The Valley of the Chiefs:

How a Hidden Montana Canyon Outlasted the Drill Bit

Introduction: A Landscape That Refused to Be Ordinary

South of Billings, where the Beartooth Mountains taper into the plains and the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone bends northward toward its confluence with the Yellowstone River, the land does something unexpected. It drops. A two-mile gash of sandstone opens in the prairie, its walls carved into hoodoos and narrow coulees by centuries of infrequent but violent water. Locally the place is called Weatherman Draw, after a homesteading family who settled nearby in the early twentieth century. To the Crow, Blackfeet, Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, and other Plains peoples who used it for generations, it has another name: the Valley of the Chiefs. Its walls hold one of the largest concentrations of Native American rock art on the continent, and for two years at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was also an oil company's exploration target. What happened in between is a story about how a nearly unknown Montana canyon became, briefly, a national test case for what a sacred site is worth.

An Ancient Corridor

Long before Weatherman Draw carried the name of any settler family, it functioned as a natural passage. Some accounts trace its use back to the earliest Paleo-Indian travelers moving through the region along what has been called the Great Northern Trail, a corridor connecting hunting grounds and winter camps across what is now south-central Montana and northern Wyoming (Our Montana). The draw's location—tucked between the Pryor and Bighorn ranges, close to a perennial river, and sheltered from the worst of the region's winds—made it a natural stopping point for people moving through an otherwise exposed and arid landscape. Archaeologists who later studied the canyon found campsites, hearths, and pigment-stained stones that reinforced what tribal oral tradition had long held: this was not simply a place people passed through, but a place where they stopped, sheltered, and gathered.

The most systematic early study of the site came from archaeologist Lawrence Loendorf, who began surveying the area in the 1970s as part of broader research into Great Plains and Rocky Mountain rock art. Loendorf's fieldwork produced some of the first formal inventories of the canyon's sites, including the discovery of several shield-bearing warrior figures, a stylistic marker associated with the era before Plains tribes acquired horses (Our Montana). In one case, Loendorf excavated a partially buried image and found an associated hearth containing pigment-covered stones, evidence used to help date the rock art to as much as nine hundred to eleven hundred years old (Our Montana; Cultural Survival). Later fieldwork by Loendorf and others, chronicled decades afterward by Billings Gazette outdoors writer Brett French, identified additional images—among them a rare carved bear-shield motif, one of only a handful documented anywhere in the state (Billings Gazette). Loendorf estimated at least one such carving at roughly four hundred and seventy years old, based on comparative stylistic analysis (Billings Gazette).

A Gallery Without Walls

What makes Weatherman Draw unusual is not a single panel of art but the density and diversity of imagery scattered across the canyon's sandstone faces. Visitors and researchers alike have documented pictographs painted in red, maroon, yellow, and green pigments alongside petroglyphs pecked directly into the rock. The subjects include human figures, animals, and, most distinctively, large ceremonial shields, some bearing internal designs of paired animals emerging from a central hole, a motif that recurs across sites associated with several different tribal traditions (Billings Gazette). The Outside Bozeman rock-art overview, produced in connection with regional archaeological education efforts, describes the site as containing nearly one hundred separate pictograph images along with numerous petroglyphs, a concentration described by researchers as among the densest documented in the northern High Plains (Outside Bozeman).

Because the imagery spans centuries and draws on the visual languages of multiple tribes, no single nation claims sole authorship. Crow historian Howard Boggess described the site's meaning in spiritual rather than purely artistic terms, stating that the work was consecrated by the people who created it, put into the stone with their own effort and belief (Sacred Land). Comanche preservation advocate Jimmy Arterberry, who later testified in federal proceedings concerning the site, offered a similarly direct assessment: that the canyon functioned as a living spiritual center rather than a historical curiosity (Sacred Land). Crow elder Barney Old Coyote, speaking at a 2002 conference on sacred site preservation held at Montana State University in Bozeman, noted that despite its remoteness, Weatherman Draw drew persistent attention, and pointed to vandalism at other regional sites as a warning of what unprotected recognition could bring (Outside Bozeman).

Tribal accounts collected by researchers describe the draw as historically serving as neutral ground, a winter gathering place where otherwise rival nations could coexist for ceremonial purposes, including vision quests, burials, prayer, and the collection of medicinal plants (Sacred Land; MTHikes.com). That function—as a shared rather than exclusive space—became an important thread in the debate that followed, since it meant the site's defenders spoke for no single tribe but for a coalition spanning much of the northern and central Plains.

Oil, Leases, and a Widening Conflict

The canyon's isolation had, for most of the twentieth century, protected it by simple obscurity; its precise location remained largely unpublicized even after Loendorf's surveys (Sacred Land). That changed in the 1980s, when the federal Bureau of Land Management, which administers the surrounding public land through its Billings Field Office, leased mineral rights beneath the draw for oil and gas development (Our Montana). The lease eventually passed into the hands of the Anschutz Exploration Corporation, a Denver-based firm controlled by businessman Philip Anschutz, whose energy holdings extended across the Rocky Mountain region.

By the late 1990s, Anschutz moved to exercise its lease, seeking federal approval to drill an exploratory well within the draw, on land the company estimated could hold as much as ten million barrels of recoverable oil (Cultural Survival). In May 2001, federal officials upheld the company's right to proceed. The decision drew immediate opposition. Ten tribal nations, along with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Sierra Club, formally appealed the approval to the Interior Board of Land Appeals, the administrative body that reviews Interior Department land-use decisions (Sacred Land). The Bureau of Land Management, facing sustained pressure, required that any drilling be accompanied by a security fence and guard around the rock art panels, a condition tribal representatives rejected outright, arguing that no amount of on-site security could substitute for keeping heavy equipment and infrastructure out of the canyon altogether (Sacred Land).

The dispute drew national coverage and legislative attention; Congressman Nick Rahall, among others, took up the case in connection with broader proposed protections for Native American sacred sites then under consideration in Congress (Sacred Land). Facing a coordinated campaign that combined tribal advocacy, national preservation organizations, and unfavorable publicity, Anschutz entered direct negotiations with the National Trust and the Department of the Interior rather than continue to litigate the appeal.

Resolution and Lasting Protection

The negotiations produced an agreement dated April 23, 2002, under which Anschutz Exploration relinquished its leases within Weatherman Draw to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which agreed to hold the leases without developing them until they lapsed on their own terms (Sacred Land). With the leases effectively neutralized, the tribal coalition and its allied organizations withdrew their pending appeal, and the Bureau of Land Management indicated it would exercise its discretion to decline issuing any new leases in the area pending a comprehensive resource management plan (Sacred Land). The National Trust later recognized Anschutz Exploration's decision with its President's Award, an unusual gesture toward a company that had, only months earlier, been the object of a national preservation campaign (Cultural Survival).

The settlement did not simply freeze the dispute; it initiated a longer process of formal protection. In the years that followed, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew the site from mineral leasing entirely and designated it an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, the agency's principal administrative tool for shielding land with exceptional cultural, historical, or ecological value from development that would otherwise be permitted under federal land-use law (Our Montana). That designation has since been expanded rather than diminished. A Bureau of Land Management resource management plan for the Billings Field Office released for public comment added roughly eight thousand additional acres to the Weatherman Draw Area of Critical Environmental Concern, part of a broader plan that closed more than three hundred miles of roads and extended protected status to additional culturally significant tracts across the office's more than 434,000 acres of managed public land (Ravalli Republic).

Weatherman Draw Today

The canyon remains open to the public but is managed under restrictions intended to limit the damage that foot traffic and casual visitation can still inflict. Motorized vehicles are barred from the interior, and visitors are asked to avoid touching, tracing, or otherwise altering the rock art, guidance that reflects lessons learned from decades of unregulated visitation elsewhere in the region (Outside Bozeman). Despite these protections, evidence of vandalism persists in places, including scratched graffiti and bullet damage to some panels, a reminder that formal designation does not by itself guarantee physical preservation (MTHikes.com).

Researchers continue to document new material within the draw. Loendorf's fieldwork extended into the following decades, and as recently as 2018 and 2019 additional panels, including the rare bear-shield carving reported by French, were still being located by researchers and hikers working with the benefit of decades of accumulated local knowledge (Billings Gazette). The site's significance, in other words, has not been exhausted by the scholarship already conducted; it continues to be written, quite literally, into the historical record.

Conclusion

Weatherman Draw's importance rests on two distinct but intertwined facts. The first is archaeological: the canyon holds one of the largest and most stylistically varied collections of Native American rock art documented in the northern Plains, spanning many centuries and multiple tribal traditions. The second is political and legal: the site's survival, unlike that of many comparable places across the American West, did not depend solely on federal discretion. It required a coordinated, cross-tribal advocacy effort, sustained national attention, and ultimately a negotiated settlement that a private energy company was persuaded, rather than compelled by court order, to accept. In an era when disputes over sacred sites and resource extraction on public land have rarely ended so cleanly, Weatherman Draw stands as a rare instance in which the outcome matched the stakes its defenders described from the beginning.

Works Cited

Billings365. "Walking Where Ancient Peoples Walked." Billings365, https://billings365.com/walking-where-ancient-peoples-walked. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

Bureau of Land Management. "Billings Field Office." U.S. Department of the Interior, https://www.blm.gov/office/billings-field-office. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

Cultural Survival. "Weatherman Draw: Where Drilling Companies and Indian Tribes Agree." Cultural Survival, 29 Apr. 2002, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/weatherman-draw-where-drilling-companies-and-indian-tribes-agree. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

French, Brett. "Searching for Ghosts: Rock Art Hides in Montana High Desert." Billings Gazette, 22 May 2022, https://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/searching-for-ghosts-rock-art-hides-in-montana-high-desert/article_f41b0440-109c-52fb-b28f-68817bc89a31.html. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

Our Montana. "Saving Weatherman Draw." Our Montana, 11 Dec. 2012, https://omsandbox.wordpress.com/our-montanas-work/preserving-weatherman-draw/saving-weatherman-draw/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

Outside Bozeman. "Native American Rock Art." Outside Bozeman, 22 June 2019, https://outsidebozeman.com/native-american-rock-art. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

Ravalli Republic. "BLM Plan for Billings Area Addresses Natural Resources Development, Road Use." Ravalli Republic, https://ravallirepublic.com/news/state-and-regional/article_ea528b6c-e39a-584b-910c-cab4be3b0b82.html. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.

Sacred Land Film Project. "Weatherman Draw – United States." Sacred Land, 1 Sept. 2001, https://sacredland.org/weatherman-draw-united-states/. Accessed 12 Aug. 2026.