Buffalo: Pioneer Uses

Spanish explorers in North America who first saw the shaggy bovine sometimes called it cibola, which was also their name for the general region where they saw it, the seven pueblos in today’s northern New Mexico—isonte, said to be related to the Old Teutonic word wisand, or the Old English wesend.

French-Canadian colonists called it Bison d’ Amerique.The French voyageurs (voy-uh-ZHOORS) called it boeuf—the source of the English word beef. Later in the 17th century, French explorers expanded it to bufflo, and later buffelo.^[1]David Dary, The Buffalo Book (n.p.: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1989), 3.

The noun buffalo apparently began to be applied to the American species in 1635, and has remained the common vernacular name ever since.^[2] American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd ed. Bison is more recent, dating in print from 1774. The journalists of the Corps of Discovery used buffalo exclusively—in various spellings, of course.

At present, bison and buffalo are used interchangeably. The latter name is actually incorrect; it properly denotes the water buffalo of Asia and the Cape buffalo of Africa, which belong to different genera. The name for our national icon which is accepted as correct today is American bison (with a soft s in the U.S., but pronounced bizon in Canada). The scientific name for the American bison has had an equally confusing history.

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), had already listed it as Bison americanus, but that was merely the beginning. Today, the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to North American Mammals lists it as Bos bison. Bos, the generic name, is Latin for cow; bison denotes the species. Bos bison belong to the family Bovidae, consisting of large hoofed animals having hollow horns, which includes domestic cattle (Bos taurus), sheep, and goats. Bison are so closely related to Bos taurus that they can readily interbreed.

Expedition Uses

To some extent, the Corps of Discovery used buffalo much as the Indians did–for clothing, blankets, tents, saddle pads, and moccasins for both men and horses. On the Yellowstone River after the last of their horses were stolen, Sergeant Pryor and his companions made Indian-style “bull boats” by covering cup-shaped wooden frames with buffalo hides.

As they entered the region Dan Flores calls the “American Serengeti,” the Corps saw bison in ever-increasing numbers, but they relied more on other game for the six pounds of fat meat each man required in his daily diet. During the fall of 1804, in the 55 days it took to make their way up the Missouri from near today’s Yankton, South Dakota, to Washburn, North Dakota, north of Bismarck, they killed only 18 bison. Some of those, however, were so “pore”—lean, that is—that only the tongues and the long bones were taken, for their fat and their rich marrow, respectively. During the same period they consumed 83 deer, 17 elk, and 17 antelope. Throughout the months spent at Fort Mandan, from 1 November 1804 to 6 April 1805, they consumed 120 deer and 46 elk, but only 38 bison. Altogether, throughout the entire period of the expedition, they killed 227 bison for food.

On 18 April 1805, some 35 miles east of present Williston, North Dakota, Meriwether Lewis was reminded of a commercial use for a bison byproduct.

Saw several parsels of buffaloe’s hair hanging on the rose bushes, which had been bleached by exposure to the weather and became perfectly white. it [had] every appearance of the wool of the sheep, tho’ much finer and more silkey and soft. I am confident that an excellent cloth may be made of the wool of the Buffaloe. The Buffaloe I killed yesterday had cast his long hare, and the poil [perhaps pile, meaning fur] which remained was very thick, fine, and about 2 inches in length. I think this anamal would have furnished about five pounds of wool.

The idea had been abroad for quite a while, in fact, and it remained current for another couple of decades, at least among big-city entrepreneurs who had never tried to shear a 2,000-pound bison.

The French-Canadian Louis Joliet (1645-1700), who explored the upper Mississippi River with the Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette, had mentioned it. Then, in 1821-22, According to the Canadian writer Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946), a company was formed at Fort Garry, on the Red River in Manitoba, and a little buffalo-wool cloth was produced. Needless to say, it was tedious and expensive to collect enough shed wool for spinning and weaving, and so the manufacturing cost exceeded the market value of the cloth. The enterprise soon failed.

Buffalo robes, cured and tanned by Indian women, were far more profitable, and that was the principal market factor that contributed to the near-disappearance of the American bison. A second use of hides was for leather belts to link of the pulleys of machines in the growing number of factories the Industrial Revolution was spawning.

Fertilizer

Of course, it was impossible to preserve much of the meat for shipment to market, even if it had been wanted. Briefly, however, there was another opportunity that consumed the last remaining byproduct of the slaughter—bones.

The railroads that penetrated the southern plains in the late 1860s, and the northern plains and Canada in the 80s, provided a cheap and efficient means of transporting the bones of millions of bison back to St. Louis and points east. There they were processed into fertilizer to meet rising demands in the east, and into “bone black,” or animal charcoal, used in refining sugar.

In the early 1900s, Charles Goodnight, a rancher who in his own way did much to assure the survival of bison in the Texas panhandle, recommended bison tallow not only for its supposed medicinal properties but also as an all-purpose household cleaner. “The discovery of the age,” he called it, but nobody bought that claim.

Predicted Doom

The history of the American bison, at least since the arrival of Europeans on the continent, reflects the opposing premises of two European philosophers. René Descartes (1596-1650) the progenitor of the Age of Reason, maintained that animals are “mechanical robots” incapable of feeling pain. The English jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) answered for a later generation: “The question is not, Can they reason? Nor, Can they talk? But, Can they suffer?”

The legal code of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, enacted in 1641, had decreed that “No man shall exercise any Tirranny or Crueltie towards any bruite Creature which are usuallie kept for man’s use.” But there was the rub. Clearly, bison could not easily be “kept for man’s use,” although some men tried. In the first place, compared with European cattle, that had been domesticated for more than 8,000 years, bison were too dangerous, too destructive, and too much trouble to control in close quarters. The final solution was obvious, so by the early 1830s they were exterminated east of the Mississippi.

Was it the flush of sympathy for abused animals that ignited the movement to preserve American bison? Or was it the realization that, as one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby says, in a comparable context, they were “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to their capacity for wonder.”

Almost as soon as frontiersmen began to push westward from the Alleghenies, a few individuals began to protest the wanton killing of bison. Given the apparent plenitude of the herds, however, plus the evident impossibility of domesticating them, a majority of westerners failed to see any problem with killing them. The old mechanistic view served well enough.

Meriwether Lewis noted on one occasion that the Corps of Discovery killed only as many animals as they needed to feed themselves, although he himself evidently felt no compunction about killing a bison for his own solitary meal (14 June 1805). Nevertheless, within only a few years following the end of the expedition, other observers saw and deplored needless and wasteful killing. George Catlin predicted in 1832 that the buffalo’s doom was sealed. Another naturalist-artist, John James Audubon, said it again in 1845. Others spoke of the need for laws to protect the species, and a few gutless statutes were enacted in western states and territories during the 1860s and 70s.

Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), the 25th president of the United States (1901-1909), was one of the most eloquent and influential spokesmen for the early conservation movement. His Hunting the Grisly [sic] and Other Sketches, a collection of his experiences as a nimrod, opened with a piece on “The Bison or American Buffalo” (1893), in which he summarized the recent history of the species in the following two paragraphs.^[3]Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1904), p. 3.

When we became a nation, in 1776, the buffaloes, the first animals to vanish when the wilderness is settled, roved to the crests of the mountains which mark the western boundaries of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. They were plentiful in what are now the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But by the beginning of the present century [the 1800s] they had been driven beyond the Mississippi; and for the next eighty years they formed one of the most distinctive and characteristic features of existence on the great plains. Their numbers were countless—incredible. In the vast herds of hundreds of thousands of individuals, they roamed from the Saskatchewan to the Rio Grande and westward to the Rocky Mountains. They furnished all the means of livelihood to the tribes of Horse [Plains] Indians, and to the curious population of French Metis, or Half-breeds, on the Red River, as well as to those dauntless and archetypical wanderers, the white hunters and trappers. Their numbers slowly diminished, but the decrease was very gradual until after the Civil War. They were not destroyed by the settlers, but by the railways and the skin hunters.

After the ending of the Civil War, the work of constructing trans-continental railway lines was pushed forward with the utmost vigor. These supplied cheap and indispensable, but hitherto wholly lacking, means of transportation to the hunters; and at the same time the demand for buffalo robes and hides became very great, while the enormous numbers of the beasts, and the comparative ease with which they were slaughtered, attracted throngs of adventurers. The result was such a slaughter of big game as the world had never before seen; never before were so many large animals of one species destroyed in so short a time. Several million buffaloes were slain. In fifteen years from the time the destruction fairly began the great herds were exterminated. In all probability there are not now [1893], all told, five hundred head of wild buffaloes on the American continent; and no herd of a hundred individuals has been in existence since 1884.

The Numbers

It is easy to conclude from the selected excerpts from the expedition’s journals that the Corps of Discovery found the Plains teeming with bison. Daniel Botkin, however, puts the Corps’ experience in a broader perspective.

“There were only 60 days during the outward journey that the expedition reported any live buffalo. These reports occurred mainly in sets of consecutive days that fall into 17 separate episodes from 6 June 1804, to 15 July 1805, a period of 404 days. They saw buffalo on only 15 percent of the days they were in buffalo country.”^[4]Our Natural History: The Lessons of Lewis and Clark (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), p. 116.

David Dary has tabulated the bison population in North America beginning in 1888, as estimated by various contemporary authorities. It is thought that in that first year there were 1,300; by 1895 it was down to 800. By 1900 the number had risen to 1,024, and it increased thereafter by increments of a few hundred annually until the 1970s, when the totals grew by several thousand each year, until there were an estimated 98,000 head by 1989.^[5]David Dary, The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal (n.p.: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1989), 287. Today, there are 200,000 head on this continent.

Clearly, the recovery of the American bison is one of the most remarkable and satisfying stories of environmental recovery in the 20th century.

Recovery

In the first year after its founding in 1866 by American reformer Henry Bergh, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals helped pass the first anti-cruelty law in the United States. The ASPCA continued to receive complaints about the treatment of bison in the West, including letters from army officers at distant outposts.

The first congressional efforts were begun in the early 1870s, but none were successful until the Lacey Bill, which outlawed buffalo hunting in Yellowstone National Park, was signed in 1894. That was ten years after the slaughter on the plains had ended for lack of targets. Until then, conscience had yielded to cash, year after year, animal by animal. But not every pilgrim who crossed the Mississippi River in the 19th century was driven by greed, or stupefied by indifference

In practical terms, the rescue of bison from extermination began in 1873, before the population reached its nadir, when Samuel Walking Coyote, a Pend d’Orielle Indian, herded eight calves back to the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, from a hunting excursion on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation east of the Rockies. His motives were mixed, like those of other individuals who, during the next thirty years, similarly “rescued” small numbers of bison. In nearly every instance, part of the mixture was profit.

In 1905, the U.S. government was responsible for fewer than a hundred bison, scattered throughout the country. In the nick of time, the American Bison Society was founded that year, with William T. Hornaday of the Smithsonian Institution as president, and Theodore Roosevelt as honorary president. It soon became a potent force in the preservation of the bison, and a model for cooperative ventures in wildlife management linking government with the private sector.

In 1907 the ABS was instrumental in the establishment of a herd at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Oklahoma, which now numbers about 1,000. In 1909, it stocked the 18,500-acre National Bison Range at Moiese, in northwestern Montana, which now supports a herd of between 350 and 500. It also began a herd on the Fort Niobrara Reservation in Nebraska in 1913, and on the Pisgah National Game Preserve in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1919. After aiding in the placing of smaller bands in various other states during the 20s and 30s, the society’s momentum was exhausted, and in 1935 it retired from the field.

One of the most influential defenders of wildlife at the turn of the 20th century was William T. Hornaday, a founder of the New York Zoological Society (today called the Wildlife Conservation Society), and director of the New York Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo). In The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations, he cited a number of encounters with members of the deer family in which people had been injured or killed, and continued:

The hollow-horned ruminants seem to be different. I believe that toward their keepers the bison, buffaloes and wild cattle entertain a certain measure of respect that in members of the Deer Family often is totally absent. But there are exceptions; and a very sad and notable case was the murder of Richard W. Rock, of Henry’s Lake, Idaho, in 1903.

Rancher Rock bred bison, and often rode his favorite (ironically named “Indian”) around the corral barebacked. “Rock felt,” said Hornaday, “that he could confidently trust the animal, and he never dreamed of guarding himself against a possible evil day.”

But one day the blood lust seized the buffalo, and he decided to assassinate his best friend. The next time Dick Rock entered the corral, closing the gate and fastening it securely,—thus shutting himself in,—the big bull attacked him so suddenly and fiercely that there was not a moment for either escape or rescue. We can easily estimate the suddenness of the attack by the fact that alert and active Dick Rock had not time even to climb upon the fence of the corral, whereby his life would have been saved. With a mighty upward thrust, the treacherous bull drove one of his horns deeply into his master’s body, and impaled him so completely and securely that the man hung there and died there! As a crowning horror, the bull was unable to dislodge his victim, and the body of the ranchman was carried about the corral on the horns of his assassin until the horrified wife went a mile and a half and summoned a neighbor, who brought a rifle and executed the murderer on the spot.

Such sudden onslaughts as this make it unsafe to trust implicitly, and without recourse, to the good temper of any animal having dangerous horns.^[6]William T. Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals: A Book of Personal Observations (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), p. 289.

Hornaday’s point is certainly valid. Bison are unpredictable, dangerous animals that must be regarded with caution. But he saw bison as shaggy four legged humans endowed with the capacity for people-feelings—”respect,” “best friend,” “his master’s body”—and people-passions—”murder,” “blood lust,” and “assassin.” Indeed, he opened his book with the motto, “The wild animal must think, or die.”

Anthropomorphisms

The name for Hornaday’s view of animals is anthropomorphism (AN-throw-po-MORPH-izm), which stands for the attribution of “human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.”^[7]The American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition. Most Euro-Americans have been brought up on it, and the anthropomorphic outlook inculcated by the traditional nursery rhymes and other children’s stories is hard to discard when we’re old enough to understand that, to the bison, we could be just two-legged non-bison that smell bad.

It is because of attitudes such as Hornaday’s, born, perhaps, out of sincere admiration and affection for the noble beast, that each year a few well-intentioned visitors to Yellowstone National Park suffer injuries, and occasionally death, from close encounters of the bison kind.

In their fascinating and enlightening book, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy convey a more empathetic view of animal existence. They admit, for example, that humans would probably find diets as monotonous as those of most herbivores exceedingly boring.

“But maybe buffalo have a higher tolerance for monotony. Maybe each blade of grass seems vastly different from the blade before. Perhaps their life is a rich tapestry of excitement and intrigue, but at a sensory level too far removed from ours to be apparent.”^[8]Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), p. 126.

Spanish colonists in Mexico in the 1600s first tried to use bison as work animals, but the earliest attempts to raise them for meat apparently took place in 1701 in Virginia, where Huguenot settlers on the James River near Richmond began cross-breeding them with domestic livestock.

A settler at Lexington, Kentucky, began trying to domesticate bison in 1815, but abandoned the effort after 30 years. In 1837, Thomas Jefferson‘s Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, reported on successful inter-breedings somewhere in the South. Scattered experiments continued throughout the 19th century, including the widely publicized enterprises of Kansan C.J. “Buffalo” Jones, and Texan Charles Goodnight. The aim of all these efforts was to produce a strain of domestic cattle that would be hardier, longer-lived, more cold-tolerant, and more disease-resistant, than their European cousins.

The major development in the history of the American bison in the 20th century has been the opening—or should we say reopening—of a market for bison meat, which holds a special appeal in urbanized American society. Beyond the symbolic appeal of “feasting on history,” there is the very attractive fact that bison meat is lower in fat, calories, and cholesterol than beef, pork, or chicken. Ironically, that is precisely the reason the Corps of Discovery disdained “pore” animals, picked over each carcass, and left much food for wolves, grizzlies, and birds.

The current interest in commercial bison production is represented by the National Bison Association, which has evolved out of two organizations established in the 1960s and 70s. The NBA (http://www.nbabison.org), which “promotes the preservation, production, and marketing of bison,” has members in the United States and Canada and abroad. Typical of the larger commercial operations are the Triple U ranch at Fort Pierre, South Dakota, which currently runs some 5,000 head, and the Turner Ranches in Montana, New Mexico, and Nebraska, which support more than 10,000 head. Regional bison associations have sprung up all over North America.

Also, bison are being re-introduced into Indian culture. The Inter-tribal Bison Cooperative (http://www.intertribalbison.org), which represents over 30 Indian tribes, is “committed to re-establishing buffalo herds on Indian lands in a manner that promotes cultural enhancement, spiritual revitalization, ecological restoration, and economic development.”

Brucellosis

In his comments on diseases Dan Flores speaks of the possible role of anthrax and bovine tuberculosis, in the decline the bison during the 19th century. But it was the bison’s susceptibility to another disease that has recently corralled it into the political arena again—”brucellosis,” named for the Scottish physician Sir David Bruce, who identified the bacterial disease agent (Brucella abortus) in 1887. Recently, strong circumstantial evidence has suggested that bison and possibly elk can transmit the disease to domestic livestock such as cattle or horses. Ironically, the American bison, in all probability, originally became infected with the brucellosis organism after contact with infected cattle originating from Europe. Brucellosis was first diagnosed in the Yellowstone National Park’s herd in 1917.

In cattle, brucellosis causes partial sterility, decreased milk supply, and abortion. A vaccine for calves was developed in the 1950s.

In humans, the same disease is called undulant fever, because the symptoms include recurrent fever, as well as joint pains and central nervous-system damage. The pasteurization of milk prevents the transmission of it; if contracted, it can be treated with certain antibiotics, at least for the time being.

During the 1960s a federally-supported campaign to eradicate brucellosis from domestic cattle began to take effect, and state after state has since earned, and rigorously guarded, its brucellosis-free status, without which interstate transportation of cattle is prohibited. All private, and most state and federal bison herds, such as those at Washita and Moiese, are tested regularly for brucellosis, but the Yellowstone National Park’s herd roams a much more extensive area, making effective disease control difficult.

The problem in Yellowstone National Park came to a head in 1996 with the midwinter migration of more than a thousand head of bison from Yellowstone National Park onto state and private land north of the Park. For a number of years a few animals had crossed the park boundary each winter, and the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks department harvested them, first by permitted hunting, and later by game wardens.

The mass exodus of 1996 was prompted by a combination of circumstances. The herd had grown beyond the carrying capacity of the park’s limited habitat, nourished by an increase in forage immediately following the fires of 1988, encouraged by a short succession of comparatively mild winters, and favored by the absence of wolves, their principal predators.

Salvation

The winter of 1995-96 was exceptionally severe, with record snow depths in Yellowstone National Park. In pursuit of alternate winter ranges, more than a thousand bison headed into Montana, their egress facilitated by winter recreationists, especially snowmobilers, who had demanded that the roads be kept plowed.

Since the health of the park bison could not be known, the State of Montana took steps to protect its livestock industry from the possibility of re-infection with brucellosis, but despite efforts to haze them back into the park, the bison kept coming. Before that winter was over, some 1,100 park bison had been shot, and the meat given to various Indian tribes.

Nationwide, the reaction was immediate, and passionate. It reached through the office of the governor of Montana, straight to the halls of Congress. Strident claims of cruelty, and worse, made headlines almost daily. Roused to action by what they perceived to be the second mass slaughter of the West’s wildlife icon, the American bison, protesters seemed readier to confront hungry bison than angry snowmobilers, while being obliged to do neither.

The winter of 1997 began under the ominous possibility of worse to come, but what ensued was mild, compared with the previous year. The crisis was to subside into a monotonous calendar of committee meetings, hearings, letters to the editor, and web sites still plaintively howling for concerned citizens to “save the buffalo.”

Actually, history was repeating itself. More than 25 years before, hunters had been permitted to help thin a herd owned by the State of Arizona, to keep it in balance with available habitat. In 1970, Columbia Pictures released an ill-conceived movie, entitled Bless the Beasts and the Children, which portrayed clumsy and cruel killing of bison in a modern setting. Actually, it was filmed on a private ranch on Catalina Island, but it generated intense anti-hunter sentiment, and public resentment, especially towards the Arizona Game and Fish Commission. Cartesian cynicism yielded to Benthamite idealism.

Bison management has often been a crisis-driven exercise, especially on public lands. The problem now is how to limit this prolific species without eliciting negative reactions from a vocal and sometimes powerful public sector. One of the bolder and, at least at the outset, more controversial recommendations is the “Buffalo Commons” proposed by Frank and Deborah Popper in 1987. This would return a substantial portion of the marginally profitable farmland in the Great Plains to herds of free-roaming bison. “If we made enough room for them,” says Buffalo Commons advocate Ernest Callenbach, “we could theoretically have 33 million bison by the year 2011.”^[9]Ernest Callenbach, Bring Back the Buffalo! (n.p.: Island Press, 1996). Adherents have not clearly indicated where, much less how, the line marking the human/bison interface would be drawn, but the responsibility would obviously fall on the human side of the equation. In other words, it would, perforce, be a major political issue.

Imagine how life in these United States would be affected if for some reason our supply of cattle, sheep, and hogs was reduced to the level that bison were in the 1880s and 90s. Here is a sketch of what would be missing from our lives:

As of 1977, according to the American Meat Institute, the per capita consumption of cooked red meats in the United States is currently about 4 ounces per day. The modern meat industry uses 20 percent fewer cows today than it did in the 1960s, to produce the same amount of red meat.

The single most obvious, and economically the most valuable, byproduct of the meatpacking industry is leather. But there are others that, though less well known, are of inestimable importance to our national health and well-being. A few of them are now produced synthetically, but the models originally came from cattle and hogs, and some, for some individuals, must not be synthesized.

The pharmaceutical industry uses blood, brains, stomach, gall bladder, heart, intestines, liver, lungs, ovaries, pancreas, parathyroid glands, pineal glands, pituitary glands, thymus glands, testes, spleen, skin, bone cartilage, and spinal chords. Other industries have uses for animal skin, bones and bone cartilage, hooves, horns, and practically every one of the trimmings, including ear tubes, pizzles, mammary glands, heads, knuckles and feet.

The secrets hidden within those parts have magical names that sound like incantations, meaningful only to the practitioners and the afflicted: aprotinin, catalase, chenodeoxycholic acid, chymosin, chymotrypsin, enterogastrone, heparin, kininogenase, melatonin, pancreatin, prolactin, secretin, thromboplastin, trypsin, and many more.

They heal, nourish, assuage pain, prolong life. They help in diagnoses of certain diseases such as cancers; they regulate the heart, control bleeding, thin blood or thicken it; stimulate bodily functions such as digestion, lactation, and metabolism; help with skin grafting, organ transplants, plastic surgery, eye surgery, and childbirth; treat anemia, burns, and frostbite; provide substitute heart valves . . . &c, &c., as Lewis and Clark would have closed the list.

Collagens from the trimmings help to glue the world together, literally. They have roles in the manufacture of cheese, wool, paper, fabrics, gelatin, sandpaper, picture frames, billiard balls, composition cork, imitation hard rubber, gummed tape, automobile bodies, caskets. They make airtight caps on match heads. Whole or dried blood and blood albumin work as fertilizer, fix pigment colors in cloth, and more.

Certain bones are turned into crochet needles, dice, chess pieces, electrical bushings, and buttons. Bone black is used as bleach for oils, fats, and waxes; it serves as an ingredient in livestock feed, and in fertilizer; it is still used in sugar refining. White hooves serve for imitation ivory products; black hooves are used in the manufacture of potassium cyanide. Horns become imitation tortoise shell wares, such as napkin rings, or knife and umbrella handles.

Portions of this article were reviewed by Stuart E. Knapp. “Valuable Byproducts reviewed by Jerry Breiter, Vice President for Allied Products, American Meat Institute, Arlington, Virginia, http://www.meatami.org

Further Reading

Center for Bison Studies—Book List: http://www.montana.edu/~wwwcbs/books.html.

David A. Dary, The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal(n.p.: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1989).

The History and Development of the American West, from the Frontier and Pioneer days of the Wild West, to today’s Modern West: http://www.americanwest.com/bison.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Region 6 (Mountain–Prairie): http://www.r6.fws.gov/index.html

John Romans, The Meat We Eat (13th ed., Danville, Illinois: Interstate Publishers, 1994).