EDITORIAL: A remarkable feat for a great athlete

Just last week, Inter Lake sports columnist Andy Viano extolled the brilliant pitching career of Ali Williams and noted her prowess is “breathtaking.”

Then the Glacier High School senior went out on the mound on Tuesday and surpassed most of the superlatives about her.

She mowed down 20 of 21 Butte batters with strikeouts en route to her second perfect game this season. The only blemish was a ground out by the only hitter who didn’t strike out.

Williams, who is bound for Carroll College, threw 77 pitches and only 14 were balls, which means she had six more strikeouts than she had pitches miss the strike zone.

Her incredible perfect game was a demonstration of dominance that will be hard to match — although Williams may well do it in the final games of her senior season as she strives to lead the Wolfpack to a repeat state championship.

Honoring the bison

There is a great deal of local pride in the announcement that the bison has been named the official national mammal.

Of course, everyone around here knows that the National Bison Range is located at Moiese in Lake County, and plenty of people know that Buffalo Hill in Kalispell was named for the herd of bison that town founder Charles Conrad had purchased in 1901 after the magnificent species had been hunted down to its last few hundred representatives.

Conrad purchased the bison from the herd that had been created by Michel Pablo and Charles Allard in what is now Lake County. Pablo and Allard were businessmen, but also keenly aware that without human care the bison would soon become extinct. Conrad shared their concern, and after Conrad’s death, his widow sold and donated a number of bison to the new Bison Range to help restore the species. Today, more than 30,000 true bison roam the country, many in Yellowstone National Park, and many more thousands exist in various states of genetic purity in commercial herds.

The bison has long played a monumental role in both Native American and cowboy life and lore. It is therefore appropriate that the animal now takes its place alongside the bald eagle as a national symbol of our treasured American identity.