Where the Buffalo Roam : In Search of the Legendary Beasts of Santa Catalina

When people in my town talk about a heavenly day, the highest accolade they deliver is: “You could even see Catalina.”

Just to see that island out there--the misted hills on ocean’s horizon--lets the mainlander know that the air in his world is worthy of human breath. Too, Catalina is a place of legends, passed on from fishermen, smugglers, lovers. The legend that’s haunted me for the better part of quite some time is Catalina’s biggest, the stuff of one of the grandest tragedies of this impatient nation--the American bison. Called les boeufs by the French explorers and, thus, eventually the buffalo. A big symbol. A big loss.

The first time you see a buffalo, it’s like happening upon a snorting monument. It was in the back hills of Santa Catalina’s interior, among the sun-baked grasses and cacti so familiar to Southern California, that I found one. A thick dust cloud was rising out of a clump of chaparral and the brush was shaking and the thistles were flying. I crept up and saw him--a solitary bull writhing enthusiastically on his back in a classic buffalo wallow, scratching the ants off his hide and telling the world to go to hell. The spectacle had an unexpected cheeriness. It was like seeing a rhinoceros rolling in catnip.

At a moment’s notice, he felt the presence of an intruder and snapped instantly to his feet. He looked hot and wary, as if he’d been caught in a shameful act. But there it was--an enormous, grizzle-faced apparition. He was dark as chocolate, almost black, shrouded in a coarse, matted shag. Suddenly the frolicsome fellow was possessed of a magisterial silence. Thick horns curled around his head like a crown. With that vast mane, he seemed all chest. I assumed that he had a heart the size of a rain barrel.

Shrugging with suspicion, he turned and hoofed along the rail leading up a ridge. Vast belts of muscles rippled under his furry flanks. He paused, looked around, saw that the intruder was still following gingerly, and then broke into a trot, kicking up powdery clouds as he ran. Stunningly swift and graceful for something so top-heavy and huge, he barely made a sound. In a moment he was far down in a deep draw. At ease among the sage and prickly pear, he resumed his idle grazing. A deer bounded out of nowhere and in five springing leaps was past the buffalo and into a grove of trees. The old bull barely looked up.

To follow him further would be harassment, so I backtracked down the ridge. I found there the waiting figure of J. J. Poindexter, the fellow who had brought me this far. He worked for the Santa Catalina Conservancy, the group that controls most of the island. Poindexter is its equivalent of a park ranger. He is stocky, mustachioed, just shy of 30 years old and in complete charge of his turf. He had a worried look on his face. The buffalo’s late-summer rutting season was only recently passed. “It’s the only time of the year they get a little belligerent,” he said. “They’ll butt heads.” We started walking down the ridge to his pickup truck.

Poindexter stopped and shielded his eyes. “You want to see some feral pigs?” he asked. He pointed up the opposite hillside. A family of wild pigs--dark, furtive little creatures--scrambled through the brush. A piglet barreled along behind. “They usually don’t come out this early in the evening. They’re night creatures. I’m not sure why, either. Maybe that’s when they know that man won’t be around.”

I guess there was a time when you could walk anywhere around the West and see animals popping out of the woodwork like this at any moment. With its strict measures of protection, Catalina--just 26 miles from Los Angeles--is an open-air zoo. Peregrine falcons also were supposed to be in abundance, and suddenly I wanted more than anything to see one of the 11 bald eagles known to be in residence. These riches were not enough.

Driving along the narrow road back to Avalon, we came across a small herd of buffalo cows and their calves. They had made their home along a rolling flat, and you could tell they had been there for some time. Large gray patches had been hollowed out of the earth by frisky fellows in buffalo wallows.

About 500 buffalo are at large on Catalina.

Before European man set foot on the North American continent, buffalo numbered at least 50 million, perhaps 100 million. Spanish explorer Hernando de Alvarado said the country was covered with “the monstrous beasts,” which were as thick as fish in the sea. At first they were killed for their meat, and to make robes of their hides and china plates from their bones. In the closing decades of the slaughter, around the 1870s, buffalo were killed by the thousands solely for their tongues, which earned the hunters a quarter apiece. (The tongues were pickled in brine, cured and then sewn into canvas sacks and shipped to the eastern markets.) The rest of their 2,000 pounds were left to rot along the railroad tracks.

Finally they were killed for sport and out of racial hatred. Columbus Delano, the Secretary of the Interior under President Grant, hoped for their extinction so that the Indians, long dependent on the animal, would become farmers and laborers. The stench of rotting carcasses blew across the Plains. The animals, which once roamed in herds up to 100 miles wide, were down to the last few hundred survivors when, in 1900, the first laws were passed to save them.

For the filming of a silent Western called “The Vanishing American” in 1924, a small herd (varying reports say between 6 and 14) was brought to Catalina. After the filming they were set free. Inbreeding eventually brought a weakness to the growing herd, so a few more bison were shipped in from the Plains. Although there are a few good herds now roaming the National Bison Range in Montana, Woods Buffalo National Park in Canada, and Yellowstone Park, I don’t know whether the furry Goliaths would be as easy to track down as they are in the cozy 75 square miles of Catalina.

It’s a tightly watched bit of paradise, Catalina. Chewing-gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., bought a controlling interest in the island in 1919, and his heirs still manage it today, albeit through the nonprofit organization called the Conservancy. The island’s sole town, Avalon, takes up but a square mile, and for a resident to take a car beyond the city gate requires both a $100 road-fee permit and a half a million dollars’ worth of liability insurance. But boaters can ply the coves, iron-man bicyclists can tackle the mountain roads, and tourists can risk a bus ride. The overall message, however, is that the place is protected, and that you will only be a visitor. The island knows a balmy quiet. The buffalo are safe from “sport.”

On occasion the buffalo mosey down into the streets of Avalon. That’s when J. J. Poindexter gets a call, and he walks the stragglers back out of town. Poindexter was raised on Catalina and, like all the home folks, automatically refers to people as either “islanders” or “mainlanders.” His schooling, from kindergarten to 12th grade, was in one schoolhouse, the same one that his father attended. After ninth grade, J. J. only had eyes for his classmate, Linda, and soon knew that he would marry her. Their two children now attend that same school--with some of the same teachers. J. J. puts 25,000 miles a year on his pickup truck as he rattles over his preserve.

“Now you see why I love this job?” he asked late one afternoon. We were passing a grove of fern-leaf ironwoods, and off down the mountainside was the white-and-blue ocean. Mountainside and seashore are the constants on Catalina. J. J.’s question needed no answer.

“When I was a kid, I got out of school for three weeks to be an extra in a movie they shot out here called ‘Bless the Beasts and Children.’ For one scene they needed a buffalo stampede, so they rounded up about 60 head and tried every way they knew to get a stampede going--rifle shots, blasting caps, everything. The animals wouldn’t budge. Then, by accident, an air hose cut loose and made a real violent hissing noise. That scared the heck out of them and they scattered in a big old stampede. Took forever to get them back.” He clucked his tongue reprovingly. “It was sure something to see.”

“Hey!” He eased the truck to a stop. “There’s a couple for you.” I jumped out and moved quietly along a dried stream bed. Two old bulls grazed in the shade, looking like shaggy gentlemen of the club. They had a morose air. And why not? They had their 20 or so years of lounging in the grass with their harem. They watched the young studs come up and muscle them out of the herd. Now they wandered the hills in solitude, waiting to die.

Their horns were impressively thick. The fur around their eyes was caked in mud and insects. One fellow, rooted to his spot in the shade, looked no more ready to move anywhere than does City Hall. I stood well away, but I still felt their palpable majesty. Finally, the other fellow lifted his rugged old noggin and offered a baleful glare that any mammal could understand. With a stiff rear leg, he reflexively pawed the ground. If there were last stands to be made, he’d be the guy to make them.

Making him mad, though, was the last thing I wanted to do. As I sidled back to the road, Poindexter was creeping along in the truck, and his face was all business. “I hope you know how to run fast,” he warned.

“Aw,” I said, “we were getting along just fine.”

We motored along the hill back to Avalon. The sky was powdery blue and the air was heavy with that beautiful, late-afternoon honey light. I once heard it said that Catalina’s sunlight is still the kind of light that made Southern California famous back in the ‘20s. You can torture yourself with that kind of comparison sometimes. When we crested the rise by Mt. Black Jack, I could see far to the eastern horizon. Poking out of a gray, hazy mantle were the mountains of Los Angeles.