The buffalo provided everything the Kiowas ever needed.

Their tipis were made of buffalo hides, stitched together with sinew. So were their clothes and tough moccasins.

 They ate dried buffalo meat and pemmican all through the year. Containers in which they kept food and provisions were made of hide, bladders and stomachs.

 Even more important, the buffalo sustained the Kiowa culture, their spirituality and religion.

When possible, a white buffalo calf must be sacrificed in the sun dance.

 The priests and medicine men used parts of the buffalo to make their prayers when they healed people or when they sang to the powers above.

 Buffalo were the lifeblood of the Kiowas.

 When white men built railroads, or when they wanted to farm and raise cattle, the buffalo still protected the Kiowas.

 They tore up the railroad tracks and gardens. They chased cattle off their ranges.

 The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.

 But war raged between the buffalo and the white men. The white men built forts in Kiowa country, and the woolly-headed buffalo soldiers shot the buffalo as fast as they could.

 But the buffalo still kept coming on, coming on, even into the post cemetery at Fort Sill. Soldiers were not enough to hold them back.

 Then the white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill buffalo. Up and down the plains those men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred buffalo a day.

Behind them came the skinners with their wagons. They piled the hides and bones into the wagons until they were full, and then took their loads to the new railroad stations that were being built, to be shipped east to the market.

 Sometimes a pile of bones rose as high as a man, stretching a mile along the railroad track.

 The buffalo saw that their day was over. No longer could they protect the Kiowa, their people.

 Sadly, the last remnant of the great herd gathered in council, and decided what they would do.

 The Kiowas camped one night on the north side of Mount Scott, those of them who were still free to camp.

 One young woman rose very early next morning.

 

The dawn mist was still rising from Medicine Creek. As she looked across the water, peering through the haze, she saw the last buffalo herd appear like a spirit dream.

 Straight toward Mount Scott came the leader of the herd, walking with determination. Behind him came the cows and their calves, and the few young males who had survived the last hunting raid.

 As the Kiowa woman watched, the face of the mountain swung open.

 

Inside Mount Scott she saw that the world was green and fresh, as it had been when she was a small girl.

 The rivers ran clear, not red. The wild plains were in blossom, chasing the red buds up the inside slopes.

Into this world of beauty the buffalo walked and began grazing, never to be seen again. The face of Mount Scott swung back and closed on them forever. 

As told  by Spear-Woman (Old Lady Horse).

Francie M Berg

Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog

Buffalo are known for their great natural vigor, surviving the worst blizzards of the north.

A freak blizzard in October 2013 killed tens of thousands of cattle in western South Dakota, as well as sheep and horses, when four feet of heavy wet snow with powerful winds drove them over banks, into creeks and waterholes and piled up against fences in deep snowdrifts.

Some ranchers lost fifty to seventy-five percent of their livestock and faced financial ruin.

Following that deadly storm, the National Bison Association checked with local buffalo breeders; none reported buffalo loss.

In another deadly storm the winter of 1997-1998, with heavy financial losses to livestock, the toll was apparently only one buffalo death. He was run off an icy bridge by an eighteen-wheeler.

Those who raise buffalo testify to their hardy endurance in cold weather.

The animals have dense hair growth, so dense—coarse guard hairs with soft wool underneath—that every square inch has ten times as many hairs growing as does an inch of cow hide, reports Dale F. Lott, University of California Wildlife, Fish and Conservation biologist.

In extreme cold when fat stores are low, this means “the difference between life and death,” says Lott. 

Buffalo face into the harsh blizzards that sometimes hit the northern plains, protected by their massive heads and shoulders. With forequarters well insulated by their heaviest hair growth, they stand or move slowly into the wind until the storm blows over.

Unfortunately, cattle and sheep do just the opposite—a sometimes deadly choice—turning their backs to a fierce blizzard. They drift with the wind into water holes and rivers or over high banks, where they may drown or die in pileups.

When snow lies deep on the prairie, buffalo plow down to find grass. Their humps contain muscles supported by vertebrae that allow them to swing their massive, low-hanging heads side to side, sweeping away snow to reach plants and grass.

When water is frozen, they eat snow. 

Ernest Thompson Seton declared their hardiness during the hard winter of 1885-86.

Reporting on a Manitoba herd in Canada, he wrote, “These buffalo receive no care beyond what is necessary to prevent their wandering away. . . They live on the open prairie summer and winter, subsisting on the wild grass, even when they have to dig for it through one or more feet of snow.

“Nor is it a bare existence that they so maintain. For when I saw them late in January, they were finding grass enough not merely to feed, but to fatten them.

“When a blizzard comes on, they lie down close together with their backs to the wind and allow the snow to drift over them, so that under the combined protection of the snow and their own woolly coats they are perfectly comfortable. 

“In January 1884 one of the cows calved on the open prairie and though at the time the thermometer registered 38 degrees below zero, neither cow nor calf appeared to suffer the slightest inconvenience.” 

“Buffalo face the storm and lower their heart rates and metabolism so their strength is maintained,” notes Mike Faith.

He says Native people see this hardiness as an affirmation of their own ability to survive adversity. 

The worst blizzard in North Dakota history was said to be March 2nd through 5th in 1966, taking the lives of 19,000 cattle. Nationwide, 175,000 cattle died. 

His whole herd went hungry during that entire storm, said one Kidder County cattle rancher.

“You couldn’t do anything, you couldn’t see nothing.” When finally able to get to his Herefords, they were in tough shape. “All the cattle had ice and snow on their eyes and they couldn’t see,” he reported. 

That blizzard prompted a South Dakota rancher who raised both cattle and buffalo to totally convert his herd to the species that survived the blizzard unscathed, according to author Douglas Ramsey in “One to Remember: The Relentless Blizzard of March 1966.” 

A record 15.5 inches of snow fell in Bismarck on the second day, and 35 inches piled up during the epic event, with relentless winds of 70 to 80 mph.

Snow drifts measured at least six feet deep in downtown Dickinson, and in some areas topped thirty feet, choking roads all across the state. A Northern Pacific passenger train carrying 500 people was stopped and buried by the storm near New Salem.

But buffalo survived, wrote Ramsey: “The buffalo, being native to the plains, form a ‘V’ shape with the bulls facing into the wind and the cows and calves inside.

“During the blizzard they moved three times. They move till the snow gets too deep, then they move again.”

Francie M Berg

Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog

Returning to Washington, after their great success in buffalo hunting, William Hornaday and his assistants set to work.

Hornaday’s vision developed before he even left Montana. This would be a grouping of bulls, cows and calves. He took time to collect some native soil, a few plants and sagebrush.

He selected six prime specimens—his masterpiece stub-horn bull, cows, calves, a young bull.

After a full year they unveiled their masterpiece. There, in a huge glass case, visitors to the Smithsonian Museum viewed an enchanting scene–six buffalo in an authentic Montana setting.

The Washington Star described the exhibit on March 10, 1888:

“A little bit of Montana—a small square patch from the wildest part of the wild West—has been transferred to the National Museum. . . The hummocky prairie, the buffalo-grass, the sagebrush, and the buffalo.

“It is as though a little group of buffalo that have come to drink at a pool had been suddenly struck motionless by some magic spell, each in a natural attitude, and then the section of prairie, pool, buffalo, and all had been carefully cut out and brought to the National Museum.

A triumph of the taxidermist’s art.”

It was a sight Hornaday fully expected no one would ever see again in life.

Secretly he hid a message voicing his despair for the species in a small sealed metal box in the Montana earth of the Smithsonian display.

Discovered nearly three-quarters of a century later when the exhibit was moved to Montana, curators read Hornaday’s heartfelt plea:

It read, “My Illustrious Successor, Enclosed please find a brief and truthful account of the capture of the specimens which compose this group. . .

“When I am dust and ashes I beg you to protect these specimens from deterioration and destruction.  —W.T. Hornaday, Chief Taxidermist, March 7, 1888.”

Hornaday’s famous six-buffalo masterpiece in its huge glass case set a new standard for Smithsonian Museum taxidermy in 1888.

During their 70 years of prominent display in Washington, Hornaday’s big bull, that he shot himself, was the model for several national symbols and government issues.

Coins and paper currency, the Great Seal of the Department of the Interior, postage stamps and the National Park Service badge all bear the likeness of the big bull in the Hornaday Collection.

In 1955 the group was dismantled. shipped to Montana, separated, and placed in storage.

After years of neglect the mounts were completely restored and returned to public display in 1996.

Refurbished, all six finally came together again and are exhibited in their original poses and positions just as they appeared in the Smithsonian.

They now stand on a pedestal in the Montana Agricultural Center and Museum in Fort Benton. A shrine to the buffalo’s loss and rebirth and the group’s dispersion and reunion.

But with his masterpiece in the Smithsonian Hornaday was not finished.

During that same year in 1887, he took on the task of writing what he expected might be the last word on the iconic buffalo—a report of its history and how the species came to be exterminated—which was published in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for the Year of 1887.

Convinced this might be the final report on the buffalo, he wanted to get it right.

With characteristic thoroughness Hornaday interviewed and contacted every possible source with buffalo know-how—from riverboat captains, to military officers on far-flung army bases, fur traders and railroaders, to explorers, ranchers and cowboys.

His report was over 200 pages long. Two years later in 1889 it was published as a book “The Extermination of the American Bison: With a Sketch of its Discovery and Life History,” by the Government Printing Office.

Then Hornaday discovered a future in living buffalo—and never looked back.

 

Francie M Berg

Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog

By 1883 the vast herds of buffalo had entirely vanished. Only a small pocket survived here and there in remote areas—and even these, as soon as any hunter learned of them, did not last long.

Clearly the buffalo would soon be extinct as a species.

Alarmed, William Hornaday, as the Chief Taxidermist at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC—America’s greatest museum—took stock of his museum’s buffalo inventory.

 He was shocked to find only a few old, dilapidated buffalo hides, one poorly mounted female, a couple of heads and some bones.

He knew what he had to do: gather some decent buffalo carcasses for his museum so that long after the species became extinct, at least there’d be mounted buffalo to view in the nation’s most important museum.

And since other prominent museums would doubtless want relics of the soon-to-be-extinct mammal—and he could help them—he wanted at least twenty to thirty skins, plus skeletons and heads.

Now, he thought, Americans in later generations would be able to see the great mammal that had once populated America by the millions. It would be too late, of course, and they’d need to travel, but they could visit—albeit only in great museums—the magnificent buffalo that had once grazed the Plains in abundance.

He pleaded with Smithsonian officials to let him go out west where he might find some buffalo and bring back dead carcasses.

Appalled at his report, they agreed to send him at once to find wild buffalo, if any were still living, and bring back specimens.

Research told him there might be some buffalo still in the rugged Missouri River Breaks of Montana.

Hornaday hoped to bring back sixty to eighty specimens if at all possible. At this point, as a taxidermist, dead buffalo were all he wanted, so their skins could be preserved and mounted.

So on May 6, 1886, William Hornaday and two or three assistants set forth by train to Miles City to launch their own last buffalo hunt.

In Miles City they picked up horses, provisions and an Army escort from Fort Keogh and headed north.

Nearly everyone they met declared all the buffalo were gone from central and eastern Montana.

But they kept going, chasing rumors from distant cow hands.

Hornaday’s party finally found its way into the rough badlands near the head of the Little Dry in the Missouri River Breaks.

There they discovered and captured a lone, lost buffalo calf. Ten days later they found a couple of bulls. They shot one and realized he was shedding his winter coat, leaving the hide so tattered and seedy looking it could not be mounted.

They decided to wait till fall for hides in prime winter condition. After Hornaday beseeched local ranchers to spare their intended targets, they took the live calf and returned with it to Washington.

In late September they returned to the same remote badlands, some 135 miles northwest of Miles City.

It was “Wild and rugged butte country, its sides scored by intricate systems of great yawning ravines and hollows, steep-sided and very deep, and badlands of the worst description. Such as persecuted game loves to seek shelter in,” wrote Hornaday.

In two months of hard riding they did find a few small bands of extremely wild stragglers—a lone buffalo bull here, two or three cows with calves there. Seven in one bunch.

By this time they had ten saddle horses and the help of a few soldiers from Ft. Keogh.

Splitting up, they rode twenty-five miles or more each day in different directions. Searching out “the heads of those great ravines around the High Divide . . . [where] the buffalo were in the habit of hiding.”

They eventually killed twenty-two buffalo—bulls, cows and calves. Not the number Hornaday hoped for, but a raging November blizzard with bitter cold cut short their hunt.

Hornaday felt pleased with the big bull he shot himself. “A prize! A truly magnificent specimen. A ‘stub-horn’ bull, about eleven years old. His hair in remarkably fine condition, being long, fine, thick and well colored—sixteen inches in length in his frontlet.”

His bull stood a full six feet tall when they added the four-inch hair on the hump, two inches taller than their next largest bull.

In length, he was nine feet-two-inches, head to tail. In circumference, eight-feet-four around the chest just behind the foreleg.

The bull had been shot several times before. Within the carcass he carried four old bullets of various sizes, as did nearly every bull they killed in those hidden canyons.

All the buffalo were extremely wild.

Regretfully, Hornaday lamented that if the buffalo had been that wild during their heyday, surely more would have survived longer.

However, his hunt was a success. He and his assistants prepared their hides for shipping and headed back to Washington to spend the next year in a great taxidermy project he envisioned for the Smithsonian.

At that point Hornaday could have rested on his laurels, but fortunately for us, he did not.

Instead, he spent the rest of his life fighting for the conservation of buffalo.

No longer satisfied with carcasses, he developed a vision for living buffalo—a way they could be kept safe in parks and public lands across America.

Francie M Berg

Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog

Samuel Walking Coyote of the Pend d’Oreille tribe had no intention of raising buffalo—he just wanted to hunt them. But there were no buffalo west of the Continental Divide where he lived with his Flathead wife on her reservation in western Montana.

Yet Walking Coyote yearned to go buffalo hunting with his friends the Blackfeet across the Rocky Mountains to the east where plenty of buffalo still lived.

In the fall of 1872 he rode east on an old Indian trail the long distance across the Rocky Mountains, with perhaps a friend or two, winding through what would later become Glacier National Park.

There on the open Plains of Montana they spent the winter hunting buffalo with a band of Blackfeet.

On one hunt 8 orphaned buffalo calves attached themselves to their horses and followed them into camp, eating hay with the horses.

Over that winter Walking Coyote fell in love with and married a Blackfeet woman, conveniently forgetting his Flathead wife, according to David Dary in The Buffalo Book. (Note: there are several versions of this story, but this is perhaps the best-known.)

Next spring he wanted to return to the Flathead reservation. He knew that having two wives was permitted by his tribe, but not by the Jesuit Fathers at St. Ignatius Mission. His friends convinced him that a nice gift might put him right with them.

They speculated that a gift of 8 buffalo calves would likely gain favor with the Fathers.

So Sam and his new wife set out on the long trail back across the Rocky Mountains, taking the buffalo calves, as well as leading a string of pack horses. The trail was hard and rugged, up and down steep mountains, slippery with melting snow, rushing torrents, mud slides and fallen timber often blocking their way.

To cross some hazardous spots they tied the youngest calves on pack horses. Finally, after many days and dangerous struggles they reached the Flathead Mission with 6 calves, two having died along the way.

Unfortunately, his gift was rejected. Punished and banished from the tribe, Sam and his Blackfeet wife left the Mission and moved farther up the Flathead Valley, still using the free range permitted to Native Americans on the Flathead.

There the six yearling calves thrived and grew on rich grasses and browse, even though mountains on the west side of the Continental Divide were not the natural home for Plains Buffalo.

The Native community grew committed to the little herd’s survival, writes Ken Zontak in Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison.

“Every Indian in the valley, believing these to be the last ones, aided in their protection,” he wrote. “Always there was in Indian rider in their vicinity.”

By 1884, Sam Walking Coyote owned 13 fairly tame buffalo. But they were becoming a problem. Hard to control, they broke down his neighbors’ fences and destroyed crops and gardens. He finally decided to sell them for $2,000, providing he could get it in gold coin.

Charles Allard and Michel Pablo, neighboring ranchers in the valley, pooled their funds and together came up with his price—in gold. Both were also part Native American.

They purchased 26 additional buffalo from Buffalo Jones of Kansas. By 1895 their herd numbered 300. It was destined to grow enormously.

But the next year Allard died at age 43, and his half of the herd was dispersed to several buyers, some going to Yellowstone Park.

Pablo kept his 150 head, which had doubled again by 1906, when he learned the Flathead reservation was opening to homesteaders and he’d lose his free range.

He offered to sell his buffalo to the US government for $200 each to replenish the Yellowstone Park herd. President Theodore Roosevelt favored the idea, but Congress balked at the price, suggesting $15 a head was plenty.

 Ultimately, these were the buffalo that Pablo sold and shipped to the Canadian government over the next six years. They were challenging years for him, rounding up the half-wild animals, getting them to the railhead and loading them onto fortified railway cars. But he was paid the handsome sum of $200 each plus freight costs, even for newborn calves. By then they had multiplied to 716 head.

 

Francie M Berg

Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog

Plan is to revive forests and historic species

Wild bison will return to the United Kingdom for the first time in thousands of years, with the release of a small herd near Canterbury in East Kent planned for spring 2022, according to the Guardian, July 10, 2020.

The Steppe Bison went extinct about 10,000 years ago. Now the UK is bringing back their nearest relative—the European Bison or Wisent (Bison bonasus), also known as the zubr—in the hope of restoring the area’s ancient woodlands.

The $1.4 million Wilder Blean project, to reintroduce the animals, will help secure the future of an endangered species. They will also naturally regenerate a former pine wood plantation by killing off trees. This is expected to create a healthy mix of woodland, scrub and glades, boost insect, bird and plant life.

Populations of the UK’s most important wildlife have dropped an average of 69% since 1970. Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, despite the best efforts of conservationists.

Paul Hadaway, from Kent Wildlife Trust, said: “The Wilder Blean project will prove that a wilder, nature-based solution is the right one to tackle the climate and nature crisis we now face. Using missing keystone species like bison to restore natural processes to habitats is the key to creating bio-abundance in our landscape.”

Bison kill selected trees by eating their bark or rubbing against them to remove their thick winter fur. This creates a feast of dead wood for insects, which provide food for birds. Falling dead trees also create sunny clearings in deep woods where native plants can thrive.

The trust expects nightingales and turtle doves to be among the beneficiaries of the bison’s “ecosystem engineering.”

The European bison is the continent’s largest land mammal and bulls can weigh as much as a ton. “They’re enormous,” said Stan Smith of Kent Wildlife Trust. “But what is amazing is how they blend into their background and they’re quite docile really.”

The bison will not be given extra food or artificial shelters, though their health will be monitored by observing their coats and examining their dung. “We need to keep them as wild as possible [for the project to succeed],” said Smith.

Once the bison are settled, the public will be able to visit the area with rangers and watch the animals from viewing platforms.

In the Netherlands, where bison projects have been running for 15 years, people walk through the areas without incident. Free-living longhorn cattle, “iron age” pigs, and Exmoor ponies will also live alongside the bison and assist in restoring the woodland.

“The partners in the Kent project have long dreamed of restoring the true wild woodlands that have been missing from England for too long,” said Paul Whitfield, of Wildwood Trust, the native species conservation charity that will ensure the welfare of the bison. “People will be able to experience nature in a way they haven’t before, connecting them back to the natural world around them in a deeper way.”

Smith said there is no intention to introduce predators such as wolves. As the herd grows in size, they will move some animals to other sites in the UK. But, he said, “if we absolutely had to, we would cull animals as a last resort.” There are already a small number of European bison in English zoos and wildlife parks, but they are not free-living.

“This initiative could be good news for Britain’s battered biodiversity,” said Rebecca Wrigley, of Rewilding Britain. “It’s increasingly clear that bold and imaginative rewilding is urgently needed to tackle the country’s worrying loss of wildlife.”

She said far more needs to be done across the UK to reintroduce large herbivores and “unleash their biodiversity-boosting rewilding magic.”

Smith said: “Sometimes in the rewilding debate people think that it’s a look back to the past, but that’s not what we’re about. We’re about trying to find the right natural solution for the modern world.”

Describing European bison as “ecosystem engineers,” the Kent Wildlife Trust, one of the conservation organizations leading the project, said the bison species can “change woodlands in a way that no other animal can.”

 “They eat bark and create dust baths which each have benefits for many plants and animals,” the trust added. “These are functions that have been missing from our UK woodlands for thousands of years and bringing them back can help restore an abundance of wildlife.”

 The breed is the closest living relative to ancient steppe bison, which once roamed Britain.

Herds were established from zoo-bred animals in Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Ukraine. Ub 1927 fewer than 50 were left—all of them in zoos.

 Beginning in 1951 they were reintroduced to the wild. Free-ranging herds are currently found in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Latvia, Switzerland, Kyrgyzstan, Germany, and in forest preserves in the Western Caucasus. The Białowieża Primeval Forest, an ancient woodland that straddles the border between Poland and Belarus, continues to have the largest free-living population in the world with around 1,000 wild bison counted in 2014. Currently they are classified as a vulnerable species.

Francie M Berg

Author of the Buffalo Tales &Trails blog