American Buffalo (30 page)

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Chapter 2

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The Wildlife Conservation Society at the Bronx Zoo revitalized the American Bison Society in 2005. The original ABS had been founded a hundred years earlier and was disbanded after the buffalo had been saved from extinction. The new incarnation of the ABS will take on what it describes as a “long-term, large-scale, international, multi-purpose, and inclusive” initiative “to restore the ecological role of bison across their original range.”
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Cortés was the first European to see a buffalo, but the prize for the first European to see a
wild
buffalo goes to the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca sailed for North America in 1527 as second-in-command of the Narváez expedition, an armada of five boats under the king’s orders to “conquer and govern” the land of Florida, a vast expanse of ground with an indefinite western boundary. Three hundred men and forty horses departed the ships and headed cross-country into the Florida Peninsula in April 1528. They had loose plans of traveling to the north and west, where they’d meet up again with the men who remained on the ships. After five months of trudging through swamps, they hadn’t found their ships and they hadn’t discovered any cities of gold, but they did manage to kill or harass every native Floridian they ran into. Word of the Spaniards’ open hostilities spread from one native village to the next, and soon the Indians were stealthily slaughtering the Spaniards with arrows.

By the time the Narváez expedition hit northern Florida, they were down to 250 men. They hatched a plan to build makeshift rafts and sail along the coast toward the Spanish colonies in Mexico. While they labored, they were forced to eat the last of their horses. They used horsehair to weave cord for lashing material, and they tanned the legs of the horses to make canteens. During construction, Indian arrows picked off ten more men. The survivors boarded the rafts and paddled up the Gulf Coast. One of the rafts vanished without a trace near the Mississippi Delta. The other rafts got split up. Five men died from drinking salt water. A couple more drowned. On November 6, 1528, two of the rafts were shipwrecked on Galveston Island, Texas, which Cabeza de Vaca dubbed the Isle of Misfortune. It was one of the homelands of the Karankawa Indians, who dressed in woven grass. The Karankawa took great pity on the suffering Spaniards; they fed the survivors and mourned the Spanish dead for an entire night, crying and wailing and sobbing. Things changed, though, when the Karankawa learned that some of the Spaniards had practiced cannibalism. The Indians were so distraught by this moral transgression that the Spaniards feared they would be put to death. What saved them from capital punishment is that they started to die on their own. Dysentery and malaria felled them. Soon the eighty or so men who landed on the Isle of Misfortune were down to fifteen. Then the Spaniards’ luck really went to shit.

The survivors were dispersed among bands of Indians. They fell into slavery and got further whittled down. They died of exposure and starvation. One Spaniard killed another Spaniard. Indians killed them for reasons that must have struck the Spaniards as very odd. Several were killed after insulting an Indian host by moving from his lodge into that of another man. More were killed when an Indian dreamed that he should kill them and then followed through with the dream. Some were sold off as slaves to distant tribes, where they were abused and killed.

Cabeza de Vaca survived only through luck and fortitude and the kindness of his hosts and keepers. Because he prayed to a God that he claimed was very powerful, the Indians asked him to heal their sick. Cabeza de Vaca explained that he did not have that kind of sway with God, but the Indians withheld his food until he relented. He genuflected, prayed, and made crosses with his hands over the bodies of the sick, and he laid his hands on them. The Indians were very pleased with the results. Once, he was credited with bringing a man back to life. In another village, he cut a man open with his knife to remove an arrowhead that had long ago punctured him in the back and lodged above his heart, where it caused him “great pain and suffering.” Cabeza de Vaca closed the incision with two stitches and became the first European to practice surgery in the New World.

By 1532, after four years of wandering, the Narváez expedition was down to four men: Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spaniards, and an African Muslim. The four of them were freed from captivity and reunited through a series of spectacular adventures, and they again continued westward on their quest to find the Spanish colonies in Mexico. They didn’t make it far. Just around the time they got into central Texas, they fell into the hands of two new tribes, the Mariames and the Yguazes. Again they were divided up and enslaved. Things got even weirder. Cabeza de Vaca encountered humans who burned their religious leaders’ bodies and drank the ashes mixed with water; he encountered men who lived with eunuch lovers, the eunuchs being “more muscular and taller than other men”; he encountered humans who ate the flesh of poisonous snakes, and when the meat was gone, they roasted the bones and ate those, too; he encountered humans who fed their infant daughters to dogs because it was considered taboo for tribal members to marry women born within their own clan and they feared that female babies would grow up to bear the children of their enemies.

Somewhere amid this mayhem in south-central Texas, Cabeza de Vaca finally encountered the buffalo. “Cows come here,” he later wrote in his
Relación.

I have seen them three or four times and eaten them. It seems to me they are about the size of the ones in Spain. They have two small horns, like Moorish cattle, and very long hair, like a fine blanket made from the wool of merino sheep. Some are brownish and others black. It seems to me they have more and better meat than cattle here in Spain. From the small ones the Indians make blankets to cover themselves, and from the large ones they make shoes and shields. These animals come from the North all the way to the coast of Florida, where they scatter, crossing the land more than four hundred leagues. All along their range, through the valleys where they roam, people who live near there descend to live off them.
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Chapter 3

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The intermingling and swapping of small buffalo herds during the establishment of the National Bison Range was emblematic of buffalo management in general during the early twentieth century. Basically, conservationists were desperately trying to gather up whatever scattered herds had survived the slaughters of previous decades, and they gave little thought to the particular histories of each herd—as long as the animals looked like buffalo, they were regarded as buffalo. However, this wasn’t always a good test, because many of the private individuals who helped “save” the buffalo from extinction were not acting out of altruistic impulses. Rather, they wanted to breed the buffalo with cattle in order to make a sort of mythical super-beast known as a cattalo. The goal was a docile animal with “less hump and more rump” than buffalo, but with the buffalo’s tolerance for extreme weather conditions and its apparent immunity to such devastating livestock diseases as Texas fever. Most of these early crossbreeding experiments were failures, though they succeeded in creating a lot of buffalo with significant amounts of genetic introgression from cattle. Today, only three herds of government-owned buffalo—those at Yellowstone and Wind Cave national parks and a state-owned herd in Utah—are known to be genetically pure. Of privately owned buffalo, which constitute about 96 percent of all buffalo in existence, only one herd, at Ted Turner’s Vermejo Park Ranch, in New Mexico, is known to be genetically pure.
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Chapter 4

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I was warned about the veracity of La Casse’s claim by Dr. Michael Wilson, a vertebrate paleontologist with Douglas College, in British Columbia. Though he did not specifically refer to La Casse’s skull (he’d never even heard of him), he explained that it was once common practice to artificially wed human artifacts with buffalo skulls. The pairing increased the value of the artifacts, both as museum exhibits and as curios for the tourist trade.
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The great weight of that ice caused the earth’s crust to sink down into the mantle (a three-mile-thick covering of ice would “sink” the crust one mile). At the end of the Ice Age, the great burden of ice melted away. Because the crust is buoyant, the earth’s surface is rising back up in a process known as isostatic rebound. It often rises in lurches, so that seismologists record (and feel) earthquakes in southern Canada, New England, and northern Europe. In all, it’s an excruciatingly slow process. Siberia, Canada, and the Great Lakes are all currently rising at average rates of centimeters or less annually, and it will take another ten thousand years before the job is done. I own a cabin that’s on pilings over the ocean on an island in Alaska, and friends keep telling me that I’m going to lose the place thanks to the rising ocean levels brought on by global warming. Not quite, I say, as the island is currently undergoing isostatic rebound.
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Because I had found the skull on national forest land, Kenneth Cannon encouraged me to report the find to the proper authorities. I resisted this at first, fearing that I’d broken a law by removing the skull from federal property and now it would be taken away from me. Eventually the guilt was too much for me to handle, and I confessed my crime to Mark Sant, a federal archaeologist whose jurisdiction includes the Beaverhead National Forest. We discussed the skull, and he informed me that I fit into a sort of gray area between rules governing anthropological specimens. Because the skull does not show direct evidence of obvious human tampering, such as carvings or brain extraction, it is not necessarily a cultural artifact. And since the bone is not yet fossilized, it isn’t considered a fossil. He granted me immunity in exchange for information. I submitted photos, a copy of the radiocarbon report, and a marked U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle map. With these materials, Sant promised to compile an archaeological site form on the skull.
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Chapter 5

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Bradbury had an eventful, though ultimately fruitless, trip. He came to the United States to collect plants, but he got a whole lot more than he bargained for. Traveling the Missouri River, he hunted for grizzly bears and buffalo, got chased by a skunk, and was sexually propositioned by many Indian women, of whom he remarked that “chastity . . . is not a virtue.” At the end of his trip, he shipped his botanical specimens to London and attempted to return home by taking a detour down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He passed through New Madrid, Missouri, on December 14, 1811, and complained that the city was shabby and poorly stocked. Much of New Madrid was destroyed two days later, when the first of several powerful earthquakes struck the region. It was the most powerful series of earthquakes to ever hit the Lower 48. The aftershocks were felt across one million square miles (the great earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 was felt across only six thousand square miles), large areas of the earth disappeared into faults, rivers flowed backward, 150,000 acres of trees were destroyed, and the Mississippi River changed its course. Bradbury was actually on the river, near Memphis, Tennessee, when the quake hit. His boat was upset by tsunamis, and hours later the current was transporting hundreds of human bodies. Bradbury continued his journey toward home, making it to New Orleans in time for the War of 1812, when the United States rehashed the Revolutionary War in a series of battles with Britain. The war delayed Bradbury’s return home by several years. In his absence, a rival botanist pirated his treasure trove of specimens and published a book based on Bradbury’s findings. Bradbury’s bitterness over the fraud lasted him throughout his life, and he died in obscurity in 1823.
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Today, when scientists with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Biological Service discuss the disappearance of grizzly bears from 95 percent of their range in the Lower 48 over the last two centuries, they cite the termination of the supply of drowned buffalo carcasses on the Great Plains as one of the causes.
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A black bear track has an arced, rainbow-shaped toe pattern, like your fingertips when your hand is stretched out flat. The tips of the claw marks fall within one or one and a half inches of the toe marks. On a grizzly’s footprint, the toes are arranged in a more or less straight line, so you can take a ruler’s edge and hit all five. Their claw marks can be two or three inches out from the toes.
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Chapter 6

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The historian Mari Sandoz argued vehemently that buffalo always, without exception, traveled into the wind. If this were true, every buffalo in the western United States would have eventually ended up congregated in great masses on the coasts of the Pacific and Arctic oceans. (Or else they’d swim, lemminglike, to their deaths.) However, she believed that seasonal wind changes routinely saved buffalo from such a disaster. Sandoz relates a story told to her by a Sioux man, which itself does a good job of illustrating the troubles that her own theory, if true, would cause for buffalo. The man described an unseasonably warm fall that allowed a massive herd of buffalo to push so far into northern Canada—perhaps into the predominant winds—that they weren’t able to go back down south in time for the winter. When Sandoz asked how many died, the Sioux man used hand signals to show that it was a hundred times a hundred times a
hundred, or a million.
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A couple of examples: In Yellowstone National Park, the largest seasonal migration is a midwinter movement toward the north, where there tends to be less snowfall. Along the Copper River, the herd’s fall migration is eastward, moving away from glaciers and toward a major river valley.
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