Wild Idea Buffalo - Grass-Fed Free Range Buffalo Meat

Sunday, November 28, 2004

In this age of celebrity, and made-for-television news, we have trouble grasping moments of quiet accomplishment. Just such a moment passed unnoticed last weekend along the Cheyenne River, a half mile west of the grouse lek, a few hundred yards from the old skeleton of a homestead that hasn’t been lived in since the Forties.. For the first time in at least a hundred and twenty years, buffalo came home to the Indian Creek wilderness. There were no network cameras to record the event, no rallies, or rock bands to mark the moment, no politicians staking a claim, no army of trucks and gitty-yuppies terrifying the herd. It just happened. Dan opened a gate, and the herd moved onto the hard winter grass, just as if they had been there before. Deep memory, those monarchs, deep memory.

The first time I rode into Indian Creek with Dan O’Brien it was late summer, about three years ago. It was hot and unforgiving. We criss-crossed the creek a dozen times, and in the mid day heat, with badland ridges all around us, it was impossible to imagine how a sad luck immigrant from Norway or Germany could make a farm on the narrow flood plain above the creek. Who knows, half a dozen tried, no one made it. About six or seven miles in, Dan stopped beneath a cottonwood, and thought out loud; “This is gettin’ awful western.” We were still on the road! On four-wheelers! We didn’t know the half of it. On foot and horseback the scale changes. There are gorgeous, expansive draws that meander south and east for miles, and serpentine ridges that light up yellow and red at sunset. There are table tops where the faint, eroded tracks of hay wagons were left from someone’s fantasy that badlands hay could make a small ranch profitable. This is land that no one has walked on since Lakota ghost dancers hid from the 7th Cavalry in the canyons surrounding the Stronghold. No one would walk Indian Creek unless they were hiding, or walking out.

What makes this moment so unique is that (with all deference to the Lakota) this is now your land, public land, yes, even the land of blue state tourists with a lot of good heart and no good sense, who drive their Volvos two miles into the valley on the gumbo road to the first creek crossing, only to find themselves looking at each other and thinking, “This is getting awful western.”

Cattle and cattle ranchers have been on this land for a century. Pete Lemley ran herds of cavalry horses here after World War One. He over-grazed and wrecked the cottonwood bottoms. Angostora tamed the river, and wrecked the flood cycle. Lease cattle crowd the eroded river banks in the summer. But we are coming on winter, and in the winter, Indian Creek muscles up and gives itself over to wilderness. The degradations of summer are forgotten. This is the time of the buffalo. This is not a diabolical government program. No one is starting a park. No one is cutting off cattle leases. No one is choking off public access. Fact is, once the first hard freeze comes, no one will ever see the buffalo on Indian Creek. That’s the way it should be. In a bold compromise between private ranchers and the Forest Service (yes, it is possible!), Dan O’Brien simply traded his summer cattle grazing permit for a winter buffalo permit.

The idea that a rancher would want his herd on Indian Creek in the winter is, well, it’s awful western. You can’t exactly cross the frozen Cheyenne with a few bales of emergency hay. You can’t do a damn thing if a big blizzard hits. And those flash floods in Spring that turn a dozen little creeks into miles of quicksand…this is survive or die. I’m betting that the buffalo herd will survive. This is their land. They know it better than we do. Deep memories. The buffalo will eat snow on the north sides of the hills. They’ll dig out springs five miles back from the River that no one ever knew were there. They’ll graze across twenty thousand acres in a day, and do it again the next, just for fun. They are big walkers. They will wait for the most ferocious sub-zero winds, then climb to the highest table top and stand with their manes facing into the storm, like a peacock cowboy on Friday night fluffing and primping his beard in front of the mirror.

In the Spring, the herd will feast on the new grass of the prairie dog towns, and the coyote will feast on the after-birth of new calves. Dan will bring the herd back across the river, fat and proud, and cattle will take their place on the grasslands…a cycle everyone can live with. My friend Craig Howe tells me that among the Lakota every story that is spoken hangs in the air where it is told, enriching and deepening each place…forever. This is a good story, to be told for a long, long time. Next winter, the elk will come.