Kurt Repanshek - Re-Bisoning the West: Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape

RE-BISONING THE WEST

Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape

RE-BISONING THE WEST

Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape

Kurt Repanshek

First Torrey House Press Edition, September 2019

Copyright 2019 by Kurt Repanshek

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written consent of the publisher.

This book was published with support from
Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

Published by Torrey House Press
Salt Lake City, Utah
www.torreyhouse.org

International Standard Book Number: 978-1-937226-98-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-948814-00-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018956436

Map used with permission from Wildlife Conservation Society

Cover design by Kathleen Metcalf

Interior design by Rachel Davis

Distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

For my wife, Marcelle,
for her patience and ever-present encouragement,
and to the red dawgs, that theyll find new room to roam

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

What is it about bison that so intrigues and entrances? Their innate power? Their place on the landscape? Their ancientness?

Its a question I hopefully answer in the following pages. And its one no doubt that Theodore Roosevelt, William Hornaday, Charles Buffalo Jones, Michel Pablo, Charles Pablo, and others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries answered for themselves and used to drive their efforts to keep the species from going extinct. Those individuals, and their peers, deserve our thanks for the groundbreaking work they did in maintaining bison on the landscape.

There are many individuals who helped me in detailing how bison avoided extinction and examining how their numbers can be increased on the Great Plains. Dr. James Derr at Texas A&M University patiently helped me understand, at least in passing, bison genetics and cattle introgression. Dr. Glenn Plumb, formerly the chief wildlife biologist for the National Park Service and now the Bison Specialist Group Chair for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, explained the work the Department of the Interior and National Park Service are doing to increase the federal governments conservation herds of bison, as did Greg Schroeder, the resource management chief at Wind Cave National Park.

I owe particular thanks to Philip Deloria, Harvard Universitys tenured professor of Native American studies; Robbie Magnan of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes at the Fort Peck Reservation; and Jason Baldes of the Eastern Shoshone Nation on the Wind River Indian Reservation for help in understanding what bison mean to native cultures. Damien Austin, superintendent of the nonprofit American Prairie Reserve in Montana, allowed me to tag along on a hunt for two bison that needed new radio collars, and endured my questions as we slowly drove across the prairie.

Staff and officials at the Montana Department of Livestock and Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks lent their perspectives of the Yellowstone bison issue, and Bill Bates, formerly of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, and Bob Mountain of the US Forest Service, happily discussed bison on the landscape and where new herds might (or might not) be located. Longtime colleague Angus Thuermer, Jr., at WyoFile, who collaborated on the initial series of bison articles that appeared on NationalParksTraveler.org in September 2017 and inspired this book, provided great reporting and writing then that have been incorporated into Re-Bisoning the West.

Special thanks to Kirsten Johanna Allen at Torrey House Press for seeing value in this project, and associate editor Anne Terashima for her keen edits, suggestions, and patience in trying to get a writer who grew up, professionally, with The Associated Press Stylebook, to adopt The Chicago Manual of Style.

An immeasurable amount of thanks goes to my wife, Marcelle Shoop, for enduring her husbands writers blocks, long road trips in search of bison and their history, and struggles with telling a story more than 200,000 years in the making.

A great many others responded with helpful information and answers to my questions. A topic such as restoring bison on the Great Plains cannot be completely covered in a single book or paper, as evidenced by the many that have been produced on bison. The next chapter, of course, will involve what success is met in both growing the herds in general and, more specifically, preserving the genetic blueprint that makes bison such incredible animals.

Kurt Repanshek
Park City, Utah
2019

CONTENTS

Prologue

A vast, placid sea undulates slightly, as though to the rise and fall of the tide, staining the ground in all directions to the horizon. Though this sea contains no water, it moves in unison, rippling up and down, forging ever forward: herds of bison covering the landscape. Their dark brown shaggy humps rise not with a tide, but with the rolling hills. A dust cloud billows in their wake. Their baritone grunts, swelling and ebbing with the herd, carry across the Great Plains.

Late September nights in the backcountry of Yellowstone dont hold warmth. They grow cold quickly. We had a reasonable pile of broken branches to feed the flames of our campfire until night called and wed crawl into the down bags waiting inside our tent. Flickering shadows danced skyward against the lodgepole pine canopy, and an ebbing glow from the campfire leapt out across the forest floor. The snap and crackle of the fire was occasionally interrupted by nearby Lone Star Geyser as it fumed and sputtered and loosed a steaming whoosh of hot water, sending rivulets gurgling down to the Firehole River.

Though not our first backpacking trek through the park, we still had understandably nervous thoughts of grizzlies clacking teeth in the middle of the night, their low but unmistakable growl filling our ears. What we didnt count on was the bison. Here in the forest. As the animal ambled along the firelights periphery, we couldnt tell in the fading twilight if it was a bull or a cow. But at a weight north of one thousand pounds, male or female, it didnt matter. It could inflict broken bones and trample our tent just by turning around. Nudging more wood into the flames, we watched the bison linger along the rim of firelight and then settle to the ground for the night.

Bison are deceptive. They are ponderous in their bulk, and their expressionless demeanor lends a certain stolidness. Matriarchal in herd structure, they are quick to defend their young, always conscious of nearby predators. They also are surprisingly nimble, capable of turning quickly and accelerating to forty mph. Bison are a mammalian relic from deep out of the past that are amazing to watch as they move in herds across the landscape or simply hunker down to bask in the sun while their calves frolic. They are powerful creatures, physically and iconically. Wander into an art gallery in the West and odds are good youll find images of bison staring out from canvases. Potent images of stout, indomitable animals that are hard to turn your eyes from. They are portrayed as they stand on the landscape, and at times in surrealistic, neon hues as the artist strives to depict their spirituality.