The Canadian Bison Association lists 1,250 buffalo ranches operating in Canada. In the late 1990s, commercial production was expected to grow 25 percent a year until 2005. Experts predict as many as 700,000 animals will be processed 10 years from now. Some agribusiness analysts predict buffalo will displace cattle in North America.
by Don Malcolm
Forty kilometres north of the busy Trans Canada Highway at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Buffalo Pound Provincial Park offers an enchanting relief from the noisy, aggressive traffic beating its way east and west on Canada's main road. Within the park the Qu'Appelle River pursues its centuries old task of cutting a deep wide valley through the prairie flat lands.
To cross the rim of the valley and begin the descent to the river evokes images in the mind of going back in time, back a hundred and fifty years when no roads broke the vastness of these great plains. Those who would venture to cross them, or live there, followed the rivers upstream or down while maintaining a strict harmony with their surroundings and the turning of the seasons.
Thus it was, for thousands of years before the wheel rolled across the land. Through fat times and lean, the land provided for its inhabitants.
The park harbours an abundance of wildlife: pelicans, geese, ducks, herons, hawks, owls and countless other birds. Coyotes sing in the night, worrying small animal neighbours, as they've done for uncounted centuries. In the daylight hours large deer, the males carrying huge racks of antlers, watch from the hillsides. Perhaps they are watched, in turn, by wolves. Somewhere in the valley, beavers may be at work.
To many visitors, perhaps, the most exciting of the park's wildlife is a small herd of wild plains bison, commonly called buffalo. Confined within a large compound, it is one of a growing number of such herds scattered throughout the Great Plains area of North America. Once estimated to number more than 100 million, the buffalo were the monarchs of a domain extending from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in north-west Alberta, 2,500 kilometres south-east to the Gulf of Mexico, and about 1,300 kilometres wide from west to east.
Before the arrival of European explorers in North America, before the gun and the surveyors' transit, and the imposition of artificial boundaries and fences, the buffalo was held sacred in the mythology and religion of the Plains First Nations. It provided their livelihood; its nomadic existence even dictated where they lived. The buffalo provided their food, its skins provided clothing and shelter and warm sleeping robes. Its bones were fashioned into many tools such as needles and bowls and its sinews provided bowstrings. Buffalo stomachs, bladders and intestines made pouches and its manure, when dried, was used for campfire fuel. Nothing was wasted.
The buffalo was a creature adapted to its environment and the original people of the plains found their security within a symbiosis with that adaptation. The plains people regularly burned exhausted grass lands to promote fresh growth which, in turn, attracted and sustained the grazing buffalo.
It's likely most North Americans and, indeed, most people throughout the world, have heard or read the sagas of the westward thrust of "civilization" across the North American continent. Many have thrilled to the description of the great herds of buffalo reaching to the horizon in every direction and the ground-shaking thunder of hooves when they ran. And skilled artists' depictions captured in detail the raw, wild power of these magnificent beasts.
Toward the close of the eighteenth century an event taking place in England would have significant worldwide impact. James Watt's lifetime fascination and experiments with steam resulted in the development of the steam engine. Watt's engine was quickly put to use powering all manner of machinery. Far away in "the new world," the fate of the buffalo and the Great Plains First Nations was sealed. Within a few years steam locomotives were pulling trains between cities in eastern North America, and railroad construction was expanding steadily westward in the United States and, later, Canada.
Land-hungry European immigrants and many long time residents of both countries, adventurers and pioneers, answered to the call: "Go west." The plains "Indians" and the buffalo that provided their livelihood stood in the way of that great western migration.
The US Army embarked on a campaign to wipe out the buffalo. General Philip Sheridan urged settlers to "kill until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance." Buffalo hunters such as the legendary Buffalo Bill Cody and Tom Nixon were employed to supply railway crews with fresh buffalo meat. Railways began shipping hides and meat east to an eager market. The killing became frenzied as the market grew.
Like a plague of locusts, thousands of buffalo hunters swarmed westward. In the eastern markets, pickled buffalo tongues had become an outrageous extravagance. Whole herds were slaughtered, only their tongues salvaged for pickling. An estimated 3 billion pounds of meat a year was left to rot on the plain.
In Canada, huge land grants were given to the Canadian Pacific Railway in a scheme to finance the construction of a coast-to-coast railroad. The railway would in turn sell homesteads to pioneers eager to try their hand at farming. As an added bonus, due to the inherent relationship between railroads and cities, the CPR would end up owning all the prime commercial properties in the future cities through which its tracks ran.
During the western migration, from the days of the covered wagon to the coming of the railroad, in less than a hundred years buffalo numbers were reduced to a few hundred. From the 1820s, Manitoba Metis organized large hunting expeditions out of Fort Garry. One group was reported to contain about 1500 hunters. They were accompanied by women and children, and some twelve hundred Red River carts to carry the dried meat and hides home. Hunting pressure remained intense on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, in spite of the declining numbers of buffalo. By the 1860s, the plains buffalo had disappeared from Manitoba.
By historical coincidence, the CPR played almost no part in the buffalo slaughter. In 1670, England's King Charles II arbitrarily granted all of the land in the Hudson Bay watershed to the Hudson's Bay Company. The grant, known as Rupert's Land, consisted of part of the present day North-West Territories, the three prairie provinces, Ontario north of Thunder Bay, and Northern Quebec. The Hudson's Bay Company jealously guarded their great prize and vigorously opposed settlement of the west. In 1870 Canada bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company. The CPR built their railroad after the buffalo slaughter. By the time the railroad reached Regina in 1882 all that remained of the buffalo were piles of bones. In fact, the original name of what would become Saskatchewan's proud capital was "Pile o' Bones."
Brought back from the edge of a planned extinction that nearly succeeded, the plains buffalo is making a promising comeback in North America. The foresight and efforts of concerned individuals and groups, for the most part without government support, has been a key factor in that recovery. In 1857, west of present-day Winnipeg, an assembled council of the Plains Cree decided to forbid white men to kill buffalo on their land. By 1876, Cree leader, Sweetgrass, was pleading for buffalo protection. The North-West Territories council passed the Buffalo Protection Act, a worthless legislation without any provision for enforcement. The act was repealed a year later.
From a few captured, motherless calves that escaped the intended destruction of their species, the buffalo population has slowly but steadily increased. Today, more than 340,000 plains buffalo graze on public and private land in North America, 17,000 of them on American television magnate Ted Turner's 567,000 hectare ranch. In Turner's opinion, buffalo are the wave of the future.
Buffalo offer many advantages over cattle. They can survive extreme cold and blizzards that would kill cattle. Although they are as large as domestic cattle, they eat only a third as much. Their meat is less fatty than that of cattle, has less cholesterol than chicken, yet is high in protein.
The Canadian Bison Association lists 1,250 buffalo ranches operating in Canada. In the late 1990s, commercial production was expected to grow 25 percent a year until 2005. Experts predict as many as 700,000 animals will be processed 10 years from now. Some agribusiness analysts predict buffalo will displace cattle in North America.
Ironically, nostalgia aside, hard-headed business decisions may win, for the buffalo, victory over General Sheridan's version of civilization.
In Buffalo Pound Park, in the campsites among the willows in the valley bottom, it's easy to imagine the voices and laughter of happy children at play, or going about their daily tasks, as they grew to fit their inherent places in the buffalo hunts and ceremonies that were so central to their society. But that reverie is shattered by another of sadness and silence, reserves and boarding schools, and the reality of turning wheels on Canada's main road. Wherever they turn, wheels cannot carry us back to start over. We can only go carefully forward.
* Sources: Bill Burns, "Bison: Back from the Brink," The Beaver, October/November 2002, Vol. 82.5; Canadian Dictionary of the English Language: An Encyclopedic Reference, ITP Nelson, Scarborough ON 1996
[From WS December 2002/January 2003]