Sitting at a prairie cemetery, on a windswept slope in western Kansas, resting half way on my daily bike ride, I look south several miles to the thin line of trees along the Smoky Hill River. Another two miles beyond that rise pretty brown bluffs. The view of the valley is unobstructed by trees, power lines or wind farms. The silence is almost perfect. The land has changed little in 150 years. Each day it takes almost no imagination to see it as it once was: one day, I see the dust from the Butterfield Overland stage coach passing nearby on the road to Denver City; on another day a hunting party of Southern Cheyenne are returning to Texas for the winter; a group of gold-seekers with “Pike’s Peak or Bust” painted on their canvass pass by on another day; an entrepreneur, peg-legged and patch-eyed, moves west the following day with a wagon load of noisy, nervous cats destined for vermin-plagued miners; a column of dragoons on patrol led by young Jeb Stuart; and so on. Most every day I sit and imagine such scenes. Each day, the only thing missing are the buffalo.
The Smoky Hill River, stretching from eastern Colorado to eastern Kansas, ran right through the very heart of buffalo country. Neatly dividing the southern from the northern plains, this shallow, sandy river was crossed twice a year by the great brown beasts as they made their seasonal migrations to greener grass. Now, only the ghosts of these most American of all animals move over the land. Without them, the prairie has always seemed lonely and haunted to me.
Back in the 19th century, killing buffalo was in. Everyone, it seemed, from the bean counter in Boston to the haberdasher in Hackensack, had to bag his buffalo. Not only did travelers in moving railroad cars shoot the animals from the windows for “sport,” but even Indians, now armed with repeating rifles, killed them for the fun of it and left the meat to rot. If something – like killing buffalo – is in vogue, people will kill buffalo. If killing buffalo is not in vogue, people won’t. Do you see a problem with this? No flock of sheep will more blindly follow the leader than humans will follow fashion (witness the current mania for tattoos, piercings and other self mutilation).
Simply put, and as the near-extermination of the buffalo bears out, we cannot trust humans to do the right thing. We must have laws to save our treasures for the common good. Without these laws one hundred years ago, without the establishment of the National Park System, does anyone doubt that the Grand Canyon would now be crowded with casinos and condos? Or that Yellowstone would be parceled out and paved over with patios and strip malls? If one wants to glimpse how our natural wonders fared minus laws, just check out Niagara Falls in New York, the Royal Gorge in Colorado, or even here on the once-pristine High Plains in plowed-over and plundered Kansas.
Better still, witness the buffalo’s fate when there was none to protect him.
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