[Ken Burns’ latest documentary explores how a group of racists,
grifters, and reformed hide hunters helped bring back the species. ]
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THE DISTURBING STORY OF HOW AMERICA SAVED THE BUFFALO  
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Jackie Flynn Mogensen
October 6, 2023
Mother Jones
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_ Ken Burns’ latest documentary explores how a group of racists,
grifters, and reformed hide hunters helped bring back the species. _

, Mother Jones; Library of Congress; Unsplash

 

If you attended high school in the United States, you likely learned
about the “Great Slaughter
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buffalo: During the 19th century, with the aid of the railroad, hide
hunters poured into the Great Plains by the thousands,
indiscriminately shooting buffalo (or, technically, “bison”
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to collect their furs and tongues, which were sold as hairbrushes. At
the same time, the US military actively encouraged the hunters
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the hope tribes would be more easily forced onto reservations without
their food supply. By the 1890s, hunters had slaughtered so many
buffalo that the animals’ numbers, once in the tens of millions,
had plummeted [[link removed]] to
less than 1,000 individuals.

The buffalo’s near extinction, along with the killing of other
western mammals like elk and grizzly bears, is “the greatest murder
of animals in the history of humankind,” says American documentary
filmmaker Ken Burns. This bleak chapter in American history is the
focus of the first half of Burns’ latest two-part documentary, _The
American Buffalo_ [[link removed]], which
airs on PBS on October 16 and 17. 

Today, there are more than 400,000
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the country. While most are in commercial herds, tens of thousands
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free. On paper, that’s a clear conservation success. But as part two
of Burns’ film explores, the story of how America saved the species
is a heck of a lot more complicated. As Burns shows, a collective
effort by Native American families, reformed bison hunters,
conservationists, and politicians helped bring the buffalo back—but
some of those involved had questionable reasons for doing so. 

The buffalo’s disappearance was part of “the greatest murder of
animals in the history of humankind.”

William T. Hornaday, for instance, a taxidermist and conservationist,
shot and killed some of the last remaining buffalo in order to put
their stuffed skins on display at the Smithsonian, with the hope of
inspiring conservation measures. He later went on to help found the
Bronx Zoo with Madison Grant
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a leading proponent of eugenics and author of the discredited book
[[link removed]], _The Passing of the
Great Race_. Hornaday shared many of Grant’s racist views: “The
idea that citizens of the United States had driven this species
extinct was offensive to him, was an outrage to him,” science
journalist Michelle Nijhuis explains in the film. “But it was also
tied up with his strong sense of racial superiority.”

Another member of the save-the-buffalo club was showman William
“Buffalo Bill” Cody, who traveled the world depicting
“heroic” reenactments of adventures in the American West,
including battles against Native Americans. Cody is credited with
helping to bring the world’s attention to the bison’s dwindling
numbers. But just years before, he had been among the hunters
responsible for decimating the species.

Two men stand with a pile of buffalo skulls in 1892.
Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
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And then there’s Theodore Roosevelt, who supported the first major
reintroductions
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Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Montana. But Roosevelt also once wrote
that killing the bison was something of a necessary evil because it
was “the only way of solving the Indian question”: The buffalo’s
disappearance, he wrote [[link removed]], was the
“only method” of forcing Native Americans “to at least partially
abandon their savage mode of life.”

These contradictions make the fall and rise of the buffalo, in
Burns’ eyes, a uniquely American story. “It is both at the heart
of the tragedy of the United States,” he told me in a conversation
last month, “but also the possibilities.”

Burns hopes viewers will see the film as “the first two acts of a
three-act play,” he says: “The third will be written by us,
particularly by Native Americans, who are working to continue to grow
and restore the country’s bison herds.” He hopes it can serve as a
“hopeful roadmap” in addressing the mass extinctions the world is
facing today.

Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, seated, in deer skin hunting suit,
holding rifle, 1885.
George Grantham Bain/Library of Congress

You can read an edited and condensed version of my conversation with
Burns below:

ONE OF THE MOST INTERESTING TAKEAWAYS FROM YOUR DOCUSERIES WAS THAT IN
LARGE PART, WE HAVE BAD PEOPLE—RACISTS—TO THANK FOR THE SURVIVAL
OF THE BISON. AND I WAS LIKE, _WHAT DO I MAKE OF THAT?_

Yeah, so you have Charlie Goodnight in the panhandle of Texas, who was
a Texas Ranger and an Indian-hater who couldn’t stand buffalo.
He’s got the first ranch in Palo Duro Canyon, and he starts a
buffalo herd for his wife because she’s 70 miles from the nearest
neighbor and lonely. And suddenly he undergoes this amazing
transformation: By the end of his life, he’s friends with Comanche
leader Quanah Parker and helping to reintroduce buffalo
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And even Theodore Roosevelt, we have to acknowledge, is someone who
had views that are reprehensible. He did believe that the
extermination of the buffalo was probably good in the long run because
it would help solve the “American Indian question,” which is
cringe-worthy. Then he later goes a long way to save, specifically,
the buffalo.

Some of the people who helped save the buffalo were also people who
were saving it, as journalist Michelle Nijhuis says, “for the wrong
reasons”—to prove a kind of supremacy. It’s “The White Man’s
Burden,” noblesse oblige. That is—excuse my French—bullshit.

THIS CONSERVATION “SUCCESS” STORY ALSO FEELS LIKE A FAILURE TO
NATIVE AMERICANS. WHILE WHITE AMERICANS MOBILIZED TO SAVE THE BUFFALO,
AS YOU NOTE, THE SAME EFFORT WAS NOT EXTENDED TO UNDO THE HARM THAT
THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT DID TO NATIVE AMERICANS.

That’s the essence of the story. This _is_ about the buffalo, but
it’s really about the US government’s treatment of Native
Americans. And it’s scandalous, it’s obscene. It’s a tragedy.
For 150 years, many Plains tribes, and much longer for other Native
peoples, had been disconnected from a major source of
sustenance—they used everything from the tail to the snout—but
also a source for significant religious and spiritual practices.

“This _is_ about the buffalo, but it’s really about the US
government’s treatment of Native Americans.”

Although it wasn’t official policy of the United States government,
[officials] thought that “If you killed the buffalo, you kill the
Indian.” They knew the slaughter of the buffalo had an ancillary
quote-benefit-unquote, in that it would starve the Native peoples in
the Plains and make them more docile and willing to be herded into
reservations and confined there and then to be Americanized. I mean,
the “Friends of the Indian
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save the man.” They’re the ones—_the progressives_—who thought
that their culture should be eradicated, their languages and customs
should be eradicated; that you should place them in schools and punish
them if they spoke their Native languages; dressed them in suits; cut
their hair, an important symbol to them. These are the “Friends of
the Indian.”

Native Americans are not absent from the story of the saving of the
buffalo; at one point, most of the [county’s remaining] buffalo were
in captivity in zoos and private herds. The two biggest herds were run
by Native tribes. I think what is quite moving and powerful about the
end of the story that we tell in our film is that it is both
hopeful—in that Native peoples are beginning to repatriate with the
buffalo—but we’re also asking, _what is the United States’
complicity and responsibility in this tragedy?_

YOU DON’T MAKE THE CASE FOR THIS DIRECTLY. BUT WATCHING IT, I FELT
LIKE THE FILM WAS AN INDIRECT CALL FOR REPARATIONS FOR INDIGENOUS
PEOPLE. THERE’S A QUOTE, FOR INSTANCE, FROM ANTHROPOLOGIST GEORGE
BIRD GRINNELL: “THE MOST SHAMEFUL CHAPTER OF AMERICAN HISTORY IS
THAT IN WHICH IS RECORDED THE ACCOUNT OF OUR DEALINGS WITH THE
INDIANS. THE STORY OF OUR GOVERNMENT’S RELATIONS WITH THIS RACE IS
AN UNBROKEN NARRATIVE OF JUSTICE, FRAUD, AND ROBBERY.” DID YOU
INTEND FOR THE FILM TO FEEL LIKE THAT?

It’s a complicated story, and it does not shy away from that. If
people were to interpret [the film] as saying, these were sins that we
need to atone for, that would be okay with me. But we’re not telling
people—there’s no, _What would you like people to take away from
that?_ It’s a really complicated story about us. And we’re all
involved in it. And it’s a tragedy, and it’s also extraordinarily
uplifting. The buffalo is not going to go extinct. It was in danger.
There may have been fewer than 25, wild and free, in Yellowstone. Now
there are hundreds of thousands in federal hands, Native hands, and
private ownerships.

We’re trying to suggest that there’s a Third Act that needs to be
written by all of us. It is intertwined with our climate disaster. It
is intertwined with our incredibly painful history. At the beginning
of episode two, there’s a [Wallace] Stegner quote: “We are the
most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species,
even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But
we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go
to great effort to save what it might destroy.” And so the question
is, can you save the buffalo? Can you save the planet?

WE’RE LIVING THROUGH A CLIMATE CRISIS AND A BIODIVERSITY CRISIS. IS
THERE ANYTHING TO LEARN FROM THE BISON STORY TO PREPARE US FOR THIS
MOMENT?

We’re at a moment in the history of our planet when we may begin to
see many large mammals going extinct
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The story of the buffalo offers human beings a hopeful roadmap to what
it might look like to try to reverse this. It was a man-made slaughter
that diminished the buffalo. We are in a place where what we have done
to our environment, man-made again, is going to eliminate lots of big
mammals in addition to thousands of other species. And we are
obligated, it seems to me, to use the story of the buffalo—the
mistakes as well as the positive steps—to help us in our effort to
save not only other animals, but our planet and, therefore, ourselves.

“We’re at a moment in the history of our planet when we will begin
to see many large mammals going extinct.”

WOULD YOU SAY THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN BUFFALO IS SOMETHING TO BE
ASHAMED OF OR CELEBRATED?

There is a neon sign I put in our editing room a dozen years ago that
says in lowercase cursive, _It’s complicated,_ to remind ourselves
to always dig deep, to include _all_ parts of a story. So, let me
let me fall back on that—it’s complicated.

I mean, I’ve made the same film, over and over again. Each film asks
one deceptively simple question: _Who are we?_ Who are those strange
and complicated people who like to call themselves Americans? And what
does an investigation of the past tell us about not only where we’ve
been, but where are we now? And where may we be going?

We have this task, both individually, socially, and nationally, in a
broad sense, of being responsible for our history and trying to be
better, whatever _better_ is. That’s the whole job. This is where
I operate—between the majesty, complexity, contradiction, and
controversy of the US and all of the intimacy of the lowercase _us_.
And that’s where this buffalo story finds itself.

_Jackie Flynn Mogensen
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reporter at Mother Jones. Reach her at [email protected]
[[link removed]]._

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