Episode 206: The Thundering Herd, The Vanishing American

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This is the memory palace.

I'm Nate Tameo.

A postcard from Catalina Island, 23 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, summer 2023.

The buffalo aren't here anymore.

The guy in the Hawaiian shirt and sandals tells us down by the good bathrooms that are worth the walk down the hill from the campground.

He is happy to tell us that he has been coming to Catalina for years, but he is sad to tell us he has never seen its famous buffalo herd in the area toward which we are planning to hike.

Not at this hour.

Just as the morning ferry from San Pedro unloads and Boy Scouts pull on their packs and frat guys seal cases of third-tier beer with duct tape to keep them safe in the back of the truck and the ride out to the cabins.

And so before we even begin our hike, we abandon our hopes of seeing the buffalo.

Or bison.

I read on my phone on the boat ride over that they are the same thing.

And so we make our way to another trail, cutting through the tiny seaside resort town of two harbors, past its cabanas and rustic pavilions in mid-century beige.

as the ice cream shop prepares to open up, and as a bachelorette party, freshly disembarked, discovers that their weekend in the island coincides with Wine Fest, with its unlimited pours, and a DJ spending till midnight, that will echo among the hillsides that cradle the harbor, and the boats within it flying flags that signal their allegiance to America, California, the life of the pirate or the parrot head or no shoes nation, and the bachelorette and her girls are superstoked.

There will be ocean views in this hike along the cliff's edge.

waves and white sails, a whale sighting if we're lucky.

But the closest we will come on this day to spotting a a bison are two signs we will encounter on the trail.

One warning us to keep our distance in the unlikely event that we bump into one, and another telling the story of how they came to live on this island, off which you can see Los Angeles, when there isn't too much smog.

The sign keeps the details vague, and in line with recent scholarship that has called into question the old story that still makes its way into the tourist brochures.

That story goes that a small group of bison were brought over in 1925 by Paramount Pictures to appear in a cowboy movie called The Vanishing American.

But production costs ran over, and one of the line items that was cut from the budget was the one that would have paid for the bison to be brought back to the mainland.

And so they were set free to roam in their new home so far from the range.

But there is a newer story that I enjoy about how someone at the Catalina Historical Society tracked down a crumbling print of the Vanishing American.

threaded it carefully through the sprockets and up on the screen were flickering cowboys and wagon trains and ten 10-gallon hats and everything you'd expect from Western.

Except Buffalo.

Similar situation happened with another theory.

This one about the buffalo being brought over to film a picture called The Thundering Herd and then leaving the titular herd on the island for future productions, making the conveniently located Catalina with its rolling hills and parched grass valleys a veritable one-stop shop for people in the business of making westerns.

But as with The Vanishing American, someone tracked down the Thundering Herd and the story fell apart.

That movie does indeed have a herd, but it is doing its thundering, silently, in a place that is clearly not Catalina.

That is most likely Montana.

And so we do not know exactly how Catalina's famous bison got here.

Though the truth is probably somewhere in there.

Some other movie or some enterprising producer importing them on spec.

hoping the herd would entice filmmakers to cross the water.

Or it's possible the island's owners, the Wrigley Chewing Gum family, who bought the island in 1919, just wanted some buffalo.

Hoarding exotic animals is run-of-the-mill rich guy behavior.

But in 1925,

there was nothing run-of-the-mill about buffalo.

You, like me, have probably heard about the incredible reign and tragic decline of the American buffalo.

We know the story.

And the story you have heard is probably pretty close to the truth.

At the beginning of the 1800s, there were somewhere between 30 and 60 million buffalo in North America, the majority of which were in the Great Plains at the edge of the American West.

And that 30 to 60, that vast range, speaks to the unknowability of the number, as no one was counting and how would they if they were.

And also speaks to the way that number would fluctuate dramatically decade to decade.

Bison are the Western Hemisphere's largest land mammal, and they had their predators, wolves and humans.

But with some herds as large as 100,000 animals, the threats to their population were planetary.

Droughts and disease, harsh winters, the earth and its cycles, with which the population would rise and fall in some unheard harmony.

But then in the early decades of the 19th century, there were suddenly rifles and wagon trains, and then trains of steel and smoke and men within them shooting buffalo for sport.

You've heard this.

And the trains and the towns that built up along the the tracks changed where and how the herds could move and migrate, limited their range, their access to food.

Meanwhile, hunting buffalo was becoming an industry, and men were making fortunes selling meat to the growing population in the east and in all those new places along the new train tracks.

Selling bones for fertilizer, turning hides into clothing, as they had been forever, but this was new.

And this was too much, much too fast.

And making money, making the belts that ran the machines that made the Industrial Revolution go.

Buffalo skin is more elastic than cattle skin and made for better belts.

Made strong straps on the saddles of U.S.

cavalrymen, who spent much of the 19th century waging war on the people who had lived alongside the buffalo in their unknown millions for centuries before.

While the military leaders in Washington didn't eliminate the buffalo to starve and subjugate the native peoples who relied upon their herds, Not explicitly, not directly, but were surely complicit.

Because it was happening anyway, and they did nothing to stop it, because it was making their goals of conquest in the West easier to achieve, and they just had to sit back.

Will the numbers mean anything?

What is 30 to 60 million?

Can we picture 30 to 60 million buffalo?

Or the 2 million said to have been slaughtered in the single year of 1870?

Were the 5.4 million killed in three years between 1872 and 1875?

I can't wrap my arms around numbers that large.

Or hold in my head that 5.4 million.

Individual animals, 1,000, 2,000 pounds each, five or six feet tall at their woolly shoulders, that could run 30 miles per hour, that care for their young, that can smell and hear predators up to two miles away.

5.4 million killed in just three years time.

But I can picture 300 buffalo and 500.

I can wrap my arms around those numbers if not quite get my head around the thought that in 1884, a single human lifetime from the start of the 19th century when some 30 to 60 million bison roamed North America, as they had an equally unimaginable number since they first crossed the land bridge from Asia an unimaginably long time ago.

In 1884,

there were between 300 and 500 buffalo left alive.

Somewhere around 150 bison are somewhere around here on Catalina Island.

And though we don't know precisely how the ancestors of this herd first arrived in in the island in 1925, we can say that they would not be here now without 15 buffalo, juttering down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in horse-drawn wagons in 1907.

They had been guided up wooden ramps by cattlemen with long sticks under the supervision of William Hornaday, the elegant director of the Bronx Zoo and a friend of President Teddy Roosevelt and a man named Madison Grant.

The three men bonded at the tail end of the 19th century over their love of nature and animals and hunting them, and being in wide open spaces and drawing big manly breaths of mountain air scented with pine and lavender, and over the sadness they felt about what had been lost to progress.

For all their pride in railroads and westward expansion and the triumph of American capitalism and cities growing at the foot of the Rockies like wildflowers and white Christian families tilling land once controlled by heathens and savages, those achievements didn't come without costs.

Where was the romance?

There was something grand about that time, not long ago at all, just a blink of an eye when brave men set out to tame that land, vast and unknowable and wild.

It was a shame to see it go.

It was a shame about the buffalo.

Remember the buffalo?

How they thundered across the plains?

A mighty animal.

Strong and noble.

An American animal.

And they set out to save it.

They founded the American Bison Society, one of the first organizations dedicated to the preservation of what we now call endangered species.

They did what those organizations still do.

They raised money, they got writers to take up their cause in the press, they lobbied Congress.

It helped a lot to have the President of the United States in their corner.

And I need to say here, as this story that has grown so dark begins to climb up again toward the light, that If you are looking for inspiration in the American Bison Society, look at their model, look at their achievements, but don't go looking for heroes.

It is so often a sucker's game when you are dealing with the giants of the early environmental movement in the United States.

So often so wrapped up in bogus race science, and this is the case here.

If you read about the American Bison Society, you will read about its prime mover, Madison Grant, who loved the bison.

and didn't want them to disappear, but his interest in their cause came primarily from his fear that the 500-odd buffalo still around were interbreeding with cattle,

just like the white race was interbreeding with non-white people.

He was a racist, he was a eugenicist.

He came up with the concept of a Nordic or master race that needed to be preserved at all costs.

And while he was saving the bison, he was writing a book that was so foundational to Nazi ideology and to the Holocaust.

that it was the first non-German book to be reprinted by Hitler's government, that Hitler himself wrote wrote to Grant to tell the founder of the American Bison Society that, quote, the book is my Bible.

And that book was entered into evidence to support the case of the Nazi defendants during the Nuremberg trials.

15 bison in horse-drawn carts in Manhattan in 1907.

Crowds cheering from the street.

More, hundreds, at the train station, to watch the animals moved onto box cars, cars, outfitted with hay and water and blankets to keep them warm as the train raced on through the night.

These 15 bison were on their way to Oklahoma, where a preserve had been established by federal law, and where dozens of their kind awaited them.

And at every stop and along the tracks were people, native people, at one-time pioneers, now resettled on reservations or In new cities in old lands now lost to conquest, in the new world created by railroads and machines run by belts of buffalo skin.

People waited for hours to watch the trains go by.

They never thought they'd see a buffalo again.

I will not see a buffalo today, but it's fine.

I'll be back at some point.

Try to time my hike better next time.

Maybe sign up for this bison observation tour for $89.95 that I just found on a website listing the top things to do in Catalina.

You just scroll down the page for a while.

It's listed there between paddle boarding and mini golf.

I saw some buffalo last spring.

My daughter and I took a quick southwestern road trip and wound up staying in cabins on a bison preserve.

A herd of about 50 animals left to roam free on 600 acres of grassland and through stands of pinions and junipers and sturdy oaks.

They're beautiful and so strange and They're fast.

It was incredible to see them spring up and run and chase.

Then there was another larger herd a bit down the road

at a ranch selling farm-to-table bison steaks.

There are about 450,000 buffalo today.

Some are there for admiring from afar, to restore balance to western ecosystems, to try to right a terrible wrong, to repair,

to atone.

Most are for eating.

About 20,000 live in what they call conservation herds.

The other 430,000 are raised as livestock.

And about 150 are here on this island because someone wanted to make cowboy pictures.

Or not.

They're here somewhere.

Cared for by the good people of the Catalina Island Conservancy.

Safe on this island without predators to smell.

Just the sea air and California poppies.

Diesel from the ferry.

And hear the rumble of its engine, bachelorette singing along to Mr.

Brightside and don't stop believing as the Wine Fest DJ goes on till midnight, and the waves rolling and rolling in.

This episode of The Memory Palace was written and produced by me, Nate DeMayo, in August of 2023.

The show gets research assistance from Eliza McGraw.

He's a proud member of Radiotopia, a collection of independently owned and operated podcasts from PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

I want to take a second to welcome a new member of the Radiotopia family.

I'm really excited about this one.

It is a new show called Hang Up, which is a reality dating show.

It is extraordinarily fun and clever and so thoughtfully produced.

You can check out Hang Up

and all the other Radiotopa shows at radiotopia.fm.

If you want to drop me a line, you can send me an email to nate at thememorypalace.org.

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you can find me there at TheMemory Palace.

And I will talk to you again.

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