Wild & free no more - bison slaughter in Montana

First, put yourself in the landscape, a rough, edgy country of sagebrush benchlands encircled by snowy plateaus and weathered mountain ridges, a land of big skies and sweeping vistas. The Yellowstone River carves a deep rift through it. The current is loaded with the melt of heavy snows. Tumbling headlong, fleeing the high country of its origin, the river rushes past the boundary of the national park that bears its name, hurrying down to the valley called Paradise, in Montana.

Now, hear the thunderclap of high-powered rifles, of firing pins striking primer and igniting gunpowder to send copper-zinc-jacketed lead bullets flying towards their mark at more than 3,000 feet per second. Bam! The bullets punch through tough bison hides, splintering bones and puncturing organs as they mushroom and tear through the guts of the large, shaggy, brown creatures. Professional marksmen in the service of the people of Montana fire the bullets. With cool efficiency the sharpshooters choose their targets and pull the triggers.

In a scene from the century before, 11 bison lie dead in the snow. The animals were killed because they crossed an imaginary line enclosing Yellowstone National Park. They were shot literally because the grass was a bit greener a few feet away, beyond the boundary. In the days to come, more will die in what has become an annual festival of gore. Last year Montana bathed in the blood of more than 1,000 bison, or fully one-third of the entire Yellowstone National Park herd. The winter of 1996-97 will be remembered for the greatest bison slaughter since the immense herds that once blackened the West were systematically destroyed in the late 19th century.

The valley of Yellowstone River is buffalo country, and for thousands of years the bison have moved with the rhythms of the seasons, following this natural migration corridor out of the wintry fastness of Yellowstone National Park to find better grazing in the gender clime of Paradise Valley. This magnificent country is one of the last places on earth where large animal migrations still occur. Few who witness the sight of hundreds of ungulates on the move remain unaffected.

One of the first to record what he saw in Yellowstone country was Osborne Russell, a mountain man who made his living trapping beaver in the presettlement West. He ably chronicled his experiences during nine years in the Rockies from 1834 to 1843.

"Traveled down the Yellow Stone river about 20Ml.," Russell noted one autumn day. "This is a beautiful country, the large plains widely extending on either side of the river intersected with streams and occasional low spurs of Mountains whilst thousands of Buffaloe may be seen in almost every direction and Deer Elk and Grizzly bear are abundant."

The Yellowstone bison were but a small fraction of the greatest animal congregation the world has ever seen. Once more than 60 million strong, bison covered the continent from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rockies, from Texas to northern Canada. In the early 1870s a cavalry officer, Colonel R. I. Dodge, wrote, "From the top of Pawnee Rock I could see from 6 to 10 miles in almost every direction. This whole vast space was covered with Buffalo, looking at a distance like a compact mass." Dodge reported that the animals sometimes migrated in columns 50 miles wide and of unknown length, an unforgettable sight sure to quicken the pulse of even the hardest-bitten frontiersman.

The Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and other Plains tribes based their culture upon the bison. The Sioux called the buffalo Pte, "Uncle," the benevolent relative who provided them with just about every material need, from food to lodge skins. Their dependence upon Pte was absolute, their fates intertwined.

But the bison, and thus the nomadic Plains Indian culture, was doomed from the moment the first European set foot in the New World. As long as the great herds remained, the Indians could not be subdued, nor could ranchers conquer the grasslands. The herds moved across the earth at will ("You can herd buffalo in any direction they choose" is a saying sometimes heard on the buffalo range), and neither domestic cattle nor crops nor fences could survive their trampling presence. The bison were an affront to the control of nature, and for that they were driven from the plains in a methodical campaign of such ruthless efficiency that by the mid-1880s a team from the American Museum of Natural History scoured the plains and found no wild buffalo.

All that remained of the herds that once darkened the plains and made the earth tremble were piles of weathered bones. "No sight is more common on the plains than the bleached buffalo skull; and their countless numbers attest the abundance of the animal at a time not so very long past," wrote Theodore Roosevelt during his years ranching in North Dakota just after the state's last great herd was slaughtered in 1883. "On those portions where the herds made their last stand, the carcasses, dried in the clear, high air, or the moldering skeletons abound." The holocaust had taken barely a dozen years.