possibly as soon as 2025. And yet, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources lists bison as near threatened. Many scientists accept that the plains bison is an ecological relic, one effectively extinct within its historic range.18 There are scant few bison roaming wild as they did 150 years ago, and the bulk of bison in North America are in commercial herds often managed to a degree as if they were cattle. Some of these captive bison face selective breeding, are moved through rotational pastures depending on the season, and are provided veterinary care on occasion. Altogether, that approach to managing bison threatens to move them away from their Bison bison ancestors both physiologically and behaviorally. At the same time, suitable land for bison is disappearing quickly. Two-and-a-half-million acres of shortgrass prairie were lost to agriculture between 2015 and 2016.19 Another 1.7 million acres were transformed in 2017.
The species’ future depends on our best animal husbandry, for both commercial and conservation herds. Without dinner-table appeal for bison ribeye steaks, tenderloins, and tri-tips and the desire to mount their heads over fireplaces in trophy homes, there would be little incentive to ranch bison. Were it not for the Interior Department’s determination to preserve bison as genetically pure, or as pure as possible, and the resolve by native peoples to connect with their spiritual past, the number of conservation herds very possibly would struggle to grow in number with healthy genetic diversity.
Compounding the threat of genetic pollution and pocket conservation herds is the reality that bison have been removed from all but a sliver of the Great Plains. Bison in large numbers don’t seem to mesh with our societal explosion of cities and towns, industrial zones, agricultural conglomerates, and even ranchettes. Without room to roam, conservation herds are limited in number of both herds and individuals. The removal of bison from the landscape also has affected the region’s ecosystems by disrupting natural processes that other native species thrive in and rely upon. The cascading ecological impacts are clearly visible, both in terms of fauna and flora. As bison go, so, too, go a number of other species that evolved alongside these cloven-hoofed creatures and which also have been slowly squeezed by development that turned the Plains into suburbia and conglomerate agricultural tracts. Swift fox, black-footed ferrets, and greater sage-grouse all face precarious futures without society’s intervention.
There are reasons for optimism. After all, bison have great public appeal. Tatanka, the Lakota word for buffalo, entered into popular lexicon in 1990 via the Oscar-winning movie Dances with Wolves. The designation of bison as the national mammal in 2016, along with the arrival of ground bison and bison steaks in groceries, raised the visibility of an animal that once was more numerous than any other ungulate on the North American landscape. The federal government’s efforts to see bison as a pure species remain on the landscape is a huge plus in their favor. But now, little more than a century after efforts to preserve bison began, the species faces a puzzling legal and biological predicament. Though sheer population numbers early in the twenty-first century placed an estimated five hundred thousand plains bison in North America, 96 percent of those animals are in commercial herds and lack genetic purity due to century-ago experiments to blend bison and cattle into some sort of super-livestock. Those experiments were conducted, ironically, by some of those who also worked so very hard to preserve the pureblood species. Today some conservationists argue the species, in a genetically sound form, needs the protection of the Endangered Species Act to survive. Some scientists view that as hubris, a grand measure of hyperbole. If a bison is 99 percent pure, containing just 1 percent cattle genes, does that weaken the species? That debate can, and will, continue without immediately dooming bison. But society must be willing to allow bison to recoup some of the landscapes they’ve been removed from if we want the species to succeed. There is a large amount of shortgrass and tallgrass prairie lands outside the National Park System that, in theory at least, could be opened to bison. Native peoples have nearly one hundred million additional acres on their reservations that could help support the animals. More acreage could be found on public lands held by states and the federal government. The era of large-scale conservation does not have to be a vestige of history or victim of development. We just need to be more creative and willing to forge alliances that would benefit from wild bison. In turn, bison would benefit the landscape, as it has been demonstrated that they are ecologically better than cattle or sheep. Bison are icons not just of the West but of the entire country. They are cultural centerpieces and are seen as key to lifting up native peoples spiritually, economically, and in terms of longevity. They should be given the opportunity to thrive not as open-air zoo specimens but as ecologically functioning biological engineers on the land.
Those sentiments are shared half a world away. In Romania, in the Southern Carpathian Mountains, European bison, or wisent, vanished from the landscape two centuries ago. But work is underway to release at least one hundred of the species by the end of 2020. Those pushing the initiative point to many of the same reasons for their recovery operation: European bison create a mosaic landscape with their grazing, which in turn benefits biodiversity. Part of the region targeted for wisent encompasses the Tarcu Mountains, which are a component of one of Europe’s last significant wilderness areas. Successful recovery of the species would not only be an environmental victory, but is seen as a way to benefit the region economically, as well.20
The Landscape
The region, once labeled “the Great American Desert,” is now more often called the “heartland,” or, sometimes, “the breadbasket of the world.” Its immense distances, flowing grasslands, sparse population, enveloping horizons, and dominating sky convey a sense of expansiveness, even emptiness or loneliness, a reaction to too much space and one’s own meager presence in it.
—Encyclopedia of the Great Plains
The Great Plains is a topographical tabletop, one about five hundred miles east to west and two thousand miles north to south. Though not as flat as a table, the region nevertheless lacks a substantial range of mountains like the Appalachians, the Rockies, or the Sierra. It quite understandably could have developed an inferiority complex, for the East and West coasts urbanized much more quickly than this heartland, and across a much greater area. It took the 1862 Homestead Act, a legislative tool for encouraging the nation’s westward expansion, to see what was possible out on the Plains. But for more than a few, taming this landscape proved impossible. Even today, more than 150 years after the Homestead Act ignited a land rush where settlers who could tame 160 acres of land for five years received it free and clear, the Plains are a tough place to live.
This is a breathtakingly wide expanse of land, as I discovered after graduating from college. Determined to see, and more specifically ski, the Rockies, I stuffed my few belongings into the back of my boxy 1978 Subaru wagon and headed west from New Jersey, only to run into the Plains on the other side of Missouri. I didn’t find many trees to slow the wind or soften the sun’s glare. Park your car along I-70 after leaving Topeka, Kansas, and stand on the highway’s shoulder and you’ll be awestruck by a setting that runs to, and then bends off, the horizon in all directions. Touching all, or parts, of a dozen US states, the roughly five hundred thousand square miles within the Great Plains province wash ashore at the foothills of the Rockies on its western edge and dip into the Missouri River on its eastern boundary. But it is bigger still, two thousand miles north and south, extending from the prairies of Canada’s Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan provinces, all the way south to the banks of the muddy Rio Grande River.
Stand on the Wyoming prairie, or on that in Kansas, the Dakotas, Nebraska, or Oklahoma, and the open country flees from you in all directions. The plains cower from the Rocky Mountain Front in Colorado and Montana, but only in physical relief. There are no majestic peaks here, and yet, the Great Plains, with sun beating down, scant water, and seemingly perpetual wind, is as demanding a place as one of Colorado’s fourteeners for those unprepared.
When I first ventured into the Great Plains, a young man making his first encounter with what lay west beyond West Virginia where I spent my college days, the contrast in landscapes was startling.
