Re-Bisoning the West. Kurt Repanshek

he wrote in 1832 as he gazed out from the Lower Missouri River. “The surface of the country is gracefully and slightly undulating, like the swells of the retiring ocean after a heavy storm. And everywhere covered with a beautiful green turf, and with occasional patches and clusters of trees.”

      You can find such settings in some places today, but very few with bison on them.

      Tatanka

      Historically the buffalo had more influence on man than all other Plains animals combined. It was life, food, raiment, and shelter to the Indians. The buffalo and the Plains Indians lived together, and together passed away. The year 1876 marks practically the end of both.

      —Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains

      For many of us on our first, and perhaps only, visit to Wind Cave, Yellowstone, Badlands, Theodore Roosevelt, or other national parks or preserves with bison, that first glance of the animals in the wild can be startling and enamoring at the same time. It’s a fleeting connection with something truly wild that lives on the landscape as it has for tens of thousands of years. We ooh and ahh, take some photographs, and head down the road. End of connection.

      Native Americans and bison, however, are intertwined, and always have been. Bison are iinii to the Blackfeet Nation, hotova’a or hotoaao’o to the Cheyennes, depending on the sex of the animal, and kúcu to the Utes. The Cherokee people know bison as ya-na-sa, while in the Pawnee language they are tarha, and in Navajo ayani. But regardless of what they are called, bison were, and continue to be, celebrated by these cultures. They not only gave life through their meat but they represented a linkage, a fastening with the earth and freedom that native cultures seek. Stories told by elders through the generations tell of bison coming from the underworld, from caves, caverns, and grottos winding deep into mountainsides. In South Dakota, on the western edge of the state that features the undulating pine country known as the Black Hills, you can walk right up to the narrow, rocky hillside crevice where, a Lakota creation narrative tells us, bison streamed out into the sunlight: hundreds and thousands of animals stretching across the prairie in a dark brown rising tide. These Pte-O-ya-te were “relatives, who provided humans with food, clothing, shelter, tools, medicine, and many other necessities.”⁴² The connection was further enforced by the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who taught the Lakota to be honorable, respectful, and self-disciplined.⁴³ Not only did the Buffalo People stampede from that crevice which led to making Wind Cave a national park, but the Lakota view the air that rushes out of that small hole as “the breath of life.”⁴⁴

      Similar creation narratives have been handed down by native peoples across the West, telling of bison spewing forth from a cave in Texas and in the Crazy Mountains of Montana.⁴⁵ The herd that spilled out of the Crazy Mountains “spread wide and blackened the plains,” according to Crow chief Plenty Coups. “Everywhere I looked great herds of buffalo were going in every direction, and still others without number were pouring out of the hole in the ground to travel on the wide plains.”⁴⁶ Pawnee narratives also tell of spirit animals that live in caves, waiting for the time when they will be granted access to the surface.⁴⁷

      The depletion of the great herds in the nineteenth century deprived native peoples of food and shelter, and was also a spiritual loss. Bison represented the universe and superseded the arrival of humans. Unlike many of the whites who came west, native peoples viewed bison with honor and dignity. Just as Lakota and other native cultures believed bison had come from the underworld, they also believed they returned to that protective dwelling place after the whites decimated the great herds. A Kiowa narrative tells of a woman who woke one morning shortly before sunrise and went to a spring to get some water. As the growing predawn light began to illuminate the wafting mists filling the valley, she saw an old bison cow walk out of the vapors. Trailing her were more bison, some old and weary, some wounded, some young calves.

      “As she watched, the old buffalo cow led the last herd through the mist and toward the mountain,” goes the traditional story. “Then the mountain opened up before them, and inside of the mountain the earth was fresh and young. The sun shone brightly and the water was clear. The earth was green and the sky blue. Into this beautiful land walked the last herd of buffalo, and the mountains closed.

      “The buffalo were gone.”⁴⁸

      Even before President Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark west in 1804 to find out exactly what he had purchased from the French via the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, bison figuratively have been going into the mountain, literally heading toward their demise. Once the horse reached the Plains with Spanish conquistadors, native peoples’ ability to travel expanded. Before the horse, dogs had pulled the travois carrying family belongings. The arrival of the horse made it possible to carry more, carry it farther, and carry it more quickly. Horses enabled these peoples to become nomads, to follow the bison on their migrations and so always have food and shelter nearby. If winter’s snows made it difficult for horses to carry warriors all the way to the bison, the hunters could dismount, don snowshoes, and drive bison into drift-clogged ravines. There the snowbound bison met their fate at the hands of hunters with their lances.⁴⁹

      As went the bison, so too did the Native Americans. The prediction by William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the Union Army’s heralded Civil War generals, that the destruction of the great bison herds would directly impact Plains native peoples, proved true. It has been debated whether the US military formally set down a strategy to wipe out bison herds specifically to subjugate the Plains cultures, or whether it was a word-of-mouth strategy. Regardless, General Sherman was determined to reduce bison herds. “As long as Buffalo are up on the Republican [River], the Indians will go there,” the general wrote to his friend, General Sheridan, in 1868 from Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory. “I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffalo and consequent(ly) Indians are out (from between) the Roads we will have collisions and trouble.”⁵⁰ The army was so intent on gaining the assistance of buffalo hunters to kill bison that it gave them ammunition for free.

      Sherman’s proposal was not made jokingly, notes David D. Smits. A historian focused largely on the American frontier following the Civil War, Smits’s research revealed that the upper echelon of the army “routinely sponsored and outfitted civilian hunting expeditions onto the plains.” “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s reputation and nickname was built on killing bison, and he often lived up to that repute. In the fall of 1871, he led a group of newspaper editors from New York and Chicago, businessmen, General Sheridan, and fellow soldiers into the prairie not far from present-day North Platte, Nebraska, for a hunt. They wound up slaughtering more than six hundred bison, taking only the tasty tongues and leaving the rest for scavengers.⁵¹

      Robert Utley long served as chief historian for the National Park Service. One of his favorite topics, despite the many possibilities that the far-flung reach of the National Park System afforded him, was the American West, about which he wrote more than fifteen books. His examination of the frontier between 1846 and 1890 called the loss of bison a “cultural catastrophe.”⁵² It left Plains peoples with little option but to settle on reservations. Their daily lifeblood had been wiped out, and other wild game was following that path, too, as whites moved west. The meager prospects of living off the land as they had for generations left those placed on reservations with little incentive to flee. The cultural dynamics of western life had swung; nomadic peoples were doomed, settlements were growing. It’s been an ongoing story through history: the conquerors dictate to the conquered. As whites moved west, striving to tame the landscape, game was becoming harder to find and the nomadic life of many cultures was not just threatened but ended.⁵³ John Fire Lame Deer didn’t know Utley, but shared his opinion. A Lakota Sioux born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in 1906, Lame Deer struggled with finding his identity, as many young men and women of any culture commonly do. He tried his hand on the rodeo circuit as both competitor and clown, and struggled with alcohol, gambling, and chasing women. Not unlike Wovoka and Black Elk before him, when Lame Deer reached his mid-fifties he found his calling as a Sioux holy man, one