Return of the Bison: A Story of Survival, Restoration, and a Wilder World

INTRODUCTION

Back from the Brink

The bison looms large in human prehistory—it was a vital prey animal throughout Europe and into Russia and North America. Stone Age Europeans depicted the species widely in cave paintings dating back 40,000 years or more, probably part of animalistic religious rites from an epoch when perhaps all humans felt spiritually linked to wildlife. It was one of the animals whose meat, bone, and hide made possible humankind’s journey into Europe, across Russia, and into the Americas. Unlike many of its ancient contemporaries, the bison was a survivor. While mammoth and mastodon disappeared, along with the Neanderthal people who hunted them, bison lived on, outlasting the ice ages.

The bison is emblematic of another vanished era, America’s Old West, which harbored one of Earth’s last wildlife spectacles, an ecological extravaganza almost unmatched anywhere during the past two hundred years. Plains and prairies often swarmed with bison, elk, pronghorn, deer, and wild sheep that in turn attracted and fed grizzly bears, wolves, and mountain lions.

The buffalo was a special symbol among the people of the Old West, too. For the Plains Indians, it meant survival in the form of meat and items crafted from hide, horn, and bone, making bison essential. For pioneers, it was a different story. The buffalo represented a force of nature that could destroy fences and compete with cattle for grass, and so the buffalo had to go. For the military, it represented the mainstay of many Plains Indians, another obstacle to Manifest Destiny’s concept of progress, and so the bison had to go—and by and large, it did.

Bison may outrun a fast horse, but they couldn’t outrun the impacts of modern history, which is why in the United States, untallied millions of bison withered to a few dozen in less than a century, symbolizing another verity of human life—we can wreak total destruction on wildlife when we’re unbridled by laws, regulations, and an ethic that encompasses all species. No other large mammal has sunk so low in number and revived as a species. But the bison is showing signs of recovery, even in Europe, where poachers once cut the native population to about fifty animals, all captives behind zoo bars.

THE AMERICAN BUFFALO—WHICH OCCURS AS TWO SUBSPECIES, THE FAMILIAR plains bison and the slightly larger wood bison of western Canada and parts of Alaska—once haunted prairies and woodlands, meadows and mountainsides from northern Canada into Mexico and from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Seaboard. They were so common in what is today upstate New York that pioneers had a hard time putting up cabins—bison rubbed against the frames almost as soon as they were erected, knocking them out of line. We can trace the animal’s once-extensive range in today’s geographic names—Buffalo, New York, springs to mind, but there are also towns called Buffalo in Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Minnesota has a Buffalo Lake, Illinois a Buffalo Grove, Texas a Buffalo Gap, and Iowa a Buffalo Center. Nebraska has a Buffalo County, as do South Dakota and Wisconsin, and Saskatchewan has Buffalo Narrows.

Europe’s distinctive bison species, the wisent, stands taller than the American thanks to longer legs. Of two Old World subspecies, only the lowland wisent survives today. Poachers shot the higher-ground Caucasian wisent into extinction in the 1920s. Because the wisent was nearly extinct by modern times, what we know about wild bison comes mostly from studying the North American plains buffalo.

Before agriculture and cities took over the bulk of American bison habitat, the animals traveled in migratory herds so large that on cold winter days you might have located out-of-sight buffalo by the fog their exhalations created above them. Their numbers made an impression on early European chroniclers of the West. While feeding, they are often scattered over a great extent of country, but when they move in mass, they form a dense and almost impenetrable column, which, once in motion, is scarcely to be impeded, according to an 1833 account. Their line of march is seldom interrupted even by considerable rivers, across which they swim without fear or hesitation, nearly in the order that they traverse the plains. . . . These animals have been seen in herds of three, four, and five thousand, blackening the plain as far as the eye could view. At night, it is impossible for persons to sleep near them who are unaccustomed to their noise, which, from the incessant lowing and roaring of the bulls, is said to resemble distant thunder.

One measure of the bison’s numbers, and of the slaughter that took place in the West, was the increasing haul of bone collectors, who traveled the prairies in wagons gathering up bison skeletal remains for use as fertilizer and in refining sugar. In 1872, these scavengers shipped 568 tons of bison bones on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line; in 1873 they shipped 1,372 tons, and in 1874, 3,457 tons. Along the Northern Pacific Railroad, collectors conveniently gleaned bones for a hundred miles on either side of the track; in 1885 a single firm shipped 200 tons from Miles City, in eastern Montana Territory. Fertilizer companies in Michigan paid eighteen dollars a ton for crushed bones, twelve dollars a ton for uncrushed.

In the years before slaughter and fences, bison followed their food with the seasons, seeking plains, prairies, and meadows where they could feed on grasses and sedges. Some herds climbed to higher elevations in summer and descended in winter, as elk, wild sheep, and some deer do today. When buffalo crowded into an area by the thousands, each downing about thirty pounds of grass daily, they could crop vegetation to the ground.

Given their numbers and the amount of food and water they consumed, buffalo packed a powerful ecological wallop. Their grazing, and the seeds that lodged in their fur, influenced the type of vegetation that flourished in their wake, which impacted the grasshopper species and other insects on a given prairie, in turn affecting the types of bird species found there.

In winter, when head and forequarters were insulated with long, shaggy hair, bison would face into the wind, swinging their heads into accumulating snow to uncover vegetation. Wandering across snowbound landscapes, they cleared paths that were beneficial to less powerful animals, such as deer, pronghorn, and wolves. While grazing, they cut openings that served as refuges for birds needing shelter from stinging wind.

Bison created microhabitats by rolling in dust patches or muddy spots, perhaps to get rid of biting insects, perhaps to cool themselves with mud, perhaps for other, unknown, reasons. This wallowing created shallow but lasting pits or depressions that filled with water during spring rains, creating temporary ponds useful to other species in dry prairie habitat. Even buffalo hunters would bathe in wallows and drink from them, practices recalled with the grim distaste of experience by Frank Mayer and Charles Roth in The Buffalo Harvest. You can still find wallows from centuries past where the plow has not erased them, such as in the Kansas Flint Hills. They continue to serve as breeding ponds for amphibians and as ephemeral water sources for birds and smaller mammals as well as thirstier plant species. Bison also left their mark in another way: many of today’s state and interstate highways, and many railroads, follow routes etched by buffalo as they moved, year by year, century by century, from feeding ground to feeding ground—well-worn trails, some of them two feet deep.

Bison cows and their offspring grouped together in maternal herds. Bulls left when about three years old, leading either solitary lives or gathering with other bulls. During breeding season, from midsummer to early fall, young bulls, seeking mates, rejoined the females but usually found an older male already herding with the cows and ready to defend his position.

When bison herds were plentiful, breeding bulls brought prairies to rumbling life, challenging one another with bellows and roars that could carry for more than three miles. Pawing the earth, a group of fifteen or twenty bulls in combat could send up dust clouds visible across miles of plains. Dominant older bulls tended to mate first, usually during the opening month of breeding season. Younger bulls might mate later.

Calves were born in spring, most of the cows in a herd giving birth within a tight time frame—at Yellowstone National Park today, for example, 80 percent of calves are born between April 25 and May 25—a strategy that helps make the young less vulnerable to predators. Cows usually wean their calves within eight months, but some continue nursing for up to a year, the cows kicking and butting their offspring away as the calves grow large enough to be a drain on maternal energy.

The earlier in the calving season a buffalo was born, the higher its social rank was likely to be as an adult. As early birth probably reflected the breeding of the healthiest, most dominant bulls with the most physically fit cows, higher rank for the early born may have reflected both birth order and better genes. In any event, calves, like scions of some royal lineage of the plains, tended to inherit their parents’ rank, with bulls and cows maintaining separate dominance hierarchies.

From late spring to early summer, cows and calves were predator magnets. Wolves, especially packs with greater numbers of large males, also attacked old, declining bulls. Sometimes wolves took hours to complete a kill, surrounding a buffalo, ripping at vulnerable spots, rendering the prey helpless by cutting the tendons of the hind legs, closing in for the kill, tearing away meat and eating before the bison was dead. One observer wrote of watching wolves kill a bull in 1859 near today’s Salina, Kansas:

[A]bout a dozen brown and white wolves [were] arrayed in a circle around one of the largest buffalos I had ever seen. . . . They did not rush upon the buffalo in a mass, but calmly waiting until his heels were towards them, several of them sprang like darts from the circle and fastened to his flanks or hams and as the buffalo turned to confront these, others would seize upon the vulnerable parts. . . . Nor did they seem the least hurried about it. Some, tired by their violent efforts, withdrew a short distance and sat down on their haunches with their tongues lolling out to watch and rest. In a few moments they returned to the attack and others dropped out to rest. Thus by this system of relief, they kept up the contest with a certainty of overcoming their foe however strong.

Because of their size, aggressiveness, and herd instinct, healthy bison generally were able to protect themselves against wolves. Calves ran to cows for defense, and cows to bulls, which when healthy and robust could combat almost any predator, with the possible exception of the grizzly bear. Early observers reported that cows and bulls often formed an outward-facing circle around vulnerable herd members to ward off predators, but generally they avoided serious conflict by running away, with cows and calves in the lead and the pugnacious bulls in the rear. If enemies drew too close, the bulls would turn and fight.

The tendency to follow the leader sometimes betrayed a herd, making it easier for Plains Indians on foot to encircle and spook the animals, driving them into a makeshift fenced pathway leading over a cliff, a preferred hunting method before Native Americans acquired European horses. Once the horse and the rifle came to the plains, and later the railroad, the bison was doomed. By 1800, mounted Plains Indians were killing an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 bison yearly, enough to contribute to a population decline. As early as 1804, Lewis and Clark reported that bison were scarce around the permanent villages of farming Indians along the Upper Missouri River, suggesting that horse-mounted Indians had wiped out bison regionally.

The most relentless slaughter began when trade in bison hides exploded in the early 1800s. The killing expanded after the Civil War, which—wrote Frank Mayer, himself an 1870s bison hunter, in his memoir, The Buffalo Harvest—supplied the nation with a cadre of eager riflemen:

At the close of any war there are bound to be thousands of young men who find peacetime pursuits too dull for their adventure-stirred lives. Maybe that was truer after the Civil War than at any other time. I know how I felt. I was restive. I wanted out. Fortunately for us then we had what you don’t have now: we had a frontier to conquer. It was a very good substitute for war.

And on this frontier, old mountain men who drifted in and kept brass rails and cuspidors of crude saloons in high polish, told us there were literally millions of buffalo. They didn’t belong to anybody. If you could kill them, what they brought was yours. They were walking gold pieces, the old timers said, and a young fellow who had guts and gumption could make his fortune.

The buffalo hunters who were trying to convert bison into gold, a strange alchemy, destroyed the herds all across the plains. Market hunters rapidly depleted herds in Kansas and Nebraska, then in Texas, and finally in Montana and the Dakota Territory. The bison cooperated in its own destruction. Under attack from gunfire, a herd might mill around aimlessly until killed to the last animal. Or, if a hunter was adept at staying hidden and a good enough shot to kill almost instantly with one bullet—no muss, no fuss, no bawling alarm calls—a buffalo herd might graze calmly while picked off one by one. Hide hunters called this efficient slaughter a stand. One famed rifleman, Vic Smith, who estimated he killed about 5,000 bison a year during the 1870s and early 1880s, once shot 107 at a single stand in a single hour. Shooting could be so constant that gun barrels became too hot to fire and would have to be allowed to cool off before the work could proceed.

AFTER LARGE BISON HERDS HAD BEEN WIPED OUT IN THE SOUTHERN AND central parts of the animal’s range, the last big herd made its final stand in what are today Montana and North Dakota. When the North Pacific Railroad arrived there in 1883, it brought market hunters into the area in droves, and they killed off bison wherever they found them. Indians, too, contributed to the species’ destruction. The agent of the Lakota (Sioux) reservation in the Dakota Territory allowed the Indians in his charge to go off the reservation for one last hunt in mid-1883. The Indians, and some white hunters, swooped down on a herd of about ten thousand and killed all but about one thousand. The agent said the hunt benefited the Indians, but at least one Badlands observer disagreed, calling the foray a blood-lustful debauch of two days, masquerading as a hunt in the name of necessity. . . . in which 600 [the count was probably 1,000] mounted Sioux Indian warriors were deliberately encouraged to destroy their own sustenance, to draw their own teeth, that they might easier be held to their reservations. He added that the hunt was particularly reprehensible not only because of its more than questionable purpose, to starve the Indians into submission, but because none knew better than the Government that it was a slaughter of the sole surviving herd of the species in America.

The following year, hunters piled their gear into wagons and went out on the plains expecting to hunt more buffalo. When they found only rotting flesh and bleaching bone, they presumed the bison had gone elsewhere, Canada perhaps, and would be back. A few years passed before the hunters admitted to themselves that they’d destroyed the incalculable herds. Within the next few years, small, harried, isolated bands of bison were hunted down and wiped out, in large part by ranchers who wanted to eliminate competitors for their cattle’s grass range. Nothing remained of wild herds but perhaps a few dozen buffalo in Yellowstone National Park.

Down to the very end, governments made little effort to save the bison from market hunters. William T. Hornaday, a leading naturalist and bison advocate in the late 1800s and early 1900s, lamented the blatant neglect that pushed the bison toward extinction: The business-like, wholesale slaughter, wherein one hunter would openly kill five thousand buffaloes and market perhaps two thousand hides, could easily have been stopped forever. Buffalo hides could not have been dealt in clandestinely, for many reasons, and had there been no sale for ill-gotten spoils the still-hunter would have gathered no spoils to sell. The means for saving the bison were readily available; the will simply was not there.

Nevertheless, some Americans lamented the passing of the bison and of the Old West. A nostalgic trace of evidence left by one such person, apparently an anonymous writer for the New York Times in 1907, reflects the sense of loss in a poem called Passing of the Prairie:

They have tamed it with their barrows, they have broken it with plows;

Where the bison used to range it someone’s built himself a home;

They have stuck it full of fence posts; they have girded it with wire,

They have shamed it and profaned it with an automobile tire;

They have bridged its gullied rivers; they have peopled it with men.

They have churched it, they have schooled it, they have steepled it—Amen!

They have furrowed it with ridges, they have seeded it with grain,

And the West that was worth knowing, I shall never see again.

They have smothered all its campfires, where the beaten plainsmen slept,

They have driven up their cattle where the skulking coyote crept;

They have made themselves a pasture where the timid deer would browse;

Where the antelope were feeding they have dotted o’er with cows;

There’s a yokel’s tuneless whistling down the bison’s winding trail,

Where the red man’s arrow fluttered there’s a woman with a pail

Driving up the cows for milking; they have cut its wild extent

Into forty-acre patches till its glory is all spent.

I remember in the sixties, when as far as I could see,

It had never lord nor ruler but the buffalo and me;

Ere the blight of man was on it, and the endless acres lay

Just as God Almighty left them on the restful seventh day;

When no sound rose from vastness but a murmured hum and dim

Like the echoed void of Silence in an unheard prairie hymn;

And I lay at night and rested in my bed of blankets curled

Much alone as if I was the only man in all the world!

But the prairie’s passed, or passing, with the passing of the year,

Till there is no West worth knowing, and there are no pioneers;

They have ridded it of dangers till the zest of it is gone;

And I’ve saddled up my pony, for I’m dull and lonesome here,

To go westward, westward, westward till we find a new frontier;

To get back to God’s own wilderness and the skies we used to know—

But there is no West; it’s conquered—and I don’t know where to go.

This book does not chronicle the destruction of the bison, a story that has been told thoroughly in many volumes. Rather, it begins where other books on bison history usually leave off, in the 1880s, when the bison was a vanishing shadow on two continents. Chronicling roughly the past 140 years, this volume shows how the species is edging toward recovery, thanks to, and sometimes in spite of, efforts to preserve it, beginning in an era when knowledge of wildlife and its needs was rudimentary.

Today, conservation biologists are struggling across the globe with the challenges of protecting herds of large, nomadic, willful species—from bison to giraffes, and from elephants and rhinos to wildebeest and African Cape buffalo. What these scientists uncover about the conservation of bison—the first large mammal subjected to recovery efforts—will provide clues for protecting these other species from systematic destruction. If you’ve ever suffered at the thought of losing these fellow earthlings, the story of the bison offers an element of hope for you and for them.

CHAPTER 1

IN THE BEGINNING

The Dakota Badlands, September 20, 1883: Twenty-four-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, fewer than two decades from becoming president of the United States, is doing a faux Indian war dance around the bloody carcass of a bull bison he has shot and killed. His guide, a local man named Joe Ferris, watches in astonishment and relief. Tough enough to eke out a living in the Badlands ranch country, Ferris has been put through the wringer as Roosevelt’s guide. He has spent the past three weeks on horseback in pursuit of bison that fled at the approach of the hunters, having been shot at so often that most of them carried bullets in their bodies. Riding the prairie through days of rain, even sleeping out on rainy nights without a tent, Ferris had begun to think he might die of exhaustion before the relentless Roosevelt killed a buffalo. When Roosevelt concluded his exuberant dance, he handed Ferris a magnificent tip of $100, further amazing the guide.

THROUGHOUT MOST OF HIS LIFE, ROOSEVELT—DESCENDED FROM ONE OF New York City’s wealthiest families—was an avid sport hunter. In his youth he shot birds of all kinds, including songbirds for his personal museum. His yen for shooting attracted him to the Dakota Badlands, which lay in the region where some of the last of the wild bison outside of Yellowstone National Park were making their final stand. Roosevelt was determined to kill one before the animals were all gone. This fixation made Roosevelt part of a trend among sport hunters. William T. Hornaday—chief taxidermist for the National Museum in Washington, DC—wrote about this trend in his 1889 book The Extermination of the American Bison, which was based on his landmark 1887 report for the museum: A buffalo is now so great a prize, and by the ignorant it is considered so great an honor (?) to kill one, that extraordinary exertions will be made to find and shoot down without mercy the ‘last buffalo.’

Only four years after his hunt, Roosevelt would help found the Boone and Crockett Club, which organized hunters to fight on behalf of wildlife and its habitat. The club led the struggle to defend the last wild bison—and their refuge in Yellowstone National Park—from the destructive development plans of such entities as the railroad industry. Nevertheless, it is little short of a miracle that bison and other dwindling species survived not only the onslaught of uncontrolled hunting and widespread habitat loss but also the practices of early wildlife advocates. Park administrators, for example, thought that predators were an evil that should be exterminated to make the world safe for deer, elk, and other game species, an idea negated by modern research. They were supported in this viewpoint by conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt, who as president of the United States wrote in 1905 that in Yellowstone the cougars are noxious because of the antelope, mountain sheep, and deer which they kill; and the Superintendent has imported some hounds with which to hunt them. Many sport hunters initially opposed hunting seasons and bag limits even as game species dwindled.

Roosevelt thoroughly exemplified the ambiguous state of wildlife conservation during a period critical to bison survival. Hunting in Idaho in spring 1889, a little below the Montana border and twenty-five miles west of Yellowstone National Park, he discovered fresh bison tracks, trailed the animals, and found them feeding in a glade fringed with timber—a cow, a calf, and a yearling. These buffalo, almost certainly from Yellowstone, would have numbered among the specific animals the Boone and Crockett Club endeavored to save. Moreover, shooting bison as they left the protective boundaries of the park, or even driving them out of the park into Idaho, was a well-known practice among poachers.

Another cow and calf joined the first animals as Roosevelt watched, sure a bull was bound to turn up. He pondered the moment: Mixed with the eager excitement of the hunter was a certain half melancholy feeling as I gazed on these bison, themselves part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race. Few, indeed, are the men who now have, or evermore shall have, the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts, in all his wild vigor, surrounded by the tremendous desolation of his far-off mountain home.

Afraid the cows might run off, Roosevelt grew increasingly edgy. Then, to his relief, a bull appeared at the edge of the glade, head outstretched as he scratched his throat against a young tree, shaking its branches. Roosevelt aimed behind the bull’s front leg, seeking heart or lungs, and fired. At the crack of the rifle all the bison, without the momentary halt of terror-struck surprise so common among game, turned and raced off at headlong speed. The fringe of young pines beyond and below the glade cracked and swayed as if a whirlwind were passing, and in another moment they reached the top of a very steep incline, thickly strewn with boulders and dead timber. Down this they plunged with reckless speed. Roosevelt found the dead buffalo fifty yards beyond the edge of the forest: a splendid old bull, still in his full vigor, with large, sharp horns, and heavy mane and glossy coat; and I felt the most exulting pride as I handled and examined him; for I had procured a trophy such as can fall henceforth to few hunters indeed.

Roosevelt’s pursuit of vanishing species dated at least to the mid-1880s, when he was establishing two ranches in the Dakota Badlands along the Little Missouri River. After hearing that an old hunter had killed a cow elk—a member of a species then nearly extinct in the region—about twenty-five miles from one of Roosevelt’s ranches, he hastened to the kill site. There he tracked down a bull elk and promptly shot it, elated that it was probably the last of his race that will ever be found in our neighborhood.

But he went further than merely killing bison for sport. Roosevelt endorsed ideas then widely accepted by a nation stoked on the concept of Manifest Destiny—the belief that the United States was meant to sweep over and settle the entire stretch of continent that lay between Canada and Mexico. While the slaughter of the buffalo has been in places needless and brutal, he wrote, and while it is to be greatly regretted that the species is likely to become extinct, and while, moreover, from a purely selfish standpoint many, including myself, would rather see it continue to exist as the chief feature in the unchanged life of the Western wilderness; yet, on the other hand, it must be remembered that its continued existence in any numbers was absolutely incompatible with any thing but a very sparse settlement of the country; and that its destruction was the condition of precedent upon the advance of white civilization in the West, and was a positive boon to the more thrifty and industrious frontiersmen. Bison, he added, competed with cattle for grass, and so must go. But there was another reason for their extinction. Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question. As long as this large animal of the chase existed, the Indians simply could not be kept on reservations, and always had an ample supply of meat on hand to support them in the event of war; and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life. From the standpoint of humanity at large, the extermination of the buffalo has been a blessing.

And yet in the same book, only a few pages earlier, he declared, The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world. . . . It may truthfully be said that the sudden and complete extermination of the vast herds of the buffalo is without a parallel in historic times.

In the hands of such men lay the fate of the bison and other hunted species at the close of the nineteenth century. Not content with killing jeopardized wildlife, Roosevelt produced an outpouring of books about his hunting experiences. His first, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, resulted in his meeting George Bird Grinnell, one of the great leaders of the wildlife-conservation movement that was developing in the 1880s. As editor of Forest and Stream magazine, an influential voice for the protection of wildlife and other natural resources, Grinnell would guide Roosevelt down a path to wildlife advocacy.

GRINNELL WAS BORN IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK, ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1849. His distinguished family tree included five colonial governors. His father served as the key Wall Street agent for Cornelius Vanderbilt, ruler of the New York Central system of railroads and founder of the Vanderbilt family line that would become synonymous with wealth and power during America’s Gilded Age.

In 1857, when Grinnell was seven or eight years old, his family built a house on Manhattan’s west side in an area called Audubon Park, overlooking the Hudson River north of where Columbia University stands today. This move from Brooklyn