The American Buffalo, part 1: "Bloody Memory," and part 2: "Into the Storm" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (October 17) I watched all four hours of the latest Ken Burns documentary on PBS, The American Buffalo, which began with the account of Merriweather Lewis of the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1805 of how the Great Plains were just filled with buffalo, versus what the same piece of real estate looked like in 1895 when almost all the buffalo had been hunted to near-extinction and it took great pains to rebuild and restore the species. Of course, the story of the American buffalo is intimately intertwined with the story of Native Americans and in particular the genocidal attitude white American settlers took towards them. I watched the first half of the show, “Bloody Memory” (also the name of the companion book by Ken Burns and the show’s writer, Dayton Duncan, published by PBS along with the series), last night on PBS’s “streaming” service, and the second half, “Into the Storm,” “live” as it aired on KPBS. Oddly, the first half was considerably more engaging than the second, even though the story it told was considerably grimmer. Many of the film’s “talking heads” are Native people, especially from the Kiowa tribe, who had a particularly strong relationship with the buffalo. The Kiowa literally worshiped the buffalo – though this didn’t stop them from killing buffalo as needed. They relied on the buffalo for food, clothing and shelter, living on a diet of what was essentially buffalo jerky and other ways of drying meat to preserve it (in the pre-refrigeration days, drying meat was the only way to keep it edible long-term), using buffalo hides to make leather and both wearing clothes made of buffalo and using buffalo skins to make their tipis. The Kiowa and other Great Plains Natives, including the Comanche, prided themselves on using every part of the buffalo they killed and not wasting anything.

Before the advent of the horse – brought to the New World by Spanish conquistadores in the 16th and 17th centuries since, though the horse’s ancestors had existed in the Western Hemisphere, they had died out while the European pre-horses survived and grew – Native Americans hunted buffalo on foot. Often they wore wolf or coyote skins to camouflage their scent so they could approach buffalo herds without the animals sensing them. The advent of horses marked the beginning of the end for the Native Americans and the buffalo who fed, clothed and sheltered them; with horses, they could hunt buffalo more effectively and efficiently, though they still retained the mind-set of not killing more buffalo than they needed and using the entire animal. Unfortunately, the advent of white people on the American continents spelled doom for the Native people and their cultures in more ways than one. Not only did white people – especially white Americans – regard the Natives as essentially expendable, clutter in the way of the so-called “Manifest Destiny” of white people to rule all North America, they introduced diseases like smallpox to which Native people had no resistance. What’s more, improvements in the tanning process by which leather is made led to a vogue for buffalo-derived clothes among white Europeans, mainly because buffalo leather is a lot softer and therefore more comfortable to wear than cow leather. The final blow came with the advent of railroads in general and transcontinental railroads in particular. What Native people called “The Iron Horse” soon criss-crossed the entire country, neatly bisecting the Great Plains and the other habitats on which Native Americans had lived for years, confident that there’d always be enough grazing land for the buffalo on whom they depended to flourish. The next blow to the buffalo herds came from teams of buffalo skinners, who would go out into the West, shoot down buffalo en masse, harvest the pelts for leather and then just leave the carcasses out on the prairie to rot – which appalled the Native Americans and left the prairies literally stinking of rotting buffalo corpses. One buffalo hunter, John Cook, admitted, “As I walked through where the carcasses lay the thickest, I could not help but think that I had done wrong to make such a slaughter for the hides alone.” But he rationalized it by saying to himself that if he didn’t shoot the buffalo, someone else would and make the money from it.

Later a thriving trade developed for buffalo bones; as this show’s narration, written by Dayton Duncan and delivered by Peter Coyote, explained, “Companies in the East offered an average of $8.00 a ton for bones they could grind into fertilizer or use in refining sugar. Buffalo horns were turned into buttons, combs, and knife handles. Hooves became glue. Homesteaders in Nebraska and Kansas – desperate for cash because drought was withering their crops – turned to harvesting the skulls and skeletons still littering the Plains. One entrepreneur in Texas stacked mounds of bones along the tracks of the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad and made $25,000. ‘Buffalo bones,’ a Kansas newspaper reported, ‘are now legal tender in Dodge City.’” It’s a testament to the evil skill of capitalism that it can monetize anything, including its own carnage, for several generations. It’s not always clear from the historical records whether white Americans deliberately pursued a genocidal policy towards the Natives and saw eliminating the buffalo as key to eliminating the Native people, or whether it was just a clash of cultures between the Native tradition of communal ownership of land and other resources and the self-righteous capitalism of white Americans, in which land was just another commodity to be monetized by all possible means. The show contains a chilling reading from future President Theodore Roosevelt’s book on the buffalo: “While the slaughter of the buffalo has been in places needless and brutal, and while it is to be greatly regretted that the species is likely to become extinct, it must be remembered that its destruction was the condition necessary for the advance of White civilization in the West. Above all, the extermination of the buffalo was the only way of solving the Indian question … and its disappearance was the only method of forcing them to at least partially abandon their savage mode of life.” (No wonder Adolf Hitler, interviewed by Edward R. Murrow in 1940, said, “I don’t know why you Americans make such a fuss about the Jews. I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians.”) Whatever the reasons, in the 91 years between the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804 and the end of outright hostilities between the U.S. and Native tribes in 1895, the number of buffalo in the U.S. had plummeted from over 30 million to just a few hundred.

The second half of The American Buffalo, “Into the Storm,” is about the handful of people who brought the buffalo back from near-extinction and saved enough of the animals that they could start reproducing and recovering at least a handful of their former numbers. Among them was George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream magazine – a journal for hunters (contrary to popular belief, many hunters are also conservationists because almost the last thing they want is for the species they like to hunt to become extinct) – who along with Theodore Roosevelt formed an organization called the Boone and Crockett Club for “the preservation of the large game of this country.” Other activists who took up the cause of the buffalo included former buffalo hide hunter Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones, Smithsonian Institution taxidermist William T. Hornaday (who was anxious to preserve and stuff enough buffalo for his museum in case living buffalo became extinct); Charlie Goodnight, a Texas cattle rancher who’d married a Native woman who taught him to revere the buffalo; and Frederick Dupuis, a fur trader in South Dakota who’d also married a Native woman and who built his own herd of buffalo. When Dupuis negotiated with then-President Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Interior to sell the more than 300 buffalo he’d accumulated on his land, Congress refused to appropriate the money to pay him, so he sold his herd to the government of Canada instead for a buffalo preserve they wanted to set up in Alberta. Later it turned out that Dupuis had been more successful than he realized; instead of the 350 buffalo he’d promised Canada there were nearly 700. “Into the Storm” mentioned the Dawes General Allotment Act of 1887, which provided that the existing Native American reservations would be cut up into small plots of land, each assigned to a Native family, so they would be forced to abandon their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and become farmers. Native people generally had no idea that individuals either should or could own land – they regarded land as communal property that could be worked by anyone for the benefit of all – and so they were thrust into the middle of the capitalist economy for which they had no frame of reference at all.

But the slogan of the day was, “Kill the Indian, save the man” – which in practice meant that Native Americans were to be assimilated forcibly into the U.S. population. They were forbidden to speak their own languages, wear their own clothes or practice their own culture. Their children were forced to attend so-called “schools” where they would learn Western culture no matter what; one of the most chilling scenes in this program shows the clear discomfort of young Native children forced to wear Western dress and pose for group photos in these “schools.” Another “benefit” of the Dawes Act from the white point of view is that if the Natives were going to be farmers instead of hunter-gatherers, they would need only a fraction of the land they had been assigned under the reservation system. So it would justify further incursions in the so-called Native “reservations,” which sparked the infamous Oklahoma Land Rush and other en masse takeovers of former Native land by white settlers. Duncan’s narration mentions that many of the people working on saving the buffalo were also devotees of the so-called “scientific racism” of the late 19th century, including theories of eugenics and Madison Grant’s crackpot racism in his sensationally successful book The Passing of the Great Race. So both the destruction of the buffalo and their preservation were largely at the expense of the Native people who had for over 10,000 years lived in harmony with nature in general and the buffalo in particular. “Into the Storm” opens with various quotes, including one from environmentalist author Wallace Stegner: “We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the Earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.” While there’s an attitude of “Ken Burns’ Greatest Hits” about The American Buffalo – the show touches on subjects of previous Burns mega-documentaries including the Civil War, the national parks system, the American West and even the Roosevelt family – for the most part it’s yet another gloomy tale of the rapaciousness of capitalism and the determination of its ruling classes to wipe out any other concept of how to live with the earth besides total greed-driven domination. The American Buffalo is yet another documentation of the monstrous evil of capitalism and how it destroys everything in its path – including the increasing likelihood that greed-driven Earthlings will destroy the planet’s very ability to sustain their species due to unchecked climate change.