Stories, Traditions and the Baby White Buffalo : Miracles: Thousands of people have been visiting the calf born on Dave Heider’s Wisconsin farm. Many Native Americans believe it is a sacred symbol.

There is but a hint of autumn on Dave Heider’s farm in southern Wisconsin. Soon it will turn cool, then cold. The maple, oak and walnut trees will shed their leaves upon the sandy loam and hoarfrost, then become winter skeletons.

It used to be quiet here. After a day spent working for the Rock County Highway Department atop roaring, heavy equipment, Heider would retreat to his 46 acres outside Janesville. And the quiet.

But since Aug. 20, thousands of people, including Southern Californians, have been arriving for a glimpse of the white baby buffalo. On Sunday, almost 2,000 people visited between noon and 5 p.m.

The white calf is a sacred symbol, a prophecy fulfilled to many Native Americans, particularly those of the Northern Plains who maintain traditional beliefs, and it has ignited a pilgrimage.

*

Jim Funmaker, 48, is a Wisconsin Winnebago, a spiritual leader and treatment coordinator at the Eagle Lodge, a Long Beach substance abuse treatment center that utilizes Native American culture in the healing process. The story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, he says, begins with two men walking on the prairie. (It would take days to tell the entire story, and as is the case with oral history, details may differ from one person to the next. The message, however, is the same.)

It was probably his grandfather who first told Funmaker the story of how she delivered a sacred gift to the people before vanishing into the clouds.

“Two men were out one day looking for food, buffalo, in a time of hardship,” he says. “They were out on the prairie, and they saw something approaching them. They thought it was a buffalo.”

As it drew near, they saw that it took on the appearance of a beautiful woman, Funmaker says. One of the men had feelings of lust for the woman, while the other was a spiritual person who warned the other warrior that it was wrong to have such thoughts. “He said that what they were witnessing was sacred, but the other man wanted to approach the woman with those physical feelings. He approached her with those thoughts, and a cloud came over them, and when the cloud lifted, the man lay dead on the ground.”

The woman instructed the spiritual warrior to return to his people and tell them what he had witnessed. She said to tell them that she was a messenger from the creator and would return in four days to deliver a gift.

“When she returned, she was carrying a bundle and some sage. She came into the lodge, which had been prepared for her and came before the chiefs and headmen, the medicine men and spiritual leaders.”

She opened the bundle and revealed a sacred pipe. The White Buffalo Calf Woman stayed four days, spending a day each with the men, the women, the children and the elders, instructing them on how to live virtuous lives, how to use the sacred pipe in ceremonies to pray to the creator. Before leaving, she told the people that she would return someday.

“As she left the village, the people watched and she transformed back into a buffalo,” Funmaker says. “She rolled on the ground four times. Each time she rolled, she was a different color. The final color was white. Then she ascended into the clouds. That was the last time she was seen.”

*

The story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman is not so different from those of other beliefs, Funmaker says.

“In Christianity, a virgin woman gave birth to a child. That child was wrapped in a bundle, a gift to the people, the son of God. For us, when we unwrapped our bundle, it was a sacred pipe, also brought to us by a virtuous woman from the creator. Our path is like any other’s path. It leads to the same place,” says Funmaker, a member of the Bear Clan, who was born in his grandparents’ two-room log home in Wisconsin.

While he doesn’t plan on visiting the calf, his belief in the sacred pipe--the words delivered from the creator by the White Buffalo Woman--have been Funmaker’s strength over the years.

He recalls his first day of school. His grandmother had braided his hair and dressed him in a fine vest she had made from deer hide and decorated with beads.

“When I got to school, they cut my hair and took my vest off and took me down to the basement where they had the furnace. They opened the furnace door, and the teacher instructed me to take my vest and my hair and put it in the furnace.”

He left home as a teen-ager and embarked on a journey, traveling all over the country, living on the streets. He drank too much, consumed and sold drugs. He did three years for assaulting a police officer in Wisconsin.

About 20 years ago, an elder offered him a pipe. Funmaker fasted and prayed and decided to take the pipe, knowing that by doing so he must live his life according to the teachings of the White Buffalo Woman.

He now runs sweat lodges for inmates, and since 1983 has worked at the Eagle Lodge. He says he has dedicated his life to the sacred pipe, which is kept in Green Grass in South Dakota, cared for by a family named Looking Horse.

It is the pipe, he says, that helped him heal from the alcohol, the drugs and the image that burns in his memory of his hair and fine vest being claimed by fire.

*

There were three visions.

Looks for Buffalo, a revered spiritual interpreter on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, says he received signs from spirits that the White Buffalo Calf Woman would soon return.

The premonitions told him that “The Lady” was coming to unite the people, and when he heard that a white calf had been born in Wisconsin, he began planning for the journey.

He arrived at the Heider farm on Sept. 12 following four days of preparation in Minneapolis, where offerings from tribes all over the country were gathered. A purification ceremony was conducted for about 300 people chosen to take part in the special ceremony to honor the sacred 40-pound calf and the White Buffalo Calf Woman.

There have been other white buffalo, the most famous being Big Medicine, born at the National Bison Range in Montana in 1933.

But Big Medicine had a brown crown. He had a male albino offspring that lived for 12 years at the National Zoological Gardens in Washington, D.C.

Looks for Buffalo, 55, has looked askance at the other white buffalo, believing that the sacred one would be female, entirely white (but not albino), and not the result of cross-breeding with cattle--as some of the others have been.

“This,” he says of the Wisconsin calf, “is the real thing.”

Before traveling to Wisconsin, Looks for Buffalo had a vision that the calf’s father would die, so that the newborn could live. He telephoned Heider and explained who he was and that he was told by spirits to deliver that message.

Heider, unfamiliar with Native American cultures, didn’t know what to think of the call.

Two days later, the bull died.

*

Heider has 13 buffalo, a llama, quarter horses, a few cattle and some peacocks. They are for his family’s enjoyment, but since the calf named Miracle was born, all that has changed.

A person representing rocker/hunter Ted Nugent, who in 1974 recorded “Great White Buffalo,” inquired about buying the calf. Word also arrived that actress Shirley MacLaine would like to see the calf.

Heider, 46, says the calf is not for sale and visitation has been limited to weekends. He doesn’t quite know what to think about all the attention, about the medicine wheels and dream catchers and sacred bundles and eagle feathers being left hanging on the pasture gate.

There was a reason why the calf was born on his farm, according to Looks for Buffalo.

“It was born to a white family as an omen to the white people,” he says. “They must pay attention to what they are losing. When they want to know something, they ask a machine. They have lost touch with Mother Earth.”

On Sunday, Arvol Looking Horse, a spiritual leader and caretaker of the sacred pipe, visited for about five hours. He and Heider drank coffee and talked.

“He told me that every four days, I could take the items off the gate, except for the eagle feathers, and burn them in a fire, and that the smoke would carry them to the spirits,” Heider says.

It has been quite a learning experience for Heider. Some things he can’t quite figure out, like the telephone call from Looks for Buffalo warning him of the death of the bull, which had been suffering from stomach ulcers.

But he says he will abide by the wishes of the Native Americans. He will wait four days before removing sacred items. He does not wish to offend spirits he just recently has learned about.

“Maybe,” he says, “somebody up there is trying to tell us something.”