****I'll grant you our pork and beef have no equals. It may be healthfully significant, however, to point out that the continent's biggest fur-bearing mammal get by on grass, herbs, twigs, and shrubs, and still tip the scales at a ton or more, some of them at least. American bison are vegetarians. True story, and there's this too: they can buck winters that'll shrivel icicles.
*****Even though we should be calling them “the American Bison,” they’re more familiarly known as "buffalo." Why? Good question, and there are several worthy answers. But listen, just avoid the conflict and call them what you’d like. Scientifically, by the way, identified by genus/species/sub-species, they're rightfully named "bison/bison/ bison." Isn’t that cute?
*****Even though the guys weigh as much as an entire defensive line, they're not turtles. They're tailbacks, 35 miles per hour. And, get this! Because their trachea are furnace ducts, they’re not just sprinters, they’re marathoners.
*****I'll grant you their vision is sub-par, but those eyes are positioned a mile apart on their massive heads to operate like a thousand-dollar wide-angle lens. They don't see better, but they sure as anything see more than you and me.
*****This just in—45,000 thousand people applied for a license to hunt buffalo in the Grand Canyon last year. Only 12 permits were issued.
*****Jesuit missionaries, 150 years ago, understood the spiritual relationship Native America had with the Buffalo and didn't like it. The hunt was so important to the people that the preparation, the gathering, and the trek itself was heavy laden with more religious seriousness than the black robes could muster. It was almost as if they worshipped the buffalo, the frustrated clergymen thought. They weren't all wrong.
*****The obscene bloodbath of the 1870s killed millions, reducing a herd of 30 million or more to fewer than a thousand, most of those few remaining at Yellowstone. When Teddy Roosevelt, who’d hunted bison himself, got wind of their near-extinction, he created a committee of men with big bucks, dedicated to bison preservation. How about that?--it took a bunch of well-heeled city boys, to come all the way out here and save them.
*****Trainloads of shooters used to come out on the railroad and shoot buffalo from the open windows of expensive touring cars. One of them, a man named Buffalo Jones, the first superintendent at Yellowstone Park, claimed he'd killed thousands and, he told people he'd “lived to regret it.” Teddy Roosevelt gave him the Yellowstone job, which, back then was little more than maintaining the herd.
*****Other than predator hunters, a buffalo's most dangerous predator is water. When Prince Maximilian came up the Missouri River in 1830, he found whole herds drowned, 1800 hundred or more. Put up a smell so putrid, he wrote in his diary, that he couldn’t handle his supper.
*****That famous “Buffalo nickel” was created by James Earl Fraser, who used a bison named Black Diamond, who was, when he created the image, locked up in some New York zoo, all of which explains why real Buffalo people claim the beast on our nickels looks so forlorn, head bowed in abject sadness.
*****American bison injure more people than any other wildlife species in Yellowstone--25 people from 2000 to 2015, most of them approaching the bison when attacked. Half were trying to grab a portrait. For the record, 10 were thrown into the air, 9 were head- butted, and six were gored; almost half required hospitalization.
What I'm saying is, as beautiful as the courthouse is, our buffalo deserves better. When Lewis and Clark came up the Missouri, they took a sidetrack to an odd little hill north of Vermillion, climbed to the top--it was beastly hot--and got a big look at a big world. Out there--not far from here--they spotted something they'd not seen before, something that took their breath away, their first huge herd of buffalo.
Sometime soon, head out to Broken Kettle. You might get lucky. Still, they're still an inspiration.
No comments:
Post a Comment