Small Wonders--Bison/bison/bison

The bison on the Woodbury County Courthouse

It's not his fault he's cracked. That's just time and maybe the fickle prairie seasons all around, maybe a flaw in construction. He deserves more than he got from the Woodbury County Courthouse. I mean, that place is a work of art, and there he is, aboard a national treasure, a National Historic Landmark with a splittin' headache. So many features of the Courthouse are worth celebrating that this fella' gets lost--he's out in the alley. You want to see him?--look hard. What I'm saying is the buffalo, the American bison, deserves better, deserves more.

Consider these bullet points:

        >>>Our pork and beef have no equal, but the continent's biggest fur-bearing mammals get by on grass, herbs, twigs, and shrubs, and still tip the scales at a ton. Not only are American bison vegetarians, they can buck winters cold enough to shrivel icicles.

        >>>We should be calling them “the American Bison,” but they’re known as "buffalo." Why? Several worthy answers exist; but just avoid the mess and call them what you’d like. Scientifically, identified by genus/species/sub-species, they're "bison/bison/bison." Isn’t that cute? “Bison/bison/bison.

        >>>Even though the guys weigh as much as a defensive line, they're not turtles but tailbacks: 35 miles per hour! And their trachea are furnace ducts. They’re not just sprinters, they’re cross-country stars.

        >>>Their vision is sub-par, but their 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 see more than you and me.

        >>>Jesuit missionaries, 150 years ago, understood the spiritual relationship Native America had with the buffalo and didn't like it because the hunt was way more important to them than the mass. They started to believe the Lakota worshipped the buffalo. About that, they weren’t far off.

        >>>The bloodbath of the 1870s killed millions, reducing a herd of 30 million or more to fewer than a thousand. 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 well-heeled city boys to come all the way out here and save them.

        >>>Trainloads of shooters used to come out here to shoot buffalo from open windows of railroad cars. A man named Buffalo Jones, the first superintendent at Yellowstone, claimed he'd killed thousands and, he said, “lived to regret it.” Teddy Roosevelt gave him the Yellowstone job, which, back then was little more than maintaining 30+ million head.

        >>>When Prince Maximilian came up the Missouri in 1830, he found whole herds drowned, 1800 or more. All of that put up a smell so putrid, he wrote in his diary, that he couldn’t handle 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 sorrow.

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 never seen before, something that took their breath away, their first huge herd of buffalo.

Next time you’re near the courthouse, cut through the east alley and pay your respects. They used to own the place, after all. He could use a lift.