BADGER-TWO MEDICINE:

THE UNSOLD HEART OF THE BLACKFEET HOMELAND

A Landscape at the Backbone of the World

Along the eastern slope of the Continental Divide in northwestern Montana, where the plains break suddenly into stone, lies a roadless expanse of roughly 130,000 acres known as the Badger-Two Medicine. The name comes from its two defining watercourses, Badger Creek and the South Fork of the Two Medicine River, both of which rise in snowfields along some thirty miles of the Rocky Mountain Front before descending eastward toward the plains of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. The area sits at a geographic crossroads: Glacier National Park borders it to the north, the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex to the south and west, and the Blackfeet Reservation to the east. Administered today by the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest, the Badger-Two Medicine occupies what tribal members and federal land managers alike often call the "Crown of the Continent." Blackfeet oral tradition places the origin of the people themselves in these mountains, at the springs where Badger Creek and the Two Medicine trace their headwaters. For more than forty years, this landscape has also been the site of one of the most protracted land-use disputes in Montana history, pitting the Blackfeet Nation and a coalition of conservationists against oil and gas interests that held federal leases beneath its surface.

Deep Time: The Piikani Homeland Before Contact

Archaeological evidence indicates that the ancestors of the modern Blackfeet, or Piikani, occupied the Two Medicine drainage for centuries before European contact, organizing their subsistence economy around communal bison hunting. Researchers working in the region have documented an extensive complex of stone cairns, drive lines, and jump sites along the Two Medicine River, including the Kutoyis and Lower Badger locales, that were used by hunting bands identified archaeologically as belonging to the Old Women's Phase, a cultural tradition dating roughly from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Excavations show that hunters arranged thousands of stones across the approaches to natural cliffs to funnel bison herds toward jump sites, a practice requiring coordinated, large-scale labor rather than the work of small opportunistic bands. Ethnographer Walter McClintock, who lived among the Blackfeet in the early twentieth century, recorded that hunters moved between several nearby jump sites depending on herd behavior and weather, a detail later corroborated by archaeological survey of the Two Medicine complex. This deep record of continuous use underlies the Blackfeet Nation's contemporary assertion that the Badger-Two Medicine is not merely scenic ground but an ancestral cultural landscape, one used historically and still today for hunting, plant gathering, and religious practice, including fasting and vision quests.

The Ceded Strip: Negotiating Away the Mountains

The Badger-Two Medicine was once part of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation itself. In September 1895, federal commissioners William Pollock, George Bird Grinnell, and Walter Clements met with Blackfeet leaders, including Chief White Calf, to negotiate the purchase of a strip of reservation land running along the eastern slope of the Divide. Blackfeet leaders initially demanded three million dollars for the land; commissioners countered that Congress would not ratify so large a sum, and the parties eventually settled on $1.5 million, paid out over a period of years to support the tribe. Congress ratified the resulting agreement in June 1896, and it is generally cited today as the 1896 Agreement, though the negotiations themselves took place the previous September. Federal court records from a 2000 prosecution arising from a Blackfeet hunting-rights dispute preserve portions of the original negotiating transcript, in which tribal leader Little Dog stated his intent to retain hunting access north of Cut Bank Creek so that young hunters "will then know where the line is and can kill game for his family." That transcript, along with subsequent litigation, has anchored a persistent Blackfeet legal argument: that the tribe ceded only the mineral rights to gold, silver, and copper believed to lie in the mountains, not the surface estate, the timber, or subsurface oil and gas that later became the subject of dispute. Many Blackfeet further recall the arrangement as a lease rather than an outright sale, though accounts differ on its intended term; a 2019 Rolling Stone report on the controversy describes tribal recollection of a ninety-nine-year lease, while a 2021 Flathead Beacon account describes it as a fifty-year lease. This discrepancy appears only in these two secondary journalistic sources, and no primary document consulted for this article specifies a fixed reversion date, so the claim of an intended lease term should be read as oral tradition rather than settled documentary fact.

From Ceded Strip to National Forest

The northern portion of the ceded strip became Glacier National Park in 1910, established by President William Howard Taft without further negotiation with the Blackfeet Nation, notwithstanding the hunting and access rights the tribe had reserved in 1896. The southern portion, encompassing the Badger-Two Medicine, remained in federal ownership and was eventually folded into the National Forest system, later designated part of the Lewis and Clark National Forest and, following a 2015 consolidation with the Helena National Forest, the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. Through the early and middle twentieth century, the area saw limited homesteading, outfitting, and logging activity along its margins. An oral history project conducted in 2006 by University of Montana graduate student David Brooks, and archived at the Mansfield Library's Archives and Special Collections, recorded interviews with area outfitters and Forest Service veterans describing homestead life, the 1910 forest fire, and the area's gradual transition toward recreational and wilderness values over the twentieth century. That collection remains one of the few sustained records of non-Blackfeet settlement history in the immediate area, and its details, drawn from a small set of interviewees, have not been independently cross-verified against other archival sources.

The Overthrust Play: Leasing in the Reagan Era

Interest in the mineral potential of the Rocky Mountain Front intensified in the 1970s, when petroleum geologists identified the region as part of a larger geological formation, the overthrust belt, believed to hold significant undiscovered oil and gas reserves. Corporations began seismic exploration along the Front by the early 1980s; Lou Bruno, a conservationist based in East Glacier, later recalled to Montana Free Press that his community was "taken over by helicopters" conducting seismic surveys that summer. In 1982, the federal government, under Interior Secretary James Watt during the Reagan administration, issued 47 oil and gas leases across the Badger-Two Medicine, reportedly for as little as one dollar per acre, without the environmental review or tribal consultation that federal law would later be found to require. The Blackfeet Tribal Business Council challenged the leases almost immediately, and by 1985 all of them had been administratively suspended pending resolution of the tribe's objections, though they were not canceled outright. Over the following two decades, the tribe and a growing coalition of hunters, ranchers, and conservation organizations worked to persuade individual leaseholders to relinquish their claims voluntarily; by 2006, roughly eighteen leases remained active, and in that same period Congress permanently withdrew the entire Rocky Mountain Front, including the Badger-Two Medicine, from any future oil and gas leasing.

Four Decades in Court: Solenex and Cultural Recognition

The most durable of the remaining leaseholders was Solenex LLC, a Louisiana-based company holding a 6,247-acre lease near Hall Creek. Frustrated by decades of suspension, Solenex sued the federal government in 2013, arguing that officials had unreasonably delayed a final decision on its permit to drill an exploratory well. The litigation forced federal agencies to complete a formal review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, and in 2014 the U.S. Forest Service, building on cultural resource studies conducted with the Blackfeet Community College, determined that the Badger-Two Medicine was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural District, recognizing its association with living Blackfeet religious and cultural practice. The precise acreage covered by that determination is reported inconsistently across sources: an Archives West summary drawing on 2006-2007 documentation cites approximately 93,000 eligible acres, while later accounts describing the 2014 expansion, including a Forest Service memo referenced in a 2017 Missoulian report, put the figure closer to 165,000 acres. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation concurred with the eligibility finding in January 2015. In 2016, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell canceled sixteen remaining leases, including those held by Solenex and Devon Energy; Solenex successfully sued to have its lease reinstated in 2018, prompting a second round of appeals. On June 16, 2020, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against Solenex and upheld the government's cancellation, though the company continued to press its claims in subsequent proceedings.

Permanent Protection and the Landscape Today

The dispute reached its conclusion in September 2023, when the federal government and Solenex finalized a settlement permanently relinquishing the company's lease, ending, according to Earthjustice, a legal and political struggle that had spanned four decades without any well ever having been drilled in the Badger-Two Medicine. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland jointly announced the retirement of the final lease, describing the area as a place of what Haaland's statement called profound cultural and spiritual importance to the Blackfeet Nation. Today the Badger-Two Medicine remains withdrawn from mineral leasing under the 2006 congressional action and is further buffered by the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act of 2014, which protects surrounding public lands from Birch Creek northward. The area continues to serve as habitat for grizzly bears, wolverines, and one of the last strongholds of genetically pure westslope cutthroat trout east of the Divide, while remaining, in the words of Blackfeet Tribal Historic Preservation Officer John Murray, a landscape the tribe continues to steward as it has since time immemorial. Discussion continues among tribal leaders, conservation groups, and Montana's congressional delegation over further legislative protections, including proposals for a formally designated Blackfeet Cultural Heritage Area, though as of this writing no such designation has been enacted into law.

Works Cited

Archives West. "Badger-Two Medicine Oral History Project, 2006." Orbis Cascade Alliance, Mansfield Library Archives and Special Collections, University of Montana, archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv39074. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Earthjustice. "Last Oil and Gas Lease in the Badger-Two Medicine Retired." Earthjustice, 2023, earthjustice.org/press/2023/last-oil-and-gas-lease-in-the-badger-two-medicine-retired. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Knoblauch, Jessica A. "Too Sacred to Drill." Earthjustice, earthjustice.org/feature/badger-two-medicine. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Missoulian. "Zinke Memo Suggests Monument Status for Badger-Two Medicine." Missoulian, missoulian.com/news/local/zinke-memo-suggests-monument-status-for-badger-two-medicine/article_379c6778-e01f-5c23-9318-00ecaf4cde95.html. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Montana Office of Public Instruction. "Blackfeet Reservation Timeline." Montana Office of Public Instruction, Indian Education Division, 2017, opi.mt.gov/Portals/182/Page%20Files/Indian%20Education/Social%20Studies/K-12%20Resources/Timelines%20for%20All%20Reservations.pdf. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Ore, Kathryn Sears. "Drilling in the Badger-Two Medicine: A Study in Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act." Public Land and Resources Law Review, University of Montana School of Law, 2015, publiclandlawreview.wordpress.com/2015/09/24/drilling-in-the-badger-two-medicine-a-study-in-section-106-of-the-national-historic-preservation-act/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

United States v. Peterson, 121 F. Supp. 2d 1309 (D. Mont. 2000). Justia, law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/121/1309/2505225/. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

United States Department of Agriculture. "Final Oil and Gas Lease to Be Relinquished in Montana's Badger-Two Medicine Area." USDA Press Release, usda.gov/node/54622. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.

Zedeño, María Nieves, et al. "Landscape Engineering and Organizational Complexity among Late Prehistoric Bison Hunters of the Northwestern Plains." Current Anthropology, vol. 55, no. 1, 2014, doi.org/10.1086/674535. Accessed 7 Aug. 2026.