Grand Prismatic Spring was shrouded in a blanket of cloud and fog. With the temperature hovering near freezing, the thermal hot spot was puffing steam into the frigid Wyoming morning air, making it impossible to see more than 20 feet into the distance.
Hikers from Michigan recommended we visit early in the day to avoid the foot traffic of “tourons” — tourist morons — inundating Yellowstone during its final week before it closes for the winter. We hustled that morning, threw on our gear, and hit the road before sunrise as the car’s thermometer read 3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Our friends had steered us right. Rather than parking by the main trailhead, they suggested a spot a mile down the road to an overlook path instead. There was a better view which the tourons passing through didn’t have the time to sully. We could have an unimpeded view directly into Grand Prismatic’s orange-rimmed blue-green iris. “No selfie sticks in sight,” we were assured.
We crossed a footbridge over Firehole River and walked along a stony path to the hiss of volcanic steam in the background. The valley felt otherworldly, untainted by humanity. The late September sun struggled to break the fog’s grasp of the valley. The mix of freezing air choked by an endless supply of steam made U.S. 191, just a few hundred feet away, invisible. Somewhere out in the grey expanse, we heard cars whistling by. I imagined they were driving back to civilization either north to Big Sky and Bozeman or south through the Tetons and Jackson Hole.
Rounding a bend, something began to materialize out of the fog. As the haze cleared, the vague shadow of a beast could be seen. Shoulder high with a thatching of dense fur, its head bowed, mouth to the ground mid-feast. It seemed unbothered by our presence. If it were a human, the buffalo would’ve given us a quick nod and gone back to its business. It spends most of its time in this state, searching for nearly 25 pounds of food and foraging upwards of a dozen hours a day.
The buffalo, or bison as academics colloquially call the species, once dotted vast swaths of North America from the original 13 colonies in the east to as far west as Nevada and Idaho. Remnants of herds have been found within the Arctic Circle, scattered across what became Canada’s Northwest and Yukon Territories, and as far south as the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Durango.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, academics believe tens of millions of buffalo roamed across our great continental expanse, playing a central role in the everyday lives of Plains Indian tribes from the Blackfoot and Crow to Cheyenne and Pawnee. The animal was a fixture throughout the entire Indigenous cycle of life, “from the moment you’re born into a warm buffalo blanket,” Ken Burns told hunter Steve Rinella on his MeatEater podcast, until “the time you die in a shroud of buffalo skin.”
However, the pillar of Indigenous life was brutally halted as the vision of Manifest Destiny guided American settlers to the Pacific, eviscerating buffalo along the way. Partly, these pioneers did it for economic reasons. There was money to be made in the fur trade, and neither conservation nor habitat preservation ranked high in the world of frontier justice. During this time, north of the border, Canadian trappers brought the beaver to near extinction for similar reasons.
Poaching, or commercial hunting, was also incentivized by the U.S. government, staffed by officials who viewed the animal’s extinction an irreparable blow to Indigenous life and community. “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western plains, in its effect upon the Indians,” Columbus Delano, secretary of the interior under President Grant, mused in 1873.
Growing awareness among American political and academic leaders coalesced in the early 1900s into a concerted effort to save the buffalo. President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid big-game hunter, along with conservationists such as William Hornaday, helped found the American Bison Society in 1904 aimed at preventing its extinction. In 1907, the group reintroduced buffalo into a wildlife preserve in Oklahoma but couldn’t find any local bison. Instead, they were forced to transport a herd from the Bronx Zoo by rail. The following year, they successfully petitioned Congress to set aside a National Bison Range an hour outside of Missoula.
“The hunting history and hunters in America have this very confusing, contradictory legacy where hunters are almost solely responsible for having demolished — for having nearly extirpated — a lot of American wildlife,” Rinella told National Review in November from his home a few hour’s drive outside Yellowstone. “And, then, they’re solely responsible for having recovered it. That’s one of the strange things about this paradox of destroying the things you love.”
For Rinella, there remains a “zeitgeisty condemnation” of hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt, whose contributions are dismissed by arguing he did “the right thing for the wrong reasons.” “To totally discount this idea that these were people who loved wildlife and wanted future generations to live in proximity to wildlife is kind of laughable.”
Rinella’s fascination with the buffalo began in the late ’90s during a bow-hunting trip with his brother in the Madison Mountains of Montana. Searching for elk, they stumbled upon a bison skull which led Rinella to study the “lost icon” of the American West. His search led him to Black Diamond, the animal immortalized on the “buffalo nickel,” who was not an immaculate specimen of the open range, but rather a neutered and docile resident of the Central Park Menagerie.
Much like the glorification of Native American mascots, the disappearance of the buffalo coincided with its romanticization in public consciousness. Black Diamond became a poetic victim who, ailing at 22, was placed on auction with his owner hoping to fetch $500. No one bid on the famed beast, and he was eventually sold to a slaughterhouse for $300, his carcass yielding “1,020 pounds of meat,” Rinella writes in his book, American Buffalo. Black Diamond’s head was preserved and hung in the butcher’s office, a keepsake eventually lost to history.
It’s hard to picture Yellowstone without these beautiful beasts plodding along the Lamar Valley in the park’s northeastern stretch. Traffic backed up well over a mile with F-150s and campervans as hundreds of bison speckled the rolling hills. Rutting season was winding down as young bulls remained a hum of nervous teen angst, wallowing in the soft dirt beside U.S. 212’s shoulder, making small craters to cool off and leave their scent. Several butted heads, tangling horns in a bid to prove themselves to the herd and potential mates.
We pushed on deeper into the valley seeking to leave the tourons in RVs behind. Many had staked out a ridgeline as the sunset faded in, binoculars and folding lawn chairs at the ready for a wolf or bear to kill one of these magnificent creatures. They were looking for entertainment, a free evening show. I wondered whether folks had changed all that much since the days of the bison’s mass slaughter when prospectors collected piles of bison bones the size of apartment blocks, with millions of tons crushed and sold as fertilizer.
“If you live in some place and spend 20 years wandering around some mountain range and get to know the animals there, you feel like it gets really intimate,” Rinella told NR. “Well, try 15,000 years of family history. You learn to appreciate the sense of loss that cultures have experienced,” he added. It “invites a level of humility to what’s been done.”
Rosalyn LaPier spent her childhood on the Blackfeet reservation in northwest Montana. “When I was growing up, we did not have bison on the reservation or within tribal lands. There were no bison,” LaPier, an author and academic in the middle of a research fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., told NR. “I learned from my grandparents because I spent a lot of time at my grandparent’s home. I learned about the role of bison in religion and religious practice, and also the role of bison in mythology.”
Throughout her upbringing, LaPier remembers the buffalo’s centrality to tribal religion, a feature, she believes, which held the community together. “I think if it was not for the continuation of religion within Blackfeet society, we would have less connection to who we are as a people.”
LaPier’s life story is a small data point in what Burns refers to as the buffalo’s “three-act play” from abundance, to near-extinction, to cautiously optimistic recovery.
“I’m old,” she jokes, pointing to the fact that Blackfeet descendants today such as her nieces and nephews, have the privilege of growing up in the presence of living, breathing, 1-ton buffalos.
There are encouraging signs LaPier sees that the buffalo’s return is not a momentary blip, but the beginning of a new chapter in the American West. Much of that hinges on federal funding and re-wilding the species, which remains largely confined to national parks and preserves.
Another part rests on awakening public consciousness.
Buried inside Burns’s studio in Walpole, N.H., a neon sign reading “it’s complicated” hangs in the editing room, written in lowercase cursive. For Burns, the art of storytelling depends on being comfortable with duality.
“Sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time,” Burns told NR, paraphrasing what Wynton Marsalis, a jazz musician, told him when he was working on an earlier film about the genre.
Burns loves drawing inspiration from fellow artists. Another favorite line of his is from novelist Richard Powers: “The best arguments in the world won’t change a single point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story.” Burns recites it from heart.
Much like the buffalo reintroduced to the West, Burns and his team see their films as “family members” that “take on a life of their own” once they’re released into the world. Although it’s not an “advocacy film,” Burns would love to see people “passionately decide that they wanted to be part of a collective will that would find spaces, ecosystems, habitats large enough for buffalo to roam wild and free again.”
“To help restore at least a tiny portion of the now relatively quiet monoculture of the Great Plains back to what it used to be: the American Serengeti.”