NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
January 29, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1997 Plains Folk
The revival of the bison on the North American plains excites the popular imagination. Of course, the bison of today do not roam the plains. They are in the category of domestic, if still somewhat obstreperous, livestock. Nevertheless, to spy a herd of bison grazing thrills passers-by in a way that a bunch of Herefords cannot. The modern bison revival is a subject of Harold P. Danz's "Of Bison and Men," a new book from the University Press of Colorado. It should have been the main, if not the only, subject of the book.
Danz spends too much time going over well-grazed range—the origins of bison on the plains, Native Americans and bison, the slaughter of the bison in the late 19th century. These stories have been well told before by authors from William Hornaday to Wayne Gard to David Dary. Danz is not so elegant a writer as these, and he doesn't have the expertise to add to our knowledge of such subjects as bison ecology.
The story gets more interesting with those men cited as saviors of the bison—Charles Goodnight of Palo Duro, Texas; Buffalo Jones of Garden City, Kan.; Samuel Walking Coyote, Charles Allard, and Michel Pablo, of western Mont.; or Scotty Philip of Pierre, S.D.
The worthwhile contribution of Danz's book, though, is comprised in the chapters entitled "The Industry" and "Public Sector Involvement." These are about private buffalo ranching and about public management of park and refuge herds. Here Danz speaks with authority, as he is a former executive director of the American Bison Association, and before that he worked for the National Park Service.
"Why do people get into the bison business?" asks Danz. "Perhaps a few because of the so-called romance," he admits, or maybe "to own a part of the Old West," but for most, it's a business proposition. He counts more than 2,000 private owners of bison in the United States today. The advantages of bison have to do with the animal's hardiness and habits, as well as nutritional advantages, but bison breeders face some disadvantages, too. The Internal Revenue Service is intolerant of small operators it thinks might be keeping bison for fun, while the U.S. Department of Agriculture declines to provide bison slaughter facilities the same inspection privileges it provides beef producers.
The bison business is nationwide, but it is most at home on the range of the plains. Ted Turner, with his ranches in Montana, New Mexico and Nebraska is the biggest bison operator in the world. Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas and South Dakota are states well known for herds of size and quality. North Dakota lacks the large herds of the other states, but it has several high-quality operations, including that of Ken and Marlys Throlson at New Rockford—"one of the nation's best," Danz remarks. New Rockford is also home to the North American Bison Cooperative, a slaughter plant, where I pick up roasts whenever I'm cruising Highway 52.
The chapter on public herds is interesting, too. I've been up close with bison at the Maxwell Game Preserve (near where I went to college in Kansas) and at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park (where one camper swore to me he had seen a bull turn on the drinking fountain at the campground), and it's fascinating to learn the lineage of the animals you have admired.
There is a common misunderstanding about the bison revival, though. When you read commentators like Deborah and Frank Popper, or Richard Manning ("Grassland"), you find the assumption that bison are part of the inevitable winding-down of Great Plains civilization, moving people out and giving the country back to nature. This is the opposite of true. The bison revival is, rather, part of the persistence of human endeavor in the region.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866