♪ MUSIC ♪ WILLIAM CLARK: Buffaloes
are now so numerous we discovered more than we had
ever seen before at one time; and if it be not
impossible to calculate the moving multitude which
darkened the whole plains, we are convinced
that 20,0000 would be no
exaggerated number. ♪ MUSIC ♪ NARRATOR: Those bison
came to symbolize the strength and wild
spirit of America. KRISTEN CARLSON: It's strong. It's beautiful. It's dynamic. It's majestic. NARRATOR: But for all
its imposing strength, the bison is a
vulnerable species that very nearly disappeared from the prairie
a century ago. DAN O'BRIEN: They were
exploited just like trees and everybody looked
around and - "where are they? "Jeez, maybe we should've
thought about this." NARRATOR: Against all odds, American bison survived near-extinction and
are today considered a conservation
success story. There are now
nearly 500,000 bison living on the Great Plains. DAN O'BRIEN: I do believe
that buffalo can serve as a metaphor for
all wild things. Buffalo make a perfect
metaphor for what we're missing, what's going
extinct every year. ♪ MUSIC ♪ DAN FLORES: The story
of what happened to bison is a complex story and
it's a story that almost looks like it's kind
of a perfect storm. (BISON STAMPEDING) NARRATOR: When Lewis
and Clark arrived on the Great Plains in 1804, tens of millions
of bison roamed the central grasslands
of the continent. DOUGLAS BAMFORTH: What they saw
had to have been something much like what had been
there for centuries. NARRATOR: But in the
final decades of the 1800's, cultural change swept
across the prairie, devastating Plains
Indian people and pushing bison to
the brink of destruction. That change arrived
in the form of drought, Euro-American settlers,
horses, trains, disease, and hide-hunters. DAN O'BRIEN: There's
a lot of factors that went to this
near-extinction. Basically, it was greed. People figured out that there
was value in hides. And those hides went
to power machines of the industrial revolution. They made belts, what we use
rubber for now. DAN FLORES: European
colonization of the Americas treats animals and wildlife as this kind of
congress of resources. We make them into commodities
that we can exploit at our whim. DAN O'BRIEN: All of a
sudden, this flow of energy came off the Great Plains. (bison grunt) People forget that a
buffalo really is a machine to process this grass. Processes it into buffalo meat. Hides,
all the parts of the buffalo have been recycled
for generations, and hundreds of years,
and thousands of years. But that energy never
leaves that valley. All of a sudden it started
leaving that valley. Basically, we started
the process of mining the Great Plains
of its energy. NARRATOR: After
the Civil War, trains brought west
thousands of former soldiers, turned hide-hunters. DAN FLORES: This is the largest
destruction of wildlife that's discoverable
in modern world history. I mean we can't find
anything that measures up to the destruction of
animals that was taking place in the West in the
years after the Civil War. DOUGLAS BAMFORTH: When white
hunters started coming in, they were just
killing at random. And people would do things
like shooting bison from trains just to watch them fall. Just killing to kill. NARRATOR:
Up until this time, bison sustained Plains Indian
people with meat for food and hides for
clothing and lodges. STEVE TAMAYO:
Understanding the Buffalo and the importance
of the buffalo for our food,
for our shelter, for our tools, for our games,
for our survival, we've always depended
on the buffalo. And so it was never
about over-killing. NARRATOR: Bison were also
of spiritual importance and were considered
brothers and sisters of the Plains people. The Lakota referred to
them as the Buffalo Nation. STEVE TAMAYO: In Lakota
we call the buffalo 'ta'. The Omaha people, they
acknowledge the buffalo as 'te' you hear
about ta-tanka. But 'tanka' is
something that's huge. It's big. We're acknowledging the buffalo
for the size of our relative. We were both
in the millions. And we almost disappeared. ♪ MUSIC ♪ DAN FLORES: The slaughter
that was taking place as a result of the market
hunt was so egregious many people noticed it. They noticed what
was happening. NARRATOR: In early spring 1886,
William T. Hornaday, chief taxidermist at
the U.S. National Museum, headed west in
search of bison. On the prairies where
millions had once ranged, Hornaday and the Smithsonian
Institution Buffalo Outfit found no live animals. DAN FLORS: He wants a
large bull, he wants cows, he wants calves. He and the Smithsonian
were convinced that bison were probably going to
completely go extinct. And he thinks there
are probably fewer than 1000 buffalo
all over the west. NARRATOR: Traveling
northward along the Missouri, they were confronted with
a vast layer of skeletons "ghastly monuments
of slaughter "bleaching in the sun." DAN FLORES: Between 1804
when Lewis and Clark described the west and 1886, not even 100 years,
when Hornaday describes it. He does that
very famous map in his The Extermination
of the American Bison, where he basically shows
this vast ocean of animals, the great bison savanna. The best metaphor for it is it's an ocean
that's evaporating into a final handful of
little pools, little puddles. And there's
a final little puddle down in the upper
Texas Panhandle and a final little puddle
in eastern Montana and that's basically
the end of it. NARRATOR: Upon returning
to Washington, D.C., Hornaday hatched an elaborate
plan to raise awareness about the destruction
of the species. He would mount a family group
for the U.S. National Museum and found a national zoo
in Washington, D.C. with bison as some of
its first residents. Hornaday's bison
exhibit represented the very height
of taxidermy, featuring as the
Washington Star trumpeted: "real buffalo-grass, "real Montana dirt, "and real buffaloes." KRISTEN CARLSON: I think it's
important to be able to see a bison close up. To be close enough
to really see that hair, the thickness of it, to see how well adapted
it is for its environment. It's meant to be here. ♪ MUSIC ♪ NARRATOR: In the final years
of the 19th Century, it was estimated that there
were only 23 remaining bison in Yellowstone National Park and about 800
in private herds. The Pablo-Allard
herd established by Samuel Walking Coyote,
a Kalispel Indian became critical to preserving
the species' genetic diversity. DAN FLORES: He had these calves
who had lost their mothers in the hunt, follow him
back from eastern Montana to western Montana and he
had a couple of cow calves and a couple of bull
calves and they became the nucleus of a famous
herd of bison. We probably wouldn't
have bison today if it hadn't been for the
actions of some of those very prescient native
people in the 1880's and 1890's who make sure that
we don't lose them. NARRATOR: Recognizing
the value of herds like Pablo-Allard, Hornaday
and Theodore Roosevelt convinced Congress to establish
federally protected herds in Yellowstone, Oklahoma,
and Montana. But this came at a cost to
the Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead
Indian Reservation when treaty land
was taken from them to establish the
National Bison Herd. DAN O'BRIEN: And what we're
trying to do here on this ranch is to keep our buffalo as
wild as is humanly possible, so that if there is a genuine
regeneration of wild buffalo, that there'll be a pocket like
Walking Coyote's buffalo were. And I think that by doing
that when the time comes for the Serengeti to
actually come back, there will be
animals that are capable of making
that transition. NARRATOR: There are
now only eight major conservation herds
that serve as the source of genetic diversity
for the species, which is critical
to their survival. (gates opening) In order to preserve
this diversity, researchers are working to
establish new herds of bison across the plains. (bison running) CHUCK COOPER: The day
the animals arrived, it was like a fairytale. Our goal is to
restore the prairie back to its historic level. As we looked around,
there's one thing that was noticeably missing and that was
the dominant species, that being American buffalo
or bison. NARRATOR: The Crane Trust bison
herd released in 2015, now ranges over native,
tall-grass prairie on Mormon
and Shoemaker Islands in the Platte River ecosystem. CHUCK COOPER: We never even
dreamt of having access to a genetically pure herd. ANDREW CAVEN: Out of the eight
major conservation herds left, I think we have six
out of those eight well-represented
in our herd. We just need to
get ten calves. We've got eighteen
to choose from. NARRATOR: In order
to track purity and diversity, MAN: Yeah, she's ready. ...researchers
collect blood samples and tail-hair follicles to
test the DNA of each bison. This genetic data
helps researchers make informed decisions that will benefit the long-term
health of the species. ANDREW CAVEN: What we're
doing is trying to create sort of a very diverse herd. And our aim is not just purity,
as much as it is diversity. NARRATOR: More
than a century ago, ranchers cross-bred
bison with cattle. Cattle DNA and low
genetic diversity can have a long-term negative
effect on the species. ANDREW CAVEN: You going to
get blood from the tail? NARRATOR: Researchers
selectively breed bison in conservation herds
to eliminate cattle DNA and maximize diversity. (gate closing) ANDREW CAVEN: For the species
to truly be itself and thrive, we're going to
start to see issues if we don't increase
the diversity. NARRATOR: The return
of this keystone species to the prairie ecosystem is critical not only for their survival, but for the survival
of the plants and animals that depend on them. KRISTEN CARLSON: To put these
animals back into the ecosystem that they belong in is repairing something
that we really broke. DAN FLORES: It's interesting
to be living in our time, because we're
living in a time when there are more
bison in North America than there have
been at any time since probably about
1880 or 1881. NARRATOR: Although bison
now only inhabit islands of prairie habitat
across the Great Plains no longer moving from water
to water, they endure. The dream of the
buffalo is not over. STEVE TAMAYO: We've been
on a long journey with our relative,
Tatanka Oyate. It's all about understanding the responsibilities
of two-leggeds, of taking care
of our relative. The Buffalo Nation
has always been here. ♪ MUSIC ♪
