American Buffalo
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Gates, C. Cormac, Robert Stephenson, et al. “National Recovery Plan for the Wood Bison (Bison bison athabascae).” National Recovery Plan No. 21, a publication of Recovery of Nationally Endangered Wildlife (RENEW), October 2001.
Stephenson, Robert O., S. Craig Gerlach, et al. “Wood Bison in Late Holocene Alaska and Adjacent Canada: Paleontological, Archaeological and Historical Records.” People and Wildlife in Northern North America, ed. S. Craig Gerlach and Maribeth S. Murray. BAR International Series 994, 2001.
“Wood Bison Restoration in Alaska: A Review of Environmental and Regulatory Issues and Recommendations for Project Implementations.” A Public Review Draft from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, July 2006.
BUFFALO WALLOWS
Gerlanc, Nicole M., and Glennis A. Kaufman. “Use of Bison Wallows by Anurans on Konza Prairie.” American Midland Naturalist, vol. 150, no. 1, July 2003, pp. 158–168.
Fritz, Ken M., and Walter K. Dodds. “The Effects of Bison Crossings on the Macroinvertebrate Community in a Tallgrass Prairie Stream.” American Midland Naturalist, vol. 141, no. 2, April 1999, pp. 253–265.
McKeown, Martha F. Them Was the Days. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1950.
Vinton, Mary Ann, David C. Hartnett, et al. “Interactive Effects of Fire, Bison (Bison bison) Grazing and Plant Community Composition in Tallgrass Prairie.” American Midland Naturalist, vol. 129, no. 1, January 1993, pp. 10–18.
Chapter Twelve
INTERACTIONS OF BUFFALO AND GRIZZLY BEARS
Clark, William, and Meriwether Lewis. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004.
Dodge, Col. Richard Irving. The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877.
Franke, Mary Ann. To Save the Wild Bison: Life on the Edge in Yellowstone. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.
Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Lott, Dale F. American Bison: A Natural History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Mattson, David J. “Use of Ungulates by Yellowstone Grizzly Bear.” Biological Conservation, vol. 81, July–August 1997, pp. 103–111.
Roe, Frank G. The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.
Wyman, Travis. “Grizzly Bear Predation on a Bull Bison in Yellowstone National Park,” Ursus, vol. 13, 2002, pp. 375–377.
Chapter Thirteen
“circles, curves and other mathematical figures …”: Irving, Washington. The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. New York: John B. Alden Publishers, 1886.
INDIAN USES OF BUFFALO
Belue, Ted Franklin. The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1996.
Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nunez. “The Account and Commentaries of Governor Alvar Nunez 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.
Dary, David A. The Buffalo Book. New York: Avon Books, 1974.
Dodge, Col. Richard Irving. The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877.
Frazier, Ian. Great Plains. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.
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.
Maximilian, Prince of Wied. “Maximilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833–1834.” Early Western Travels, 1784–1846. vols. 22–25. New York: A. H. Clark Co., 1904–1907.
McCreight, Major Israel. Buffalo Bone Days. Sykesville: Nupp Printing, 1939.
Sandoz, Mari. The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978 (original publication, 1954).
Chapter Fourteen
“Suppose two men to be disputing about their exploits …”: Maximilian, Prince of Wied. “Maximilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833–1834.” Early Western Travels, 1784–1846. vols. 22–25. New York: A. H. Clark Co., 1904–1907.
“The shock of battles and scenes of carnage and cruelty were as of the breath of his nostrils …”: Fry, General James B. Army Sacrifices: Briefs from Official Pigeon-Holes. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2003.
WHITE BUFFALO
Fleron, Julian, and Donald Hoagland. “Miracles and Mathematical Biology: The Case of the White Buffalo,” in Environmental Mathematics in the Classroom, ed. B. A. Fusaro and P. C. Kenschaft. Mathematical Association of America, 2003.
Grinnell, George Bird. Blackfoot Lodge Tales: The Story of a Prairie People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962.
———. 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.
Hunt, James W. Buffalo Days: Stories from J. Wright Mooar. Abilene: State House Press, 2005.
Maximilian, Prince of Wied. “Maximilian, Prince of Wied’s Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833–1834.” Early Western Travels, 1784–1846. vols. 22–25. New York: A. H. Clark Co., 1904–1907.
Meagher, Mary. “Bison bison.” The American Society of Mammalogists, Mammalian Species, no. 266, 1986, pp. 1–8.
Roe, Frank G. The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I’d like to thank my agent and friend, Marc Gerald, for placing me with the perfect editor and collaborator, Cindy Spiegel. Thanks to Cindy and everyone else at Spiegel & Grau, especially Gretchen Koss, Hana Landes, and Meghan Walker, for taking such good care of my project and me.
I am indebted to many professionals, agencies, and self-taught experts who offered me physical assistance and personal time while I was researching this book. Thanks to Tony Baker for showing me “the really old shit”; Reverend Grant of Garrett County, Maryland, for giving me a firsthand introduction to President George Washington; Mike Kunz of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Arctic Field Office for the banjo songs, helicopters, and twenty-four-hour sunlight; Paul Picha of the State Historical Society of North Dakota for showing me the earthen mounds and weird holes in the ground along the Missouri River; David Eck and Commissioner Patrick H. Lyons of the New Mexico State Lands Office for the use of a truck, a knowledgeable guide, and keys to the gates; geneticist Beth Shapiro for putting me up and removing two grams of my skull at the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre at Oxford University; Stephen Sautner, Steve Johnson, and everyone else at the Wildlife Conservation Society for letting me come to Denver and introducing me to that precious stash in the library at the Bronx Zoo; Bob Stephenson of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in Fairbanks, Alaska, for showing me some old skulls, taking me to see a cool painting, and giving me a glimpse into the buffalo’s bright future in Alaska; Jason Labelle of Colorado State University for showing me a bunch of Ice Age kill sites; Dan Flores, an environmental historian and my onetime professor at the University of Montana, for taking a day off to visit Clovis, New Mexico; Ray the Rock Man Baker of Miles City, Montana, for his unique cultural insights and cool hunks of rock; Dan Brister and Mike Mease of the Buffalo Field Campaign in West Yellowstone, Montana, for sharing a couch and meals.
Many historians, scientists, and knowledgeable laypeople gave me valuable insights and answers when called upon via phon
e, e-mail, or office visits, including Ryan Byerly and Judith Cooper of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas; Wes Olson of Elk Island National Park in Alberta, Canada; Stuart MacMillan and Rhona Kindopp of Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada’s Northwest Territories; Kenneth P. Cannon of the Midwest Archeological Center in Lincoln, Nebraska; Michael C. Wilson of Douglas College in British Columbia; Tom Groneberg, of northwest Montana; Faber the taxidermist, of Miles City, Montana; Jim Matheson of the National Buffalo Association; Shelly Toenniges of Ebonex Corporation in Melvindale, Michigan; Darden Hood of Beta Analytic, in Miama Florida; Nola Davis of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department; and George Hamell of the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.
Finally, and most important, a huge thanks to my personal friends and family who offered me their particular blends of muscle power and brain power, especially Katie Finch (Catherine Rinella, that is), Danny Rinella, Dr. Matt Rinella, Matt Rafferty, Jeff Jessen, Hardcover Jeffy, Dr. Matt Carlson, Dr. Eric Kern, and my mother, Rosemary. You guys have made this world a very interesting place to hang out.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steven Rinella is the author of The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine and a correspondent for Outside magazine. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, American Heritage, the New York Times, Field & Stream, Men’s Journal, and Salon.com. He grew up in Twin Lake, Michigan, and now splits his time between Anchorage, Alaska, and New York City.
Footnotes
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Chapter 2
*The Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo revitalized the American Bison Society in 2005. The original ABS had been founded a hundred years earlier and was disbanded after the buffalo had been saved from extinction. The new incarnation of the ABS will take on what it describes as a “long-term, large-scale, international, multi-purpose, and inclusive” initiative “to restore the ecological role of bison across their original range.”
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*Cortés was the first European to see a buffalo, but the prize for the first European to see a wild buffalo goes to the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca sailed for North America in 1527 as second-in-command of the Narváez expedition, an armada of five boats under the king’s orders to “conquer and govern” the land of Florida, a vast expanse of ground with an indefinite western boundary. Three hundred men and forty horses departed the ships and headed cross-country into the Florida Peninsula in April 1528. They had loose plans of traveling to the north and west, where they’d meet up again with the men who remained on the ships. After five months of trudging through swamps, they hadn’t found their ships and they hadn’t discovered any cities of gold, but they did manage to kill or harass every native Floridian they ran into. Word of the Spaniards’ open hostilities spread from one native village to the next, and soon the Indians were stealthily slaughtering the Spaniards with arrows.
By the time the Narváez expedition hit northern Florida, they were down to 250 men. They hatched a plan to build makeshift rafts and sail along the coast toward the Spanish colonies in Mexico. While they labored, they were forced to eat the last of their horses. They used horsehair to weave cord for lashing material, and they tanned the legs of the horses to make canteens. During construction, Indian arrows picked off ten more men. The survivors boarded the rafts and paddled up the Gulf Coast. One of the rafts vanished without a trace near the Mississippi Delta. The other rafts got split up. Five men died from drinking salt water. A couple more drowned. On November 6, 1528, two of the rafts were shipwrecked on Galveston Island, Texas, which Cabeza de Vaca dubbed the Isle of Misfortune. It was one of the homelands of the Karankawa Indians, who dressed in woven grass. The Karankawa took great pity on the suffering Spaniards; they fed the survivors and mourned the Spanish dead for an entire night, crying and wailing and sobbing. Things changed, though, when the Karankawa learned that some of the Spaniards had practiced cannibalism. The Indians were so distraught by this moral transgression that the Spaniards feared they would be put to death. What saved them from capital punishment is that they started to die on their own. Dysentery and malaria felled them. Soon the eighty or so men who landed on the Isle of Misfortune were down to fifteen. Then the Spaniards’ luck really went to shit.
The survivors were dispersed among bands of Indians. They fell into slavery and got further whittled down. They died of exposure and starvation. One Spaniard killed another Spaniard. Indians killed them for reasons that must have struck the Spaniards as very odd. Several were killed after insulting an Indian host by moving from his lodge into that of another man. More were killed when an Indian dreamed that he should kill them and then followed through with the dream. Some were sold off as slaves to distant tribes, where they were abused and killed.
Cabeza de Vaca survived only through luck and fortitude and the kindness of his hosts and keepers. Because he prayed to a God that he claimed was very powerful, the Indians asked him to heal their sick. Cabeza de Vaca explained that he did not have that kind of sway with God, but the Indians withheld his food until he relented. He genuflected, prayed, and made crosses with his hands over the bodies of the sick, and he laid his hands on them. The Indians were very pleased with the results. Once, he was credited with bringing a man back to life. In another village, he cut a man open with his knife to remove an arrowhead that had long ago punctured him in the back and lodged above his heart, where it caused him “great pain and suffering.” Cabeza de Vaca closed the incision with two stitches and became the first European to practice surgery in the New World.
By 1532, after four years of wandering, the Narváez expedition was down to four men: Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spaniards, and an African Muslim. The four of them were freed from captivity and reunited through a series of spectacular adventures, and they again continued westward on their quest to find the Spanish colonies in Mexico. They didn’t make it far. Just around the time they got into central Texas, they fell into the hands of two new tribes, the Mariames and the Yguazes. Again they were divided up and enslaved. Things got even weirder. Cabeza de Vaca encountered humans who burned their religious leaders’ bodies and drank the ashes mixed with water; he encountered men who lived with eunuch lovers, the eunuchs being “more muscular and taller than other men”; he encountered humans who ate the flesh of poisonous snakes, and when the meat was gone, they roasted the bones and ate those, too; he encountered humans who fed their infant daughters to dogs because it was considered taboo for tribal members to marry women born within their own clan and they feared that female babies would grow up to bear the children of their enemies.
Somewhere amid this mayhem in south-central Texas, Cabeza de Vaca finally encountered the buffalo. “Cows come here,” he later wrote in his Relación.
I have seen them three or four times and eaten them. It seems to me they are about the size of the ones in Spain. They have two small horns, like Moorish cattle, and very long hair, like a fine blanket made from the wool of merino sheep. Some are brownish and others black. It seems to me they have more and better meat than cattle here in Spain. From the small ones the Indians make blankets to cover themselves, and from the large ones they make shoes and shields. These animals come from the North all the way to the coast of Florida, where they scatter, crossing the land more than four hundred leagues. All along their range, through the valleys where they roam, people who live near there descend to live off them.
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Chapter 3
*The intermingling and swapping of small buffalo herds during the establishment of the National Bison Range was emblematic of buffalo management in general during the early twentieth century. Basically, conservationists were desperately trying to gather up whatever scattered herds had survived the slaughters of previous decades, and they gave little thought to the particular histories of each herd—as long as the animals looked like buffalo, they were regarded as buffalo. H
owever, this wasn’t always a good test, because many of the private individuals who helped “save” the buffalo from extinction were not acting out of altruistic impulses. Rather, they wanted to breed the buffalo with cattle in order to make a sort of mythical super-beast known as a cattalo. The goal was a docile animal with “less hump and more rump” than buffalo, but with the buffalo’s tolerance for extreme weather conditions and its apparent immunity to such devastating livestock diseases as Texas fever. Most of these early crossbreeding experiments were failures, though they succeeded in creating a lot of buffalo with significant amounts of genetic introgression from cattle. Today, only three herds of government-owned buffalo—those at Yellowstone and Wind Cave national parks and a state-owned herd in Utah—are known to be genetically pure. Of privately owned buffalo, which constitute about 96 percent of all buffalo in existence, only one herd, at Ted Turner’s Vermejo Park Ranch, in New Mexico, is known to be genetically pure.
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Chapter 4
*I was warned about the veracity of La Casse’s claim by Dr. Michael Wilson, a vertebrate paleontologist with Douglas College, in British Columbia. Though he did not specifically refer to La Casse’s skull (he’d never even heard of him), he explained that it was once common practice to artificially wed human artifacts with buffalo skulls. The pairing increased the value of the artifacts, both as museum exhibits and as curios for the tourist trade.
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*The great weight of that ice caused the earth’s crust to sink down into the mantle (a three-mile-thick covering of ice would “sink” the crust one mile). At the end of the Ice Age, the great burden of ice melted away. Because the crust is buoyant, the earth’s surface is rising back up in a process known as isostatic rebound. It often rises in lurches, so that seismologists record (and feel) earthquakes in southern Canada, New England, and northern Europe. In all, it’s an excruciatingly slow process. Siberia, Canada, and the Great Lakes are all currently rising at average rates of centimeters or less annually, and it will take another ten thousand years before the job is done. I own a cabin that’s on pilings over the ocean on an island in Alaska, and friends keep telling me that I’m going to lose the place thanks to the rising ocean levels brought on by global warming. Not quite, I say, as the island is currently undergoing isostatic rebound.