September 25, 2003

Plains Folk: Bison Country

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

If you cut to the final chapter, that’s where it gets wild. In "Big Sky Rivers: The Yellowstone and Upper Missouri River," author Robert Kelley Schneiders writes, "Establishing a sustainable economy across the Upper Missouri requires the reopening of ancient migratory routes through the removal of dams and reservoirs and the elimination or modification of other human constructs that block species migration, such as roads, towns, or cities in the Missouri Valley bottoms."

I mean, this guy is seriously proposing that we remove the main-stem dams on the Missouri River. And he’s doing so in a scholarly work published by a prestigious regional publisher, the University Press of Kansas. How have we come to this point?

Do it gradually, Schneiders says. Some dams would go right away. Oahe and Fort Randall would have to remain for a while, until all cities and buildings could be removed from the flood plain, and then they could be punctured, too.

And for what purpose? "The Upper Missouri was a bison world," the author writes, "and any future, sustainable socioeconomic order there must consider bison. The bison needs to be reintroduced all across the Upper Missouri, not just in several isolated and widely dispersed national parks or private enclaves."

It happens I reviewed this manuscript prior to publication, praised it, and urged a broad readership for it. These are ideas the people of the plains need to consider and digest. We need thinkers who broaden the continuum of possibilities.

Here’s what’s truly fascinating, downright prepossessing, about "Big Sky Rivers." This book is like a Genesis for the Missouri and Yellowstone river valleys, describing how they came to be the way they are. It’s what’s called a bioregional history, and Schneiders places bison in the middle of it.

We are accustomed to thinking of bison as herbivores that merely inhabit the plains environment. As described here, they created the plains environment. "The animal dominated the region," Schneiders says. Bison mapped the land with their roads and traces of migration. They did not just follow paths; by their physical force, by their hoof traffic, "bison built roads to connect one ecologically rich zone with another."

Schneiders’s careful, indeed loving descriptions of ancient bison trails, descriptions largely the product of extensive fieldwork, compel a re-imagining of the land.

The presence of bison in the region patterned all human life, Indian or European, well into the 19th century. Most human changes in the land after that were superficial, but those involving water management were profound. Dam-building and development on the rivers of the plains stopped the arteries of the prairie. That’s why in the end, Schneiders calls for humankind to give up control, or attempted control, of the rivers.

In print I have called "Big Sky Rivers" "a breathtaking work of the historian’s imagination." It is indeed so--and yet I suggest that those of us who live on the plains need to be more imaginative yet. It is a mistake to consider humankind, as we generally do, the centerpiece of all regional life. We need Schneiders’s book to move us off that square.

Still, to propose reshaping all regional life in favor of bison is merely to substitute one privileged species for another. Fundamental ecology and common experience tell us that a system wholly devoted to any one thing--bison, humankind, wheat, or cockroaches--is a house of cards.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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