Numbers
I’ve read the literature on the disastrous history of Buffalo National Park, and all I see are numbers. That's what happens when a being becomes a commodity; he, she, they become interchangeable—just numbers.
20 to 60 million bison ranged North America before colonial contact.
By 1888 there were 103 wild bison in North America.
By 1912, 748 bison had arrived at Buffalo National Park from Michel Pablo’s herd.
The estimated carrying capacity of the 583 square kilometres fenced preserve was 5,000 bison.
By 1922 6,780 bison were sharing the limited resources with large deer, moose, and elk populations.
The bison population peaked at 8,832 in 1925.
6,673 were shipped on trains and barges to Wood Buffalo National Park between 1925 and 1928.
Over 19,141 had been slaughtered over the park's 30-year existence.
Just numbers.
So let me try again. Let’s see if I can turn these numbers back into bison.
Herds of bison had continually moved through the Neutral Hills. The land and the bison had sustained one another.
The English name for this region reveals part of this relationship; Some settler sources claim it was a borderland between the Blackfoot territory in the southwest and the Cree territory in the northeast, or in other words a no-man’s land “conveniently” devoid of Indigenous people (16). Still other settler sources, which at least stem from “Native” oral accounts,” describe the Neutral Hills as a “Sprawling, spiritually significant place where warring entities were forced to accommodate each other” (Colpitts 428). I am inclined to believe the latter, that this place of cooperation and Indigenous “management” had emerged in tandem with bison “land management.”
Bison wintered here, and they compacted the arid land, helping it hold onto precious moisture. The reciprocity goes deeper though. These cows and bulls felt their way across the grassland, stems and blades tickling and poking their nostrils as soil stirred up by a roving muzzle and probing tonged was inhaled. I have seen this constant grazing and heard the sharp tearing of grasses. What I missed is a more intimate interconnection between bison and the thousands of "microbes; fungi, bacteria, and protozoa" that populate each square centimetre of forage. This assemblage of microscopic life is specific to the plant he or she has just eaten and is essential to creating the right balance of microbial life in the first of his or her three stomachs. These microscopic beings have the enzymes to break down the cellulose in the grasses the bison eats; they could not live without this symbiotic relationship. As the seasons change and the bison follows a shifting “mutually dependent pattern” of vegetation, the microbes that coat the plants and soil do as well. And so, the ecosystem inside the bison’s stomach shifts with it. Of course, this microbial community is returned to the external ecosystem in the wake of the bison in what is euphemistically called a bison patty. Insects that consume the bacteria and protozoa continue this web of connections. Predators arrive to pick them out of the manure. They spread the fertilizer along with seeds prepared for germination by the journey through the bison’s digestive system. Reciprocity and movement that co-evolved over centuries enabled the sandy soil, dunes, and desert-like conditions of the Hills to sustain vast herds over the winter months. This dance of heavy winter use and spring and summer regeneration worked because this concert of reciprocity was performed by all the players.
Government surveyors and homestead inspectors saw none of this. They came looking for a home for the government’s newly acquired bison. What they saw was land that had no value because it could not be settled or farmed. It was worthless, but maybe it could be made useful supporting the Dominion government’s newest investment.
This place, southwest of Wainwright, Alberta, became Buffalo National Park in 1908.
Like all investors, the government wanted quick and exponential growth. They converted meadows into hayfields for winter feed. The park managers ordered riders to harass the herds daily, cutting out a few bison so that eventually they would become desensitized and less combative when handled. In short, the men who oversaw the Parks Branch ran Buffalo National Park like a cattle ranch.
In 1914 a sex ratio based on a cattle ranching model was enforced, and old and unruly bulls were "disposed" of. In this way, bison like Bolivar, a mature bull who "refused to be frightened, controlled, or subdued," were eliminated from the gene pool. It was thought the future generations, made docile through “unnatural” selection, would be saved through domestication.
Killing the old bulls, however, posed two problems. First, taking out only old bulls wasn't sufficient to control the ballooning herd numbers. Second, slaughtering bison cost money, and the tough and gamey flesh of an old bull wouldn't bring in any income. The idea of selling taxidermied heads was floated, but it seems the head of a farmed bison, taken down by a park ranger, did not hold much cultural cache. Even these old giants’ hides, which had once been so prized that the frenzy for them had driven the species to the brink of extinction, couldn’t cover the expense of their deaths.
Park officials tried castrating the young to improve the palatability of their flesh, but still, profitability alluded the park. By the early 1920s, it was clear that at least a thousand a year had to be killed if the park's resources were to support the herd. But by then, the toll of living in such crowded, degraded and unsanitary conditions had robbed the bisons' bodies of what little "value" they had left. When split open, their stomachs were filled with twigs, and their bodies were scarred with Tuberculosis lesions. Three-quarters of the bison killed in 1922 were affected. Tuberculosis contaminates a mother’s milk and infects the young, but at the park, it was also transmitted when managers spread winter hay in the same spot day after day, forcing bison to eat from ground contaminated with fecal matter and, of course, the bacteria. Their bodies were condemned.
The land strained under the pressure of all these mouths and bodies. Grasses and other plants were grazed so short that they couldn't produce seeds. Hillsides became blanketed with the silver shimmer of prairie sage, beautiful and fragrant but inedible to the bison.
The decision came down from the federal government to ship thousands of sick, starved bison to the newly established Wood Buffalo National Park. All warnings and objections were ignored. The government was desperate to deal with its "bison problem," and the move would be cheaper and draw less public outcry than mass slaughter.
The parks compromised with outraged biologists by declaring they would move only the young. They were considered less likely to have an active tuberculosis infection. That meant still nursing calves were taken and corralled away from their mothers; Nine hundred of them in the first shipment. I know this because the park officials complained about the extra hay they required when otherwise they would have gotten all they needed from their mother's milk. Of course, this meant the park ran out of hay and substituted it with poor-quality straw bought from local farmers. 256 of the bison left behind at Buffalo National Park died in their cramped enclosure that winter.
And so, the young were sent North by a combination of rail and then 1120 km on specially constructed crowded barges. 6,673 in total. 1,634 in 1925, 2,011 in 1926, 1,940 in 1927, and 1,088 in 1928. “They were… released into unfamiliar habitat, with no traditions, no leaders and no experience with predators.” It is unlikely that more than 4000 survived their first year in the park. But in Wood Buffalo National Park, there were no outsiders to witness their natural deaths.
Yet still, more bison were born than the land could handle, and so the slaughter continued. I wonder how they managed the thousands of dead bodies. I imagine they were driven through shoots and into corrals and shot. Not the "noble" hunt colonizers had vested with so much meaning in the past. I’ve seen a later picture at Wood Buffalo National Park where a body is being pushed by a bulldozer to the abattoir. I suppose they used horses or a tractor in the 1920s and 30s. I am arrested by the fact that one of the few gaps in the slaughter came when the abattoir burned to the ground in 1935. The city of Wainwright begged the federal government for the funds to rebuild it quickly. Many of the men in that depression era town depended on the seasonal industrial-scale processing of bodies to meat. The money did not come that year, and though spared from the violence of slaughter, both humans and animals suffered.
Numbers, again, I am doing it; I am reducing their lives to numbers. Let me try, one more time, to show you why their lives, and how they ended, matters.
Bison cow and calf herds are strongly bonded, social groups. Mothers break off with their newborns to form nursery bands during a relatively short calving season. The nearly identical caramel-coloured calves blend in with the dried, pale-brown plant life just emerging from winter dormancy but also with one another, making it harder to single one out.
Newly weaned yearlings form strong bonds that will manifest in loyalty, maybe even friendship, throughout their lives. "Spinster bands" watch over their play.
They will defend one another against wolves and men, sometimes to the death.
They mourn one another.
Bulls and disparate bands came together in summer breeding congregations, constantly moving to find enough resources for thousands of bison. The calves may look identical in another species’ eyes, but a mother can pick out the sound of her calf’s cry from thousands of grunting young, and so a constant call and response can be heard. Even in this massive mixing of bodies, the calf/cow herds, connected by genetics and kinship can re-form after the four weeks of breeding season.
Distinct personalities and age determine leadership among the matriarchs.
Knowledge is passed down through blood but also through social learning.
This is what was decimated by the systematic slaughters and removals at Buffalo National Park.
First the old bulls, then the younger males, then mature cows, and by the 1938 slaughter, all they had left to kill were yearlings and two-year-olds. (75) These young barely had enough meat on them to make their flesh sellable.
Today, some biologists and Indigenous leaders advocate for the elimination of bison contaminated with cattle DNA. They want to get back to a true and pure bison of the past, but I wonder if what makes a bison lies just in their genetics? Did the intensive and systematic destruction of bison lifeways change what bison are?
Wasn’t eradicating bison social order part of an effort to change them into something domestic? Less resistant to control because they were less bonded to one another?
With Canada’s involvement in World War II looming, Buffalo National Park was declared a failure. On December 30, 1939, the last bison were shot; untold numbers of deer, moose, and elk followed them to the abattoir. Once again, the Dominion government sought to make use of the now blighted land. Cleared of most of its complex, lively interactions, it became the perfect place to practice death. It became a Department of Defense training grounds and artillery range.
CFB Wainwright remains on the old grounds of Buffalo National Park. An “exhibition herd” of around a dozen bison, brought over from Elk Island, currently reside in a paddock on the base.
At the base’s entrance, signage bears the CFB Wainwright emblem; an impassive bison head, disconnected like a taxidermy mount from its body, corralled in gold maple leaves while an ornate crown looms above.