Time of the Buffalo

The magnificent beast that once roamed from Alaska to the Carolinas "in numbers numberless" is superbly memorialized in this full-scale study, which begins with his genesis in the Ice Age (behold Bison latifrons -- measuring nine feet from tip of horn to tip of horn), traces his evolution and natural history, observes his patterns of behavior, and records his life-and-death relationship with three cultures of man. Here are the ways in which the buffalo crucially affected (and was affected by) the hunters of the Pleistocene epoch and, in our era, the life of the Plains Indians and the nineteenth-century frontiersmen. Here is the creature himself - seen as an integral part of the rich ecological and cultural tapestry that includes the grasses of the plains, the Kiowa Sun Dance, hunting methods from "foot surrounds" to buffalo-running on horseback, the making of pemmican, the sacred albino bison, the politics of man, the rutting battles of bulls...a vivid spectrum of human, natural, and animal lore.

From his own research among present-day herds (and with stills from his filming for The Vanishing Prairie) Tom McHugh offers a rare close-up view of the buffalo's habits and life cycle, detailing such aspects as mating, calving, stampedes, play and aggression. He explores such disputed problems as the "migrations" of buffalo, the reason why bulls "wallow" in the dirt, the way leadership and order of rank are determined. He relates this "life history" to the wilderness - and its other animal inhabitants - through time. In equally fascinating detail he tells how the Plains Indians used the buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter, and endowed it with spirit; how the European settlers viewed it first as an object of awe and then as a source of plunder and, by nearly exterminating this single species, destroyed all the Plains cultures, driving the Indians into reservations more effectively and tragically than did the Horse Soldiers of a Custer or a Crook.

The book is alive with resonant detail: hunting ways, buffalo products, stories and ceremonies of the Cheyenne, Sioux, Mandan, Cree, and Assiniboin tribes, rare and pertinent Indian drawings, the use of buffalo horns as spoons, the Plains-wide revolution effected by the horse. Here, too, are reports from Coronado, Lewis and Clark, the painter George Catlin; the diaries of trappers, soldiers, travelers. And this is how luxurious hunting parties (Sir St. Gore in 1854 and Grand Duke Alexis in 1872) found sport in a land just beginning its tragedy; and how the hidemen of 1871 to 1883, catering to Eastern markets for robes and leather, and out for fast money in lean times, completed the tragedy. The movement to save the buffalo completes a large, informative, and moving work whose lucid narrative and lavish complement of maps, drawings, paintings, and photographs give us at last, in a full sense, the life, the world, the nature, the time of the buffalo.