BUFFALO SAVIORS
I am positive it was the wickedness committed in killing so many that impelled me to take measures for perpetuating the race which I had helped almost destroy
Those were the words of Charles Jesse “Buffalo” Jones as he recalled his early days as a buffalo hunter on the Great Plains. Jones, Charles and Molly Goodnight, Fred and Mary Dupuis, and Sam and Sabine Walking Coyote are among the cast of colorful characters who played a role in buffalo conservation efforts when the great beast was on the verge of extinction in the late 19th century. What makes their stories so extraordinary is that each of the four families had contributed in some measure to the buffalo’s demise through hunting, ranching and/or trading in buffalo robes. In time, though, all strode or stumbled into the front lines of bison conservation.
By the late 1880s the buffalo had all but disappeared from the Plains, with only a few remnant herds remaining in the wild. The powers that be back East contributed to subsequent conservation efforts by setting aside reserves on which bison could live and breed, notably the National Bison Range in 1908, as well as tasking the U.S. Army with anti-poaching patrols during its 1886–1916 tenure overseeing Yellowstone National Park, which today shelters the largest public bison herd in the United States. But it was Westerners who bred and raised bison to populate such reserves. The aforementioned four families made no coordinated effort to restore the bison, but acted independently. What links them is the era in which they chose to take action—just as the bison were about to tumble from the proverbial cliff into memory.
Several factors figured in their efforts. Conservation was certainly one motive, and guilt over the
