Duncan and Burns Deliver Warning from our Past

Terri Schlichenmeyer
THE BOOKWORM SEZ
”Blood Memory: The Tragic and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo” by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns; 2023, Knopf $40.00 331 pages

The sound must’ve been tremendous.

If you’d been there — if you’d witnessed it — you might have thought you’d been deafened. Just think: millions of almost-vehicle-size animals racing across the plains as far as you could see. It’s almost unimaginable today, but it happened. Read about it in “Blood Memory” by Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns.

Twenty thousand years ago, North America was full of large beasts, the likes of which we’ve never seen alive: saber-tooth cats, giant sloths, and dire wolves populated the continent. Then, humans arrived and just after the last Ice Age, those animals and some forty-seven other species went extinct. That was good for bison bison, a mammal that was smaller than the others and that took advantage of the sudden space, abundant food, and lack of competition to survive the die-off and thrive.

“Fully grown,” the authors say, “an American buffalo can weight more than a ton…” At over six feet at the shoulders, a buffalo is taller than most humans and it can measure more than ten feet long. It’s fast, powerful, protective, and exquisitely built to live on the grasslands in almost any temperature. An animal that size changed the prairie and the very nature of nature.

While Lewis & Clark searched three months for a buffalo and claimed they didn’t see one, the plains then were full of bison. Millions of them, the authors say, and the animals were essential to the Native people for whom the buffalo was considered family, spiritual beings, and a source of food, clothing, shelter, and tools.

Then Europeans arrived in North America.

Their presence brought diseases to which the Native Americans had no immunity, and Native populations dropped by more than 80%. The buffalo population completely disappeared east of the Mississippi River by the early 1800s and the “millions” that survived west of the river were hunted for railroad workers’ and immigrants’ sustenance; for their hides; and for sport, their carcasses left to rot in the grass.

By 1884, the American buffalo was all but gone…

You, of course, know that total extinction didn’t happen; you can see American buffalo in many places around the country. But “Blood Memory” is not just about the buffalo.

Science peeks into the narrative you’ll find, and there’s politics and early American culture here, too, but mostly, understandably, centuries of Native American history run side-by-side with that of the bison throughout this book. Indeed, as authors Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns suggest, you cannot separate one from the other. Even the books’ title reflects it.

The timeline here is crisp, leaving no questions on what happened, when, and readers will find no glossing over of facts. You can take that as a warning: there’s brutality and bloodshed in this book and much of it lands on specific culprits. The abundant illustrations are proof.

This elegantly-presented book speaks to the heart of every Western historian or cowboy fiction reader, and it’s great for students, too. Crack it open, and you’ll know that “Blood Memory” is a tremendous read.

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Want more? Then look for “Rewilding: The Radical new Science of Ecological Recovery” by Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe (The MIT Press). There, you’ll learn about how the buffalo recovered and more conservation efforts.