Yosemite Valley from Artist’s Point. Photograph: Smithsonian American Art Museum
In 1913, on a remote, windswept stretch of buffalo-grass prairie in western North Dakota, Roald Peterson was born – the ninth of 11 children to hardy Norwegian homesteaders.
The child fell in love with the ecosystem he was born into. It was a landscape as awe-inspiring and expansive as the ocean, with hawks riding sage-scented winds by day and the Milky Way glowing at night.
As a young adult, he decided to study the emerging field of range science in college, which led him to Louisiana – where he was so appalled by the harsh conditions faced by sharecroppers that he volunteered with a farmers’ union. After serving stateside in the army air forces during the second world war, he took a job in Montana with the US Forest Service, monitoring cattle and sheep grazing on public lands. He took to his work with high morale.
Unfortunately for Peterson, his career took off at the height of anti-communist hysteria, at which time the second red scare, also known as the McCarthy era, was well under way.
In the midst of this culture war, Peterson’s environmental advocacy and concern for exploited workers made him a glaring target, a man with a bullseye on his back. In 1949, two anonymous informants falsely accused Peterson of having been a communist, setting off an invasive loyalty investigation.
Montanans from across the political spectrum rallied to his defense. So did the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and conservationist Bernard DeVoto, who was so moved by the case that he penned the most controversial column of his 20-year run at Harper’s Magazine: Due Notice to the FBI.
In it, DeVoto delivered a bold defense of civil liberties in the face of growing authoritarianism – one of the earliest national articles to openly criticize both FBI director J Edgar Hoover and senator Joseph McCarthy.
As the red scare escalated, Peterson’s loyalty was investigated a second time, and then a third when another informant told the FBI he was “behaving like a homosexual”.
Peterson was fired from the Forest Service in early 1953. He lost his family’s ranch in Montana’s Bitterroot valley (not far from where the show Yellowstone is filmed). Peterson’s wife left him and was committed by her family to an asylum. A judge awarded custody of his three children to the state, placing them in foster care.
A granddaughter, whom I located and interviewed, told me the children were repeatedly sexually abused; the two youngest later died by suicide.
Peterson’s 2004 obituary, penned by his surviving daughter, states that he was “blacklisted by the infamous Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and J Edgar Hoover group of legal thugs”.
That the one in the middle was Donald Trump’s mentor underscores the connection between then and now.
Peterson was targeted during a low chapter in American history – one that feels eerily familiar today.
It was a time when reactionaries in Congress plotted to sell off public lands – just as they do now. When the US Forest Service was under intense pressure to clear-cut more trees – just as it is now. When public lands faced destruction in the name of energy production – just as they do now. More than 14,000 people were forced out of government jobs during the red scare – a mass purge that mirrors the targeted layoffs we’re witnessing now.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made no secret of its ambitions: a ramp-up of logging and drilling across public lands, and a sweeping plan to shrink up to six national monuments in the south-west.