If the image alone didn’t reflect enough respect for the animals, it was further enhanced and given lifelike qualities by the artist’s use of rippling rock wall contours to add heft, some muscular definition, to the paintings.
That idolization of, and reliance upon, bison came to North America with those humans who walked from Asia east to the continent. As in the old world, in the new one the beasts were hunted for food and shelter, clothing and fuel, even ornamentation. Evolving societies of native cultures were nothing if not inventive and practiced at finding what they needed. Bison hides were scraped clean of fat and muscle to become tepees and robes. They were stretched over curved tree limbs to form bull boats that could be paddled across a river. Bison ribs became runners for winter sleds, while sinews launched arrows from bows or served as thread. And, of course, the meat was about the richest protein around.
But bison were more than sustenance and shelter. Great Plains people viewed them almost as deities, and perhaps rightfully so, considering not only their sheer bulk and demeanor but also the reliance on them and their cultural significance. Bison were mythical, practical, spiritual, and transformative animals. Black Elk held bison in particular regard. Born shortly before the end of the Civil War, this Oglala Sioux holy man fell sick when he was nine years old and lingered for several days in a semiconscious state. During that period, he had a vision in which he was taken to the center of the Lakota world and instructed on the keys of earthly unity. “I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being,” he recalled.13
As a young man, Black Elk traveled for a while as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, though he would later return to the Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming to describe for whites the traditions of the Lakota. In 1932, with his son acting as translator, Black Elk related his life story to a biographer. During hours of interviews, Black Elk explained the Lakota’s reverence for bison. “The buffalo represents the people and the universe and should always be treated with respect, for was he not here before the two-legged peoples, and is he not generous in that he gives us our home and our food?” he asked rhetorically. “The buffalo is wise in many things, and, thus, we should learn from him and should always be as a relative with him.”14
But human predators, primarily those with white skin, didn’t always share that respect. Hunters hired by the railroads to provide meat for the gritty crews building the Transcontinental Railroad, military personnel working to deprive the native peoples of their foremost sustenance, and buffalo hunters making a living by selling bison robes and hides decimated the species in the nineteenth century, pushing it toward extinction. So great and widespread were the killing fields that a Paiute medicine man, Wovoka, near the end of the century instructed his people to perform a once-forgotten dance that he maintained would drive the whites from the landscape.
Wovoka had been born in Nevada, about seven years before Black Elk. Though his teenage years were spent living with a white family, a time during which he learned about Christianity, when he was about thirty years old he refocused on Paiute traditions and beliefs. A powerful vision he experienced during the total solar eclipse of January 1, 1889, spurred Wovoka to revive the Ghost Dance—which an earlier Paiute medicine man, or healer, had started in 1869. That man, Hawthorne Wodziwob, encouraged his followers to perform a circle dance. A series of visions convinced him that doing so would wipe the white people from the earth while native cultures would be left to prosper. Wovoka built on this message through his own vision, and promoted it as a way to cleanse the world of whites and renew the landscape and its wildlife, including bison. “All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing,” urged Wovoka. “Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again.”15
But the return of bison was not spawned by these visions or Ghost Dance rituals. Late nineteenth-century technological advances gave buffalo hunters even more reason to kill bison. These advances seemed ready to doom both the species and the native peoples who relied upon it. As more and more bison were killed, the people who once followed the great herds through the seasons continued to lose hold of the Great Plains as their homeland and were being pushed into reservation life. The downfall of bison herds was dynamic, though not accomplished solely by two-legged white predators. Other factors included the hunting by native cultures and even predation by wolves and grizzlies. Some think disease may also have played a role. Myriad factors contributed to the Great Slaughter.
Bison miraculously did come back, but not due to a prophecy. Their future was ensured by a handful of players, of white and native cultures, who sensed the demise of the great animals and worked to prevent it. There were men whose names stand out in American history, as well as some who have been overlooked. Among those often relegated to the back of the story are several men with Native American blood, including two who built a turn-of-the-century herd of several hundred bison that today is key to the return of purebred bison to the Rocky Mountain Front that sidles up to Glacier National Park. Still, it was a modest number of players, a small, far-flung group in a sparsely populated, far-stretching nation at the turn of the twentieth century, that crossed paths and collaborated as they worked to preserve bison. Today we see their success in small but strikingly rich, diverse pools of bison genes nurtured from Canada to Mexico, from Iowa to California. These men had no template to work from, no previous conservation mission or map that they were trying to emulate. There were no instructions, no how-to manuals. They were acting upon their own instincts, developing their own theories, arguing when necessary to gain some forward momentum in securing a place in the country where bison could survive.
Their timing coincided with a national consciousness welling up around the conservation of wildlife and natural spaces. John Muir had been praising the values of nature in promoting the High Sierra and what would become Yosemite National Park. His efforts corresponded with the rise in the 1870s of magazines such as American Sportsman, Forest and Stream, and American Angler that cultivated national audiences concerned about wildlife. Emerging at the same time were various organizations dedicated to wildlife and conservation, groups such as the League of American Sportsmen, the Camp Fire Club, and the Audubon Society.16
Four of the actors who had key roles in engineering the recovery of bison had big, oversized personalities; they were proud of their accomplishments, and not shy about announcing them. Each had hunted bison. Yet each came to recognize the dark fate bison faced, and was determined to see the animals avoid it. To a large degree they succeeded, as bison numbers rebounded from dozens to hundreds to thousands and then tens and even hundreds of thousands. Not to the millions that once roamed the West, but to herds that today ostensibly will prevent the species from vanishing.
But while the numbers are impressive, the touted recovery of bison as a unique, genetically pure species is not that simple and not so certain. Arguments have been made over whether the species is indeed recovered, saved from extinction, and some courts have entertained those arguments. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any great urgency to resolving them, thanks to an estimated half-million bison in North America. Those animals are divided into two groups: commercial herds, raised for meat, their decorative hides, and even their heads as Western chic mounts on display in homes, hotels, and lodges; and conservation herds, which are viewed as inviolate reservoirs of pure bison genes intended to preserve the species. Media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner owns the largest commercial bison herd, some fifty-one thousand head,17 while conservation herds are scattered across the West and the Great Plains states, most often in units of the National Park System but also in preserves such as those managed by the Nature Conservancy and on Native American reservations.
Conservation herds stretch from Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park in the Northwest Territories south to Yellowstone, and from California to Iowa. State parks from Florida to Utah and even “landscape zoos”—with enclosures of tens of acres—in California feature bison. The National Bison Association, a non-profit organization that promotes commercial bison operations,
