Buses were waiting to carry people from danger area, which on Thursday night suddenly meant the entire town of 2,000.

Desi Small-Rodriguez, a volunteer with the tribe's disaster and emergency services department, recalled the chaotic scene as the Chalky Fire threatened to burn down the seat of the southeastern Montana reservation.

"A lot of people were walking with their belongings, getting on buses, trying to find rides, getting out as told," Small-Rodriguez said Friday.

About 250 people stayed at a Red Cross shelter 25 miles away at the St. Labre Mission. Others took shelter with friends and relatives on other parts of the reservation. Those with no place to go camped out on lawns in nearby communities, or they just refused to leave.

The fire had already burned two homes earlier in the day, then wind from a cold front whipped up the flames and drove the fire straight toward town. Things looked grim to Carol Raymond, Rosebud County's head of disaster and emergency services, who had driven from Forsyth to see firsthand what was happening.

"I figured the whole town of Lame Deer would go up in flames," Raymond said.

Firefighters worked overnight trying to keep the flames back. At one point early Friday, the fire jumped Highway 212, but firefighters contained it with a back burn of the surrounding area, and the wildfire skirted around town without destroying any buildings or causing any injuries, Small-Rodriguez said.

On Friday, the smoke was choking the town, but rain was assisting firefighters. A red-flag warning was to be in effect until evening, and firefighters prepared for gusty winds and possible thunderstorms. The mandatory evacuation remained in effect.

The Chalky Fire is part of the Rosebud complex — the second major fire to affect the Northern Cheyenne Reservation this summer. June's Ash Creek Fire burned at least 18 homes, forced evacuations and caused $20,000 worth of damage to tribal property.


The Rosebud complex of six wildfires measured about 205 square miles Friday morning.

The Chalky Fire is the largest in the complex, at more than 156 square miles, and was uncontained. Besides the two homes lost, a third structure burned in one subdivision and the blaze was still threatening another subdivision.

To the west, the Crow Reservation was dealing with its own wildfires. Residents east of Crow Agency also had to flee their homes when strong wind gusts pushed the Sarpy Hill complex of fires toward their homes. The fire burned one home around midnight.

The complex of fires measured 80 square miles Thursday but has grown since its overnight run, fire officials said.

Meanwhile, in Northern California, higher humidity and calmer winds helped crews make progress against a wildfire in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

The Salt Creek Fire near the community of O'Brien about 16 miles north of Redding has consumed 900 acres, burned an outbuilding and forced the evacuation of about 100 homes. It was 30 percent contained Friday morning.

U.S. Forest Service representative Don Ferguson said some residents were allowed to return to their homes Thursday, but most of the evacuations remained in place. The fire also was threatening 20 commercial buildings and 100 other structures.

The blaze began in the median of Interstate 5 Wednesday and is believed to have been caused by human activity.

Also in Northern California, more than 400 firefighters were struggling to contain a fire that was threatening dozens of trailer homes and other structures in the Plumas National Forest.

The Chips Fire has scorched more than 4 square miles near Belden, about 120 miles north of Sacramento, fire officials said. On Thursday night, it was only 5 percent contained, and full containment was not expected until Aug. 15.

The blaze that began July 29 has been fueled by high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds.


Elsewhere in the West:

— In Idaho, a wildfire burning in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness has scorched nearly 29 square miles and was being battled by more than 200 firefighters, fire officials said. The Halstead Fire was burning in the wilderness 18 miles northwest of the small resort town of Stanley. It ignited a week ago from a lightning strike and was uncontained.

— In Washington, the state mobilized resources to help local firefighters at a fire burning 1,000 acres in the state's southeast corner and at a fire burning 15 square miles of land in central Washington. No structures were threatened.

— In Wyoming, fire danger was high again across much of the southern and central part of the state. Gusty west winds were expected Friday as a cold front moved in. The National Weather Service said the front would arrive in central Wyoming in the afternoon and the southern part of the state in the evening. A few showers and thunderstorms also were expected.

— In Utah, several major wildfires that scorched mountainsides last month have triggered a heightened concern for flash floods. The National Weather Service said southern Utah is at risk for flash floods over the next several days. Officials also were concerned about flooding in northern Utah County because the Quail Fire there burned near hundreds of homes last month. (Source)

WOLF POINT, Mont. — Sioux and Assiniboine tribe members wailed a welcome song last month as around 60 bison from Yellowstone National Park stormed onto a prairie pasture that had not felt a bison’s hoof for almost 140 years.

That historic homecoming came just 11 days after 71 pureblood bison, descended from one of Montana’s last wild herds, were released nearby onto untilled grassland owned by a charity with a vision of building a haven for prairie wildlife. Some hunters and conservationists are now calling for bison to be reintroduced to a million-acre wildlife refuge spanning this remote region.

“Populations of all native Montana wildlife have been allowed to rebound except bison; it’s time to take care of them like they once took care of us,” said Robert Magnan, 58, director of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation’s Fish and Game Department, who will oversee the transplanted Yellowstone bison program.

But with several groups now navigating a complex and contentious path to return bison to these plains, agribusiness is fighting back. Many farmers and ranchers fear that bison, particularly those from Yellowstone, might be mismanaged and damage private property, and worry that they would compete for grass with their own herds.

“Bison are a romantic notion, but they don’t belong today,” said Curt McCann, 46, a Chinook rancher who this month drove four hours to a public meeting in Jordan to speak against bison reintroduction.


When the explorer Meriwether Lewis followed the Missouri River through this region in 1805, he came across bison herds he described as “innumerable.” Just eight decades later, a young Theodore Roosevelt noted that all that remained were “countless” bleached skulls covering the Montana badlands.

Scientists estimate that tens of millions of bison once roamed America, but by 1902 there were only 23 known survivors in the wild, all hiding from poachers in a remote Yellowstone valley. For decades, attempts to transplant bison from the rebounding Yellowstone herd were thwarted, despite requests from tribes to steward some of the animals.

“I call them my brothers and sisters because they are a genetic link to the same ones my ancestors hunted,” said Tote Gray Hawk, 54, a Sioux who has brought the Fort Peck bison hay and water each day since their arrival. Their meat, lower in cholesterol than beef, will feed elderly tribe members and their skulls will be used in traditional sun dance ceremonies, he said.


The last hunt for indigenous bison on the Fort Peck reservation happened in 1873. In the 1880s, hundreds of tribe members starved to death on the barren land. Around them homesteaders from Europe began wresting an agricultural living from this windswept expanse of rolling amber in northeast Montana. Most of the neighboring farmers and ranchers today are descendants of those pioneers, and they safeguard their traditions with generational grit.

“Bison is a big issue that could really impact our livelihood,” said Brett Dailey, 52, who ranches near Jordan.

Today there are three million cattle in Montana and agribusiness is the state’s biggest industry, but not a single bison roams free. A 2011 survey commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation showed that a majority of state residents support reintroducing huntable bison to the vast Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, similar to a Utah herd created in 1941 from the last few bison allowed out of Yellowstone.

“Within this sea of agriculture there is room for small islands of conservation,” said Sean Gerrity, president of the American Prairie Reserve, the charity that brought the group of genetically pure bison back to a pasture just north of the refuge.

The arrival of Yellowstone bison was welcome news around the troubled Fort Peck reservation. When the first calf was born on Sunday, a rust-colored baby bull, tribal flags still hung at half-staff for a teenage boy who had committed suicide days earlier. Rates of poverty, unemployment, disease and addiction hover stubbornly above national averages here.


Census data shows that around northeast Montana, a prairie expanse almost the size of Indiana, most county populations peaked in the early 1900s and have since dropped by almost half.

The region’s fastest growing economic engine, oil production, is proving a mixed blessing. In 2010 the Environmental Protection Agency reported that toxic chemicals from nearby drilling contaminated drinking water supplies for Poplar, a reservation town of around 3,000. This year a schoolteacher from Sidney, near the North Dakota border, was kidnapped during her morning jog and murdered. The suspects are two Colorado roughnecks.

“These bison represent healing,” said Iris Greybull, 62, of Poplar.

The bison debate has dredged up old tensions between tribes and their neighbors. Before Ms. Greybull, a Sioux, spoke in favor of the animals last fall at a fractious meeting in Glasgow, dozens of farmers and ranchers walked out in protest.

She and other tribe members say they see an ugly double standard in the fact that there are more than 130 private bison ranches in the state, including one belonging to the mogul Ted Turner housing dozens of controversial Yellowstone bison, and yet only the Fort Peck herd has been visited by protesters.

But some say the bison on the ranches do not pose the threat that the wild ones do.

“Unless they have the German wall and a moat with a bunch of crocodiles and piranhas, they’re not going to contain those woolly tanks,” said State Senator John Brenden of nearby Scobey, who has long done battle on the bison issue in the state Legislature.

Around a century ago some Yellowstone bison contracted disease from domestic livestock and in recent decades thousands have been slaughtered in an effort to protect ranchers’ herds. At the direction of Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana, a few of these bison were quarantined for years and certified healthy. Some may soon go to the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, about 170 miles west of Fort Peck, pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by opponents.

“I took a lot of arrows for this, but it was the right thing to do,” Mr. Schweitzer said. “If you want to get into a fistfight in Montana, go into a bar and share your opinion about bison or wolves.”