Antelope Island and the Bison That Almost Weren't
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
The largest island in the Great Salt Lake is forty-two square miles of high desert grassland, ancient volcanic rock, and beaches of salt-crusted sand. From the causeway that connects it to the mainland, you can see mule deer and pronghorn along the road. Further in, on the grassy uplands, there are bison.
Twelve bison were brought to Antelope Island in eighteen ninety-three by a man named John Dooly, with the help of a partner named William Glassman. The timing was not incidental. American bison, which had numbered between thirty and sixty million animals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been reduced to fewer than one thousand individuals by the early eighteen nineties. The great commercial hunting of the eighteen sixties through eighties, encouraged by the United States military as a strategy to undermine the Plains tribes who depended on them, had brought the species to the edge of extinction in less than a generation.
The twelve bison on Antelope Island were part of a scattered conservation effort that would eventually pull the species back. The island herd is now one of the largest and oldest publicly owned bison herds in the United States, numbering between five hundred fifty and seven hundred animals depending on the year. An annual roundup manages the population and allows health checks.
The catch is that the island is surrounded by a lake that is disappearing. On the north end, where the water is shallowest, the former lakeshore is now exposed flat. The causeway no longer crosses water for much of its length. The bison roam an island that is, on its drier edges, no longer entirely an island. What saved the bison is being tested again by what is happening to the lake.
