blackfoot-valley

for some time a net movement of farmer-settlers out of the region, which has accelerated since the breakup of the Soviet Union. In the American Great Plains the hardships and damage wrought by overfarming that produced the “dust bowl” conditions in dry years caused a mass exodus in the late 1930s that should need no recounting here. A region that might be called “an Asian Montana” is Tuva, an “autono- mous region” of the Russian Federation in the precise geographical center of Asia. Adjoining Mongolia to the south, between the two world wars Tuva (then called Tannu Tuva) was officially a sovereign nation in its own right and might well become one again. In area, Tuva is about half the size of Mon- tana and shows a mix of grassy valley lands and forested mountains similar to the area around the Ranch, though its main valleys are much broader. Tuva is comparably thinly populated as is Montana, and its main city, Kyzyl, had a 1999 estimated population of 88,000, almost exactly the same as Montana’s largest city, Billings. Although culturally the two regions are vastly different, even in this respect there are basic similarities. The most obvious, is a tradi- tional economy based on livestock grazing and a love of horseflesh. In cen- tral Asia, this extends much farther back than the Mongol explosion that 42