Buffalo Get Home on Range as...

They came plodding out of the foggy dawn, lured by the bleat of the truck’s horn and its promise of alfalfa and molasses cubes, a tempting treat compared to their sturdy diet of native Blue Stem and Indian grasses.

The morning ritual was to prepare 300 buffalos for release onto the sepia-toned hills and swales of ranchland owned by the Nature Conservancy. Gamboling around the slow-moving truck, the buffalo grunted a murmur of reassurance that ripples slowly through the herd.

“You know they belong when you see them out there,” said Bob Hamilton, a biologist charged with growing the herd into 1,800 head over the next decade. “They’re a major cog in the ecological machine.”

The buffalo release this fall at the 36,600-acre preserve on the Kansas border is but one piece in a mosaic that, for some, is beginning to resemble the prophesies made by Native American mystics a century ago.

In the Ghost Dance of the late 1880s, Plains Indians spoke of a time the buffalo would return, signaling the collapse of white society and a reclamation of lands taken from the tribes and their buffalo brothers.

Now, the buffalo are returning.

Their numbers have quadrupled to 135,000 since the 1970s; exponential growth is expected to continue as the herds expand for commercial, conservation and cultural reasons.

And as the buffalo move onto the land, people continue to move off.

Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and the Dakotas have seen populations in more than a hundred rural counties drop to half their 1930 levels. Railroad and bus services have declined. Schools and hospitals have closed. Working farms and ranches have disappeared.

There are those who see a connection.

“The buffalo tell us what is happening and what is likely to happen in the Great Plains,” said Frank Popper, a Rutgers University urban planner who has been predicting the Plains will revert to a frontier of buffalo and open spaces.

“Buffalo are the only animals in America that have commercial, wildlife and mythic value,” he said. “They are important because they represent a different use of the land.”

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Those seeking buffalo signs can find them up and down the Great Plains, a 1,500-mile, 10-state region stretching from Montana to the Rio Grande. The signs are fueled by different, unrelated sources, from ranchers and conservationists to Native American tribes. But whatever their motives, each are contributing to the rapid growth of the herds.

In Yellowstone National Park, a policy of nonintervention has seen the herd triple to 3,300 over 20 years and push beyond park boundaries. There are plans for herds on public parklands and private conservation tracts from Wyoming to Texas.

Ranchers are turning to buffalo. Naturally adapted to prairie life, buffalo are cheaper to raise than cattle; their low-in-fat, high-in-hype meat brings in more money. The incentives are such that the American Bison Assn. has grown from 14 members in 1974 to 1,200 today.

Buffalos also are returning to Native American lands throughout the Plains. Economic and ecological benefits are cited, but there is an emphasis, too, on their spiritual impact.

“When native people see a herd for the first time, the moment is incredible,” said Donna House, a tribal organizer in Santa Fe, N.M.. “There is a breath, a sigh, as if they had been waiting for something for a long time and it’s finally here.”

But there also is a considered hesitation as some wonder if it is the time--or the way--for the buffalos’ return. They worry about the imposition of feedlots and breeding strategies on an animal that symbolizes the ethos of the American frontier.

“We’ve seen people manipulating buffalo to behave like cattle and we believe the buffalo has an intrinsic spirit that won’t stand to be treated like that,” said Mark Heckert, director of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, a group of 26 tribes raising buffalo on Native American lands. “It has some tribal elders saying we have to ask the buffalo if they want to come back.”

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It is too early to tell if the buffalo will even come back. Their total population represents little more than one day’s cattle slaughter in this country. The future of the animal, and its habitat, remains as Crowfoot, a Blackfoot warrior-poet once said, ethereal as “the breath of a buffalo in the winter time.”

“What’s developing is a New West that’s similar in some ways to the Old West,” said Robert Pickering, head of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Natural History. “It’s visionary stuff. It’s just not clear what the vision is.”

The vast grasslands of the Great Plains molded, and were molded by, the partnership of buffalo and Native Americans that lasted a hundred centuries before the white man came.

About 700 varieties of plants formed the great sea of grass that covered 20% of the continent.

The buffalo grazed the grasses into a balance of annuals and perennials that provided home for a rich diversity of animal life. Buffalo manure provided a rich compost for plant and insect species. The tribes had their impact, too, setting prairie fires in ceremonies and warfare that kept eastern forests from invading the Plains.

In turn, the Plains shaped the buffalo. The big animals adapted to a climate that produces the nation’s hottest summers and coldest winters, a landscape with the shortest growing season and a succession of miseries ranging from hail, windstorms and blizzards to drought and locusts.

The herds prospered in sizes estimated between 30 million to 50 million animals. But it took only a generation--and the introduction of railroads and buffalo hunters--to wipe them out.

They were replaced by settlers lured to the region by the free land of the 1862 Homestead Act, but continuing drought in the 1890s sent many farmers packing. They were followed by a second wave of migration enticed by even more generous homestead laws and Europe’s hunger for American wheat during and after World War I.

Then came the Dust Bowl and the Depression of the 1930s, and the land emptied again. A third boom-bust cycle ended in the 1980s with the farm crisis and the dramatic plunge in the energy industry.

The results can be seen in the 1990 census of the Great Plains counties: In Nebraska, 50 out of 52 counties lost population, and North Dakota lost people in 38 of 41 counties. Oklahoma had only one county that did not lose people.

The only growth in rural counties is among the tribes; rising births and a return to the land by tribal members has doubled the Native American population in South Dakota alone since 1960.

This resurgence among the native tribes is boosted by the buffalo’s return.

“Every indigenous people have something to say about buffalo,” said Ed Valandra, a Lakota Sioux activist and writer. “It’s a relationship that goes back to the beginning.”

Lakota Sioux narratives tell of a time when man and buffalo were one, helping each other in times of crisis. They lived in a balance that made it possible for both groups to, as the Lakota say, “live well in the natural world.”

Today, on many reservations, animals are culled for food and money. But the buffalo also bring a return of old ceremonies and sense of tribal identity.

“It is a way of getting to know our spirituality. It gets the younger generation talking about re-establishing their roots,” said Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa Native American and superintendent of the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument who has helped establish herds on public parkland and reservations.

Popper, the urban planner, sees all these trends confirming a 1987 paper he wrote with his wife, Deborah, that predicted an evolution of “Buffalo Commons,” a metaphor to describe a future Plains similar to the past--a place of sparse population where buffalo would be a major commodity of food, ecology, even tourism.

“What we’re saying is the more than century-long settlement of the Plains isn’t working,” Popper said. “It’s really as if the Ghost Dance prophesy is coming true.”