Where the Bison Roam

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

BOZEMAN, Montana — The Middle East is erupting, the economy is cooling, the climate is melting down. Let’s talk buffalo.

The other day, in company with some vacationing friends from back East, my wife and I visited the Madison Buffalo Jump State Park outside Logan, Montana, about 20 miles west of here. When we arrived, there were only two other people there. It wasn’t hard to see why.

“Beware of Rattlesnakes,” warned a sign at the parking lot, which was enough to persuade the ladies to stay in the car.

And though there were no rattlesnakes in sight, there wasn’t much else in sight either, other than Montana’s proverbial Big Sky, a lovely landscape, and a small but precipitous butte across the way. From time immemorial, explained the historical markers, Native Americans had herded buffalo to their deaths by running up behind nearby herds and stampeding them over the edge of the butte.

Such “pedestrian hunting” was an efficient system for a horseless, gun-less people, but the stampedes necessarily provided far more meat and hides than the Indians could use at any given time. Far from treading lightly on the planet, in other words, Native Americans — like any other peoples — did what they had to do to survive. And once they had horses and guns, they only grew more efficient at the killing: Serious historians have concluded that bison populations in the Great Plains already were in marked decline by the time the white hunter came along to (nearly) finish them off.

No doubt that will be disappointing news to Hollywood romantics and others who like to think of the Indians as living in perfect balance with nature (and each other) until the Europeans came along to mess things up. But that view of the American Indian comes in for much-needed correction in a series of scholarly essays published by Stanford University Press under the title “Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans.”

As Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Douglass North writes in the Introduction, “The history of Native Americans has been fundamentally colored by the perceptions — or the belief systems, if you will — of the writers.” Native Americans, he says, “deserve a better story — one that tries to comprehend the complex evolution of Native Americans … ” And one that treats Native Americans as fully human, not some sort of primitive, half-human species. Among other things, the essays make clear, Indians developed institutions, such as property rights, that bore a remarkable resemblance to European systems for managing scarcity where it occurred.

The invading Europeans also deserve a better story. While much attention is paid in school textbooks about how the American buffalo was reduced to a population of 1,500 or so by the end of the 19th century, less attention is paid to the fact that today there are some 350,000 buffalo, properly known as bison, roaming the range these days, mostly on 4,000 or so ranches and farms.

Hollywood romantics dislike the idea of property rights and monetary incentives, but they have worked together to bring the buffalo back from the edge of extinction. That’s vividly clear from another stop on our tour: the Spanish Creek campground southwest of Bozeman. It is reached by a rutted county road that passes through Ted Turner’s 107,000-acre Flying D Ranch, where he raises buffalo for their meat. (He started a restaurant chain specializing in buffalo burgers.)

Buffalo graze on either side of the road — and occasionally block the road itself. You no longer have to go to Yellowstone National Park to encounter one of the Wild West’s icons up close and personal.

Indeed, it is in Yellowstone National Park itself that the buffalo appears to face the greatest challenge. The park’s herd has grown from a mere 30 buffalo in the early 1900s to about 5,000 today, thanks to the lack of its major natural predator, man. The herd is so large that it threatens to destroy significant portions of the Yellowstone habitat.

Each winter much of the herd tries to migrate out of the park into surrounding ranchland in search of fodder. Because the buffalo carry brucellosis, a disease that causes cows to abort their calves, the Park Service was compelled to cull about 1,000 of the errant animals last winter, sending them to slaughter houses.

All of which is causing the federal government, which has long been in the grips of the “preservationist” philosophy that man is a threat to nature, to reintroduce humans to the natural equation.The Park Service last fall reintroduced the idea of the buffalo hunt, albeit on a tiny scale, by handing out 50 licenses by lottery to hunt buffalo that stray from the park. (There were some 6,000 applicants, including Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer.)

Animal rights activists and environmental extremists were of course apoplectic. But mankind, after all, is a part of nature. And in the real world, nature requires some managing. Remember the “let-burn” philosophy that led to the destructive Yellowstone fires of 1988?

The view of nature as some sort of static phenomenon that must be protected from any human imprint is as unnatural as it is unrealistic — and in the end a threat to nature itself. Indeed, if the Park Service would take the next step, charging for the licenses (Turner’s ranch charges $4,000 for periodic culling hunts on his property), Yellowstone might have more money to spend on restoring its “natural” habitat.

Mr. Bray is a freelance columnist who lives in the Detroit area.


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use