“American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon,” by Steven Rinella
(Published by Spiegel & Grau, 2008, 288 pages, Hardcover, $24.95
ISBN-10: 0385521685 & ISBN-13: 978-0385521680)

In the mid-18th century, when the United States was merely a whispered fantasy among a few intrepid colonial patriots, somewhere close to 40 million wild, free-ranging buffalo roamed the vast North American continent from Florida to British Columbia, mostly on the western Great Plains. By 1911, only around 2,200 remained. Although the buffalo now hover at a relatively stable population of around half a million (96-percent of which are privately owned livestock), we still aren’t very conscious of the history of an animal that played such an integral part in the dawn of the American West. Even today, most Americans’ knowledge of the buffalo stems from a drive through Yellowstone National Park or a visit to the butcher at the local Whole Foods.

In “American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon,” Steven Rinella attempts to trace the thread of an animal that was likely once the most numerous land mammal on Earth, from its probable crossing of the Bering Land Bridge thousands of years ago to its near demise within the blossoming United States.

After stumbling across a 250-year-old buffalo skull in the mountains of Montana and drawing a lottery permit to hunt a remote and elusive buffalo herd in the mountains of Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Rinella is drawn to, and subsequently delves deeper into the complex story of an iconic beast with a long and conflicted history in American (and pre-American) culture.

Rinella frames the book around the narrative of his Alaskan hunt, interweaving his physical and factual pursuits of the buffalo. He unearths a host of fascinating history and anecdotal trivia, including the animal’s connection to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, the most desirable characteristics of a buffalo chip and the multitude of uses the Native Americans had for them (think tongue combs and stomach buckets).

His quest in search of the buffalo’s story takes him from New York City, where the sculptor James Earl Fraser crafted the famous buffalo nickel after a captive specimen named Black Diamond, to the Brooks Range of Alaska, where Rinella searches for paleo-Indian hunting tools on what was once the eastern edge of the Bering Land Bridge. He visits buffalo jumps in Montana and goes to the birthday party of a white buffalo in North Dakota.

For the Alaskan hunt, which consumes the better part of the book, Rinella’s odds of merely drawing a permit were one-in-fifty, and the logistics of hunting a half-ton animal in a remote wilderness presented unique challenges. From lurking grizzly bears and icy, unforgiving rivers, to a bout with what he calls “buffalo fever,” the hunt is rife with difficulty, yet Rinella’s jovial tone and amusing analogies make the suspense all the more enjoyable.

Amid the history lessons and hunting tales, Rinella reveals a strong parallel between the wide-roaming freedom of the buffalo and the adventurous, pioneering ideals that our country was founded upon. In many ways, the buffalo embodied our free-wheeling ideals long before we did, and their powerful, untamed presence is likely part of what made our unspoiled nation so alluring in the first place.

The great irony, however, is that the animal that is now so representative of the early American experience eventually became a victim of it. Now that the buffalo plays such a miniscule role in our natural world, we don’t give much credence or thought to the existence or history of what was once such an integral part of our landscape.

Although not directly mentioned in the book, the similarities between the buffalo and Native American experiences in early America are also striking. Initially utilized for their resources (the buffalo for its meat and hide, and the Native American for his land and knowledge of it), both were eventually exploited to the brink of extinction for the same resources, and now, although relatively stable in numbers and revered for their historical mystique, reside within the confines of strict boundaries in the modern West. As rampant oil and natural resource consumption issues fill our daily headlines, Rinella’s commentary aptly tells us something about America’s historic penchant for overconsumption.

Yet in the end, Rinella’s exhaustive search for the buffalo reveals to us a true symbol of the wild, frontier spirit that once ran rampant across the plains and mountains something as deeply fundamental to the evolution of America as Lewis and Clark.

After the successful conclusion of his hunt, Rinella snacks on buffalo meat cooked in crackling orange buffalo fat and says, “You can say what you want about Coca-Cola and hot dogs and apple pie, but this is the real original American meal right here, buffalo meat.”

Through his search for the long, emotive legacy of the buffalo and his own personal encounter with it, Rinella compellingly documents the connection between American history and the animal that, perhaps more than any other, is intrinsically a part of it.

Andy Anderson’s last story for the Mountain Gazette was “Biddin’ Treasure,” which appeared in #154. He lives in Salt Lake City.