and was extravagant because allegedly he paid $12.50 for a dish. I guess 

 it was a gravy boat so it was called the gravy-boat campaign. Anyway, 

 he was hit hard and he lost. He lost his race. But the initiative passed 

 because they sort of forgot it in the background. 



And so we see another interesting situation in Montana where the 

 leader of an issue went down in flames but a principal won. And a 

 number of years later he made this comment. He said, in thinking about 

 all these events, "I would not have taken a different course even though I 

 had known in advance that my action meant inevitable defeat. In the calm 

 reflection of these after-years, my judgment is that we participated in the 

 biggest work of this generation. Anyway," he added, "we raised a whole 

 lot of glorious hell." 



Well, I just wanted to recount a little bit of Montana's past. And it 

 is a lot of fun, but you can see when you look at it that the state has 

 been bruised and battered quite a lot. But all things considered, maybe 

 it's fared pretty well. My feeling is that it has fared maybe not too badly 

 because we have been lucky enough to have some leaders who felt that it 

 was worth fighting for. And they were ready to lay themselves on the 

 line and sacrifice anything, including their office in order to gain a 

 principal. And to a large extent, the second half of my comments is about 

 the future to a large extent. I would say our future depends on our 

 ability to continue that tradition. So what does the future hold--that's 

 what we're supposed to talk about. 



According to one government study, Montana is a likely setting for 36 

 synthetic fuel plants, 36, requiring obviously billions of tons of coal and 

 thousands of acre feet of water that's questionable whether we even have. 

 Montana has been listed by the Department of Energy as--this is a 

 quote--"Medium high," whatever that means. Medium high for siting ease 

 with regard to our air, water and coal and the study says that any state 

 siting problems that might exist can be solved by the Energy Mobilization 

 Board. That's reassuring. And it pegs water problems as those of 

 distribution and not of quantity or supply. And it says that we are 

 considered a low cancer risk because we have a low population density. 



That's your government speaking. And most recently, while our 

 efforts to save the Milwaukee Railroad have been strong so we can ship 

 coal and grain out of this state, they have been positively obstructed by 

 the federal government, which is now renewing a new push for coal slurry 

 pipelines. For those who are slightly comforted in the state of Montana by 

 the feeling that our chief sacrifice area was going to be the Northern 

 Plains, that comfort is fading. We've heard a little discussion today from 

 Bill Ritz and others about for example, the oil and gas interests which are 

 knocking on the over-thrust belt and even, imagine this, pushing for 

 entry into Glacier National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. There's 

 a new fear in the state of Montana and other western states about not only 

 having this area become the nation's furnace, but the nation's hotspot as 

 well. In the state of Montana we have 140,000 acres of state land that has 

 been leased to corporations who are drilling for uranium. And that's only 

 state land. What is involved as far as federal and private land is 

 undocumented, we don't really know. But I think it's fair to say that the 

 state is really not quite prepared for this recent new surge of interest 



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