The American Buffalo Documentary by Ken Burns Looks at the Slaughter—and Salvation—of Bison

At times it seems like the earth is so upset about what happened to the American buffalo that it literally vomits up the remains. It’s amazing how bones continue to pop out of the ground. I found my first skull in 1999, poking up from the soil at 9,000 feet above sea level in the mountains of southwest Montana. Radiocarbon dating placed the year of the animal’s death at around 1770, a time when there were still perhaps 30 million of the animals on the American landscape.

Back then the famed hunter Daniel Boone was still encountering buffalo, now known to scientists as Bison bison, as far east as Kentucky and North Carolina. Native Americans living in the vicinity of where I found my skull were largely unaware of the Europeans advancing toward them from that direction. Most had probably heard of white men but had yet to see one. Certainly they couldn’t have imagined that these strange people would exterminate the herds they’d relied on for hundreds of generations in just over a century.

I keep finding more and more bones. I found buffalo vertebrae eroding from the banks of the Yellowstone River, with the absurdly long spinous process that gives the animal the distinctive hump on its back. Then I found two skulls in a Yellowstone tributary—on different days, but not more than a mile apart. One was just the upper-right quadrant of a skull, tipping out of the river’s west bank. The other was nearly complete, lying flush with the river cobbles in ankle-deep water. When I lifted it up, I was surprised to find a half-dozen juvenile crayfish occupying its sinus cavities.

A month later I would find myself in Fort Benton, Montana, north of the drainage divide that separates the Yellowstone and Upper Missouri Rivers. I was there to be interviewed for the latest project by the documentarian Ken Burns, titled The American Buffalo, premiering on PBS on October 16. Through a career spanning more than four decades and around 40 films, Burns has been doing his own form of bone digging, unearthing the stories that shaped America’s identity and, at times, haunted its soul. In searching for lessons about America’s relationship to its wildlife, the complex and centuries-long story of the bison’s near extinction is indeed fertile ground for Burns to excavate.

Burns told me that he and his team considered the subject of the American buffalo for 30 years before making the film. He recalls giving the film’s writer, Dayton Duncan, the gift of a tanned buffalo hide back in the 1990s. (Duncan’s writing credits include the Burns docs Country Music, The Dust Bowl, The National Parks, and Lewis and Clark.) “Some films take a long time to incubate,” Burns told me. He said that he keeps dozens of ideas in his head at all times. He resisted my question about how he prioritizes them, because he said that “prioritize” implied an organized mind. Rather, he compared his ideas to the numbered Ping-Pong balls in a lottery machine. They bounce around in your head, he said, “and then one drops down to your heart.”

It says a lot about the richness of the subject that you can make a two-part, four-hour documentary on the American buffalo without saying much about the animals themselves. The evolutionary history of the species, which spans millions of years and multiple continents, gets less than a minute of consideration in Burns’s film. There’s no mention of the animal’s incredible cold tolerance, which blows away that of a Tibetan yak. (In the 1970s, the director of the Alberta Veterinary Researchers Institute tried to find the point where a buffalo’s metabolic rate increased in response to the cold. It was still decreasing at minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit, as cold as they could get the room.)

Or of the species’ propensity to suffer staggering numbers of deaths even in the absence of any humans: two thousand of the animals expired in the mud of the Platte River in 1867; a quarter-mile-long pile was stacked by a tornado near the Arkansas River; so many were killed by a Wyoming prairie fire in 1864 that Sioux warriors had a hard time getting their horses through the carnage; and approximately ten thousand drowned in Canada’s Saskatchewan River in 1829.

Instead, the documentary is a human tale hiding inside a film about animals. “It’s the story of us,” said Burns. “Both uppercase, as in the U.S., and lowercase, as in us humans.”

Getting the perspective of all the humans involved in the buffalo’s narrative was something that concerned Burns. “I’m glad we waited those 30 years to do the film,” he said, “because we were able to get it right.” Getting it right involved capturing the voices of as many people as possible, particularly Native Americans. “We learned to get out of the way,” he told me, which “permitted us to center Native American experience. They had a relationship with the animal that lasted 12,000 years. Maybe they understand some things?”

The film makes an exploration of those Native American experiences, delivered through the techniques that have long been hallmarks of Burns’s films. We see archival photos, Native artwork ranging from paintings to petroglyphs, and mesmerizing footage of current buffalo herds. Voices come down the centuries, with actor-read quotes from an array of historical figures, including the Crow medicine woman Pretty-shield, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine, and the Kiowa chief Lone Wolf. Contemporary commentary is given by tribal nation members Dustin Tahmahkera (Comanche), Marcia Pablo (Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai), and Gerard Baker (Mandan-Hidatsa), among many others.

Along the way, we hear from many living writers and historians, their interviews edited into tightly focused clips that move the film along at a brisk pace. Early in the story, the Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday, now 89 years old, describes the buffalo as figuring prominently in his “blood memory.” “We have regard for each other,” he says. “We are friends and we are brothers. We are related.”

The evolution of Momaday’s mystical perception of a relationship between man and buffalo is impossible to track through time, as it likely took root in the late Pleistocene, some 10,000 years prior to the earliest human encounters with the animals of North America. The forefathers of today’s Native Americans encountered Bison priscus, an extinct ancestor of Bison bison, on the grassland of northern Siberia. Generations of bison hunters would have roamed a rolling prairie later covered by the Bering Sea. The bison there intermingled with mammoths and died at the teeth of now extinct short-faced bears and American lions.

The first Americans arrived in Alaska perhaps 20,000 years ago. Bison, caribou, and horses were the dominant grazers in the Alaskan interior. Currently, the fashionable notion among researchers is that the earliest human migrants to what is now the lower 48 arrived by a coastal route, hunting and gathering along a “kelp highway” that extended the entirety of the Pacific coast. Those early arrivals likely ate more clams than bison steaks, but by 12,500 years ago there were bison-hunting specialists on the American Great Plains.

In the early 2000s, while researching my book American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, I visited a late Pleistocene kill site near Folsom, New Mexico, where hunters corralled and killed at least 32 bison in a narrow box canyon. The hunters butchered the animals in a methodical manner, hauling away hides with the tails intact and likely removing the tongues with knives made of knapped stone.

The Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday describes the buffalo as figuring prominently in his “blood memory.” “We have regard for each other,” he says. “We are friends and we are brothers. We are related.”

At the end of the last ice age, the continent lost about 50 percent of its large-mammalian biodiversity. Literally dozens of species weighing between 400 and 4,000 pounds vanished, including 70 percent of the grazing animals. This was almost certainly the result of overhunting by recently arrived humans. Bison bison was left standing as the Western Hemisphere’s largest land mammal.

Then began a 10,000-year history of equilibrium between Native peoples and wildlife that the historian Dan Flores refers to as the period of Native America. (Flores, as much a philosopher and raconteur as a historian, appears throughout Burns’s film.) This stretch of time spanned some 400 human generations and witnessed only one extinction event, when Chendytes lawi, a goose-size flightless bird, was wiped out by overharvesting along the Pacific coast. That equilibrium between humans and wildlife in North America would be utterly shattered by the spasm of extinctions brought on by European arrivals in the 18th and 19th centuries.

What happened when Europeans showed up in the New World is summarized with stunning lucidity by the first words heard in Burns’s film, spoken by the narrator Peter Coyote, who has worked with Burns on over a dozen films. Accompanied by pastoral piano, Coyote describes the immensity of the herds encountered by the Lewis and Clark expedition in what is now eastern Montana in the spring of 1805. As Captain Lewis described it, “The whole face of the country was covered with buffalo.” At times the animals trailed after the expedition as though trying to figure out what the humans were.

Following this description of mammalian splendor, the narrator describes the findings of a later expedition that combed through much of that same country in 1887. “They hoped to find some buffaloes to kill and then preserve for an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York City. They searched for three months without seeing a single one.”

With a mix of contempt and reverence that varied by individual, the Europeans who explored the Great Plains and met its inhabitants described a people who had woven the buffalo into every aspect of their lives, from birth to death. Babies were swaddled in the woolly fur of buffalo calves by parents who lived inside tents of buffalo leather. The children were raised on a diet of buffalo meat cooked over fires of buffalo dung and served with spoons made of buffalo horn. Their thirst was quenched by water drunk out of vessels made from buffalo bladders.

A special treat was warm curdled mother’s milk, drunk from the stomachs of slaughtered buffalo calves. The people transported their possessions on travois lashed together with buffalo hide or inside boats made of the skin. At death they were placed on scaffolds wrapped in buffalo robes.

The animal was as central to the spiritual understanding of the people as it was to their day-to-day existence. Some plains tribes described a distant past when buffalo were the dominant species and preyed upon humans. There is a Cheyenne legend that the buffalo’s thymus gland is a hunk of human fat still stuck in the animal’s throat. Humans and buffalo eventually swapped roles; the Cheyenne and Lakota believed that humans won the right to hunt the animals by competing against them in a great race. Even as victors, tribal relations with the buffalo were governed by elaborate ceremonies that placed both species on the same footing, equal inhabitants of the landscape.

Virtually all the tribes on the High Plains used the buffalo as a primary symbol in their various sun dance rituals, conducted in the spring or early summer as a way of fostering spiritual renewal of the participants and their relatives, as well as of the living earth and its components. When buffalo herds couldn’t be found, Native American hunters might plead to the animals in atonement for their transgressions against the cosmic order. To be repeatedly skunked in one’s hunts could be a symptom of moral failing and not just a streak of bad luck.

Popular historians and writers have largely treated the decimation of the buffalo and of the plains tribes through the 1800s as distinct narratives. Most acknowledge the obvious relationship between the two with a recognition that the destruction of the herds literally starved Native peoples into submission. Still, authors usually lean one way or the other—toward the buffalo or the Indians. The Extermination of the American Bison, by the taxidermist and conservationist William T. Hornaday, featured prominently in the film, is an example of the former. First written as a report for the Smithsonian Institution, his work was published as a book in 1889, focusing narrowly on the disappearance of the buffalo, and argues for Native American complicity in that destruction.

Compare that with the novelist Evan S. Connell’s 1984 nonfiction masterpiece Son of the Morning Star, which recounts an intimate history of the individual white soldiers and Indian warriors who converged at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. While capturing the collapse of Indigenous lifeways on the northern plains with intense and unsettling detail, we see the buffalo only dimly, as though viewed at a distance through the smoke of a prairie fire.

Burns’s film brooks no such distinctions. Rather than present the stories of the buffalo and the Indian, they’re braided into a single thread. George Horse Capture Jr., an Aaniiih man who Burns described to me as the “soul” of his documentary, directly compares the fate of his own people to that of the buffalo. “Just like my people,” he says, “[the buffalo’s] people suffered from manifest destiny. They were victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing, westward expansion—shared history all across.”

It’s a compelling argument. The same European trappers and traders who introduced the infectious diseases in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that would kill a majority of the Indians on the Great Plains also introduced a market economy for buffalo robes that would function without any consideration of the finiteness of the herds. In the mid-1800s, railroad lines would snake their way across the West. The tracks would segment Indian lands into ever shrinking parcels, while commercial hunters such as Buffalo Bill Cody extinguished thousands upon thousands of buffalo to feed the labor crews. Cody himself killed over 4,000.

At the end of the Civil War, those railroad lines would deliver soldiers and supplies to carry out punitive campaigns against the tribes who refused reservation confinement. The train cars would head back east loaded with the remains of the Indians’ food supply. Literally millions of buffalo hides and tongues were shipped to markets on the Atlantic seaboard and beyond to Europe. The meat was left on the ground to rot in the sun or be eaten by wolves and coyotes.

Anyone familiar with Ken Burns should know better than to expect an apology from him for toying with the purity of our heroes and national pride. As he put it to me, “There is nothing binary.”

The madness stopped only because it couldn’t go on anymore. The United States simply ran out of buffalo. The last major slaughter occurred in the winter of 1881–82, when the Northern Pacific reached eastern Montana and tapped into the final bastion of what was called the northern herd. There, between the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, the hide hunters killed the last million or two. Then it was over. Some folks believed that more buffalo would come down from the north, thinking it impossible that the animals were gone.

Others woke up to reality, as though emerging from a violent drinking binge to take stock and assess the damage. Hornaday of the Smithsonian began a letter-writing campaign across the American West to ascertain how many of the animals were still out there. When the answer emerged, it was shockingly low—541 total, including 256 living in zoos or in private herds, 200 in Yellowstone National Park, and only 85 roaming free and unprotected on the Plains.

By then, of course, the same was true of the Plains Indians; with virtually synchronized timing, the last of them had been confined to reservations. Burns’s film refuses to accept this timing as coincidence.

I suppose a spoiler alert is warranted before saying that, thankfully, the buffalo is no longer at risk of genetic extinction. According to Jim Matheson from the National Bison Association, we likely have around 400,000 of the animals on the continent, with perhaps a quarter-million in the U.S. (The last official estimate, from 2019, was more than 362,000 in the U.S. and Canada; Matheson believes that number has grown substantially since then.)

The vast majority of these animals are privately owned by ranchers and Indian tribes, but there are public herds as far-flung as Alaska and Arizona that live a free-range existence, interacting with their natural predators (including human predators, in some cases) and surviving without supplemental feeding or any other assistance.

Burns explained to me that he regards the story of the buffalo as comprising three acts. The first is “the 10,000-year history of the animal and its relationship to the Native people of the continent, along with its near extinction in the 19th century,” he said. The second act is how we got from there to here, thanks to what Burns describes as a “fascinating group of individuals.” As the film reveals, “fascinating individuals” is polite shorthand for an unlikely and decentralized group of ranchers, artists, Native American activists, former buffalo hunters, celebrities, and politicians, who work in an ad hoc fashion with mixed motivations to save and protect a species that would be officially designated the United States’ national mammal in 2016.

If Burns brings something fresh to his presentation of this “second act,” it’s a zeitgeisty condemnation of some of the bigoted racial attitudes of individuals such as Hornaday and Theodore Roosevelt. Certainly, many viewers are going to pause at environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis’s proclamation that Roosevelt was “doing the right thing for the wrong reasons” in saving the buffalo, as he was motivated by an impulse to “protect his own ideas about national progress, about white masculinity, about his own race.” But anyone familiar with Ken Burns should know better than to expect an apology from him for toying with the purity of our heroes and national pride. As he put it to me, “There is nothing binary.”

The third act of the buffalo’s story falls outside the film’s scope, simply because Burns is a historian and this act is, he said, “what’s happening now—the further restoration, often led by Indigenous people, and the effort to create fuller ecosystems to support the animal in its natural environment.”

The object of this act was most succinctly described to me in 2005, when I attended a ceremony of the Wildlife Conservation Society to relaunch an organization called the American Bison Society. The ABS was first established a century earlier, in 1904, by a group including Hornaday and Roosevelt, to save the buffalo from extinction. Back then extinction meant just what you think it means—they wished to save the buffalo from going the way of the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet, and the ivory-billed woodpecker. In this century, the renewed focus of the organization became saving the animal from “ecological extinction,” which entailed the restoration of the species as a widespread and functioning component of the American landscape.

Ultimately, success in this endeavor will be more social than scientific. As we see in virtually every situation where attempts are made to give the animals room to roam—within Grand Canyon National Park, at the periphery of Yellowstone National Park, within the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument—they encounter a wall of human resistance far more imposing than barbed wire. I expect that Burns’s film will lend a hand in that struggle. In his endeavor to tell a story aimed at the American mammal, he hits us square in the heart.

Steven Rinella (@stevenrinella) is a longtime Outside contributor, who has written numerous stories for us on everything from squid jigging to nearly dying from a parasite he picked up after eating bear meat. He’s also a conservationist, founder of the hunting and fishing lifestyle company MeatEater, and author of 10 books, including American Buffalo:In Search of a Lost Icon and most recently Outdoor Kids in an Inside World.