaved roads in the area. The siege ended without any dramatic confrontations. Eventually the Freemen all left the ranch and many were arrested. Some disrupted their trials by refusing to recognize the court’s authority. The Freemen faced a variety of charges, including bank fraud, mail fraud, and armed robbery. Eight of the men received twelve-to-eighteen-year sentences. Others received lesser sentences and LeRoy Schweitzer, the leader, was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years and is still in prison.
    The Freemen standoff caused painful divides in families, between brothers and sisters, and parents and children. Many of the people who lived in and around Jordan thought of the Freemen as a cult. This was before Montana State set up a dig at Hell Creek, but our research staff was touched by the events, as were many people in Montana, who saw friends, neighbors, and relatives somehow drawn into the Freemen. Mary Schweitzer, who, as I mentioned in the introduction, led the research on the fossil bone tissue of B. rex, was connected by marriage to LeRoy Schweitzer, the leader of the group. He is the brother of her ex-husband.
    That was a difficult summer for Montana in other ways. Ted Kaczynski was found living in a cabin in Lincoln, on the western side of the Rockies. Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber, was bigger news than the Freemen. He had sent bombs through the mail to people he thought were responsible for the ruin of modern society by technology. Over the course of about two decades he killed three people and wounded twenty-two. He was eventually identified by his own brother and he turned out to be an academic, with a Ph.D. in mathematics, who had gradually detached himself from society and embarked on a violent crusade.
    It’s an old rhetorical flourish to tie politics to the land, and often false. The Freemen had no support from the population around Jordan, partly because they didn’t do any honest work. But it is true that eastern Montana is extreme even in a state given to extremes, in landscapes, weather, and history. And as life gets easier in other parts of the country, it just seems to get harder to make a go of it in Garfield County. The land can be harsh to the point of desolation. In the summer, dry mudstone flats bake in 120-degree heat and drinking a gallon or two of water a day to keep hydrated becomes a matter of survival. In the winter the wind rages at 40 below zero. The end of nature may have arrived in principle, but in a place where cell phone signals often disappear, the ancient hazards have not lost their power.
    The Missouri River is the county’s northern border, in the form of Fort Peck Lake, 134 miles long, rich with fish and often shrunken by drought. The lake is a product of the Depression-era Fort Peck Dam, built from 1933 to 1937 to provide power and jobs. Ten thousand people worked on the dam, just over the line in McCone County. Since the dam was finished, nothing else has brought people to this part of Montana in those numbers.
    The geological past seems to dominate the human story here the way the weather can overwhelm philosophical musings about the planet. The earliest ranches here are only a few generations old. The hold of people on the badlands feels tenuous. The fossil hunters for the great New York and Washington museums, who arrived at about the same time as settlers, struck it rich, so to speak, filling the halls of natural history museums with their discoveries. The ranchers have hit no jackpots.
    But from the Indians to the Freemen this is a thin