When they hear the feed wagon and Jim Strand calling , the Johnson buffalo herd of 400 comes running up the hill. As you can see, they have lots of great June grass—they don’t need extra feed, but they love it and I think they enjoy the special attention Jim gives them. Just this side of the distant blue ridge the south Grande Riv’er runs southeast (off to our left). Photo by Kathy Berg Walsh.
by Francie M. Berg | Dec 28, 2021 | Blog 74
We hope you had a Merry Christmas with a Happy New Year ahead!
We will be making some major changes in 2023. During the New Year we will be developing a Virtual Buffalo Website that we expect to be equally available to other countries around the world, in addition to our North American citizens.
One of the fun things we did this year related to buffalo, was the three-day Bismarck State College Bison Symposium which we helped sponsor, the last weekend in June. It has inspired us to move ahead.
The 2nd day my daughter Kathy and I and 80-some visitors traveled our Historic Tour in 2 large travel buses to the Hettinger-Lemmon area of North and South Dakota. We all had a great experience—we hosts as well as tourists!
Note: You can’t visit all our 8 Historic Sites in one day—it’s too exhausting! But we made it to 5 of them.
This included: a big herd of 400 live buffalo that came running up over the hills and milled around us in the loaded buses. Our authentic Shadehill Buffalo Jump used 5,500 to 7,000 ago. Two of the last great buffalo hunts anywhere in the world. And the Dakota Buttes museum where our guests enjoyed a delicious Bison Stroganoff dinner and admired Prairie Thunder—our full-size mounted bull buffalo.
Jim Strand, herdsman of the Johnson buffalo herd, came on the bus to explain some of his favorite individuals. Then he walked among them, petting old friends calmly and confidently, while we stayed on the bus. The yellow area in the foreground marks an area where the bison have recently wallowed. Photo KBW.
One Bismarck woman told me she and her husband had traveled the world, seen “everything,” and this was the BEST TOUR they’d EVER taken!
The first and third days were in Bismarck focused around the State Heritage Center—lots of good speakers and 3 or 4 fascinating panel discussions led by Native Americans as well as college experts.
We had so many requests for repeat tours that some of us are now involved in a small “Brainstorming Group” for our area. A wise young man— Hettinger’s mayor—talked us into beginning by focusing first on a smashing virtual Website. We think he’s right!
So now that’s what we’re working on, playing with names. Maybe it will be “Alive on La Riv’er Grande Buffalo Trails” or “Buffalo Trails Alive on La Riv’er Grande.”
Maybe not. But this honors early French fur traders who paddled up and down our rivers way back in the 1700s loaded with furs and named them with a French flair. And it celebrates our Grande Riv’er which waters a great chunk of this part of North and South Dakota and ultimately pours southeast into the Missouri River.
Visitors learned that buffalo are not cattle—in many ways they are wild animals. Like the deer in the headlights you glimpse at the edge of the highway or shelterbelt.
Just watch them break into an uncontrollable stampede one day when pushed too hard!
“The point of the tour,” explained Erik Holland of the North Dakota Heritage Society which helped to sponsor the Symposium. “Is to get people who have spent a day listening to the rationale about bison and bison ecology and preserving the animals on a Thursday—to a place where they can imagine it.
“And being inside a bison herd helps them recognize the majesty of the animal, the depth of the story and the broad wide spaces of North Dakota.”
We think this may be a first for this kind of program—that included scientific presentations on Bison by college professors as well as thousands of years of Buffalo history and culture told by Native American storytellers in a three-day event.
Archaeology and anthropology blending together with live herds of buffalo grazing the buttes and badlands in these historic hills made a powerful impact.
Live buffalo have always grazed the banks of La Riv’er Grande—and we predict—always will. They bridged the near-extinction of buffalo back in the 1880s.
Newborn calves were saved here on the South Grande by the Duprees—a Native American family—the next spring after their long, cold winter hunt, when the animals became almost extinct. They were nurtured with range cows on these very grasslands until Pete Dupree owned a herd of 83.
Today several long-standing commercial buffalo herds still graze the same grasslands, still watered by La Riv’er Grande.
We hope you and your family and friends celebrated a Merry Christmas—and wish you a Happy, Happy New Year throughout all of 2023!
We’ll meet with you again on January 10, 2023. That’s when our blog continues to explore the North Dakota 8th Grade curriculum and asks the question (Italic, bold) “When did Native Americans in this place obtain horses and how did it change Buffalo hunting?”
And we have a century-old buffalo trail a few miles north to visit when the snow melts off the green grass next spring. We’re eager to hike that trail and photograph it for you!
If you’d like to take another look at the BSC Bison Symposium, here are the links
https://buffalotalesandtrails.com/2022/05/teachers-do-you-remember-what-you-did-last-summer? Blog 58-May 7— Advance Rehearsal of the Tour
https://buffalotalesandtrails.com/2022/07/blog-62-part-1-bsc-bison-symposium-june-22-25-2022/ Blog 62-July 12–BSC Bison Symposium Part 1
https://buffalotalesandtrails.com/2022/07/bsc-bison-symposium-june-22-25-2022-part-2/ Blog 63-July 26—BSC Bison Symposium Part 2
Francie M Berg, Author
Ronda Fink, Assistant
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NEXT: Part 2 North Dakota Studies—Mandan and Lakota Horses.
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Francie M Berg
Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog
