Bison: back from the brink. Bill Burns. The Beaver: Exploring Canada's History 82.5 (Oct-Nov 2002): p16(6).
Once the hooves of tens of millions of bison thundered across vast tracts of North America, from the spruce bogs of the Arctic Circle to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. No other large mammal on any continent, at any time in history, existed in such numbers. Nor did any other animal play such a dominant role in the history of a continent. Although this primeval beast was the living emblem of the West to both First Nations and settlers, the bison stood in the way of the Europeans' westward expansion. That alone sealed the bison's fate.
The American version of the buffalo * saga, perpetuated by colourful stories of hunters like Buffalo Bill Cody and Sitting Bull, contrasts with the lesser--known but equally fascinating Canadian version--which is less bloody and played a vital part in rescuing the bison from oblivion
Before the first European explorers arrived in North America, the oddly built bison dominated all phases of the life of the Plains First Nations, who adapted their lifestyle to its nomadic existence. The bison acquired mythic proportions with many of the First Nations and was revered as a life giver--as indeed it was.
The symbiotic relationship that existed between bison and the Plains First Nations was dependent on a third element--the landscape that shaped this magnificent animal.
The Great Plains of North America stretch 2,400 kilometres from Alberta to Mexico and some 1,300 kilometres from east to west. Also called the Central Plains, the Great American Desert, the Prairies, or the Bison Belt, these tall and short grasslands dominate the central part of the continent. The seasons rule this harsh and severe landscape: Winter freezes the brooks and streams, dumping a thick blanket of snow that makes travel impossible, Spring melts the snow, changing streams to raging torrents. The intense heat of summer dries up the streams and bakes the land, scorching the earth until it becomes desert.
Wind is the constant voice of the plains, sweeping unimpeded across the trackless expanse as vast as the ocean. Often the wind turns fierce, producing raging blizzards in winter and violent, hail-laden thunderstorms in summer. Twisters roar to life from the violent collision of air masses.
The Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez was the first known European to see and describe a bison. In 1521, his historian De Solis wrote, "It has a bunch on its back like a camel ... its neck covered with hair like a lion ... its head armed like that of a bull, which it resembles in fierceness, with no less strength and agility." When Francisco Vazquez de Coronado reached Texas in 1540, he compared the numbers of bison to "fish in the sea" In the two years-Coronado's expedition spent on the Great Plains, they were never out of the sight of bison. Centuries later, U.S. General Phillip Sheridan rode 122 kilometres from Fort Dodge to Fort Supply through one solid herd. Some officers with Sheridan estimated the herd at a staggering--and clearly exaggerated--ten billion. In 1858, Red River trader James McKay rode for twenty days through an almost solid herd. "On all sides, as far as the eye could see," he wrote, "the prairie was black with them."
How many bison inhabited North America? Estimates range from 30 million to more than 100 million. One thing is certain, however: Despite their great numbers, bison were reduced to a few hundred in under a hundred years.
When the first Europeans arrived along the eastern coast, they discovered scattered herds of bison, This so-called "eastern bison" was so successful Farley Mowat claimed "it was the dominant herbivore of the Atlantic seaboard." Explorers initially speculated there were four types of buffalo: plains, wood, mountain (also called the Oregon bison), and eastern bison. Zoologists now classify bison into two types--the more numerous plains bison (bison bison bison) and the wood bison (bison bison athabascae).
The first reported sighting of a wood bison came from Samuel Hearne in 1772. Hearne wrote that the bull's huge size prevented the hunters from skinning it in one coat. Instead, they had to cut off the meat on one side to turn the bull over. This was necessary as a wood bison bull can exceed two metres at the shoulder, measure 3.6 metres in length and top 1,000 kilograms. A female's weight averages about half that of a male. (By comparison, a plains bull seldom exceeds 900 kilograms.) The wood bison moved in small herds close to forests, spreading out over a wide arc extending from northeast British Columbia across Alberta to northwest Saskatchewan and up into the southwest Northwest Territories. With an estimated wood bison population during the early 1800s of only 168,000, the numbers of wood bison never approached those of its plains cousins.
The reason for the bison slaughter in the U.S. was simple. Bison, along with the Plains natives, blocked the westward expansion of European settlers who wanted to farm and raise crops. General Sheridan urged settlers to "kill until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance."
Initially, buffalo hunters shot bison to supply railway crews with fresh meat. Buffalo Bill Cody got his name after being hired for the then huge wage of $500 a month to shoot twelve bison a day--easy work for a sharpshooter. (Legendary hunter Tom Nixon once killed 120 in forty minutes.) As railways began shipping bison hides and meat back east, demand increased and the slaughter became indiscriminate. Entire herds were decimated for the price tongues, which were pickled, leaving 3 billion pounds of meat a year to rot. After witnessing such a hunt in 1843, Audubon wrote "what a terrible destruction of life, as the tongues only were brought in and the flesh ... left."
After the railway opened up the Great Plains in the early 1870's, the killing escalated as thousands of buffalo hunters poured into the American west. The extent of the slaughter staggers the imagination. Bison expert Colonel Richard Irving Dodge claims 5.5 million were killed from 1872 to 1874 around Kansas. Joseph Allen puts the figure at 2.5 million a year from 1870 to 1875. "Hunting trains" became popular, with guides like Buffalo Bill Cody helping distinguished visitors like the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia shoot bison from the comfort of a train seat.
Soon the plains became a vast boneyard, with mountains of skulls stockpiled for eventual use as fertilizer. The near extinction of North America's largest land mammal marked the end of the frontier era. The Indians were declared "pacified," settlements dotted the plains, and the train replaced the prairie schooners. When the last herd of wild buffalo in the U.S. was killed in Colorado in 1897, Sitting Bull lamented "a cold wind blew across the prairies when the last buffalo fell ... a death-wind for my people."
Canada's role in the near annihilation differed. Pressure to open the West to immigration was not as strong. In fact, the Hudson's Bay Company persistently opposed settlement of the West--Canada didn't buy Rupert's Land from the HBC until 1869. Unlike the U.S., railways in Canada played almost no part in the wholesale slaughter as the CPR was built after the bison were destroyed.
The Plains First Nation in Canada hunted bison, stampeding them into enclosures or off cliffs. After horses were introduced, these primitive techniques were abandoned as natives followed the herds on horseback. The culling had no effect on the numbers of bison, and the First Nations habit of setting fires helped keep the plains free of trees, which probably contributed to the numbers of plains bison.
While Canada's role might be considered less bloody, as far back as the 1820s Metis organized large hunting expeditions. One expedition leaving Fort Garry in Manitoba in spring boasted over fifteen hundred hunters, accompanied by women and children and some twelve hundred Red River carts needed to carry the dried meat and hides back. These organized hunts continued into the 1860s, when bison, pressured by hunting on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, disappeared from Manitoba.
One of the first conservation measures was taken by Plains Cree living 400 kilometres west of Winnipeg. They became so worried that they assembled a council in 1857, which decided to forbid white men to kill bison on their land. Pressure increased on the remaining plains bison in Saskatchewan and Alberta when American traders crossed the border in 1866 and built Fort Whoop-Up in southern Alberta to trade rotgut whisky for bison hides. In 1873, the U.S. consul in Winnipeg wrote, "the destruction of buffalo in the Saskatchewan region must have amounted to considerably more than a million." By 1876, Cree leader Sweetgrass was pleading for bison protection. The next year, the North-West Territories council passed the Buffalo Protection Act, but it lacked any provision for enforcement. A toothless piece of legislation, it was repealed a year later.
Credited with killing the last bison in Alberta is John Douglas Campbell, the Marquis of Lorne, governor-general of Canada from 1878 to 1883. On a well-publicized tour of western Canada to promote the building of the CPR and lure immigrants to the west, Lord Lorne took part in a hunt near the Red Deer River, chasing and shooting three bulls in 1881. With hunting restrictions absent and indiscriminate slaughter prevailing, starvation spread across the First Nations of the prairies. When the CPR reached Regina in 1882 all that remained were bison bones, giving the future capital its first name--Pile o'Bones.
After plains bison were slaughtered, hunters turned their guns on the wood bison roaming the boreal forests of northern Canada. By 1891, only 300 were left in an isolated region, now Wood Buffalo National Park, a thousand kilometres south of the Arctic Circle.
The plains bison might be extinct today if it was not for the foresight of a few men, like Manitobans James McKay and Charles Alloway, who captured orphaned calves in Saskatchewan. McKay raised the bison outside Winnipeg until his death in 1879 when Colonel Sam Bedson, warden at Stony Mountain prison, took over. By 1888, the herd numbered 125 and Bedson gave twenty-seven to Donald A. Smith as a repayment of a loan. Smith, who later became Lord Strathcona, donated bison to the Assiniboine Zoo in Winnipeg and Banff National Park. Colonel Bedson sold the rest to C.J. "Buffalo" Jones of Kansas. Moving the bison proved difficult for Jones as the bulls fought while confined at the railway pen, killing three bison. When the bison reached Missouri, thirteen stampeded while being unloaded, rampaging through Kansas City. In 1893, the Allard-Pablo herd had grown to 100. Meanwhile, the Jones herd in Kansas had been decimated by ticks in the southern heat. It was also purchased by Allard and Pablo
In 1872 Samuel Walking Coyote found several motherless calves in Alberta and raised them in northern Montana until he could no longer afford to buy feed for his growing herd. Walking Coyote sold them in 1884 for $2,500 to two Montana ranchers, Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, who later bought Buffalo Jones's herd.
In 1906, after Allard died, the herd was offered to the U.S. government, but Congress refused to appropriate the funds. Snubbed by Congress's action, Pablo approached the Canadian government, which bought his entire herd for $245 a head. Even with seventy-five cowboys chasing the herd, it proved impossible to round up the bison. After months of futile attempts, Pablo built forty-two kilometres of fence leading to a boxcar. The plan failed when the lead bull roared up the ramp and crashed through the wall of the boxcar as if it were a paper bag. It took six years, but eventually the last of the 709 bison were transported north to Alberta's Elk Island Park, a wildlife sanctuary, in 1912.
The farcical roundup turned into a tragedy thirteen years later. By then the herd had multiplied so rapidly that authorities ignored the protests of wildlife managers and began moving surplus plains bison north to Wood Buffalo National Park, created in 1922 as a permanent habitat for the last remaining wood bison. By 1940, the dire predictions seemed to be true--crossbreeding put the last of the wood bison out of existence.
Then in 1957, in an inaccessible corner of Wood Buffalo National Park isolated by more than 120 kilometres of impenetrable muskeg, a plane spotted a herd of 200 bison. They proved to be "pure" wood bison. The species was not extinct. Their capture, in the deep snow of midwinter when the frozen muskeg permitted access, turned out to be one of the most difficult animal rescues ever attempted. This time the wood bison were kept separate from the interbred herd.
Gradually the numbers of both types of bison increased until today some 350,000 range on public and private land throughout the continent--the vast majority being plains bison. Wood bison numbers exceed 4,500, with almost all of these in Canada. With both Canadian and U.S. governments committed to their continued protection, the bison's survival seems assured. But what of their future? Will bison be viewed as shaggy curiosities confined to outdoor pens and offering viewers a window on a vanished world?
Conservationists have proposed grandiose plans like the Buffalo Commons, which would return parts of ten states and three provinces to their former wild state, in a area extending from Saskatoon to the Texas Panhandle. Other schemes include the Big Open, which would transform eastern Montana into an American Serengeti supporting 75,000 free-ranging bison. And two University of Calgary academics want most of the Palliser Triangle turned into a park almost the size of Nova Scotia. The proponents of all three plans claim these semiarid prairie areas are so savaged by wind and hail that little agriculture is possible.
Many First Nations want to see bison restored to under-populated areas of the plains, which would not only restore the bison to native culture but spark economic renewal through hunting and tourism. But debate rages about "game ranching," where a hunter can pay as much as $14,000 to shoot bison on private land.
Not only does the bison have a legendary past, its future promises to change the face of agribusiness in North America. Today, thousands of ranches raise bison, ranging in size from American television mogul Ted Turner's 567,000-hectare ranch--containing the world's largest private herd of 17,000 bison--to smaller spreads. Turner claims "bison are the wave of the future." Ranchers like Albertan Gary Fakeley agree, saying bison "are one-tenth of the work of beef cows and make three times the money."
Indeed, bison offer many advantages over cattle. These extremely hardy animals can survive the tough blizzards that would kill cattle. In fact, bison are so tough they will actually face into the driving snowstorm, using their noses as blunt snowploughs to push aside snow to graze. As large as domestic cattle, they eat only a third as much. Their meat is less fatty than cattle and has less cholesterol than chicken. At the same time, bison beef is high in protein.
The Canadian Bison Association lists 1,250 bison ranches operating in Canada. In the late 1990s, commercial production was expected to grow 25 percent a year until 2005, one of the fastest growing areas in agriculture. If demand continues to increase as it did through the 1990s, experts predict as many as 700,000 animals will be processed ten years from now. Given these exponential figures, it is small wonder that some agribusiness analysts predict bison will displace cattle in North America.
It's taken a century, but that great bearded creature of myth, an anachronism belonging to the frontier era, has made a dramatic comeback. Once again bison graze in free-roaming herds as they have done for centuries. Even the rarer wood bison was down-listed from "endangered" to "threatened" in 1988. While conservationists, First Nations, and agribusiness all claim to share the same goal--the recovery of the bison--the question remains: Can nostalgia peacefully coexist with free enterprise? The last chapter in the bison saga still has to be written.
* Debate continues about whether these bearded and bulky creatures should be called bison or buffalo, how the term buffalo came into use is unclear. It could be a corruption of the Portuguese word bufalo, used to describe the hides of the Cape buffalo. More likely, the term buffalo came from the French-Canadian voyageurs' boeuf, meaning ox or cattle. While the more common name is buffalo, the correct name is bison, as tree buffalo have no shoulder hump.
RELATED ARTICLE: The Bison--North America's largest land animal.
Tales of the incredible strength of bison are legend, with frontiersmen witnessing bison goring grizzlies to death. In 1872. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote that two trains of the Santa Fe Railway were "thrown off the tracks twice in one week" by rampaging bison. Decades later Texan Bob Yokum shipped a bison to Mexico for an unusual bullfight. Yokum's bison dislocated a back leg in the rail car, but even with only three good legs easily dispatched four Mexican bulls in rapid succession.
Recently, naturalists at Elk Island Park recorded an enraged bull charging a car and flipping it upside down into a ditch--along with its four passengers. Yellowstone National Park has recorded fifty attacks by bison since 1983, two of which resulted in fatalities after visitors were gored.
Bison are long-lived, with an average lifespan of twenty-five years. Cows mature early, at age three, and one famous female produced calves almost every year until she died at age forty-one. Bulls guarding harems produce a roar that sounds much like a lion and are surprisingly agile--one bull jumped a 2.1-metre fence.
A bison possesses surprising speed for a creature the size and weight of a pickup truck. It can reach sixty-one kilometres over sprint distances--three times faster than a man can run. In the 1980s, a hand-raised bison called Harvey Wallbanger raced against horses in Vancouver and Calgary, winning over 80 percent of the races. Over time, the bison evolved another survival trait--the ability to outdistance any enemy it could not outsprint. The bison's ability to run all day fascinated and frustrated the first cowboys who tried to round up the beasts.
--B.B.
RELATED ARTICLE: The four-legged commissary.
On a material level, it is doubtful any other animal anywhere in the world was as important to a people as the bison. It was a four-legged commissary providing all of the prime needs of First Nations: food, shelter, and clothing. The secondary uses of the bison were many and varied; horns provided drinking vessels, hooves produced glue, sinews were used as bowstrings, bladders became pouches, and bones served a number of functions, ranging from needles to bowls. One expert listed eighty-seven different nonfood uses of the bison. Even the animal's droppings were valuable. On the treeless prairie, they were often the only fuel source available. White settlers called them "buffalo chips" and claimed they provided "a hot fire with little smoke."
et cetera
Buffalo Sacred and Sacrifices by Grant MacEwan. Alberta Sport, Recreation, Parks and Wildlife Foundation, Edmonton, 1995.
The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi by Ted Belue. Stackpole Books, Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, 1996.
The Great Bison Saga, a 1985 film by Michael McKennirey about the revival of the bison, is available through the National Film Board at or by calling 1-800-267-7710.
Winnipeg-born Bill Burns was once charged by a bull bison and narrowly avoided being gored. He is the author of Raising Susan: A Man, a Woman, and a Golden Eagle and is working on a book about bison.
Source Citation: Burns, Bill. "Bison: back from the brink." The Beaver: Exploring Canada's History 82.5 (Oct-Nov 2002): 16(6). CPI.Q (Canadian Periodicals). Thomson Gale. Moose Jaw Public Library. 28 Apr. 2007 Thomson Gale Document Number: A92691289
Picture of the now released Plains Bison taken in Grasslands National Park:
This message was edited May 12, 2007 12:27 AM
