The Bison That Came From the Bronx

By nineteen hundred, the North American bison population had been reduced from somewhere between thirty and sixty million animals to fewer than one thousand. The commercial hunting of the eighteen seventies and eighties had accomplished in roughly fifteen years what centuries of Native hunting had not come close to approaching. The herds were, for practical purposes, gone.

Wind Cave was established as a national park in nineteen oh three, primarily to protect the cave itself and the first cave anywhere in the world given national park status; its role in wildlife preservation came a decade later. Its original bison population was fourteen animals acquired in nineteen thirteen from the New York Zoological Society, which is better known today as the Bronx Zoo. The zoo had been maintaining a captive herd as part of a deliberate effort by the American Bison Society to preserve the species from extinction, and the Wind Cave animals were among the first systematic releases of zoo-bred bison into a protected wild habitat in United States history.

The herd descends from those fourteen animals. Today, Wind Cave maintains a free-ranging herd of several hundred animals that are managed as part of the larger restoration project spanning multiple national parks and tribal lands across the Great Plains. The herd is genetically important partly because of its relative isolation over more than a century, which has preserved a degree of genetic diversity distinct from other restored populations.

The irony the naturalists of nineteen thirteen understood and did not fully resolve is this: the bison were saved in part by the same industrial civilization whose economy had required their destruction. The Bronx Zoo held the remnant; the railroad brought the animals west; the federal government protected the land. The species survived. The question of who the surviving herds belong to, and what their restoration means for the nations whose civilization was destroyed alongside them, is not settled.