Yellowstone’s bison have been bottled up in the park since their remarkable recovery over the course of the 20th Century. But a deal cut this week with the neighboring Royal Teton Ranch will allow these iconic beasts that once roamed the West freely, a chance to expand their range outside of the park.

Yellowstone National Park superintendent Suzanne Lewis engineered the deal, buying out the ranch’s grazing rights for 30 years for $2.8 million on 5,000 acres. As expected Montana’s cattle ranchers don’t like the deal because they are fearful the bison will spread brucellosis, a disease that causes spontaneous abortion in cows, into their herds.

The story took me back to the 1980s and the early 1990s when I covered Yellowstone more closely. Two women, whose work then set the stage for this bison deal.

One was Mary Meagher, a Park Service biologist who knew and perhaps still knows more about bison than any living person. Her decades of research on Yellowstone’s bison remains the foundation on which bison management is done.

She can be stubborn, sometimes arrogant but always has been committed to her research and Yellowstone's wildlife.

She told me in the 1980s that Yellowstone’s bison were hard-wired to roam. She accurately predicted they would continue to move out of the park seeking to expand into Montana and even Idaho.

The other woman is Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the prophet and leader of the Church Universal Triumphant, a new age church that combined religious from both east and West. She bought the Forbes ranch adjacent to Yellowstone, in part because of the lack of foresight by the Reagan Administration to get it, and moved her followers from California to Montana.

They had all kinds of clashes with Yellowstone Park and eventually state and local authorities when she predicted a major catastrophe would hit the world in 1990. Followers from around the world came to wilds of the Royal Teton Ranch as they named it, which was became sacred ground for the religion, the “inner retreat.”

There they hoarded food, fuel and even guns preparing for moment when they would defend themselves from the rest of the world. It created a siege mentality that only ended after federal gun charges against some leaders.

I visited the inner retreat several times in those days and interviewed Prophet, who had a powerful personality and an engaging charm. In 1999 she was diagnosed with Alzheimer ’s disease and has spend years in a nursing facility.

Now the church is run by a board and has become a regular part of the Montana community. It will now share its land with bison who will continue their own quest to expand into the promised land.