“Cut every one of those eyesores. I want them gone before the weekend.”
Vivian Crowfoot delivered that order through the open window of her pearl-white Lincoln Navigator as though she were telling a landscaping crew to trim an overgrown hedge.
The man standing beside her vehicle was wearing a hard hat and a Crowfoot Line Works jacket. Behind him, a bucket truck waited beneath three high-voltage transmission lines crossing my family’s ranch outside Big Timber, Montana.
Those lines carried 70,000 volts.
They also supplied electricity to Vivian’s own luxury subdivision.
She had spent nearly four years demanding their removal because they spoiled the view of the Crazy Mountains from her neighbors’ expensive back decks. She had sent letters, threatened lawsuits, complained at county meetings, and insisted that the homeowners association possessed authority over land it did not own.
Now she had apparently decided to stop asking.
“Mr. Crowfoot said we had authorization,” the foreman told her.
“You do,” Vivian replied. “I’m the HOA president.”
At 11:47 that Thursday morning, the foreman raised a hydraulic cutter toward the first conductor.
Less than a minute later, every house in Crooked Creek Estates went dark.
Including Vivian’s.
What she didn’t know was that my son had already identified her husband’s crew on our security cameras. She didn’t know that an FBI agent was sitting beside me, watching the same live feed. And she certainly didn’t know that the utility company she had spent years trying to intimidate had been founded by my grandfather nearly eighty years earlier.
My name is Oren Osterman. I was fifty-eight years old that August, and I had spent most of my adult life working for Big Timber Electric and Power Company.
I knew exactly what those lines carried.
By the end of that day, Vivian Crowfoot would discover what else they had been carrying for six years.
Evidence.
The Osterman Ranch lies south of the Yellowstone River, about four miles west of Big Timber. Six hundred and forty acres of hay meadow, sagebrush, pasture, and rolling ground that rises toward the Crazy Mountains.
My grandfather, Sverre Osterman, bought the property in 1937.
He had come to Montana after working construction jobs in Washington, saving every dollar he could. He spoke English with a Norwegian accent until the day he died, and he believed two things without qualification: a man should pay his debts, and electricity should reach a farmhouse whether or not that farmhouse made anyone rich.
In 1947, he founded Big Timber Electric and Power Company with a modest rural electrification loan and the savings he had accumulated over nearly a decade.
The following summer, he and two cousins strung twenty-two miles of electrical line across Sweet Grass County.
They worked from sunrise until the light failed. They hauled poles with borrowed equipment, dug holes by hand when the ground was too rocky for machinery, and slept in the back of a truck when the distance home made driving impractical.
One of those original poles still stands near the Yellowstone River.
It is fifty-eight feet tall, made of cedar, and set deep into the riverbank.
My grandfather installed it himself.
Every year, I inspect it.
Some people find that strange. I own a utility company with modern monitoring systems, qualified engineers, and hundreds of miles of infrastructure. I could send any experienced lineman to inspect an old pole.
But that one belongs to my grandfather’s story.
When I climb it, I remember that he built the company to serve people who had been told their properties were too remote to matter.
He died in 1973, leaving the company to my father, Bjorn.
Dad ran it for forty-two years.
I took over in 2015.
By then, Big Timber Electric and Power Company served approximately 380 residential and commercial customers across Sweet Grass County and parts of neighboring counties. We maintained hundreds of miles of distribution infrastructure, operated a round-the-clock control center, and employed people who understood that a power outage in rural Montana could mean much more than an inconvenient afternoon.
It could mean a rancher losing refrigeration for veterinary supplies.
It could mean a family without heat during a January blizzard.
It could mean a well pump failing when livestock needed water.
My wife, Frieda, served as our chief operating officer. Our daughter, Ingrid, was a journeyman lineman. Our son, Keld, supervised the daytime shift in our SCADA control center.
We were a family business in the most literal sense.
We ate dinner together, argued about maintenance budgets, and sometimes spent Christmas morning discussing transformer failures.
We also understood the responsibility attached to our last name.
Then Crooked Creek Estates appeared south of our ranch.
Construction began in 2018 on land that had been cattle pasture for generations. Within a few years, the developers had built 120 large houses with stone fireplaces, oversized garages, landscaped entrances, and windows designed to frame the Crazy Mountains.
I had nothing against the development.
People were entitled to buy expensive homes and enjoy their views.
The trouble began when some of those homeowners decided that everything visible from their property should be subject to their approval.
In 2021, Vivian Crowfoot became president of the Crooked Creek Estates homeowners association.
She was fifty-three, impeccably dressed, and remarkably comfortable issuing instructions to people who had never agreed to work for her.
Her pearl-white Lincoln Navigator had personalized plates reading VIVC.
She liked to park it where everyone could see it.
Her husband, Renton Crowfoot, owned Crowfoot Line Works LLC, a regional contractor specializing in vegetation clearance and utility right-of-way maintenance.
His company had worked with ours for years.
That connection would eventually become important.
Vivian’s first letter arrived in October 2021.
It was written on expensive HOA stationery and described the transmission lines crossing our southern pasture as an unacceptable visual obstruction.
She requested that Big Timber Electric and Power Company relocate them underground.
I read the letter twice, then asked Frieda to review my response before I sent it.
