Turner started to critically ponder—and it’s a question that still remains unreconciled—why a great country would deliberately slaughter the animals and the people that were featured on its money? Around the time he turned forty, he vowed that one day he would raise a few bison. “I was aware of the fact they were rare. I just liked the look of them. I’ve always had an interest in art and I would sketch pictures of them on paper. I mean, how can a person not be magnetized? I wanted to be the first guy on my block to show a few of them off.”
But Turner was headquartered in Georgia. In 1976, before he had launched CNN and bought the historic Hope Plantation in South Carolina, he attended a sale of “exotic livestock” and bid on some behemoths coming through the chutes. That purchase altered the course of his life. His inaugural “herd” of bison, three animals strong, was turned out in a makeshift pasture surrounded by a humid cypress swamp. “It took a few years and a hell of a lot of reading before I gained an understanding of what their presence meant for the ecology of the American prairie,” he says.
The conditions for raising bison, he soon realized, were not idyllic in the confined spaces. A lot has happened between then and now. Today, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, Turner, with around fifty-six thousand bison in his herd, maintains more of the animals than any person who has ever lived. Of the five hundred thousand bison now alive in the world (compared to, conservatively, thirty-five million that inhabited the United States and Canada prior to the Civil War), roughly one of every nine ranges on Turner lands. The Flying D alone has nearly five thousand, more than the entire bison population of nearby Yellowstone National Park.
Dan Flores has an air of sagacity. In the past, I’ve encountered the history professor at his cramped office in Missoula on the University of Montana campus and at symposia across the West. I also have a stack of books he’s written. Over the years, he’s been my go-to guy for sorting out the difference between western mythology, fabricated by Hollywood, and the less sanguine, often brutal, realities of Anglo-European conquest. With hair worn long and tied back in a ponytail, Flores has a walrus mustache and occasionally a beard, the style of which could have been worn by a member of Coronado’s troop when it charged north out of Mexico.
In a word, Flores is a historical revisionist. “Ted Turner, now that’s an interesting topic,” he says. “But how will he be interpreted?”
Flores says that Turner has earned a place in history for what he’s doing on this side of the Mississippi River. “As a land manager, you could almost describe him as an ecological Thomas Edison,” he told me as we visited at a bison conference in downtown Denver. “That he selected bison shows how he thinks outside the box.”
Flores does not utter bold overgeneralizations. Before continuing, he notes that it is important to take a moment and ponder the American West, the way generations of citizens have been taught to think about it in the classroom. Turner is not a figure cut from that cloth. “Who are the just and worthy heroes in the textbooks, whose names we can recite by heart?” he asks. Often venerated, Flores asserts, are the “smiteful voices of plunderers”—seldom the latter day healers who followed in the wake of destruction and attempted to put emptied, battered places back together again.
Three individuals over the last 150 years have become supremely synonymous with the American bison: William Frederick (aka “Buffalo Bill”) Cody, who famously bragged that he killed thousands of buffalo and is associated with the near annihilation of the species carried out in the name of conquest and prosperity; zoologist William Temple Hornaday, headquartered at the Bronx Zoo, who collaborated with his friend President Theodore Roosevelt and other sportsmen to rescue bison from near extinction at the end of the nineteenth century; and Turner, now a fulcrum in an unprecedented movement to restore the animals to their former indigenous landscapes, starting with his own properties.
Flores says, “What I’ve come to appreciate about Turner is that there seems to be sophisticated logic informing his decisions. It doesn’t matter how Turner started; it’s what he has achieved that we need to be mindful of.”
Cody has towns, landmarks, and the children of modern lifestyle pilgrims named after him. But for the sake of argument, how many people are conversant with his exploits? Cody’s celebrity is based on a dubious achievement and legacy, Flores argues. He earned his colorful sobriquet by slaying, reportedly and by Cody’s own estimation, 4,208 bison in a matter of months to feed frontier railroad workers. Later in life, Cody would state his regret how others following in his wake acted with a more insidious purpose to wipe the landscape clean of bison.
“Kill the buffalo and you subdue the Indians.” This was the strategic maxim of US general William Tecumseh Sherman. And it is merely a western variation of Sherman’s notorious military scorched-earth tactics that he wielded with no remorse as a Union Army commander in his march toward Savannah. Savvy to Sherman’s ways, Cody and his contemporaries aided in eliminating bison as a way to deplete the commissary of native peoples. Replacing them, the new coin of the realm, beef cows. While there are innumerable virtuous traits associated with the middle of America as a breadbasket, history often avoids a reference to what’s gone missing, Flores says.
Among William Hornaday’s dying wishes in 1937 (the year before Turner was born) was to return bison to their rightful place. They had been, after all, the most populous large land mammal on the continent going back to the Ice Age, found eastward in the Carolinas, across the heartland to the Great Basin, and south to north ranging from Mexico to the start of Canada’s boreal forest. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado encountered them in the desert and Alexander Mackenzie ran into them in the subarctic muskeg.
Ecologists say they dwarfed the spectacle of today’s migration of wildebeest across the Serengeti Plain in Tanzania and Kenya. “Buffalo lived in vast herds that swept over the plains like fish in the sea,” writes Tim Flannery in his book The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. Some of the groupings were so extensive that Anglo travelers passing through the big open country reported vistas unendingly covered, those same panoramas taking days to traverse all of the animals.
Yes, tens of millions of bison that had been sources of physical and spiritual soul food for Curly Bear Wagner’s ancestors were reduced to mere scattered handfuls during Cody’s lifetime. Lacking was any profound remorse until it was too late. Flores thinks of Turner as a kind of antipode to Buffalo Bill.
“We pretend as if the history of the West didn’t begin until the Conquistadors arrived in the Southwest in the fifteenth century, or when Lewis and Clark passed through Montana in 1804,” Turner says. “The natural story of the West is something much bigger and I think it holds important lessons. I’ve seen the kind of natural destruction that occurred with bison and Indians repeated around the world with different cultures and different abuses of nature.”
Flores says America’s future—certainly her relationship with nature—spins on how it comes to clearer terms with the past. “Who are the people in the West today who will be looked up to as heroes tomorrow? The reason I ask is that there’s an undeniable political nature of history. When I do public talks, I often tell people that I can make a strong guess about how they vote if they will admit which of these two western figures they admire most: John Wayne, or John Muir.”
He asks, why is an actor from Iowa who portrayed cowboys in the movies deified? Why is Muir, a real person, who led a conservative movement to save the redwoods and who supported the creation of national parks to serve as sanctuaries guarded against conquest, a partisan lightning rod?
Flores says his profession deserves part of the blame. “I think one of the answers explaining why some of America’s population still considers the people who destroyed so much of American nature to be cultural icons is a fault of generations of historians who presented US history as a triumphant march across the c
ontinent.”
A paragon in pushing for democracy around the world, America still is contending with the long dark shadow of how it treated its own native people and wildlife. Understanding why it happened is essential to preventing the same mindset from cycling back again.
“It sounds a little nuts to many of us, but in this view, Manifest Destiny—seizing the continent from its existing inhabitants, the wholesale depletion of wildlife for fun and profit—became a divinely inspired project,” he says. “All sorts of crimes were thus glossed over because they represented inevitable positive gains on behalf of Jesus and civilization and the market. It still goes on. Wildlife was just collateral damage in this great enterprise. This has nothing to do with political correctness. Stewardship, human rights, respect for nature, have roots in the Bible and the Constitution. What’s needed, though, is an honest, adult conversation. I think that Ted Turner, by putting bison back on the land, is trying to broker a larger dialogue.”
Flores says he would find it interesting if a new litmus test for assessing virtue were administered to young people: Would they consider Cody or Turner to be a more virtuous figure, and why?
In John Neihardt’s classic Black Elk Speaks, shaman Nicholas Black Elk equates the plight of indigenous peoples to the loss of bison. Black Elk, a Lakota, was alive at the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the assassinations of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, and the Wounded Knee Massacre, the latter resulting in part from the Ghost Dance, a spiritual belief that bison would reappear.
“I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed his vision on Earth for the people to see,” Black Elk told Neihardt.
Flores makes it clear that he is not attempting to stir up melodrama, or portray the former “media mogul” from Atlanta as a New Age figure, but he believes that Turner and his unmatched modern experiment with bison is Black Elk’s words put into practice. “I think that what he is doing with his land and financial resources possesses far greater substance than his better known exploits in the media. This, to me, is what makes Turner ‘the bison baron’ an interesting character—far greater than anything Cody did.”
Suppose hypothetically that an ambitious person wakes one morning with aspirations of becoming a bison baron—a title that has been bestowed upon Turner by the media.
Precisely what is required? How many animals does one need? How would it differ from being a land baron? Cattle? Oil? How does a rancher employ beasts as “ecological tools” to mend the terrain of former abuses even while trying to promote their conservation as a species, generating if one can, a profit, and delivering healthy food in a safe, reliable way?
The inquiry is presented to Russell Miller, general manager of Turner’s bison ranches in the West. An English major in college (and occasional cowboy poet), with past lives as a farmer/rancher, agricultural loan officer, and land management consultant, Miller was there at the nebulous beginning of his boss’s quest to amass a herd and unleash it as a tool in restoration ecology. Miller saw the experiment move from hypothetical boyhood reverie, based on aesthetics, to assuming substance on an ever-increasing land base.
And, in the beginning, he notes, there was chaos.
“I think that when you work for Ted, and when it involves something that touches him as personally as bison do, you get used to him thinking expansively,” Miller says.
He recounts a strategic planning meeting with Turner around the conference room table on the top floor of CNN in Atlanta in the mid-1990s. With Turner’s financial advisors in attendance, a meeting had been requested to determine Turner’s goals for bison and the ranches—specifically how many animals and acres that Turner had in mind.
“Although he was reluctant to be pinned down, Ted finally asked, ‘Well, how many bison could we run on one million acres?’ A rough estimate was thrown out, and Ted seemed to be satisfied. The rest of us were relieved that we now knew, at least, where we were headed, which was into the realm of the unprecedented.”
Turner wasn’t finished ruminating. As he was leaving the room, he turned to the group and queried, “Oh, by the way, how many acres would it take to run one million bison?”
“Ted disappeared to another meeting, but his message was clear. We were on a journey, but we were not sure of our destination,” Miller shares.
I joined Miller on tours of a few of those destinations that form a larger whole—ranches in Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Montana. Turner values government, Miller says as we stroll across Turner’s McGinley Ranch in the Sandhills of Nebraska. But he remains perpetually frustrated at the slow pace of bureaucracies and the legislative process of responding to problems. Turner’s a do-gooder, Miller says, but he approaches many of the things he does through the instincts he sharpened as a businessman. When I bring it up with Turner himself, he says government and the marketplace, preferably with both working together to achieve virtuous results for society, are the only forces that can deliver change at the systemic level where it has the most impact.
With effusiveness, Turner says he loves national parks such as Yellowstone, but he believes that private landowners, being less hamstrung by politics, funding, and having to appease fractured public constituencies, can move much faster.
So, again, how did his “empire of bison” begin?
Miller says the foundational elements are no mystery. “Well, any good farmer or rancher will tell you: Before you can think about building a herd of any size, you must have a sufficient amount of land and available water; the land needs to have lasting, fertile soil for growing good grass; and for grass to grow you need an adequate amount of precipitation.”
Of course, if you abuse one, he says, you harm the rest.
“This isn’t revolutionary stuff. It’s elemental; it’s evolutionary,” he says, repeating the ingredients again: Ample Land. Fertile Soil. Bountiful Grass. And Clean, Abundant Water. These are the holistic, agrarian building blocks that every rancher and farmer knows at the gut level if one has ambitions of persisting more than a couple of years. With bison, however, achieving the fullest complement of ecological effects requires operating at scale.
In Bozeman, Montana, where the western management headquarters of Turner’s landholdings are based, Miller has file cabinets brimming with contracts and itemized profit and loss statements, topo maps of the Great Plains, and studies completed by the United States Geological Survey, colleges, and ag extension offices. He has pored over the information, examining historic rainfall and snowpack patterns, flow levels in rivers, studies of underground water tables, soil types, and lengths of growing seasons to try and narrow down the scope of places that meet those four parameters.
“Of course, as the best computer models project, climate change with shifting natural precipitation and hotter temperatures could turn everything on its head, disabusing us of what we think we know and count on,” Miller says.
Turner’s competitive advantage? Raising native species that, over thousands of years, have weathered fluctuations in climate. But Turner is worried that if temperatures rise as much as scientists expect, droughts and water shortages may become the new norm on the plains.
What started initially as a less than fully formed desire to give bison a home on the range blossomed into one of the world’s most fascinating experiments in large mammal wildlife conservation. Turner’s adventure with bison and the ranches he’s using as laboratories are changing the way agrarians think about sustainable stewardship of grasslands, sharing habitat with predators and other wildlife, the role of locally grown crops in the burgeoning organic food movement, and humane treatment of animals raised for the dinner table.
The mission of Turner Enterprises Inc., the umbrella of Turner’s ranching operation, is “to manage the land in an economically sustainable and ecologically
sensitive manner while promoting conservation of native species.”
It’s not hands off, Miller says; it’s light on the land as opposed to heavy-handed or industrial. “For the record,” he notes, during a tour of the Z Bar Ranch in Kansas, “Ted’s goal is not to turn bison into beef cows.”
In 1992 Turner offered me his first visual reference of what he aimed to achieve with bison. I was at the Flying D at the time, interviewing him for a magazine story.
He and Jane Fonda were newlyweds. They had just built a new home on the ranch and had a layover in Montana amid a hectic schedule of travel. At the time, numerous kinds of provincial suspicions swirled in the rural western hinters about Turner and Fonda.
Danny Johnson, the Flying D’s current foreman, was a local teenager when Turner and Fonda showed up in Montana. “I think people were looking for a reason to find fault in them. Jane had a reputation for protesting the Vietnam War and going to Hanoi. Ted was looked upon as a loudmouth. To be honest, I think much of the resentment stemmed from the fact that they were rich outsiders, settling upon a piece of land that all of us wished we could own.”
According to some local residents, one of the greatest sins Turner committed, as an affront to “traditional” ranch culture, was selling off the beef cows that came with the Flying D and replacing them with bison, which were looked upon as odd, exotic animals. His coup de grâce was pronouncing to local reporters that cattle were dumber than bison; that they defecate all over themselves; that their hooves trampled the banks of streams in ways that were more harmful than bison; and that they were wimpier, less capable of withstanding the elements, demanding more coddling, artificial feed, and protection from wildlife predators than bison.
Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet Page 3