Well, happy Thanksgiving to all! Susan and I hosted it this year, and it seems that every time there is some such get-together, I come out of it with a Ranger Randy research assignment. This time it was my brother Byron and his girlfriend Ronni, who had been wondering whether the American bison ever existed west of the Rockies. Hell, I didn’t have any idea. But I do have an internet connection, so I can’t be stumped.
We all grow up knowing a lot about the bison, and to be honest, I didn’t really expect anything very new or fascinating, but as usual I was wrong. My God, what a fascinating animal! First of all, the short answer is yes. They reached through Idaho and Oregon almost to the coast. Not so farther to the south. They didn’t care much for those deserts, and they barely touched what is now California, only way up in the north-east corner. But their range was huge, all the way to the East Coast, up into Canada and even down a little ways into Mexico. They were all about the prairies, though, and it looks to me like they could handle the Rockies, which is a very old, worn-down mountain range with wide valleys and lots of open spaces, but I notice they never touched the Sierras.
Here’s something interesting: Those horizon-to-horizon herds that are talked about so much in Nineteenth Century literature were probably unusual, and new. The Native Americans controlled the bison’s numbers with hunting pressure, and preserved their ideal grassy habitat through the use of burns. But in the nineteenth century, Native American numbers were decimated by waves of European disease, and the huge herds of bison we hear so much about were probably an example of an out-of-balance ecosystem. Still, it is thought that at one time they were the most numerous large mammal on the planet.
They are now what is called ecologically extinct in most of their former range. That means that though many animals exist in artificial circumstances, the places where they interact with their ecosystem as they always did are precious few—like Yellowstone National Park.
They are a relative newcomer to North America. They migrated in from Asia across the Berring Straits from fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, replacing an earlier migrant called the steppe bison, which was even bigger, and perished along with the rest of the North American mega-fauna like the mammoth and the mastodon, probably with the development of the Clovis point, a projectile point capable of bringing down a really large animal.
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Clovis Point
Before the introduction of the horse from Europe, the Plains Indians would construct chutes out of rock and willow branches and stampede them off cliffs by charging at them dressed up as wolves and coyotes. These are called buffalo jumps, and can still be visited today. The Blackfoot Indians used one in Alberta called Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Later, on horseback, they found that one skilled rider could easily supply an entire tribe with meat by simply chasing one down and sending a Clovis point through its hide.
It must have been a sporting proposition. For a 2,200-pound animal they are amazingly fast and agile. They can jump six feet straight into the air, and can run at thirty-five to forty miles per hour. On top of that, they are very mean-tempered, which is why they have never been successfully domesticated, either by Native Americans or Europeans. They can jump over or knock down almost any enclosure you put around them, and they don’t hesitate to do so. The ones being raised domestically today are visually indistinguishable from the wild ones, but are actually a fertile hybrid of bison and domestic cattle.
But it’s possible that there are no genetically pure bison left, even in the wild. Scientists find the genes of domestic cattle almost everywhere they look, even in a herd on Santa Catalina Island, off the coast of California, where they have been isolated since they were introduced in 1924 for a movie shoot.
They were a keystone species in the prairie ecosystem. A keystone species is one which exerts a disproportionate effect on its ecosystem. Remove it and the ecosystem collapses. The term comes from the keystone at the top of a stone arch, which receives less pressure than any other stone, and yet cannot be removed or the arch comes down. The bison was such a species, controlling the vegetation and trampling the earth and making the prairie what it was. Another was the prairie dog, whose burrows reversed the compacting of the soil from all those hooves, and channeled water back down into the water table, preventing runoff and erosion and keeping the prairie flat. (You could argue that another keystone species was the Native Americans, who were very much a part of the equation.)
Like most bovines, they are very social and have a complex social structure, and behaviors way more intelligent than the bovine stereotypes suggest (domestic cattle are no exception, and someday I’ll do an article on them). When moving from one grazing area to another, the dominant female leads the herd. When attacked by a wolf pack, they form up in a very precise configuration, stampeding with the females in the lead, the young in the center, and the large males bringing up the rear and fending off the pursuers. There really isn’t a predator that can bring down a healthy adult bison, but of course the predators target the young and infirm. Cougars also occasionally will prey on them, and a grizzly bear will take one on if he’s hungry enough.
When they travel between grazing areas, they do so in single file, and the paths they developed over the years became very compacted and still exist today where they have not been paved over. They are called buffalo trails, and they were wisely laid out, following ridge tops and watersheds, and avoiding the valley bottoms with their mud and snow drift problems. The Native Americans were hip to them and used them in their migrations, and later the pioneers did as well. Daniel Boone widened a buffalo trail to blaze a route across the Blueridge Mountains through the Cumberland Gap, creating access from the Eastern Seaboard into Kentucky. Later still, the railroads used several of the bison’s key east-west routes, crossings and passages, including the crossing points of the Ohio River in Ohio and the Wabash River in Indiana. Really, the bison can be credited with mapping out our modern transportation system.
So the story has a sad, sad ending that we’ve all known since childhood. The bison are gone, and the prairie ecosystem has collapsed, and our repurposing of the plains has resulted only in the sprawling cities of the Rust Belt, and epic ecological disasters like the Dust Bowl. A public policy professor named Frank J. Popper proposed in 1987 to return 139,000 square miles of the drier parts of the Great Plains to prairie, and re-introduce the bison, pointing out that it has been resoundingly proven that the area is not sustainable for farming. Wouldn’t that be something to leave our children? It ain’t going to happen, but it’s nice to know that someone out there is trying to learn from our mistakes.
Now you know.