"a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life"

Maybe gas prices will open up Yellowstone this summer. Otherwise, it's as busy as a downtown intersection. Lots of attractions, of course, but one of the majors is the buffalo. Every year some clown gets mashed by some angry bull, but it doesn't stop dozens of others from getting out of the car and risking the ire of these wonderful mammoth beasts, of whom all of us can be proud.

This is part of the herd belonging to the Yankton Sioux, on their reservation land. They're a wonder to see because, rare as they are, they remind all of us of our world once was. 

They bestow a reverence that downright spiritual.

This passage from Warren Angus Ferris' Life in the Rocky Mountains (1843), describes a scene thousands witnessed 200 years ago but is almost unimaginable today. 

But, go ahead and imagine--

On the fourteenth, hurrah, boys! we saw a buffalo; a solitary, stately old chap, who did not wait an invitation to dinner, but toddled off with his tail in the air. We saw on the sixteenth a small herd of ten or twelve, and had the luck to kill one of them. It was a patriarchal allow, poor and tough, but what of that? we had a roast presently, and hamped the gristle with a zest. Hunger is said to be a capital sauce, and if so our meal was well seasoned, for we had been living for some days on boiled corn alone, and had the grace to thank heaven for meat of any quality. Our hunters killed also several antelopes, but they were equally poor, and on the whole we rather preferred the balance of the buffalo for supper. 

People soon learn to be dainty, when they have a choice of viands. Next day, oh, there they were, thousands and thou­sands of them! Far as the eye could reach the prairie was literally cov­ered, and not only covered but crowded with them. 

In very sooth it was a gallant show; a vast expanse of moving, plunging, rolling, rush­ing life--a literal sea of dark forms, with still pools, sweeping currents, and heaving billows, and all the grades of movement from calm repose to wild agitation. 

The air was filled with dust and bellowings, the prairie was alive with animation. I never realized before the majesty and power of the mighty tides of life that heave and surge in all great gatherings of human or brute creation. 

The scene had here a wild sublimity of aspect, that charmed the eye with a spell of power, while the natural sympathy of life with life made the pulse bound and almost madden with excitement. Jove but it was glorious! and the next day too, the dense masses pressed on in such vast numbers, that we were compelled to halt, and let them pass to avoid being overrun by them in a literal sense. 

On the following day also, the number seemed if possible more countless than before, surpassing even the prairie-black­ening accounts of those who had been here before us, and whose strange tales it had been our wont to believe the natural extravagance of a mere travelers' turn for romancing, but they must have been true, for such a scene as this our language wants words to describe, much less to exaggerate. On, on, still on, the black masses come and thicken--an ebless deluge of life is moving and swelling around us!

Buffalo rank high on vacation destinations because somehow even a couple of hundred create visions of what once was the world where we live.