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What I intended to write about yesterday was not
the state of free expression as between publicly-funded and privately-funded
media, but, rather, simply the story of that documentary movie I worked on at
the National Film Board, The Great
Buffalo Saga. I have always liked this story of how people worked to ensure
that the bison that once lived in millions across the plains of North America,
should not become extinct.
I knew
nothing at all about this subject when I set out to research it, but by the
time I finished I realized it was a completely
typical Canadian story, in that Canada’s government had carried out an
action unequalled anywhere in the world at the time, and yet in our own time,
half a century later, only a handful of specialists had ever heard of it.
By
1880, in one of the greatest mass killings in history, the bison had been reduced
from the 15 million that once roamed the plains, to a mere handful of survivors,
probably no more than 1,000. Somewhere
in our wanderings we dug up a fellow called Doug Allard, who kept an Indian
trading post in Montana, and was the descendant of a French-Canadian family that
had played a fairly central role in the bison survival story.
Doug, a
colourful, talkative fellow, told us the
story began in the 1880s, when a
Flathead Indian called Samuel Walking Coyote, who had run away to the
sweetgrass country of Saskatchewan with a woman, decided he was going back home
to try to re-establish his relationship with his wife. As a peace offering, he
gathered up a small number of bison calves --- Doug wasn't sure whether there
were four or six, but thought five was about right --- and embarked with them
on a 250-300 mile tramp across the Continental Divide, no
small undertaking when driving a number of bison calves.
Although
much changed by modern life, this is still one of the most beautiful areas in
the United States, lying just south of the contiguous national parks, Waterton
Lakes in Canada, and the very much larger Glacier National park in the United
States. Walking Coyote ran the herd
freely in his home reservation, but when he fell on hard times he sold them to
two men, a part-native, part-Mexican called Michel Pablo, and the original Doug
Allard, now claimed as his great-grandfather by our friend Doug.
“It was
a kind of sad ending for Walking Coyote, being found dead under the bridge in
Missoula,” says the current Doug Allard. “There is another story that my great-grandfather
ended up with all Walking Coyote’s money a couple of days after his death. Now,
I don’t know how that might have happened, My great-grandfather was an
honorable man, but he might have won it in a card game, or something like
that.”
When
the original Allard died in 1886, he and Pablo had 300 animals, so far as they
could count them --- for they were scattered far and wide throughout the large
Indian reservation. But at about the same time, the government was opening the reservation
for homesteading, so there would be no more room for such a large herd of
animals.
Michel
Pablo offered to sell his herd to the American government, but his offer was
rejected. He then got in touch with his friend Alexander Ayotte, employed as a
Canadian immigration officer in nearby Great Falls. He got in touch with the
director of Canada’s newly-minted National Parks service, Howard Douglas, who
understood the importance of the offer, and badgered the Canadian Minister of the
Interior, Frank Oliver, until the latter agreed to undertake the purchase.
Douglas
travelled to Missoula, where he deposited a $40,000 cheque in a local bank. The
bank manager told him American conservationists were livid that Canada was
being allowed to buy the animals, and he was certain they would have been ready
to pay half a million dollars for them. But Pablo must have been offended by the
Americans and was determined not to deal with the US government.
Pablo
now was confronted with rounding up the biggest herd of wild animals on the continent,
a formidable task.
“The
man in charge of the round-up, Charlie Allard, was a hero of mine," said his
descendant, Doug, bursting with family pride. Charlie was the captain of the
first football team of the University of Montana, but there was no record of
his ever having been a student. While living in Missoula and playing football, according
to one story, this hero hired a railroad car, took it to the station in the
small town of Ravalli, and drove it to a place called Wild Horse Lake, where
they had a week-long party that has become an item in the social history of
Montana.
The
round-up of the bison for transport to Canada was a huge enterprise that
required all the outdoor skills that marked the residents of this state which,
even as late as 1905 was close to living the life of the wild west. Charlie Allard
was in charge of the operation, and day after day dawn to dusk, the teams of
riders scoured the immense territory looking for bison. The wild animals, once
they got moving, could outrun any horse, and when cornered did not go quietly.
Dozens of horses either collapsed from exhaustion or were killed in encounters
with the dangerous animals, but slowly, they managed to drive the animals along a
narrow pathway towards the railhead, where they fought desperately not to be
coaxed into the rail cars. It took the riders a month to round-up twenty animals,
and they began to think it would take many years to load the whole herd.The
Northern Railroad company complied by modifying the railcars to aid in the
capture of the animals, and it was all watched by Howard Douglas, who came down
from Canada to oversee the operation. Many local people turned up to watch, and they
told stories of terrified animals bashing their way through the walls of the
railcars in an effort to escape. First,
they had to be coaxed, until a rope could be established over their horns, by
which they were then pulled by a long rope into the cars. Gradually, the cowboys
became more expert, and within a week the train was full, and was able to depart.
In
Canada, near Wainwright, Alberta, a special national park had been created to house
the animals.
The
operation drew people from the villages surrounding Edmonton, and crowds as big
as a thousand sat in the grass watching as the railcars were offloaded and the
huge animals ran free in their own park. The operation in Montana took five
years to complete. By 1909 they designed a crate that they used for each individual
animal. In total they transported, without a single loss of life, some 716
animals. The famous wildlife artist Charles M Russell painted the operation,
and I was personally delighted when I was told that the loading had been photographed
every year by photographers, whose old-fashioned glass prints were available in
the University of Montana archives. They
agreed to our borrowing the plates so that we were able to include in our film
a very life-like version of the rounding up and transferring of the biggest
herd of wildlife ever moved anywhere in the world up to that time
In the
Wainwright park things did not go so well: or, to put it another way, things
went so well that within a few years there were 8,000 bison, eating themselves
out of habitat. For some years they conducted a discreet cull, and one
sharpshooter was reputed to have killed 28,000 bison during the 1920s.We spoke
to one delightful 93-year-old, Bud Cotton, who had been a rider on the first transfer
north, and was also involved when the decision was made to transfer the herd
from Wainwright into the Wood Buffalo National Park --- one of the largest national
parks in the world at the time, with an area bigger than Belgium --- that
straddles the Alberta-NWT border.
The
Plains bison of the southern herd were infected with tuberculosis and there was
a concern that they would intermingle with, and infect, the Wood Bison in the
northern park. Nevertheless the transfer was made, and the inevitable happened.
By the 1960s, there were an estimated 12,000 bison in the park, infected with
tuberculosis and later with anthrax. A programme of inoculation against TB was
begun, but they found it impossible to reach more than 4,000 in any one summer,
and finally abandoned the project.
A small
herd of Woods Bison had been found in the far north of the park that appeared not
to have been affected by the introduced bison, and a decision was made to take
some of them, and introduce them into an area north of Great Slave Lake as the
first in a programme to re-establish free-ranging bison herds in different
parts of Canada. Some 77 of these bison
were crated and transferred north. Only 18 survived the journey, but these 18 apparently
have managed to become settled, with a very much larger number, but one that
in recent years has been reported again to be diminishing.
That’s about
as far as I was able to take my investigation of the fate of bison. This is
certainly a magnificent animal --- the biggest animal native to North America –
and it is encouraging that a great deal of detailed work seems to be underway
to ensure their survival.
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