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A recent search for a thought-provoking quote about land ownership yielded two that feel relevant to Montana Free Press’ story this week on a study examining the rise of “mega-properties” in Montana and what that means for its wildlife.
The first is a tidy Mark Twain quip: “Buy land. They aren’t making any more of it.” The second was a new-to-me observation made by writer and lecturer Henry George in 1887, when this swath of the Northern Rockies was still the Montana Territory.
“The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of a people,” George wrote in “Progress and Poverty.”
It makes me wonder what George would say about some of the statistics that surfaced in the study, which demonstrate that a growing percentage of Montana’s private land is owned by individuals or corporations with especially large holdings.
Lead author of the study, Alexander Metcalf, a University of Montana social scientist specializing in natural resource issues, told MTFP that his analysis revealed that 13 owners control 15% of the state’s private land. Metcalf said that gives a select number of people an outsized ability to improve or degrade conditions for Montana’s treasured wildlife, which are held in trust by Montana’s government to be managed for the common good.
I was fascinated by the study because it brings together subjects that play a prominent role in Montanans’ cultural consciousness (to the extent that’s a cohesive thing): an orientation toward private property rights and a love for the state’s open spaces and wildlife.
Montana’s wildlife is varied and unique. Despite considerable pressure ranging from habitat loss and shifting climate regimes to invasive species threats, Montana has the type of biodiversity that’s the envy of much of the world. Montana’s an outlier for retaining the full complement of large mammals that were present before European settlement. All of which is to say that the stakes are quite high. Like Metcalf, I’m curious about the condition of the public trust resources that future generations of Montanans will inherit.
— Amanda Eggert
5 Questions For ❓
On Monday, Jan. 5, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced it would drop six vaccines from the routine schedule for childhood immunizations. The changes scale back recommendations for hepatitis A and B, influenza, rotavirus, RSV and meningococcal disease.
That decision — shared by top officials at the federal Department of Health and Human Services — took many public health experts by surprise, in part because of how the administration of President Donald Trump departed from the CDC’s typical process for changing childhood vaccine recommendations.
Montana Free Press spoke to Atty Moriarty, a Missoula-based pediatrician and president of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, about her perspective on the CDC’s changes. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
MTFP: What happened in this most recent change and how does that differ from the CDC’s normal process for adjusting childhood vaccination schedules?
Moriarty: The way that vaccines have traditionally been recommended in the past is that vaccines were developed, and then they traditionally went through a formal vetting process before going to the [CDC]’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, which did a full review of the safety data, the efficacy data, and then made recommendations based on that. Since November 2025, that committee has completely been changed and is not a panel of experts, but it is a panel of political appointees that don’t have expertise in public health, let alone infectious disease or immunology. So now, this decision was made purely based unilaterally on opinion and not on any new data or evidence-based medicine.
MTFP: Can you walk through some of the administration’s stated reasons for these changes?
Moriarty: To be honest, these changes are so nonsensical that it’s really hard. There’s a lot of concern in the new administration and in the Department of Health and Human Services and the CDC that we are giving too many immunizations. That, again, is not based on any kind of data or science. And there’s a lot of publicity surrounding the number of vaccines as compared to 30 years ago, and questioning why we give so many. The answer to that is fairly simple. It’s because science has evolved enough that we actually can prevent more diseases. Now, some comparisons have been made to other countries, specifically Denmark, that do not give as many vaccines, but also are a completely different public health landscape and population than the United States and have a completely different public health system in general than we do.
MTFP: Where is the American Academy of Pediatrics [AAP] getting its guidance from now, if not ACIP?
Moriarty: We really started to separate with the [CDC’s] vaccine recommendations earlier in 2025. So as soon as they stopped recommending the COVID vaccine, that’s when [AAP] published our vaccine schedule that we have published for the last 45 years, but it’s the first time that it differed from the CDC’s. We continue to advocate for immunizations as a public health measure for families and kids, and are using the previous immunization schedule. And that schedule can be found on the [AAP’s] healthychildren.org website.
MTFP: Do any of the recent vaccine scheduling changes concern you more than others?
Moriarty: I think that any pediatrician will tell you that 20-30 years ago, hospitals were completely full of babies with rotavirus infection. That is an infection that is a gastrointestinal disease and causes severe dehydration in babies. I’m nervous about that coming roaring back because babies die of dehydration. It’s one of the top reasons they’re admitted to the hospital. I’m nervous about their recommendation against the flu vaccine. [The U.S. is] in one of the worst flu outbreaks we’ve ever seen currently right now and have had many children die already this season.
MTFP: Do you think, though, that hearing this changed guidance from the Trump administration will change some families’ minds about what vaccines they’ll elect to get for their children?
Moriarty: Oh, absolutely. We saw that before this recommendation. I mean, social media is such a scary place to get medical information, and [listening to] talking heads on the news is just really not an effective way to find medical information, but we see people getting it all the time. I meet families in the hospital that make decisions for their kids based on TikTok. So I think that one of the effects of this is going to be to sow more distrust in the public health infrastructure that we have in the United States that has kept our country healthy.
— Mara Silvers
Say What? 🤔
Nearly eight months after the 2025 session of the Montana Legislature adjourned, legislative staff say they’re still working on combining the nearly 1,000 laws passed last year with existing statutes to produce the 2025 edition of Montana Code Annotated, the state’s official lawbook.
That codification process traditionally concludes in the fall after Montana’s every-other-year legislative sessions, which start in January and typically run through late April or early May. This cycle, though, legislative staff say a combination of bill volume, legislative complexity, delayed bill signings and technical difficulties has slowed the process. They’re now hoping electronic versions of the 2025 code book will be available in early February, with print versions delivered to subscribers by mid-March.
The Legislature’s chief attorney, Todd Everts, told MTFP in an email this week that a “tidal wave” of increasingly complex bills passed in 2023 and 2025 has combined with “extremely vexing” issues with the state’s software to delay the publication of updated code books each of the past two sessions.
Legislative data indicates lawmakers passed 950 bills last year and 885 in 2023, compared to 725 in 2021 and 597 in 2019. In some cases, Everts noted, major legislation like 2025’s property tax bills has also been structured in ways that force legislative staff to split it apart as they incorporate it into existing statutes.
Lawmakers and legislative staffers are exploring ways to speed things along in 2027, Everts said, including working “strenuously” with the software vendor and potentially limiting the number of bills lawmakers can introduce.
For the time being, however, the lack of a published 2025 code book hasn’t kept 2025’s laws from taking effect. Unless they specify otherwise, last year’s batch of laws — ranging from a ban on government use of artificial intelligence for surveillance in public spaces to bigger fines for introducing an invasive species to the state — went into effect Oct. 1.
— Eric Dietrich
By the Numbers 🔢
Pounds of pork harvested from a herd of feral swine in Phillips County and donated to the Montana Food Bank Network over several months.
The roughly 100 uncontained, roaming hogs were originally identified in September by Wildlife Services, an arm of the federal government. The Montana Department of Livestock intervened to initiate trapping operations and collaborated with a Livingston-based nonprofit that supplies donated livestock to food banks and pantries throughout Montana to process and deliver the pork to food distributors. This week, the Producer Partnership, the only U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected nonprofit meat processing plant in the country, affirmed that the USDA cleared all the donated pork for distribution.
— Mara Silvers
Departed 🥀
Indian Country mourned the loss of two giants this holiday season. Former U.S. senator, renowned jeweler and Native advocate Ben Nighthorse Campbell, Northern Cheyenne, died Dec. 30 at the age of 92. And Harold Monteau, gaming leader and chief judge of the Chippewa Cree Tribe, died Dec. 27 at age 72.
Nighthorse Campbell served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1987 to 1993 and in the Senate from 1993 to 2005. He was the only Native American serving in either chamber at the time, according to his New York Times obituary. In Congress, he advocated for Indigenous sovereignty, improved health care and the return of sacred items. Nighthorse Campbell told his colleagues in Congress that his great-grandfather fought in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lakota, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors defeated the U.S. cavalry and killed Col. George Custer. In 1991, he successfully brought legislation that changed the name of the site in southeast Montana from the Custer Battlefield National Monument to the Little Bighorn Battlefield.
“This is the only battlefield I’ve ever heard of being named after a loser,” he said at the time.
Nighthorse Campbell also served on the council of chiefs of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and in 1964, he was a member of the inaugural USA Olympic Judo team. In a Dec. 31 statement, Northern Cheyenne President Gene Small called Nighthorse Campbell “one of the most remarkable Northern Cheyenne leaders and visionaries in our history.”
Harold Monteau was an expert in economic development and Indian law. In 1994, President Bill Clinton appointed him to serve as the first chair of the National Indian Gaming Commission at a time when there was no existing structure for the growing tribal gaming industry. As chair, he played a key role in shaping and implementing new federal legislation that oversees gaming on tribal lands.
Monteau served as a professor of Indian law at the University of New Mexico School of Law and at Stone Child College, the tribal college on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation. At the time of his death, he was the chief judge of the Chippewa Cree Tribe in north-central Montana.
The tribe wrote in a Dec. 29 statement that it was “deeply honored when [Monteau] returned home to serve our people once more as Chief Judge, guiding our court with dignity, wisdom and quiet strength.”
— Nora Mabie
Highlights ☀️
In other news this week —
- Anti-dark-money group again files effort to change the Montana Constitution, prevent corporate spending.
- Campaign season heats up to challenge Rep. Zinke for his seat in Congress.
On Our Radar
Amanda — Given the mix of TV news and podcast personalities involved, this episode of The Daily podcast about the state of media was pretty chaotic. But it was fascinating to see the panelists coalesce around two big issues: a frustration with the role of algorithms in information consumption and a hunger for more face-to-face communication.
Nick — Seymour Hersh is one of the country’s great investigative journalists. If you’re into that sort of thing, I highly recommend “Cover-Up,” a newly released Netflix documentary about Hersh and his work.
Matt — Prominent conservative donor and industrialist Bill Koch consigned a large collection of western art to Christie’s, which will hold an auction later this month in New York City. Total auction sales are expected to hit records near $50 million, according to Christie’s. The auction items include multiple high-value pieces by Charles M. Russell, whose namesake museum in Great Falls holds an annual art auction and apparently didn’t get any of this Koch art.
Mara — After a high-stakes week of news and dueling narratives about an ICE officer using deadly force in Minnesota, I began wondering how national journalists verify and authenticate eye-witness videos and social media content. Among other tools, some visual investigative reporters measure shadows, evaluate weather patterns and consult satellite imagery to suss out what’s real and what’s not.
Eric — This YouTuber modded a driving simulator computer game to run soapbox-derby-style races with fully modeled crash physics. It’s waaaay more entertaining to watch than it has any right to be.
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This week’s edition of the Lowdown was edited by Nick Ehli, with additional copy-editing by Holly Michels.