Happy October! Less than two weeks from now, Ken Burns’s newest documentary, The American Buffalo, will debut on PBS on October 16, 2023 and October 17, 2023. In honor of this upcoming show and National Bison Day, which is coming up on November 4, I decided to devote this month’s Missing Pieces issue to America’s national mammal, the bison.
By the late 1800s, the American bison was almost extinct. However, the species is alive and well today thanks to the conservation efforts of people like President Theodore Roosevelt.
At first, TR was similar to others of the era and was eager to hunt the big game animal, killing his first bison in 1883. However, near the end of the 1800s, he began to realize how close bison were to extinction; their numbers had dropped from 30-40 million to around 1,000.
As he wrote in a handwritten draft of a chapter on bison in the 1890s, TR was much more despondent about the species:
“Mixed with the eager excitement of the hunter I felt a certain half-melancholy feeling as I gazed on these bison, themselves part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race.”
After this realization and upon the urging of people like conservationist Ernest Harold Baynes, TR began to devote himself to the preservation of the species. In his Fourth Annual Message in December 1904, he became the first—and only—sitting president to argue for bison conservation:
“We owe it to future generations to keep alive the noble and beautiful creatures which by their presence add such distinctive character to the American wilderness.”
TR also used his position as president to encourage support for the newly formed American Bison Society (ABS), which was created in 1905 to raise public awareness about the American bison and to save the species from extinction. As TR wrote in a 1907 letter to Baynes, he admired the work of the ABS—which also had elected him honorary president:
“I feel real and great interest in the work being done by the American Bison Society to preserve the buffalo – the biggest of the American big game, probably on the whole the most distinctive game animal of this continent, and certainly the animal which played the greatest part in the lives of the Indians, which most deeply imprest [simplified spelling version of impressed] the imagination of all the old hunters and early settlers. It would be a real misfortune to permit the species to become extinct, and I hope that all good citizens will aid the society in its efforts for its preservation.”
This letter was then published in the January 1908 issue of Country Life in America at the beginning of an article by Baynes entitled “The Fight to Save the Buffalo.”
Just as TR wanted all citizens to be involved in government, all were invited to join in the work of the ABS: “The American Bison Society is trying to accomplish a work which will benefit the whole country, and it asks the whole country to bear a hand.”
Although many of those who were involved in or who contributed to the ABS were men, there were also many women who joined the cause. All told, women contributed $1,227 of the $10,560.50 raised for the bison fund, according to the 1908 annual report. (In 2023 dollars, that’s roughly $40,000 out of $350,000.)
As William Temple Hornaday wrote in the 1908 report, the organizers of the ABS were surprised by the number of contributions that came from women:
“Notwithstanding the widespread interest taken by women in the protection of birds, it was not expected (by the undersigned) that the plan for the creation of a national bison herd in Montana would strongly appeal to them.”
The report specifically calls out two women of note: Emma L. Mee, the first person who donated to the cause, and Ethel Randolph Clark Thayer (known as “Mrs. Ezra R. Thayer” in the report), who raised the second largest sum “outside of the President’s office.” Thayer was even elected to serve on the Board of Managers—and appears to be the only woman of the twenty-six members.
Thanks to the efforts of pioneering conservationists like TR and Ethel Randolph Clark Thayer, the ABS worked with several organizations in the early 1900s to reintroduce bison into the wild.
The first animal reintroduction occurred in 1907 when fifteen bison were shipped from the Bronx Zoo to the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge and Game Preserve in Oklahoma. The last reintroduction occurred in the Pisgah National Forest and Game Preserve in North Carolina in 1919.
Today about one-third of all wild bison in North America live in herds on public lands—roughly 10,000 bison. To learn more about bison conservation efforts today, I’d invite you to listen to fellow oral historian Francine Spang-Willis’s podcast series, Becoming Wild Again in America: The Restoration and Resurgence of the Pablo-Allard Bison Herd.
TR believed so strongly in bison as an American icon that he thought the lion sculptures outside the New York Public Library should be bison. Do you agree with TR, or do you think our twenty-sixth president got it wrong this time? Cast your vote in the poll below.
So cool that Buffalo were in NC!
TR’s observation: “[T]heir presence add such distinctive character to the American wilderness” catches the essence of the creature and the landscape of America. Great quotation!