Main Street, Wyoming; 716; Bison I

Main Street Wyoming is made possible by Kennicott energy company proud to be part of Wyoming's future in the coal and uranium industries which includes exploration mining and production. And the Wyoming Council for the Humanities enriching the lives of Wyoming people through the study of Wyoming history values and ideas. The story of the American rising is the story of the American West. Join us on Main Street Wyoming for our two part program which examines the past present and future of this American symbol. See how this animal serves as a window for man's changing attitudes regarding the natural world. You. Will use it. There Buffalo is there have a long history on the North America.

We know about. American artifacts on earth. Through history. Generation to the next. But we also know about because of the chronicles of early explorers and artists. I think the story of surviving on the scene in the early exploration days of the West is a very interesting one. The University of Art Museum along with the Department of Anthropology and the American Heritage Center sponsored an exhibit buffalo in our culture the very early explorations did not have artists along there were there were all kinds of scientists cynics and journalists recording information and journals and and in books but there was really not an artistic record that began until approximately the late 20s or early 30s. At that time George Allen was one of our earliest

artists who made a real concerted effort to record as much as he could about the tribes what their life was like and what they looked like. And so he would go on these explorations living in the forts and going into the tribes in their villages and recording as much as he could. He did a document called letters and notes. And so not only was he recording artistically what he was saying but he was recording all of his observations and written form as well. The buffalo mask is put over the head and generally have a strip of skin hanging to it of the whole length of the animal with the tail attached. When one becomes fatigued of the exercise he signifies it by bending quite forward that another draws a bow upon him and hits him with a blunt arrow and he falls like a buffalo.

For thousands of years American Indian tribes followed the migration of the buffalo and their lives were bound together. Buffalo provided them not only food but shelter and clothing as well. The animals were a central part of the Native American spiritual and cultural life. Each animal killed was considered a gift and revered and each part of the animal was put to good use. In the early seventeen hundreds the Plains Indians acquired the horse and with their way of life flourished. Well I think the Indians really started prior to the arrival of artists on the scene I think there's a progression that you can see across the country. We are looking at this part of the country in Wyoming in the mountain plains

certainly the time from. Oh I would say the 1860s 1880s mark the greatest change when we were really settling this part of the country the Pony Express started the colonization of the west and started the Union Pacific have come across the state. And that of course had great impact on bison because we divided the herds and of course we started to see bison as a commercial product. And so the the mass extinction near extinction of the bison occurred during that time. In 1871 the process was perfect and a worldwide market for hundreds of thousands of hives were shipped from the plains. The process of settling the West is also a process of destroying it. And in about 1890 named Frederick Turner kind of proclaimed the frontier dead. This is in 1893

and I think at that time you know the country was really looking for. An identity and had had a large landscape of the West was one of the symbolic things that we had to begin to stand for freedom and independence from Europe and all of those kinds of things the bison was very much a part of that landscape and became a very important icon in American culture. Which stood for freedom and power and independence and all those things. By the turn of the century the great buffalo herds grazing the American planes were gone. From the plains where the Native American tribes who depended on the buffalo for their sustenance. For the loss of the buffalo and its way of life. In Wyoming are states why design was officially adopted

at the University of Wyoming persuaded me to reverse the design turn to face the wind. Powerful image for American. Society. And all ways of life. I actually became interested in bison when I was about five or six years. Rick Prager teaches at Eastern Wyoming college and has a lifelong love of bison. When I saw those nickels in Indiana one side and a buffalo in the other one. And from that point on I began to collect pictures. I look for anything I could because I

lived in northwest Missouri and there not a lot of bison there. So I collected everything I could get. And from that point on. Anywhere I went I looked for bison in zoos in pictures. And we got TV. If there was a Western I looked bison. And that's where I was. And it's been a love affair. From then till now. Rick is a biologist and has studied the bison behavior including feeding and grazing patterns. First of all the bison is primarily a grass feeder. They do eat other kinds of plants Oliva need the cambium off a tree after they take the bark off the dandelions. Certain kinds of thistles but they're primarily grass feeders. And when you look. At the Great Plains as a whole say going from southern Texas there up into Canada. You have a distribution of grasses going from it's thousands of miles.

Goshen County where Rick lives still has evidence of the bison herds which once fed there. And when you go around the rim of this country and it's sandstone you have cliffs and you have areas that would be easy for bison to get into this basin and to get out of it because there are grasses on the high plains. And this is primarily a grassland and they literally were grooves in the rock. By moving from place to place year after year. So we know that they were all approximately 30 to 40 maybe 50 million head of bison in the Great Plains and grass was their primary food that was their resource. You're around. These vast herds of bison migrated across the Great Plains region. When people think about migration sometimes they think about animals moving hundreds and hundreds of miles like birds flying from here to South America. Bison do migrate but they do it locally. Now the bison that were here will say in Goshen hall.

They didn't get far from Goshen home or any part of the year. Think about it this way if 30 to 40 to 50 million head of bison had migrated to Texas. This continent would have tilted. Texas would probably be a lower elevation than it is today. But the bison up and down the Great Plains moved in what I call big circles. They did two primary things on the Prairie. They groomed it. And they fertilized. One. There are those who believe bison should be returned to the Great Plains. It's called the bison Commons concept. We asked Eric what he thought of it. Am I for putting bison. Back on the you know on the Great Plains completely. No I'm not. Because I respect other people's rights to do what they do in terms of ranching. Before you have public lands where you have huge tracts of grassland and sagebrush you

have areas where you could put bison back and they would literally bring that prairie back to the components that had four to five hundred years ago. But I do believe that there are areas where we could put bison in and everybody would benefit from that kind of the native animal back on native grasses doing natural things. Because bison thrive on native grasses there's been a dramatic increase in raising them on ranches across the west. Rick has plans on joining them bison ranching in the last 20 years has become. A viable. Industry in the United States. In Canada. Bison ranching today. In terms of the demand. They can't keep up with the demand for bison. In other words people still have to breed them. They have to grow up. There's a foreign market there's a market here in the United States for all kinds of bison products. The meat. The hide.

The bones. Every part of the bison is in the meat. And you can hardly name an animal that has that kind of demand on it today. In fact there are bison today in every state in the United States. Rick's passion for bison is shared by others who believe this uniquely American animal holds a special place in our nation's history and future. But to me the bison symbolizes America. It's all up front. It's a bison. It's an animal that's built to stand and fight. It really doesn't run. It's an animal was here it didn't need man's help. And it doesn't need need man's help today. It's doing very well in every aspect. So to me the bison is what I might call the monarch of the place. It stands by itself. Other animals depend on it. The Indians depended on the bison as their commissary. Source and one animal in North America to me. That has its place in my heart. And in your United States as well.

Eyes until sight are scattered across the state of Wyoming. But the most significant location is to the east of Devil's Tower at a place called the boar buffalo jump. The family had been in this area since 1882. Eight years before Wyoming became a state the Bork family settled in the territories northeast corner Doris vore married their youngest son and has spent her adult life on the ranch. Still in the ranching business when. Doris described how they discovered that the sinkhole on their property was an ancient buffalo jump it was discovered when the interstate plans were being formulated. When they. Came and laid out their plans on our kitchen table. I said you're not going over that hole.

And I said oh yes we are and I said no you're not well why not. And I said because I don't know why not but you're not. But oftentimes when we come over here to work we drive up to the edge of this hole and just sit here because it just drew us here. What we didn't know why and we'd we'd watch the deer run out and we'd watch rabbits down in there and different things and just. Just enjoy the view and the awesome part of it. One of the sample soil cores taken at the sinkhole revealed that the planned highway would cover a premiere archaeological site. But we had. People interested in it right away there was a couple a man flew up from Florida they wanted to buy it right away. If we were interested in the financial according to Dr. rare there are enough skulls down here to make each one of us four kids a millionaire. So we just put it on a back burner and then and. Then

when my husband was dying. After our forty eight years together. Why we had. He said I want to do something with that. Well my father as he was in his last years of his life a terminal disease told us kids one day that he wanted to turn this buffalo jump over to us kids. And he said but before I do I want to know. What you're going to do with it. The family decided they wanted the site to become an educational and research center. They donated it to the University of Wyoming with the understanding that the center was to be built within 12 years. Seven years have already passed. And we gave them a time limit. And they just went back to sleep.

The interest wasn't there apparently so. The last thing we want is the sale of rubber Tomahawks etc.. I mean we're not interested in the money we're interested in developing this into something that not only we as a family will be proud of but the whole county and the state will be proud of and hopefully the whole nation because according to Dr. rare this is an extremely unique site. No. Gate is the local UW extension educator and serves on the board a buffalo foundation board. Today what you're going to see is the hole in the ground and some of our interpretive sites are signs and so on and. We do distributed brochures and that sort of thing that kind of explain it. But the larger vision of course is to have a world class facility here that will interpret the site for them and have guided tours and ongoing

excavation and that sort of thing and that when we get to that stage and we only have it for a few weeks a year now it'll be a major contribution I think to people's experience in this whole region. There's a lot of interest and Indians there's a lot of interest in history in general. And this site is. Spectacular and it's the kind of thing I think that people would commonly drive hundreds of miles out of their way to see if they're into that sort of experience. But here they don't have to right next to the other states. It's kind of between places that they want to be. So you know it's an ideal. World. The site has among the best preservation of any site that we've ever encountered. Some of the arrow points in the upper level still have pine pitch that hearing to the end.

Archaeologist Colorado which is visited by thousands of tourists. Dr. Charles rary has worked at the baffling time since the 1970s. Describe that for us right. Basically of course to protect the sight we sort of backfilled it when we were done with our original test excavations in the early 70s and now we're working here each summer and we tend to cover with you can see it behind us here we cover with real bolted down plywood lids and black plastic and then Mordred instead so really it's just kind of covered back up here at this time that's what we have to do to protect it. We're standing here on the bottom of this sinkhole and under our feet about starting about four feet down are 22 levels middens huge piles of butchered bone. They represent the killing of about and butchering of about 20000 animals as near as we can figure all of these huge swaths of butchered bone are sprinkled liberally with arrow points and

Chip stone butchering tools and ornaments and dead dogs and different things. The fact is that is just a tremendous accumulation maybe indeed the largest kill site in the world. Tremendous enqueue accumulation of the set remnants of a killing and butchering bison. Site development plans include visitors being able to see the levels of bones beneath the ground. This life sized painting shows the side exposed. The first things we asked Dr. were to tell us about the time dating method used at the baths not just to give us a sense of its sound. We have several dating methods that I won't go into in detail indeed but certain dating methods that indicate that this thing was used for only about three hundred years the bottom of it's about 80 15:00 in the top of it four feet under our feet is about eighty eight hundred. So all of those killing and butchering of bison took place in about three hundred years.

It's a pretty I mean the pictures really can be pretty amazing but don't do justice to what's really under us here it's pretty incredible site preservation is the best of any killed site that I've ever seen in any place. It just has a lot of things going on. The accumulation of bone here just boggles the mind. You know we were giving guided tours to a lot of visitors there were thousand visitors this summer and trying to convey to them the scale of this thing when all they were seeing was a small unit opened in one level. And we would say well this represents the killing of seven or eight bison and you can see the different elements that show whistle that's 5000 pounds of meat. I would say 5000 10000 15000 25000 that's thirty five thousand forty five thousand pounds of meat you get the picture. And they say well you know and then I'd start Well you know if you took these boom levels and unstacked them and laid them side by side you'd have blown a hundred feet wide going for half a mile. They seem to be impressed by that so they said in fact if you took all the fic levels or spread them out to go for five miles that's how much bone is down there. However when I came back and found the crew talking to them you know if you took all these bones and laid them in the

end they would go for 2500 miles. That's enough that's enough. But then they came up with one more. Where I found them telling the visitors that if you had to buy all this buffalo burger at Safeway it cost you seventeen million dollars. So there's different ways of looking at it but it's pretty impressive. Doctor various descriptions brought to life for us the world of the planes and. The first thing to realize is that when you do this buffalo jumping as it was called It was a dirty nasty dangerous business people were killed doing this people were I mean you're out in the middle of this extremely dangerous large land based on foot because this is all pretty horse. And it was a dangerous business. You had to have incredible expertise about the bison where you would be able to gather them up and get them clumping into larger groups and they wanted to be in for and bring them along without stampeding them for miles and keep them in a narrow corridor and finally only in the last 200 yards or something you would stampede to maybe in some instances even turn them at a right

angle so they could kind of building a little more out of control. And then the front ones they're really agile creatures when they saw the precipice they put on the brakes and tried to stop but the back ones in the stampede would crowd them over maybe even follow them over and all the death and confusion. So it took months of preparation and weeks of careful work and then finally all culminating on this one dramatic stampede. You know it's hard to sit here and imagine but if we were standing here seeing all those buffalo coming over the edge you'd be pretty wild. Then the real activity began to flurry because then suddenly your can confronted with ton after town after town of meat and this meat met the difference between starvation and survival in some winters. It certainly meant the difference for with a secure winter where you would be telling stories to the children and visiting relatives and working on art objects as opposed to going out freezing hands and feet running buffalo and we do have accounts of that. So if they could get all this meat put into storable products it was really a nice winter and they depended on the stores so they were able to do a kind of an assembly line like butchering using stone

tools that we really can't comprehend. I mean imagine you've got two or three days to put 300000 pounds of meat and pemmican and hides and storable products so they had the ability to work in teams and they would take those buffalo skin them turn them certain ways break off certain bones break certain articulations and just begin to assembly line pound after pound town after town of meat out of this out of this hole. They had to do it before it spoiled and so forth. And in fact something like 60 to 80 percent of a lot of the manger major limb bones are gone because they took those away for further processing rendering them down from morrow and so forth. We have insights like this to my knowledge nowhere north america real evidence of dramatic amounts of wastage like you sometimes hear. To say that the Native Americans wasted the Buffalo is based on a few exceptions possibly or exaggerations even these things were intensely butchered. And then after that's all gone and this stacked up bona settling down that's what we have interest here. It's estimated that it would take 200 to 400 people to accomplish the task of

killing butchering and preserving the buffalo I think you would cut this meat into narrow strips a kind of a jerky like fashion and hang that overacts over bushes or whatever to get it dried quickly. And what happens is it gets a coarser glaze on it right away after an in and a good sunny day even if it's cooler weather it will get a glaze on it that will keep the flies from laying eggs in and so forth it begins to sort of dry out and preserve slowly from there. So you do that and then you have like rawhide part fresh major called almost like saddle bags and you pack it all in there and you can ship hundreds of pounds of it around the other thing you do is you take the cylinders of the bone crank them open with a sort of speak with the anvil stone and a hammer and you break open the bones they break out certainly in those large Buffalo bones have like two cubes of butter in there tomorrow you know same thing we have in our suit and stuff but it's more when you set that aside then you take the articular ends of the bones the joining hands which have kind of little pockets little you've seen and when you saw bone have a little round pocket in there and it's hard to get that bone grease out of it

sort of like morrow with a little bit different. And you boil that in ceramic pots and stuff and it boils at the top and you skim it off and you literally get tons of that. Then you mix the dried meat kind of powdered up into a paste you mix that with the maro in the bone grease and put it into a cleaned out inside out in testifying a sausage like sort of thing like our ancestors used to do indeed. And you get pemmican. I mean if you've heard of pemmican extremely nutritious portable food you seal the ends with grease and it will keep without refrigeration for a year or even two years. This is the kind of site where we can really celebrate the heritage of the Native American in this region. This is the kind of site that we can use to get people aware of this kind of cultural diversity to learn the real story and indeed we hope to get Native American folks here talking just about that to people. The other thing I would hope the people one would understand is that we're indeed involved in this development campaign to try to get a research and

educational center here so that we can bring out all these stories and more. We want people to be looking right over our shoulder. We want them to ask questions I don't like this kind of Glastonbury and there's something going on and meanwhile somebody sort of a Park Ranger type of person a professional. But they've given the same rap about 10000 times. And you can tell by the end of the summer we want them to talk to students that are actively learning how to do this and so forth. And it can be done here. Magically over the past herds now living in mountain valley on the herds in the greater. Thanks to my dad. For a copy of this or any mainstream Wyoming send a check or money order to Wyoming Public

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