American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  A bull and cow along the upper Chetaslina, June 2006.

  There’s beauty in the young calf’s unknowingness, in the mystery of its wild and remote existence. My quest to understand the buffalo has carried me across several years and thousands of miles, yet only rarely have I been able to see the animal in the way that I see this calf—as an untethered beast living outside human context and beyond the reach of human history. But my enjoyment of this animal as a simple biological being is short-lived; within seconds, my concentration is broken by a question that I’ve been struggling with for the past few months—how can I claim to love the very thing that I worked so hard to kill? I’ve thought of this often lately, yet I haven’t been able to answer it with force and conviction. For now, I rely on a response that is admittedly glib: I just do, and I always will.

  In a historical sense, I suppose that my confused and convoluted relationship to the buffalo is nothing new. For the entirety of man’s existence in North America, we’ve struggled with the meaning of this animal, with the ways in which its life is intertwined with our own. I think of the first hunters who walked through some long-ago gap between glaciers and stumbled onto a landscape populated with strange and massive creatures. The buffalo was just one of many then, a giant among a host of other giants, but over time these many animals were whittled away by the forces of man and nature. Eventually the buffalo stood alone, the continent’s greatest beast, like the winning contestant in a game show.

  Herd crossing the upper Chetaslina, June 2006.

  Its prize was humanity’s never-ending attention, which was ultimately a bittersweet award. For thousands of years, the first people of North America fed on the buffalo’s meat and wore the buffalo’s skin, and then made a deity of the animal as a way of reconciling their need to slaughter the thing that granted them life. My own European ancestors came to the New World and scoffed at the heathen nature of the Indians’ ideas, then stood by as the buffalo nearly vanished from the earth beneath their notion that the animal was an expendable gift of their own God, a commodity meant to get them started before stepping aside and letting “civilization” bloom in the wilderness.

  I sometimes imagine that we saved the buffalo from the brink of extinction for the simple reason that the animal provided a handy mirror in which we could see our innermost desires and failures, and our most confounding contradictions. Our efforts to use the buffalo as a looking glass have rendered the animal almost inscrutable. At once it is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it’s a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it’s a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation. Perhaps the buffalo’s enduring strength and legacy come from this chameleonic wizardry, this ability to provide whatever we need at the given moment. Maybe that’s what the sculptor James Earle Fraser had in mind when he put the buffalo on the American nickel. In pursuit of a timeless design, he gave us an image that will never lose its meaning, whatever that meaning might ultimately be.

  I think of a day last February when I went to Yellowstone National Park, at a point about forty miles away from where I unearthed the buffalo skull years before on that warm September afternoon. I’d come to the park to watch Nez Percé Indians kill buffalo near the northern border as a way to exercise treaty rights that their forefathers had negotiated with the U.S. government many generations ago. The Nez Percé had not hunted the park since 1877, and their plans to kill buffalo generated a firestorm of local interest. Along with dozens of spectators, including hunters, game wardens, protesters, tribal police, Department of Homeland Security officers, county sheriffs, and the merely curious, I watched as a group of young hunters, many of them teenagers, gunned down five buffalo amid a long volley of firing. The animals staggered around in the snow, leaving vivid trails of blood that flowed from poorly placed head shots. When the fifth buffalo finally fell, everyone, no matter their reason for being there, breathed a long sigh of relief.

  Buffalo calf along the upper Chetaslina, June 2006.

  I returned to the place in the morning, hoping to watch wolves clean up the tidbits of the buffalo’s remains. Instead, another small party of Indian hunters was there. They’d just killed another buffalo down the mountain from the first five carcasses. Several vehicles carrying protesters pulled in next to a truck that was loaded with meat; they’d come to pay their respects to the fallen animals. The hunters and I joined the protesters and walked up to what was left of the freshly butchered carcass on the snow. Without talking, we joined hands around the animal’s severed insides and a small offering of meat and burned sweetgrass laid out by the hunters. A woman next to me was crying uncontrollably, her hand shaking in mine. Down from me, an Indian man was singing a song of thankfulness that made me think of triumph. One of the hunters had bloodied hands, and his face bore a look of inner peace and contentment. He would eat well this winter, the meal of his fathers. High above, a cluster of ravens circled in the air. They were waiting. I looked at the buffalo’s remains on the snow, and I could sense that this animal would live on in a new form, forever and ever.

  THE BUFFALO PASS BY THE BEAVER DAM where Danny and I are hiding, and soon there’s nothing for me to see but their twitching tails. We quietly back up and enter a line of trees. We stop to sit in a small hillside clearing where we can look out across the valley. The herd arrives at the end of the willow flat. They move across the dry gravel bars of the riverbed, their hooves kicking up dust that gets swept upstream by the stiff wind. They come to the river’s channel and pause. The adults walk back and forth to find a good spot and then start climbing in. At first it’s just one at a time, but then there are groups of five or six plunging in together. As the buffalo emerge from the river, they shake the water away like wet dogs. By the time that half of the herd has crossed, they’ve created a house-sized patch of wet gravel. It looks like the shadow of a small cloud. Soon there’s just one buffalo left on our side of the river, a young calf. She paces back and forth and several times enters up to her knees before backing out. She watches the herd move away and then dives in. Her jump is so frantic that she disappears beneath the surface. When her head pops up, the current rushes her downriver. She swims hard and climbs out on spindly legs. When she shakes dry, she leaves her own little patch of wet gravel just downstream of the others. As she runs to catch up, a feeling of joy rises from deep inside me. The joy turns to words. I don’t want to destroy the silence, so I just think them to myself.

  Let the buffalo roam.

  NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Chapter Two

  “an exercise in assumption, conjecture, and surmise.”: McMurtry, Larry. Crazy Horse. New York: Viking Penguin, 1999.

  “And, in my search for symbols …”: Text accompanying Buffalo Nickel Exhibit at National Cowboy Hall of Fame, circa 1972, quoting James Frazer. Biographical/historical file on Black Diamond, Bronx Zoo Library.

  “Its head droops as if it had lost all hope in the world”: Personal correspondence between William T. Hornaday and Martin S. Garretson, secretary of the American Bison Society, in 1918. Collected in biographical/historical file on Black Diamond, Bronx Zoo Library.

  NUMBERS OF BUFFALO AND HISTORIC DISTRIBUTION

  Allen, J.A. “The American Bisons, Living and Extinct.” Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, vol. 4, no. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1876.

  Belue, Ted Franklin. The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1996.

  Dodge, Col. Richard Irving. The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877.

  Flores, Dan. “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850.” Journal of American History, vol. 78, no. 2, September 1991, pp. 465–485.

  Hamell, George. Personal correspond
ence with the author. Hamell is a former senior historian with the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.

  Hornaday, William T. The Extermination of the American Bison. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.

  Lott, Dale F. American Bison: A Natural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

  Roe, Frank G. The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

  Weber, Bill. “Buffalo Visions: Bringing Back the American Bison—Symbol of the Great Plains.” Wildlife Conservation Magazine. September/October 2006.

  CORTÉS AND CABEZA DE VACA

  Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. “The Account and Commentaries of Governor Alvar Nunuz Cabeza de Vaca, of what occurred on the two journeys that he made to the Indies.” Online book made available through the Southwestern Writers Collection of the Texas State University—San Marcos, http://alkek.library.tx state.edu/swwc/cdv/index.htm.

  De Solis, Don Antonio, translated by Thomas Townsend. The History of the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards. London: T. Woodward, J. Hooke, and J. Peele, 1724.

  Prescott, William H. History of the Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortes. New York: Harper and Borthers, 1843.

  CRAZY HORSE

  Ambrose, Stephen E. Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

  Frazier, Ian. Great Plains. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. Chapter 6 encompasses a factual, though moving, account of the life and death of Crazy Horse.

  Sandoz, Mari. Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.

  THE BRONX ZOO AND BLACK DIAMOND

  Bridges, William. Gathering of Animals: An Unconventional History of the New York Zoological Society. New York: Harper and Row, 1974, pp. 145–49.

  Sanborn, Elwin R. “The National Bison Herd: An Account of the Transportation of the Bison from the Zoological Park to the Wichita Range.” Zoological Society Bulletin, no. 28, January 1908, pp. 400–412.

  SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BUFFALO IN PLAINS INDIAN MYTHOLOGY

  Barsness, Larry. Heads, Hides & Horns: The Compleat Buffalo Book. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1985.

  Grinnell, George Bird. Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of a Prairie People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967.

  ———. By Cheyenne Campfires. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.

  ———. Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales with Notes on the Origin, Customs and Character of the Pawnee People. New York: Forest and Stream Publishing Co., 1889.

  Marriot, Alice, and Carol K. Rachlin, Plains Indian Mythology. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975.

  Chapter Three

  “The passion for buffalo is a regular fever among them and could not be stopped.”: As quoted in Farr, William E. “Going to Buffalo: Indian Hunting Migrations Across the Rocky Mountains, Part 1.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, Winter 2003.

  “as good an investment as real estate.”: As quoted in Barsness, Larry. Heads, Hides & Horns: The Compleat Buffalo Book. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1985. Original text from Allard, Charles. “Breeding Buffaloes.” Self-Culture, May 1895, pp. 81–82.

  “short on services but big on wilderness.”: National Park Services website for the Nabesna Road, http://www.nps.gov/wrst/planyourvisit/the-nabesna-road.httm.

  “East of the Copper River, south of the Nadina River …”: “DI 454 Bison Hunt: Copper River Land Status and Public Access.” Pamphlet produced by Alaska Department of Fish and Game, August 2000.

  “Dear Hunter: Congratulations on winning a Copper River Herd Bison Permit …”: Letter from Alaska Department of Fish and Game, July 19, 2005.

  INTROGRESSION OF CATTLE GENES INTO BUFFALO HERDS

  Derr, Jim. “Genetic Considerations: American Bison—the Ultimate Genetic Survivor.” Ecological Future of the Bison in North America: A Report from a Multi-Stakeholder, Transboundary Meeting, ed. Kent H. Redford and Eva Fearn. Wildlife Conservation Society, May 2007.

  Robbins, Jim. “Out West, with the Buffalo, Roam Some Strands of Undesirable DNA.” New York Times, January 9, 2007.

  INTRODUCTION AND MANAGEMENT OF COPPER RIVER BUFFALO HERD

  Burris, Bud (Oliver). Personal correspondence with author. Bud Burris is a long-time Delta Junction resident and retired employee of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

  Burris, Oliver E., and Donald E. McKnight. “Game Transplants in Alaska.” Alaska Department of Fish and Game pamphlet published in December 1973.

  “Delta Junction State Bison Range: History of Bison in Alaska.” Alaska Department of Fish and Game Web site, http://wildlife.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=refuge .delta-bison.

  Elrod, Morton J. “The Flathead Buffalo Range: A Report to the American Bison Society.” Report of the American Bison Society. New York: American Bison Society, 1908.

  Robert, Bigart, ed. “I Will Be Meat for my Salish: The Montana Writers Project and the Buffalo of the Flathead Indian Reservation.” Salish Kootenai College Press and the Montana Historical Society, May 2002.

  “Southcentral Bison Population Management.” Performance report completed in 2000 by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

  Chapter Four

  “I felt the most dreary forebodings”: Parkman, Francis. Oregon Trail. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1880.

  “well aged but still a little tough.”: Guthrie, Dale. Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

  “altered body proportions”: Geist, Valerius. “The relation of social evolution and dispersal in ungulates during the Pleistocene, with emphasis on the Old World deer and the genus Bison.” Quaternary Research, 1971: 1, pp. 283–315.

  “cranial characteristics and horn-core morphology”: From e-mail and telephone correspondence with Ryan Byerly, a graduate student with the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

  “rostral width at maxillary-premaxillary suture”: Shackleton, D.M., L.V. Hills, and D.A. Hutton. “Aspects of Variation in Cranial Characters of Plains Bison (Bison bison bison Linnaeus) from Elk Island National Park, Alberta.” Journal of Mammology, vol. 56, no. 4, 1975, pp. 871–887.

  “dudes riding three-wheeled ATVs on a hill”: “Quarter Designs Come Rolling In.” Billings Gazette, August 4, 2005.

  “That quarter is UG-LY”: Taken from online comments posted to the Billings Gazette website (www.billingsgazette.net) in response to “Bison Skull Selected for State Quarter.” Billings Gazette, June 30, 2006.

  “Statistically, this bison likely died in the early to mid-18th century”: Cannon, Kenneth. “ ‘They Went as High as They Chose’: What an Isolated Skull Can Tell Us about the Biogeography of High-altitude Bison.” Arctic, Antartic and Alpine Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2007, pp. 44–56.

  TORONTO BUFFALO SKULL

  “May Have Roamed Ontario: Skull 10,000 Years Old Found.” Edmonton Journal, June 11, 1932.

  ARTIFACT-BEARING BUFFALO SKULL FROM BOW RIVER

  Roe, Frank G. The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

  GLACIATIONS, PLEISTOCENE MAMMALS, MIGRATIONS, AND BISON EVOLUTION

  Allen, J. A. “The American Bisons, Living and Extinct.” Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, vol. 4, no. 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1876.

  Guthrie, Dale. Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

  Lange, Ian. Ice Age Mammals of North America: A Guide to the Big, the Hairy, and the Bizarre. Missoula: Mountain Press Publishing Co., 2002.

  Shapiro, Beth et al. “The Rise and Fall of the Beringia Steppe Bison.” Science, vol. 306, November 2004.

  Van Zyll De Jong, C. G. “Origin and Geo
graphic Variation of Recent North American Bison.” Alberta, vol. 3, no. 2, 1993, pp. 21–35.

  Weiner, Jonathan. The Beak of the Finch. New York: Knopf, 1994.

  Wilson, Michael C. “Late Quaternary Vertebrates and the Opening of the Ice-Free Corridor, with Special Reference to the Genus Bison.” Quaternary International, vol. 32, 1996, pp. 97–105.

  ———. Personal correspondence with author.

  ———. and James A. Burns. “Searching for the Earliest Canadians: Wide Corridors, Narrow Doorways, Small Windows,” in Ice Age People of North America: Environments, Origins and Adaptations, ed. Bonnichsen and Turnmire. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Oregon State University Press and Center for the Study of the First Americans, 1999.

  Chapter Five

  “that had fallen victims to the embrace of the flames”: Kelly, Fanny. Narrative of My Captivity Among the Sioux Indians, with a Brief Account of Sully’s Indian Expedition in 1864, Bearing Upon Events Occurring in My Captivity. Hartford: Mutual Publishing Co., 1871.

  “staggering about, sometimes running afoul”: as quoted in McHugh, Tom. The Time of the Buffalo. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

  “we began to notice more particularly the great number of drowned buffaloes”: Bradbury, John. “Bradbury’s Travels in the Interior of America, 1809–1811.” As collected in volume 5 of Early Western Travels, 1784–1846. New York: A. H. Clark Co., 1904–1907.

  “as many as 10,000 of their putrid carcasses lying mired in a single ford”: Sir George Simpson, as quoted in Frank G. Roe’s The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.

  “whole herds were often drowned in the Missouri”: Maximilian, Prince of Wied. “Maximilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1832–1834.” As collected in volumes 22–25 of Early Western Travels, 1784–1846. New York: A. H. Clark Co., 1904–1907.