American Buffalo (2 page)

Fraser’s cast of buffalo nickel. Photograph courtesy of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City.

Fast-forward to 1911—the year that James Earle Fraser started working on his coin. There were only about twenty-two hundred buffalo left on the North American continent, or about two million pounds of buffalo meat. Then the buffalo meat party would have lasted only about forty-five seconds. The distribution of wild, free-ranging buffalo living on their native range looked like this:

Canada
Montana

In all probability, Fraser, who was born toward the end of the wild buffalo’s reign on the Great Plains, in 1876, would never have seen a free-roaming buffalo. Fraser claimed that the model for his coin was a buffalo named Black Diamond, which lived in a pasture at the Bronx Zoo. This is somewhat conjectural, as the Bronx Zoo never had a Black Diamond. However, the Central Park Menagerie did. The bull had been born to a pair of buffalo that once belonged to the Barnum Circus, and it lived in a very small cage. People have argued various theories concerning this confusion, either that Fraser was correct about the buffalo’s name and confused about its location or that he was correct about the location but got the name wrong. Most evidence suggests right buffalo, wrong location. The coin itself is the most compelling piece of evidence for that, because the buffalo on it looks as if he’s accustomed to tight confines. One critic of the nickel summed it up: “Its head droops as if it had lost all hope in the world, and even the sculptor was not able to raise it.”

On January 27, 1913, twenty-five presses at the Philadelphia Mint began stamping out three thousand buffalo nickels a minute. Production continued until 1938, and Black Diamond’s profile became the most widely distributed image of a buffalo in the world. In the midst of that production, in 1915, Black Diamond himself was put up on an auction block in New York City. There were no bidders. His keeper, Bill Snyder, then offered Black Diamond for private sale. Snyder was hoping to get $500, but the best he could do was $300, this from a dealer in meat specialties named August Silz. The purchaser hauled the still-alive buffalo to 416 West Fourteenth Street, in New York’s meatpacking district. The carcass yielded 1,020 pounds of meat, and his head went up on the wall of Silz’s office.

Black Diamond’s head hung in Silz’s office at least until 1918, but no one knows where it is now. On my first-ever trip to New York City I hailed a taxicab in front of Madison Square Garden, where Buffalo Bill Cody’s entire herd of twenty buffalo was killed by pneumonia while he performed there in the winter of 1886–87. The driver took me to 416 West Fourteenth Street, but I found that Mr. Silz’s enterprise had been replaced by a store called Esthete that specializes in expensive clothes. The store, decorated in the industrial-chic style, with exposed beams and brickwork, was selling a shirt for over eight times the selling price of Black Diamond’s entire carcass. I walked up to the clerk, a woman with her legs crossed and her back arched, and I said, “You know what happened in here? They slaughtered Black Diamond in this building and hung his head on the wall. That’s the buffalo from the buffalo-head nickel. Isn’t that crazy?” She glanced down nervously at her telephone and placed her hand on it. I thanked her and walked out.

Next I took the subway to the Bronx Zoo, where Fraser claimed to have sculpted Black Diamond. It was raining a cold spring rain. The zoo’s buffalo were in their pasture, soaking wet but content next to a haystack and a large stump that they like to scratch themselves against. A woman was standing under an umbrella at the fence with a small child, and she laughed when the kid looked at her and said, “I wouldn’t want to go in there. Those are big.”

In the early twentieth century, a group of well-to-do Easterners, including the artist Frederic Remington and the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, established the American Bison Society at the zoo.
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President Theodore Roosevelt, a onetime buffalo hunter and the honorary president of the ABS, believed that the total annihilation of the buffalo would do irreparable damage to the manly mystique of the American West and that it would have overall negative impacts on the American psyche. Society members financed a search for a suitable range in the West where buffalo could be restocked and protected, and they settled on land in Cache, Oklahoma. One of America’s great ironies is that not only did New York’s aristocrats help save the West’s buffalo from extinction, but they used New York’s buffalo to do it. On Friday, October 11, 1907, fifteen buffalo left the Bronx Zoo’s buffalo pasture and began a two-thousand-mile journey out west. A photographer and editor from the zoo rode in the car with the buffalo and complained of how the animals reached out of their cages with their tongues to nab the straw that he was using as a bed. In Oklahoma, the train was approached by a group of curious Comanche Indians. The adults remembered buffalo, though the children had never seen one.

I went inside the Bronx Zoo Library to talk with the librarian, Steven Johnson, about the potential whereabouts of Black Diamond’s head. Johnson has sleepy eyes and a slow, precise way about him. He told me that I’m not the first person to come looking for the head. He’s sometimes visited by numismatists, those who study and collect coins. Johnson shared with me his freshest clue about Black Diamond’s head. In the 1980s, shortly after he started working at the Bronx Zoo, a man called and said he had the head. At the time, Johnson didn’t know what the man was talking about. Later, when it occurred to him, he scoured his desk for a note or a phone number, but there was no trace of the caller.

“You think that person threw it out or something?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s the type of thing you throw away,” said Johnson. “I think it’s still around. If there was a story in the New York papers—‘Who Has Black Diamond’s Head?’—I think the answer might emerge. Until then, we’ll just have to wait and see.”

THE BUFFALO’S RELATIONSHIP
with man has been so complex and dramatic that it’s sometimes difficult for us to explain. We lean on patriotism, mythology, spirituality, even religion. The Blackfoot Indians of the northern Great Plains believed that the buffalo once hunted and ate humans, but then the Maker of People gave humans bows and flint knives and instructed them to eat the buffalo instead of the other way around. Some plains tribes did not eat the thymus glands, or sweetbreads, of buffalo, believing that they were chunks of human flesh still stuck in the buffalo’s throat. A Crow narrative explains that humans received the buffalo from giants who rode buffalo but did not eat them. The Cheyenne believed that buffalo originated from a magical sack that hung from the lodge pole of an old man who was afraid of geese. The Kiowa believed that buffalo were related to the sun.

I have to say that the buffalo was given to me by Lady Luck. There’s really no other way to explain it. I was lucky to find the buffalo skull on that warm mid-September day in Montana’s Madison Mountains. And I got lucky again in the summer of 2005 when I was walking through downtown Oxford, Mississippi, with my friend Anna Baker. She and I had spent the previous evening in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the “Official Home of the Blues.” There I ate fried catfish, fried okra, and fried hush puppies before drinking so many drinks that I decided to sell my soul to the Devil at the same crossroads where the blues legend Robert Johnson allegedly sold his. Anna wouldn’t stop the car to let me out at the proper place, and so she and I got into a big fight. My soul was still my own in the morning, but my head felt like someone was trying to take it away with a set of rusty pliers. In short, I wasn’t feeling lucky.

Just then my phone rang. It was my brother Danny up in Alaska.

“Lucky fucker!” he yelled into the phone. “You drew a buffalo tag for the Copper River!”

Earlier that year, in the spring of 2005, the state of Alaska announced that it was issuing twenty-four hunting permits for the Copper River buffalo herd. The herd wanders freely throughout hundreds of square miles of roadless wilderness in Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, a twenty-three-million-acre chunk of federally owned land in the south-central portion of the state. Along with 1,303 other people from around the country, I filled out my form and mailed in my ten bucks. My odds were one in fifty. Danny was right—lucky indeed.

A GAME OF ASSOCIATION
, a skull, a coin, the luck of the draw. It seems to me that each represents an important aspect of our relationship to the buffalo. The game, which allows me to see the interconnectedness of the world through the buffalo, represents the often hidden though pervasive presence of the animal in our culture. The skull, which sent me on its own journey, represents the buffalo itself, an animal of flesh and bone. The coin and its unsolved mystery represent man, particularly in the way that he has struggled to put the buffalo to use as an icon, a resource, and a trophy. The lottery drawing, which led to my own physical encounter with the buffalo, represents the forces that continue to draw us toward the buffalo, to join it in nature in the ancient dance of predator and prey. In my efforts to understand the buffalo, I had to follow the animals. I’ve tracked them through mountains and prairies, zoos and ranches, libraries and laboratories, museums and tourist traps. Sometimes even my own dreams. This book is my attempt to follow their trail.
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I
HAVE THREE RECURRING NIGHTMARES
. In order of increasing frequency, they are (1) that I’m reaching into dark, murky water to retrieve a muskrat from a trap, but instead of feeling the fur of the muskrat, I clasp the hair of a drowned human; (2) that I did not, in fact, graduate from college; and (3) that I’m in a small airplane that’s about to crash into an entanglement of overhead power lines.

I’m thinking of the third nightmare right now, as I happen to be sitting in an airplane on a landing strip along the western bank of the Copper River. My pilot, a man my brothers and I know as Bushpilot Dave, is sitting directly in front of me in the cockpit of his Super Cub—a small, single-engine airplane made of cloth stretched over a wooden frame that serves as the work horse, or I should say the work pony, of Alaska’s bush pilots. If I were to try to slide a chopstick between the roof of the aircraft and Dave’s head, it would be a tight fit. A deck of cards placed between his shoulders and the side windows would probably be held in place. My only view forward is when I press my cheek on the window and try to look around him. Doing so, I see up the runway. The strip ends at a low line of stunted spruce trees and then, beyond, power lines. Dave starts the airplane, then fiddles with some controls and messes with the cockpit GPS unit. Over his radio, he converses with someone about the weather. Then he gives the plane some throttle and adjusts it on the airstrip. I lose sight of the power lines for a moment. Then Dave turns the plane into the wind and there they are again, dead ahead.

It’s October. Over three months have passed since I drew my buffalo permit, and I’ve hired Dave to fly me over Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve so I can get an idea of where I’ll be going when I head into the woods tomorrow. Dave was born in the valley of the Copper River, and he’s been flying it for almost his entire life. When I arrived in the town of Glennallen this afternoon, I found Dave in his office. He was wearing the unofficial Alaskan bush pilot uniform: jeans, flannel shirt, sneakers, and a mustache. Besides airplanes, his hangar contains rubber rafts, tents, boxes of freeze-dried food, plane parts, shotgun and rifle ammunition, building materials, steel drums, and landing gear. Dave has kayak-shaped floats for landing planes on water, skis for landing on ice, and large balloon tires for landing on gravel bars or tundra. On a series of shelves covering one of the walls, I noticed rows of parcels labeled with dates. “What’s with those?” I asked.

“That’s stuff that needs to go places at whatever time is written on them,” said Dave. The parcels were prepackaged shipments of food and gear put together by gold prospectors working in the mountains. When the date on a given package comes up, Dave knows to fly the gear into whatever remote airstrip is nearest to the gold miner’s claim. Flying gold miners and their gear into the mountains is just a fraction of Dave’s business. He also flies scientists to remote field camps on top of glaciers, hunters into the mountains, hikers to alpine trails, fishermen to lakes, whitewater rafters to the headwaters of rivers, and, in my case, people who just want to get a look at the ground.

The plane lifts. The wings rock gently as we come level with the power lines. Despite my nightmares, we continue to climb, and the wires pass easily beneath us. It is the only clear sky that I will see for several days, and I take in the view. I can see Glennallen out the right window. From this perspective the town seems to be positioned in a donut hole. It is encircled by four mountain ranges—the Alaska Range to the north, the Wrangell Mountains to the east, the Talkeetna Range to the west, and the Chugach Mountains to the south. The U.S. Census Bureau classifies Glennallen as a census-designated place (CDP) of 115 square miles. The population of the CDP is 550 people, at a density of 5 persons per square mile (Manhattan’s population density is 66,490 persons per square mile). It’s the largest CDP along the entire length of the river.

The bulk of Glennallen’s citizenry lives at the intersection of the Glenn and Richardson highways. The Richardson Highway connects Valdez and Fairbanks, and the Glenn Highway connects the Richardson Highway to the town of Palmer, which is north of Anchorage and about 150 miles away.

The forest that surrounds these highways is dominated by coniferous trees, or evergreens, with scatterings of small-leaf deciduous trees such as birch, alder, and willow mixed in. In most places, the ground is frozen into a layer of permafrost that lies just a couple of feet below the soil’s surface. Precipitation from rain and melted snow does not easily penetrate permafrost, and organic matter breaks down very slowly in the cold climate, so the ground is very spongy with water, moss, and accumulated debris. Trees do not get very big in this biome; the roots have a hard time penetrating the layer of ice, and since the ice traps and holds surface water from rain and melting snow, the ground is often wet enough to drown deep-rooted plants. To survive, the trees sink only shallow roots. And because a tree’s roots act as its anchor and support, the trees tend to stay low to the ground lest a big load of snow and ice renders them so top-heavy that they tip over. In what seems like a form of compensation for their diminutive size, the trees grow so densely that foresters refer to this type of landscape as closed forest.

When people build homes in closed forest, they’ll sometimes use earthmoving equipment to clear the trees and scrape away the spongy layer of ground. This is often done in very unimaginative ways, and building lots tend to occur in perfect rectangles and squares. People with small businesses will abut their lots directly on the highway, so the asphalt forms one side of the box. People who want some privacy will plow a small driveway through the trees and then create their square of open land back in the woods a ways. These are the places that I get most curious about. When Dave and I level off, at about eight hundred feet, I sneak a couple looks at these citizens’ lives. I see magnificent arrays of utilitarian items: log living structures, stacks of firewood, work sheds, dismantled cars and trucks, dog kennels, miscellaneous sections of stovepipe and plumbing, propane tanks, boat motors, bleached moose antlers.

Glennallen passes in seconds and we veer directly over the course of the Copper River, a wide gray swirl of water flanked by broad gravel bars. The river forms to the northeast of here, at Copper Glacier, a mass of melting ice on the north end of the Wrangell Mountains. We’re headed downriver, toward the south. Out across the river, toward the east, there is no visible evidence of man. That’s Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve, where the buffalo live. The forest stretches for twenty miles or so and then gives way to mountains that rise out of the land at severe angles.

The next road to the east is 160 miles away, in Canada. It’s exhilarating to think that there’s a herd of buffalo running around out there. Of the 500,000 buffalo living on the continent today, only 4 percent are allowed to roam free; the remaining 480,000 are held captive behind fences because most people think the animals are too big and bad and dangerous to roam free. The story of how these animals came to be here is part legend and part fact, though it’s likely that the legend portions actually contain a few nuggets of truth. It begins in the early 1870s, when North America’s last remaining buffalo herds were on the verge of their final collapse. The southern Great Plains were just about cleaned out; the northern plains still had fairly abundant herds, but the animals would be gone in a decade or so.

Enter a man named Sam Walking Coyote, a.k.a. Sam Short Coyote, Running Coyote, or just plain Walking Coyote. He was from the Pend d’Oreille tribe of the Idaho panhandle, but he was married to a Salish woman who lived on the Flathead Indian Reservation on the Flathead River of northwestern Montana. The people of the Flathead valley had always been buffalo hunters, though their own land had never had many. Every year, hunting parties would voyage across the Continental Divide to hunt on Blackfoot land to the east of the Rockies, where the animals were thick. These hunting trips dismayed the Jesuit missionaries who lived among the Flatheads, because they caused significant interruptions to their job of “civilizing” the Indians. Father Jerome D’Aste complained bitterly about this in the 1870s. “The passion for buffalo is a regular fever among them and could not be stopped.”

This “fever” was certainly part of Sam Walking Coyote’s makeup, and when he fell out of favor with his wife, he crossed the Continental Divide to go hunting and decided to stay for a couple years in the valley of the Milk River. He took a new wife, a Blackfoot woman. This was a serious violation of the Catholic ban on polygamy, and Sam Walking Coyote worried about it so much that the Blackfeet told him that maybe he should go back home and patch things up with the Jesuits. As a goodwill token to his first wife’s people, he tamed six buffalo and herded them back across the mountains. He and the buffalo arrived in the Flathead valley in the spring of 1873. He was promptly beaten by the Indian police, either of their own volition or else under the orders of the Jesuits. This pissed off Sam Walking Coyote, and he decided to keep the buffalo for himself. By 1884 his herd had increased to thirteen head. He sold the buffalo to two ranchers on the reservation for $3,000 in gold and then went down to Missoula to get drunk. Days later, he turned up dead and penniless beneath the Higgins Street Bridge.

The two ranchers, Michel Pablo and Charles Allard, bragged that their buffalo were “as good an investment as real estate.” They ran the herd like a business, and the business grew and grew. In the latter years of the 1890s there were fewer than one thousand buffalo in the United States, but the two ranchers owned more than half of them. Just ten years earlier, complete buffalo hides were selling for $2 or $3 apiece, but now a person could sell just a severed head for $100 and then sell the same animal’s hide for another two to five hundred bucks. Pablo and Allard refused to sell breeding-aged pairs of the animals because they didn’t want to create competition for themselves. Instead, they sold single bulls to zoos and parks, and also to private individuals who wanted pet buffalo, which was a developing fad.

Charles Allard died just before the new century, and his family sold off his share of the buffalo in small bunches—some to taxidermists, some to private collectors, a small herd to the Conrad family of Kalispell, Montana. Pablo kept his until 1907, when he was up to six hundred head. Then trouble struck. Because he was married to a Salish woman, he had been allowed to graze his buffalo free of charge on reservation lands. But that year the federal government essentially deregulated the reservation and opened tribal lands to purchase by white settlers. Whites bought prime reservation land from Indians who wanted cash instead of land, and other whites received free land that they acquired through squatter’s rights. Soon Pablo had no place to graze his buffalo.

He sought land in the United States for his herd to roam free, but the U.S. government didn’t want them, because it already owned close to a hundred buffalo and didn’t see the need to have more. Pablo made arrangements to sell the herd to Canada at $250 apiece. He spent the next five years trying to round them up. It was a fiasco. Some years he caught a couple hundred, one year he caught only seven. What he did catch was shipped to Canada’s Wainwright Preserve, east of Edmonton, Alberta. Some died in transit, literally rampaging themselves to death inside the train cars. Others had to be shot to protect the cowboys who were trying to corral them. Pablo ordered twenty-five killed because they were too wild to deal with. In the meantime, the buffalo that remained on the reservation continued to breed. By the time he finally quit trying to round them up, in 1912, Pablo had shipped 695 buffalo to Alberta and had grossed $170,000 on the sale. About seventy-five buffalo remained on the reservation, too wild to catch. A valley that held the United States’ largest buffalo herd just six years before now contained just a remnant.

The American Bison Society countered the U.S. government’s belief that it already had enough buffalo by arguing that a single prairie fire or an outbreak of disease could easily kill off half of the publicly owned buffalo in the country. This worried President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed legislation enabling the United States to purchase thirteen thousand acres of Flathead Reservation from the Indians for $30,000. The American Bison Society spent over ten grand to purchase the nucleus herd for the Flathead Reservation land. It bought thirty-four animals from the Conrad family of Kalispell, who had purchased them from Charles Allard, who had purchased them from Sam Walking Coyote. Three other buffalo were donated, and two of those were also direct descendants of Sam Walking Coyote’s original six animals.
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In October 1909, these thirty-seven buffalo were released into the fences of the National Bison Range and then watched as the remainder of Michel Pablo’s now-wild buffalo were killed off by poachers outside the fence.