If you’ve ever been to Yellowstone National Park, you know there’s a chance you’ll see one of the most troubled and majestic creatures we have the honor of calling our own: the American Bison, or the buffalo, or in the Lakota language: Tatanka. By this decade’s end, there will be a herd of semi-wild bison on the Great Sand Dunes National Preserve. They’re not traveling from Yellowstone. They’ll be driven just a few miles up the road from the Medano-Zapata Ranch’s private herd.
The Department of the Interior, through a Secretary’s Order and a few different provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, announced a series of funding and programs that would not only give land stewardship to tribes and tribal leaders, but would also help to restore the buffalo.
In the mid-19th century, it’s believed that there were anywhere from 30 to 60 million buffalo roaming the United States. By the turn of the century, there were less than 500. Those were tucked away in Yellowstone, far from preying hands.
Today, there are roughly 450,000 wild and commercial bison in the United States. Colorado classifies bison as livestock, but there is a herd in the Rocky Mountain Arsenal that is treated as wildlife. Soon, so will the herd at the Dunes.
“The American bison is inextricably intertwined with Indigenous culture, grassland ecology and American history. While the overall recovery of bison over the last 130 years is a conservation success story, significant work remains to not only ensure that bison will remain a viable species but also to restore grassland ecosystems, strengthen rural economies dependent on grassland health and provide for the return of bison to tribally owned and ancestral lands,” said Secretary Deb Haaland in the March 2023 announcement. “New historic funding from the Inflation Reduction Act will help support the Department’s efforts to restore this iconic species and integrate indigenous knowledge into our shared stewardship goals.”
The transfer of 9,362 acres of land from the Nature Conservancy-held Medano-Zapata Ranch Preserve will expand federally protected land, which means more federally protected buffalo. It won’t happen until 2029, but it’s a plan years in the making. The conversations first started in the 1990s.
“The Nature Conservancy was a willing seller of the Medano Ranch inholding,” said Giovanni Rocco, an Interior spokesperson, in an email exchange with Alamosa Citizen. “Since TNC purchased the ranch in the late 1990s, it has been the intention of TNC to sell the acreage to the NPS once funding was secured.”
The total acreage transfer exceeds 12,000 acres, but the remaining three won’t be given over to the Dunes until 2029. It took a long time for the National Parks Service to secure that funding, but it finally happened and now this plan can begin moving forward. It’s still in its early stages.
“The Nature Conservancy currently holds a historic grazing lease on a portion of the ranch and will be permitted to draw down the legacy bison production herd through 2029, at which point the park plans to establish a high conservation value herd of bison. That herd will be founded with bison from other existing federal herds,” Rocco said.
New Dunes Superintendent Andrea Compton mentioned this program on an earlier episode of The Valley Pod.
“So the previous ranch owner wanted to preserve it [the 12,000 acres], wanted to save it, use it for conservation,” Compton said. “The Park Service was interested in this, but we don’t have instant funding, the wheels of bureaucracy. It takes a while to sort that out. The Nature Conservancy was a wonderful partner and they stepped in and purchased these 9,300 acres while the Park Service is gathering those funds to make that transfer.”
The herd was established on the Medano-Zapata ranch in 2001. There’s a limit on animals that can be on the land at one time, so they’re treated as livestock. The herd is around 1,600 strong. According to a Nature Conservancy article from 2021, this herd, despite being a commercial herd, is actually a keystone group that is used for research to assist other herds across the country.
“And we will be introducing a smaller herd to begin with of animals. And this is just planning right now, and those will be more wild. So right now there’s a fence around the herd, a large fence, and it’s designed to keep the public safe. So it’s kind of an area that’s closed to the public, but in the future, the fence will come down and the bison will be more free roaming. So they will roam not only on Park service lands, but on Fish and wildlife service lands. So all of this is really in the initial stages,” Compton said.
The buffalo will be more or less free-roaming on the preserve section of the park, numbering perhaps a few hundred, maybe more. The herd, at the end of the day, will allow leaders from tribes such as the Utes, Jicarilla Apache, the Dine, as well as researchers from across the nation to better understand how to restore the populations to what is ideal.
Bison are grazers. So their notch on the ecological cycle is inextricably tied to the lands they roam.
“When fully established, the public conservation herd at the Great Sand Dunes may ultimately number up to several hundred animals and will enable park managers and biologists to better assess and prepare habitat and its conditions, install infrastructure, and enhance partnerships to understand how bison use the broader acreage available to them and how people can most appropriately manage them for public enjoyment and engagement,” Rocco said.
13,000 years of bison history in the San Luis Valley, definitely more
The people followed the buffalo. They followed it wherever the herds went, because a thriving buffalo population meant a thriving population of people. Most of those humans were Native Americans from various tribes and cultures – all of whom relied on the buffalo. The United States government understood that indigenous peoples relied on the buffalo. So, during and after the Civil War, Manifest Destiny was on the front of everyone’s minds.
The native peoples, in the eyes of the U.S. Government at that time, were standing in the way of that. So, little by little – then a lot by a lot – the U.S. Army conducted nothing less than a scorched-earth campaign against indigenous people by eradicating as many buffalo as possible. People were encouraged to shoot the animals for sport from moving trains. The fur trade exceeded what would be billions of dollars today.
The mountain of buffalo skulls should be a stark reminder.
By starving the native peoples of the United States, people who have been here for thousands of years, officials committed nothing short of genocide. Starving the indigenous peoples put them into a position to make desperate deals with the government.
Because the people followed the buffalo, it led some of them right here to the San Luis Valley.
You can’t talk about the buffalo in the Valley without talking about Clovis Points and the Folsom People. Just off the Lane 6 North is the second most studied Folsom site in the United States. The Stewart’s Cattle Guard archaeological site has been studied for the better part of 60 years. The main takeaway from this site: in essence, it was used as a bison processing center. The species of bison the Folsom People hunted and relied on is the now-extinct Bison antiquus.
Bison antiquus, or the antique bison, was a much larger animal (about 25 percent larger than modern-day buffalo) with grand horns that stretched 3 feet across its skull. It stood at nearly eight feet tall and was 15 feet long, weighing in at more than 3,500 pounds each. Compare that to the modern-day bison, which stands six feet tall and weighs in at 2,000 pounds. Taking down one of those ancient animals was no easy hunt. The Folsom People had a specialized tactic for hunting bison and would move from one kill to the next.
At the Stewart’s Cattle Guard site, evidence suggests that the Folsom had extensive settlements built around processing the bison. The Folsom were sporadic visitors to the San Luis Valley and probably spent their early summers here hunting.
Alongside the Folsom People, the Utes and Dine, to name just a few, utilized the Valley’s buffalo for their survival and well-being.
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