Buffalo at water circa 1904 by Denver Kendrick. Source: Library of Congress

Darkness Over the Plain

The Bison in American History

10.04.19

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, there are over 28,000 threatened species in the world. But this is hardly the first time our planet has faced the prospect of mass extinction.

In the beginning of the 20th century, America’s flora and fauna were seriously threatened by urban encroachment and over-hunting. And one animal at the center of this struggle was the bison.

So in celebration of World Animal Day, Brian and Nathan explore the history of bison in America. We’ll find out how the bison went from an animal in excess to near extinction and we’ll learn how Madison Grant’s work preserving the bison went hand and hand with his theories on eugenics. Plus, we’ll hear from the Buffalo Representative of the Eastern Shoshone about his efforts to restore the buffalo.

This episode and related resources are funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this {article, book, exhibition, film, program, database, report, Web resource}, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

animal history; bison; environmental history; zoology

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Darkness Over the Plain Lesson Set

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At the beginning of the 19th century, millions of American bison freely roamed the plains. They were an important and sacred part of the lives of Native American tribes. However, in the years following the Civil War, westward expansion from frontiersmen resulted in the rapid decline of the bison population. The expanding railroad system gave settlers unprecedented access to hunting and transporting bison herds. The United States government saw a strategic benefit in allowing overhunting, knowing that it would upend society for Native Americans. As a result, bison were nearly hunted into extinction by the end of the century.

This lesson and corresponding BackStory episode explore the reasons for the decimation of the bison population during the 19th century. It also outlines historical and contemporary efforts to conserve and protect this species. Bison are often used as a positive symbol of the American Great Plains. However, as this lesson examines, the destruction of the bison population also represents darker undercurrents of United States history such as colonization and Manifest Destiny.

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Millions Of Bison Once Roamed The Great Plains. So What Happened?

In the early 1800s, there was approximately 30 million bison roaming the Great Plains. But by the end of the 19th century, less than a thousand still existed. Historian Andrew Isenberg says environmental challenges and a devastating blow by white hunters led the bison to go from an animal in excess to near extinction in less than a hundred years. Brian talks with Isenberg about the bison’s decline in the 1800s and why some people see the bison as a symbol of a bygone American frontier.

Next year, Isenberg’s book The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 will be re-released with an updated foreword focusing on the current status of the mammal in America.

Music:

Denouement by Podington Bear

endangered species; environmental degradation; extinction; frontier; great plans; hunting

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians along with our colleagues, Ed Ayers and Joanne Freeman. Each week, we explore a topic in American history.

Brian Balogh: Last month, youth climate activist, Greta Thunberg, gave an impassioned speech at the United Nations Climate Summit. During the speech, she admonished world leaders for their unwillingness to take meaningful action against climate change.

Greta Thunberg: You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

Nathan Connolly: But this is hardly the first time the world has faced the prospect of mass extinction. In the beginning of the 20th century, America’s flora and fauna were seriously threatened by urban encroachment and over-hunting. One animal at the center of this struggle was the bison.

Andrew Isenberg: By the end of the 19th century, once various environmental factors and human hunters had done their work there were fewer than a thousand bison left in North America.

Brian Balogh: That’s Andrew Isenberg. He specializes in environmental history and has studied how the bison went from an animal in excess to near extinction in the 19th century. He says at two point in the early 1800s, there were tens of millions of bison roaming America’s Great Plains.

Andrew Isenberg: Some years it may have been above 30 million and then they may have overgrazed the range and then the number would crash. The number of bison is always fluctuating and going up and down, that 30 million or 24, 25 million is probably much closer to the maximum number that the Great Plains could sustain.

Nathan Connolly: So how did an animal which grazed the western grasslands in its millions reach the brink of extinction in under a hundred years? What’s the current state of the bison? Today you can find bison protected on animal preserves in the West and packaged for consumption on the shelves of grocery stores. In 2016, President Obama named the bison America’s first national mammal. So what exactly does the animal represent to people? And how has the bison population changed with the times?

Brian Balogh: In celebration of World Animal Day, we’re going to explore the history of the bison in the United States. We’ll hear more from Andrew Isenberg on what caused the bison’s destruction in the 19th century and why some today see it as a symbol of a bygone American frontier.

Nathan Connolly: You’ll find out how one man is working to restore buffalo for the Eastern Shoshone tribe at Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

Brian Balogh: And you’ll learn about the surprising and troubling connection between bison preservation and Adolf Hitler.

Brian Balogh: Let’s start our story back in the 1800s when millions of bison roamed the Great Plains and as Andrew Isenberg says, “Diverse groups of Native Americans like the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes were hunting them.”

Andrew Isenberg: If you look at the number of Natives and you look at the pressure they’re putting on the bison, in a good year the number of bison that they’re consuming for food and for hides, for their lodges and for robes to keep themselves warm, the robe is the winter skin of the bison with the hair still attached, all of that was well within the capacity of the bison to sustain.

Brian Balogh: But in the 1860s, everything changed with the influx of white hunters in the Great Plains. “In a short amount of time,” Isenberg says, “these hunters delivered a devastating blow to the bison population.”

Andrew Isenberg: What happens in the 1860s, and really after the Civil War, it’s a kind of spasm of industrial expansion on the part of the United States as the US lurches into the Great Plains. So there are very powerful, accurate rifles that had been developed during the Civil War. In the late 1860s, railroads start reaching out into the Great Plains. All of these things kind of conspired to have a few thousand white hide hunters move first into the Southern Great Plains and then they moved farther north.

Andrew Isenberg: They delivered the coup de grace to the bison. The Native hunting had chipped away at the bison population over several decades. Within about 10 or 15 years, these white hide hunters did away with about 12 to 15 million bison. Though we don’t necessarily think about this now, tanning and leather was, I think, the fifth largest industry in the United States in the middle of the 19th century or end of the 19th century. There’s an extraordinary demand for this. So bison leather was simply just incorporated into this expanding demand.

Andrew Isenberg: As it turned out, bison leather is highly elastic, so a lot of it wound up as belting for industrial machinery, which is another sense in which this is a kind of industrial consumption of the bison.

Brian Balogh: Now, there has been speculation that the Federal Government actively supported the destruction of the bison by white hunters. Is that the case?

Andrew Isenberg: Yes. I think we have to phrase this very carefully. Some people have said that the Army went out and shot bison in order to deny their use to Indians, so that Natives would have to submit to the reservation system. In fact, what did happen is that there were too few bison left for Natives to sustain themselves and they had to submit to the reservation system. The Army welcomed this because the Army was not having a lot of success when they were fighting Natives directly. They were beaten rather badly a couple times in 1876 by the Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Andrew Isenberg: But what’s not true is that the Army went out and did this directly. In fact, what happened was is it was private hunters who did the work of killing off the bison. The Army and the Department of the Interior saw what was happening and applauded what was happening, but they didn’t direct it. So the way I put it is that the Federal Government commended the work of these hunters, but it didn’t command them.

Brian Balogh: Right. It probably could have put a stop to it, but-

Andrew Isenberg: It absolutely could have put a stop to it. There were a couple of bills that were introduced into Congress in the 1870s that would have forbade the hunting of bison in federal territories. The people who were sponsoring this legislation were inspired by the SPCA, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was founded right after the Civil War and primarily had as its mission kind treatment of pets and domestic livestock. This was the SPCA’s first and perhaps maybe their only effort to extend their mission to a wild animal.

Andrew Isenberg: The people who were in favor of this legislation in Congress, I remember reading in the debates in Congress, what one of them said is that, “A man who will kill a bison is someone who would shoot down his mother’s cow in the barnyard.” Really sort of adopting that SPCA rhetoric.

Brian Balogh: Yes. There are those who’ve critiqued your interpretation of the decline of bison for placing too much blame on Native Americans. I wanted to get your response to that.

Andrew Isenberg: Well, I don’t think that anyone who’s read the book, Destruction of the Bison, with an open mind would think that I let white hide hunters off the hook. I make it very clear that they were the ones who delivered the coup de grace to the bison. I think it’s one thing to say that Native groups who had kind of improvised a new resource strategy around hunting bison from horseback and over the course of 80 years or so from beginning around the 1770s and 1780s, chipped away at the bison population in concert with environmental factors over which they had no control, like the fact that the weather began to get warmer in the Great Plains starting in the 1850s and that those patchy droughts throughout the Great Plains were kind of chipping away at the bison population as well.

Andrew Isenberg: To me, that kind of use of the bison where they may have been overusing the bison in seasons where there was not enough rainfall to support the bison population is very different from this industrial surge into the Great Plains in the 1860s and 1870s that did away with 12 or 15 million bison very quickly. For instance, we don’t know whether Natives left to themselves might not have reconfigured their use of the bison having realized that in some seasons we may be killing more than can be sustained. We need to pull back on this. We don’t know because they weren’t given the chance to figure that out. So to me, they’re very different things.

Brian Balogh: Often we don’t miss something until it’s gone and disappearing. Was that the case with the precipitous decline of the bison? What I’m getting at here, Andrew, is trying to understand the move to preserve the bison.

Andrew Isenberg: Yeah. There’s a very interesting pivot or slalom on the part of a lot of white Americans about the bison. It was a species that was thought of as wild, as the resource of the Natives, as an animal that would interfere with farming and ranching in the Great Plains. So a lot of people applauded the destruction of the bison in the 1870s.

Brian Balogh: So they were seen as pests?

Andrew Isenberg: Yeah. It was a way of opening up the Great Plains. And then as soon as Natives were on reservations and no longer presented the same threat to white settlement of the West, then there were a number of people who became nostalgic about the bison and sought to preserve it from extinction. These people included Teddy Roosevelt, who was very much about a kind of frontier, masculine notion of the West and how that sort of experience of the West was good for all Americans, William Hornaday who ran the Bronx Zoo, also some pretty prominent people, JP Morgan among them. All of them got together and founded the American Bison Society in 1905.

Andrew Isenberg: The idea was to preserve the bison from extinction. What they did was they rounded up the bison and they collected a few, really fewer than a hundred, and they put them on some very small preserves. They installed these bison on those preserves and then declared that they had done their job because they essentially created them as tourist attractions. People could go see bison, experience the West, and then return to cities or return to the East having tasted for flavor of the frontier.

Brian Balogh: What do you make of turning the bison into a symbol of Western masculinity when clearly that Western masculinity had almost led the bison to become extinct?

Andrew Isenberg: Right. Well, there’s obviously a lot of irony to that. I think one of the things we need to think about is that this kind of preservation happened within the cultural context of the late 19th and early 20th century. Elites such as Teddy Roosevelt had an overweening concern with what they saw as the debilitating and feminizing effects of citified, cosmopolitan easy living. So they really were advocating this kind of move to get back into the outdoors and experience strenuous living in the West, the kind of living that bison hunters had had, they imagined, in the 1870s and 1880s.

Andrew Isenberg: So going to national parks or going to a bison preserve and at least seeing these kinds of animals, even if you weren’t hunting them, although there was continued hunting of bison going on at private ranches. That would give you this kind of taste of the frontier. The bison were preserved in a peculiar kind of way. They no longer had free range throughout the West. They were preserved in very small little herds. Those herds were so small, in fact, that there was not enough genetic diversity. So there were some genetic anomalies that began to occur after a few generations of these small herds on these tourist preserves.

Andrew Isenberg: That’s not something that the American Bison Society necessarily understood. In fact, to the contrary, they thought that these few bison that had survived the slaughter of the 19th century must be the fittest of the species, so it’d be okay to start over with them in these preserves.

Brian Balogh: So how many bison are there today?

Andrew Isenberg: Well, there’s somewhere between half a million and a million bison in the United States. The overwhelming majority of them are on ranches and they are raised for slaughter. There are only about 10 or 15,000 bison on public preserves. That gets to the weird status of bison in the United States, that they are animals you can go see at a zoo or in the public preserve, and you can also go to a supermarket and buy a bison steak. That’s a kind of strange position to be in. What I find interesting about that is that we get upset about the Yellowstone bison being killed because we’ve kind of thought of the bison as, though it wasn’t when this began, our national mammal but it always unofficially was a symbol of something.

Andrew Isenberg: But we don’t get upset at all at the large number of bison that are slaughtered every day in abattoirs in order to provide meat for restaurants and supermarkets. So they’re biologically exactly the same animal, but one of them on a public preserve we’ve decided is special and the other one on a private ranch we don’t think is special.

Brian Balogh: Andrew Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He’s also the author of the book, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 1750-1920.

The Two Sides of Madison Grant

Madison Grant, one of the original founders of the conservation movement, played a crucial role in saving the bison from extinction in the early 20th century. So why has he been forgotten? Brian sits down with historian Jonathan Spiro to find out.

Music:

Conscience by Ketsa

Madison Grant; conservationism; environmentalism; extinction

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Nathan Connolly: Madison Grant is one of the more important figures in American history you’ve probably never heard of. Credited as the savior to some of our most cherished wildlife, Grant was one of the original founders of the conservation movement.

Brian Balogh: But beneath his pioneering theories on conservation lay a dark undercurrent of scientific racism. While Grant devoted his life to preserving bison and other endangered species, he also worked tirelessly to save what he considered the superior human race, blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics. Born in 1865 to a wealthy family in Manhattan, Grant spent much of his early adulthood going to elite men’s club and hunting big game.

Jonathan Spiro: He’s the same class as Teddy Roosevelt and drinking and hunting were what men like that, who didn’t have to worry about earning a living, did.

Brian Balogh: Well, some things never change.

Jonathan Spiro: Indeed.

Nathan Connolly: That’s historian, Jonathan Spiro. He says while young Grant was a prolific hunter, he soon underwent a dramatic transformation.

Jonathan Spiro: The more that Grant hunted, the more he noticed that our wildlife population was declining because of unrestricted hunting and because of the encroachments of urban civilization and, to his credit, he was transformed from a rather shallow young man known for his carousing and his hunting into an ardent conservationist. By the 1890s, he would have looked at the bison and realized starkly and to his horror that they were declining precipitously in population. So he concluded that we need to save the bison, and not save the bison so I can hunt them 20 years from now. Save the bison because they have a right to exist.

Brian Balogh: As the bison teetered on the verge of extinction, Grant came up with a plan. He started by lobbying to create a bison refuge in their former habitat.

Jonathan Spiro: In fact, he actually hoped to create four bison refuges purposely separated to ensure that no one calamity or disease would endanger the entire species. So he surveyed all the national forests and hit upon one. It’s called Wichita Mountains National Forest. It’s in Oklahoma, which had great grazing grounds for the southern herd of American bison originally. In 1905, Grant convinced his friend, Teddy Roosevelt, who happened to be president of the United States, to create the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma. It’s the nation’s first ever big game refuge.

Jonathan Spiro: William T. Hornaday, the director of the Bronx Zoo, then selected 15 bison from the zoo’s herd. He drove them to Grand Central Station.

Brian Balogh: He didn’t take a cab, did he?

Jonathan Spiro: He did not take a cab. There’s photos of the wagons in which he drove them down to the railroad station.

Brian Balogh: Because it’s hard enough to get a cab in Manhattan, but hailing a cab with a herd of bison, that’s a tough call.

Jonathan Spiro: He gets these bison onto a train and they head out West. It really was a spectacle. Throngs of Westerners would come out along the railroad route to see these bison. Aged Native Americans showed up to see a living bison. They would applaud as the train drove out West. It took them a week. They arrived in Oklahoma. They were released into their new home. To make a long and happy story short, those 15 bison from the Bronx have now grown into a very happy, safe, and prolific herd of 1000 bison.

Brian Balogh: Were there moving-in issues? I mean when you go from the Bronx … I would have trouble going from the Bronx to Oklahoma. Did the bison struggle or did they feel right at home right away?

Jonathan Spiro: There were all kinds of issues, issues with ticks, issues with predators, issues with poachers. These were all issues that Grant and his fellow conservationists had to work out. In fact, it became such a project that Grant decided to create an organization, the American Bison Society, specifically to help the bison acclimate to the new range and to create … Remember, he wanted to create four refuges. So he felt they needed an organization to raise the money to create the three more refuges that they needed.

Jonathan Spiro: William Hornaday was the first president of the American Bison Society. Teddy Roosevelt was the honorary president. They gave lectures. They wrote newspaper and magazine articles extolling the cause of bison preservation. The American Bison Society had a very dramatic logo in which painter, Maxfield Parrish, had this magnificent bull standing proudly on a rocky mound. As a result, the public became actually very aware of the plight of the bison. Donations pour into the Bison Society. The Society reconnoiters possible additional ranges out West. They identified three more possible ranges. They lobby Congress.

Jonathan Spiro: Madison Grant, Hornaday lobby Congress. By the time of the First World War, Congress in fact had established three more bison ranges, one in Montana, one in South Dakota, one in Nebraska. Those are the first four bison refuges. They are national treasures.

Brian Balogh: By now there were enough bison to actually populate them.

Jonathan Spiro: Well, they were still being populated by bison from either zoos or private collections. Madison Grant insisted on absolutely pure-blooded bison. Most bison that you would just find in the wild had by now mated with cows. They were called cattaloes, and he didn’t want to save that species. He wanted actual bison. But that’s how they saved the bison. There were 500 bison left when he started, and today there’s 500,000 bison. It’s one of the great conservation efforts in world history.

Brian Balogh: It’s a remarkable story. But there was a phrase that you used, “His fascination with pure-blooded,” that I want to return to because he felt that way about human beings as well. Am I wrong?

Jonathan Spiro: In 1916, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race. It’s one of the most influential books of the 20th century because it employed the latest findings of science to claim that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics, that’s a term invented by Madison Grant, the Nordics are the master race. But of course, the book is entitled The Passing of the Great Race.

Brian Balogh: Right.

Jonathan Spiro: That’s because Grant claims that the Nordics are becoming extinct, the great race is passing. How could the master race be dying out? Because in 1916, the Nordics in America are being swamped by millions of inferior immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who were predominately Catholic and worst of all, as far as Madison Grant is concerned, Jews.

Brian Balogh: Right. My relatives.

Jonathan Spiro: And my relatives. Grant felt he must warn his fellow Nordics that we must prevent these inferior immigrants from polluting our purer blood or the great race is going to pass.

Brian Balogh: Jonathan, did he draw upon his understanding of the principles of conservation in saving the bison in order to come to this conclusion about humans?

Jonathan Spiro: Absolutely. Grant learned from his work in conservation that, first of all, one of the worst things you can do is introduce non-native species into North America because they’ll take over and drive out the native-born species.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Jonathan Spiro: You can see that Jews, in his mind, are like weeds being introduced to North America and they’re going to drive out the native Nordics.

Brian Balogh: As historians, we’re not supposed to jump ahead, but I got to ask you whether a guy like Hitler picked up on this kind of thinking?

Jonathan Spiro: Sadly and tragically, yes. In 1924, Hitler read a German translation of The Passing of the Great Race, [German 00:24:12], and learned from this respected American conservationist that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics, which in Germany they call Aryans are the master race and that the dark-haired, dark-eyed Jews are the lowest of the races. Hitler declared, “Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race is my Bible.” Not surprisingly therefore, most of the leaders of the Nazi party read it.

Jonathan Spiro: At the Nuremberg war trials after World War II when the US put the surviving leaders of the Third Reich on trial, the Nazi defendants entered The Passing of the Great Race as a defense exhibit to justify their policy of anti-Semitic genocide.

Brian Balogh: So how do you square, let’s call it, the overlap between some conservationist thought and eugenic thought?

Jonathan Spiro: Well, we’re speaking in 2019 where, to be blunt, conservationism good, racism bad. That, of course, is not how they viewed these things back at the turn of the 20th century. Madison Grant was hardly the only conservationist who was a racist in those days. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, John Muir comes to mind, most of Grant’s peers were active in both the conservation movement and the eugenic movement, which was the movement to implement scientific racism.

Jonathan Spiro: I am an historian. I can attempt to put myself in the shoes of historical actors. I can empathize with the fact that the members of the eastern aristocracy in 1900 were deeply anxious that they were losing their hold over America. Their reactionary response was to desperately try to preserve the best and largest and oldest and most magnificent of our endangered native species. In the case of fauna, that means save the American bison. Flora, the gigantic redwoods, people, the superior Nordics. It was clear to Grant at least that just as the noble bison were going extinct, so too were the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics, and it was his duty to save them.

Brian Balogh: Jonathan Spiro is dean of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Castleton University. He’s also the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant.

Bringing Buffalo Home

Jason Baldes is the Eastern Shoshone tribe’s Buffalo Representative and Tribal Bison Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s Tribal Partnerships Program. He speaks with Nathan about what it means to bring the buffalo back to the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

Music:

Back Stairs by Podington Bear
Gentle Chase by Podington Bear

Indian reservations; Shoshone tribe; Wyoming; preservation

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Jason Baldes: When we witnessed the wildebeest migration, there was something that clicked.

Nathan Connolly: This is Jason Baldes talking about a pivotal moment for him in the late 1990s. He was in east Africa, the Serengeti, and Masai Mara plains. He was witnessing an extraordinary scene, wildebeests migrating in a herd so massive it defied the imagination.

Jason Baldes: I was driving for 80 to 100 miles on dirt roads and as far as you can see in every direction is wildebeests. We counted 30 other species or so. One day we saw 88 hyenas. It was at that moment, sitting there with my dad on the plains and having a conversation about what our own Serengeti had looked like and the realization that what we were seeing was just less than 5% of what the bison was here less than 200 years ago. So that sparked something in me.

Nathan Connolly: Jason is the Buffalo Representative for the Eastern Shoshone tribe at the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. He’s passionate about bringing bison back to the area where they once roamed.

Jason Baldes: The hope is that we can instill a respect for this animal. We can work on a paradigm shift of how we view these animals. The story of buffalo and Native Americans is very similar in that we’re now on remnants of our once former vast territories. Tribes are now on reservations and buffalo in parks and refuges or on private lands. So you still can’t go to anywhere in public lands and very few tribal lands to see bison managed as wildlife. There’s really a discrepancy in how these animals are treated because there’s 850,000 or so bison in the commercial meat market. Those are genetically manipulated. But there’s only 21,000 bison that exist in conservation populations, meaning they exist as wildlife or under natural-regulating factors.

Jason Baldes: So it’s important that in bison conservation, we’re leading the way towards a paradigm shift that respects these animals as wildlife. We see them all over as logos and emblems and things like that. They’re on our flags. But where do you have to go to see them?

Nathan Connolly: I spoke recently with Jason about what it means to restore and reclaim an animal the Eastern Shoshone considers sacred. I started though by asking him to take us back to the 1880s when a local missionary recorded a staggering change.

Jason Baldes: That particular set of data is from the Shoshone Episcopal missionary by the name of Reverend Roberts who spent 66 years with the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho people. He kept journals documenting the number of bison that were being taken by the tribes at that time. So in 1881, I believe the figure was around 2500 bison were taken for food, for clothing, shelter, et cetera. But by 1885, there were 19 that were taken by the tribes. After that, there were no more available.

Nathan Connolly: All this changed in 2016. That year, building off the work of his father, Jason helped usher in the arrival of 10 bison at Wind River. It was a historic moment.

Jason Baldes: The tribe had never had access to bison for food or for ceremonial purposes. So when that first hoof hit the ground in the middle of the night off of that trailer, that’s really when it hit home that they were back for us, not bison to be managed like cows, not bison that get rounded up and ear-tagged and vaccinated and treated like a cow. We wanted these buffalo to be respected in the way that they should be and that is like the other wildlife species. So this effort is unique in that these buffalo will ultimately be treated differently, and it’s part of that paradigm shift to show what can happen in terms of what buffalo management as wildlife on tribal lands and how that really can trickle over into how we see them on public lands.

Nathan Connolly: Tell me a little bit more about what seeing the bison as tribal animals, as part of the community of the Wind River Reservation, what does that mean for the folks living on that reservation and thinking about their own visions of self-determination?

Jason Baldes: The name for ourselves is Guchundeka. The Shoshone here of the Eastern Shoshone band, we call ourselves the Buffalo Eaters. But again, that buffalo has been gone from us for so long that we’ve forgotten how to live with that animal. We maintain our ceremonies and those types of things, but even those it’s only really legally been able to practice those ceremonies since the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978. That’s 40 years ago. So we are still healing from some of these policies and things in the past that have resulted in a lot of this intergenerational trauma that we have in our society, in our culture.

Jason Baldes: So we have to instill a sense of pride. A way to do that has always been through this buffalo. This buffalo is a way to help us heal. It’s a way to help us reconnect. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do through an education program, to harvest the buffalo and bring our elders together with our young people to reinvigorate our languages, to learn how we use those parts of that animal, how we process that hide, and even how we utilize those parts in parts of our ceremonies. These things and cultural revitalization is critical to who we are as Shoshone people or Arapaho people or Blackfeet or Cheyenne.

Nathan Connolly: That means that there must be something special about having bison among the folks living at Wind River as opposed to those who are simply on farms or simply being raised for meat. I mean how would you describe the importance of that difference. I mean again, you mentioned earlier, it’s not about ending necessarily the farm raising of bison, but there is something different about how the Shoshone people are relating to bison.

Jason Baldes: That is part of that healing process. We did harvest two of our buffalo a couple weeks ago and it was for those purposes that I mentioned. It was to send meat to the Shoshone reunion that happened about a week ago in Lawton, Oklahoma. Feeding our people buffalo is probably one of the most important steps to relearning how to use it. It was difficult to harvest those animals because of the hard work that it’s taken to get them here. But it’s also community education. A lot of our own people don’t understand the history of what’s happened to bison, the governmental policies that resulted in their extermination, the contemporary efforts, why that’s important.

Jason Baldes: But we’re also not saying that anybody has to change their livelihood. A lot of people, especially in the cattle industry, feel threatened by bison. We have tribal farmers and ranchers that run cattle. One of the things we’ve always said is that these buffalo are in no way a threat to those cattle or that livelihood. That cow benefits that family or that individual. But these buffalo, they benefit everybody.

Nathan Connolly: For you, it really does begin with thinking about the bison as wildlife.

Jason Baldes: We currently manage six of the seven [inaudible 00:35:55] species as wildlife, including the wolves and bears and other predators. So why is it that bison or buffalo is the only one that we don’t treat like that? A lot of it goes back to the conquering of the West, the notion of Manifest Destiny that the pioneers and settlers out here were on a task to remove Indians and remove buffalo. That made way for these large beef operations, many of which are in existence today.

Jason Baldes: So we’re now in an era of a time when tribes can exercise some sovereignty. We can relearn our languages. We can practice and be who we are as Shoshones or Arapahos or Lakotas in a time like we’ve never been able to before.

Nathan Connolly: Right. The herd at Wind River is now to just over 30 bison. Is there a long-term plan for growing the number of bison? Is it about introducing more population, simply natural reproduction? What’s the idea or the hope at least for how many bison the reservation can actually sustain?

Jason Baldes: The steps that need to take place are of collaboration and more partnership. We have two tribal governments on this reservation, the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho, where both nations are buffalo people. If we can look at buffalo as a benefit to all of us on this reservation, then that means expanding the range into tribal land. We want to reach a threshold of 1000 animals. This is for the conservation of the species. The International Union of Conservation and Nature, IUCN, puts out a benchmark of 1000 animals for you to maintain genetic heterogeneity.

Jason Baldes: We would hope that we could expand range to an area that would facilitate the growth of our population to a harvestable level and then in a period of time, think about expanding further past that. This Wind River Reservation has more potential habitat for bison than almost any other reservation in the West. But again, wildlife management is a lot less about managing wildlife as it is about managing people because if you put the animals back in their habitat, they do just fine. It’s the people that you have to worry about.

Nathan Connolly: Is this a partisan issue at all or is this really a matter of … One other activist I spoke to, Nick Estes, described it as settler infighting, in other words that there are folks who are operating in mainstream party politics who are basically wrangling with each other over allocations and apportionments and such. It has less to do with necessarily what the tribe is trying to put forward.

Jason Baldes: That’s correct. Just a couple years ago in Montana, we defeated 13 anti-bison bills and this last legislative session, at least six anti-bison bills. There’s less of that legislation in Wyoming, but there is that infighting to fight those tribes on getting bison back on the landscape as wildlife, not even the tribes. You look at the American Prairie Reserve, and the CMR, the Charles M. Russell efforts to restore bison on large landscapes. They’re met with quite a bit of hostility. People don’t want to see it.

Nathan Connolly: So Jason, give me some sense of what the flavor is of these bills that are opposing the expansion of the bison population.

Jason Baldes: Expanding the bison population has been controversial because, well, you have a population of bison in Yellowstone that in 1902 there was 23. That park grew up essentially around those animals and the population. It kind of came to a head in 1997 where there was a tough winter. Bison were leaving the park in order to seek winter forage. Of course, inside the park bison are iconic species that are just revered. But as those animals stepped outside of that imaginary boundary, they became essentially livestock or a threat to the livestock industry because of the perceived threat of brucellosis.

Jason Baldes: Brucellosis was brought by cattle in the first place and infected the wildlife. And then states like Idaho and Montana and Wyoming established brucellosis-free status so that they could export their beef. Well, that created controversy. When those bison went to leave the park, they were shot. There’s never been a documented case of a bison giving a cow brucellosis in the wild. There is documented cases of elk giving cattle brucellosis. But elk can move freely across that boundary. What is the reasoning there? Well, it’s money. The Jackson elk herd, the sports industry that draws in people to hunt elk is a tremendous economic boost to that economy.

Jason Baldes: If elk were persecuted or treated in the similar way that bison were, that economy could crash or collapse. They don’t receive the same economic benefit from bison.

Nathan Connolly: In 2016, President Barack Obama designated the bison the official mammal of the United States. The story of the bison is a big part of American history obviously and you lay that history out extraordinarily well and compellingly. But what do we miss if we overlook that centrality, if we don’t give the bison their due?

Jason Baldes: I think back a lot about when our reservation was established. In 1863, the Shoshone Reservation was 44 million acres. That was the traditional territory of the Shoshone people. This was before the States were, but it would have been half of Wyoming, northern Colorado, and northern Utah, and eastern Idaho, and majority of Yellowstone. Only five years later in 1868, our reservation was reduced by 42 million acres. So when it comes to federal Indian law and policy, most Americans look at it like here’s the United States that gave these tribes their reservations when, in fact, it’s the other way around.

Jason Baldes: The tribes relinquished parts of the United States in that we would be able to reserve, our reservation, reserve our ways of life in perpetuity. Of course, that didn’t happen. Things like the General Allotment Act opened up reservations for homesteading, then the boarding schools that removed our children. Our spirituality was outlawed. All of these things chipped away at who we were as Native Americans. Now, I think back to what if our reservation was still 44 million acres? Would we have issues with wildland urban interface? No, we wouldn’t. Would we have issues with healthy rivers and streams, overgrazing by livestock?

Jason Baldes: I think about a lot of these things and that we continue to encroach upon these places that our ancestors had set aside for our continued use and occupancy. Those things are even today being diminished. That’s not for just Native Americans. That’s all people, because even our public lands have the potential to be auctioned off. So our democracy is being eroded away. Our access to these public lands, these places, are under threat. Those animals, those birds, those fish, they don’t have a voice. We have to be that voice for them. If we can’t see it that way, if we’re always at the top of the food chain and don’t care about what happens below us, we’re in doom.

Jason Baldes: So I think that we not only need a paradigm shift in terms of how we think about buffalo, but we need a paradigm shift in about how we think about our connection with the natural world.

Nathan Connolly: Jason Baldes is the Eastern Shoshone tribe’s Buffalo Representative. He also works for the National Wildlife Federation’s Tribal Partnerships Program as the Tribal Bison Coordinator.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today, but you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought about the episode or ask us your questions about history. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to backstory@virginia.edu. We’re also on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory’s produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the Johns Hopkins University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 8: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.