Reckoning with the Buffalo

The American bison’s fragile wildness. /

This is how I remember it. But bear in mind that I was only 8. And when a story gets repeated, as this one has in my family many times over more than three decades, you remember the story more than the event. But I’m pretty sure I remember the ground shaking.

I definitely remember the sound. The rumble. Long before the first bison sprinted out from the trees, along the ridge above the Yellowstone boardwalk, we all heard the rumble. There were a lot of them. Dozens? They were a blur. A herd. A stampede. A marvel.

Perhaps I’d assumed that bison sprinting 10 yards away is just how things are in Yellowstone: a geyser here, a stampede there. Maybe they tell you at the visitor station when to expect the next one. Perhaps I just was mesmerized by the massive animals. In any case, I just stared.

Then came the yelling from Mom: “Save the baby! Save the baby!” I had bored of the previous hot spring and had pushed on. I had the stroller and my baby brother. There was nowhere to go: Bison to the left, hot springs to the right. One slight shift from the bison and we’d be trampled.

But it was already over. The bison passed. Mom apologized for not being clear that I, too, should be saved. And we tried not to think about the fragility of life as we all laughed nervously and derided fools we’d seen throughout the park approaching bison as if they were domesticated petting zoo attractions.

Sorry the story isn’t more exciting. But I’ve had a hard time coming up with stories to tell about bison that aren’t merely tragic.

For example, I was going to tell the story of Harvey Wallbanger, a bison who became a celebrity of sorts at Western horseracing venues. He won 79 races out of 93 starts (or 72 of 92), a record not unlike, say, the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals. Sure, the races were mostly crowd pleasing spectacles, but they illustrate a real point about the giants’ ability to run at racehorse-like speeds of 35 or 40 miles an hour. They’re capable of other physical feats, too. The late animal behaviorist Dale F. Lott, in his brilliant American Bison: A Natural History, says he saw bison calmly do a standing high jump of six feet with little strain. He witnessed another bull perform a standing broad jump of 14 feet simply to avoid a cattle guard. When the cattle guard’s length was doubled, he saw one delicately tiptoe across (they’re always on tiptoe) “with all the poise, and a good bit of the daring, of a man on a tightrope.”

Still, it was size, speed, and endurance that surprised most white observers during America’s westward expansion. “The buffalo has immense powers of endurance, and will run for many miles without any apparent effort or diminution in speed,” Army officer Randolph B. Marcy wrote in his 1859 bestselling Prairie Traveler. “The first buffalo I ever saw I followed about ten miles, and when I left him he seemed to run faster than when the chase commenced.”

As I said, Harvey Wallbanger was going to be the focus of this article. But Harvey’s story ends with Harvey dead from poisoning, Harvey’s owner’s wife drowned under suspicious circumstances, and other sordid doings. It’s a better fit for a true crime magazine than for The Behemoth. We try to keep things upbeat around here.

Of course, the story of the wild bison that Marcy (and many others) chased out on the Great Plains is far worse.

Last month’s congressional act to make the bison America’s national mammal praised the animal as “a historical symbol of the United States … integrally linked with the economic and spiritual lives of many Indian tribes.” It also praised the bison’s “economic value for private producers and rural communities.” It mentions the heroic efforts to bring “a mammal species on the brink of extinction back into the natural habitat,” but doesn’t say anything about the deliberate effort to bring about that extinction. Or how it was encouraged in part to destroy those “economic and spiritual lives of many Indian tribes” and force them onto reservations.

“Really, the destruction of the buffalo isn’t one horrendous story—it’s several horrendous stories,” Lott wrote. “The buffalo vanished in different places at different times for different reasons, its slaughter the work of different people.” It is not a simple story. There were, for example, legislative efforts to end the hunt or limit it (Congress passed one significant law, but President Grant refused to sign it). But as Lott says, it happened and it was horrendous: Around 30 million bison roamed primitive America. By 1902, an estimated 700 bison survived in privately owned herds. The only truly wild bison resided in Yellowstone, and there were only 23 of them. (There had been 200 in the park when it opened in 1872, but the Cavalry had trouble stopping poachers.)

There’s an old woodcut of the Fall of Man, made by master German artist Albrecht Durer. Durer made lots of Eden scenes. In a 1504 copper etching, his Adam and Eve take the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil as various animals idly lie by. In a similar woodcut six years later, he replaced the cow with a (European) bison. Several art historians have suggested that the animals in the works are meant to represent the four humors—the bison supposedly depicting melancholy. I get a little melancholic myself viewing the piece, a prescient depiction of mankind’s choosing inhumanity, abandoning its role as gardener in a move that would almost eliminate the bison as it had many other species.

We repented and became gardeners again. There are now about 500,000 bison in North America. But the overwhelming majority of these are on private ranches and are being domesticated in one way or another. Only about 30,000 bison live in conservation herds, and only the Yellowstone bison are untouched by early crossbreeding experiments with cattle.

“I studied and admired wild bison for decades. The thought of their being converted to humpbacked cattle gets my viscera going,” Lott wrote. “It would be a terrible irony if we saved wild buffalo from the hide hunters’ Sharps rifle, then lost the species to the breeders’ bottom line. The most vivid threat today is eradication by modification.”

Is he right? Are we in danger of losing the bison just as we lost the aurochs when we domesticated cattle? Is turning wild bison docile, meek, and sedentary part of our act of repentance? Is it tending the garden? Or is it scorching the earth? Or is it something else?

This isn’t the bison story I wanted to write. As I’ve told dozens of writers, publicists, and others, The Behemoth is not a creation care advocacy magazine, not really. We publish a lot of articles about animals, nature, and other parts of creation. But we don’t want to lecture Christians on how important it is to care about habitat destruction, species loss, climate change, or a litany of other woes. We just want to help people behold what God has made—to love it a little more, to rejoice in it a little more, and to be nourished with its goodness. I’m sure that doing so will lead many to find ways to care for creation a little (or a lot) more. But I’ve always rooted our calling less in Genesis garden mandates than in God’s revelation to Job: Get over yourself for a moment and see how amazing the cosmos is. This magazine strives to behold animals and other creations for what they are, not for what they can do for us or what they represent.

But I reread Job as I worked on this article. Over and over again, I noticed, God shows off the wildness of his creation: “Who provides food for the raven?” “Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?” “Who let the wild donkey go free?” “Will the wild ox consent to serve you?” There’s no command here to capture the animals, or “trap it and pierce its nose” (Job 40:24). In many cases, domestication is laughed off as folly. In one case, even hunting is a joke: “The sword that reaches [Leviathan] has no effect, nor does the spear or the dart or the javelin.”

The American bison is not Leviathan. Most have fallen to spears, darts, and javelins. Of those that remain, most have had their nose pierced, serving their masters for food. But thousands of wild bison remain. And that’s what I’ve found myself beholding as I’ve reflected on this new national mammal, this ancient icon of a continent. Sometimes it’s not the strength that makes a behemoth such a wonder. Sometimes it’s the fragility of life that’s worth thinking about. One small shift and it could have been trampled. One small shift and it still could be.

Ted Olsen is editor of The Behemoth.

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Also in this Issue

Issue 49 / May 26, 2016
  1. Editor's Note from May 26, 2016

    Issue 49: The spark of human creation, beauty’s golden number, and beholding the bison. /

  2. Let There Be Light at Every Human’s Creation?

    Sadly, no. But biologists have new ways to reveal the unseen. /

  3. Beauty Has a Number

    Phi, the “Golden Ratio,” seems to be everywhere you look. /

  4. A Subsequent Lecture

    “You’ll be surprised” /

  5. Wonder on the Web

    Issue 49: Links to amazing stuff.

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