Kids & Buffalo

Like most people, not knowing anything about a subject doesn't keep me from making assumptions. Strong, firmly held, bet-the-ranch assumptions. And then being shocked when proven wrong.

So it was when, sent out to photograph a family tour in Yellowstone one year, I watched a handful of kids between 12 and 15 years of age spot a group of buffalo for the very first time in their short lives. I thought they'd be transfixed. Instead they paused, looked at them impassively the way we might view a clump of black-and-white milkers on a hillside in Vermont, and walked on toward the bubbling mud pots. I was stunned.

On the van that morning I'd discovered that they'd never seen a bison in the flesh. Or in the fur, which seems more apt in this case. Immediately a photo leapt into my brain, a close-up of four young faces as they stared in wonder at a 2,000-pound living locomotive able to leap a barb-wire fence in a single bound. An animal who, disguised as a mild-mannered cud chewer, fights a never-ending battle to prove itself otherwise - completely, utterly otherwise - if people don't leave it alone.

Our guides that morning had made this very keep-your-distance point in no uncertain terms, and so I figured my chance to catch that shot of awe was even more assured. When we entered the park my hopes were ratcheted up even farther, for a ranger had provided handouts showing a buffalo standing on the ground, a man nearby but traveling through the air (with a singularly surprised expression on his face), and his camera on its way to the ground. The drawing was accompanied by the warning that a buffalo can run at three times the speed of the average human, plus the words "These animals may appear tame but are wild, unpredictable, and dangerous."

Yet none of this had produced the effect I had expected. Why?

At lunch I quizzed the parents, once the kids had wolfed down their bison burgers and taken off, excitedly, to explore the cavernous and historic Old Faithful Inn. These mothers and fathers seemed amused at my befuddlement, and exchanged knowing smiles as they explained things to non-parent me.

"They've grown up seeing them," one mother said. "In books and magazines, on TV, and full-screen at the movies. You can't expect kids today to react the way we did years ago."

"That's right. They can Google 'em up any time they want on the computer," another mother added. "Or think how many they saw just in "Dances With Wolves"!

A father said I'd misinterpreted their reaction. They weren't overwhelmed, granted, but neither were they uninterested. As they saw more buffalo through the week, he promised, I'd hear them asking questions. "And later, when they're back home, they'll remember seeing them in real life. All the pictures will mean more to them then."

He was right. I did hear questions, from how many buffalo there used to be and why there aren't more now, to how the Indians killed them and what they made from their hides. I was impressed with the questions, and with some of the guides' answers, and especially with the fact that when the guides didn't know they said so, promised to find out and get back with the kids on it - and did.

Here's some of what I learned that week:

Numbers: It is estimated that before the commercial hunting of the late 1800s, between 30 and 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains. By 1889 there were only some 600 left.

One of the first European descriptions of the buffalo, & how they were used by the Indians: It was the early 1540s when Spanish conquistador Francisco de Coronado and his men wound their way north out of Mexico to near present-day Santa Fe, then east across the seemingly never-ending Great Plains into central Kansas. The survivors of that expedition called the American buffalo "cows" and "oxen," and said of them:

...they are the food of the natives, which drink the bloud hot, and eate the fat and often ravine the flesh raw...That which they eate not raw, they rost, or warm rather at a fire of Oxe-dung, and holding the flesh with his teeth, cut it with Rasors of stone. These Oxen are of the bignesse of our Bulls...haire...which is like wooll...They are the meat, drinke, shooes, houses, fire, vessels [dishes], and their masters [the Indians] whole substance.

Noted with respect in many explorers' journals were the practical uses of almost every part of the buffalo, from the tail (used as a flyswatter), to the eyes at the other end (which were boiled down to make glue). The meat was eaten, the skins worn as coats or used as blankets and as wrappings around the poles of teepees. The tendons served as tough thread to sew the skins together, and also as bowstrings.

Hair was used as insulation, and for its softness (as in winter moccasins), and braided into rope. Skins that weren't tanned (using a mixture of brain, bone marrow, and liver) became rock-hard rawhide, which could be soaked into pliability and then dried and shaped into kettles, cradles, cups, war shields, drums....

The animal's large stomach was cleaned (no doubt many times) and, along with the bladder and large intestine, served as containers for food and water. The shoulder blade, strapped to a long stick with rawhide (which was soaked and then dried in the sun), served as a hoe.

How many buffalo remain today? In the United States, some 150,000.

by Dennis Coello