“Oh, give me a home where the Buffalo roam, where the Deer and the Antelope play; Where seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the sky is not cloudy all day.”
While it was first published in a Kansas newspaper in 1876, Dr. Brewster Higley’s “My Western Home,” also known as “Home on the Range,” has been an evocative staple across the rolling hills and storied high plains of Texas.
Icon and subject of everything from Abilene’s Frontier Texas to the mascot of West Texas A&M University, the American buffalo is a cornerstone figure in the history and culture of the Southwest and stands as the national mammal of the U.S.
However, despite their ubiquity in iconography, many Texans have never seen a living buffalo. What happened to them, and where do they roam today?
A look back at the American buffalo
Occupying sprawling grasslands and green hills, environmental historians have reported that as many as 60 million buffalo once roamed the Great Plains of North America. Known among the largest land mammals on the continent, buffalo (or bison), the National Park Service contends that predecessors of the modern herbivore found their way to North America between 130,000 to 300,000 years ago. Their travels across the continent and grazing and wallowing behaviors contributed to broad diversity in vegetation and soils that helped create habitats for many plants and animals.
As noted in other reporting from the Associated Press, buffalo were driven to the brink of extinction in the 1800s as hunters, US troops and tourists shot them by the thousands to supply a commercial market that used parts of the animal in machinery, fertilizer, and clothing.
Further, according to the NPS, buffalo were slaughtered by the US military in a directive meant to control and otherwise decimate indigenous communities, for whom the buffalo has been central to lifestyle and spiritual traditions and diets for thousands of years.
Only a few hundred buffalo remained by 1889, in the wake of what historians have phrased as the annihilation of the creature in “the Great Slaughter.” The NPS noted that private citizens were central to the first major push by the US to conserve the buffalo when they began to independently capture and shelter herds.
Among the most notable were Texan ranchers Mary Ann and Charles Goodnight of the JA Ranch and Goodnight Ranch. Recorded by historians, newspapers, and the man himself, Charles Goodnight began his herd in 1879.
“In the spring of 1879- to be exact, May 15th- at my wife’s request, started out to look for some young buffalo,” recalled Goodnight around 1903, “At last I found a few younger ones in Palo Duro canyon, and ‘roped’ them from horseback. The month following W.W. Dyer, my wife’s brother, caught two young females. From this start we have now a herd of forty-five purebred buffaloes… The buffalo breeds slowly in captivity. It seems incomprehensible that they should have grown into such enormous herds as there were when I came to this country, and which, in fact, covered all the western plains.”
The Goodnight Herd stands as one of the earliest herds of domesticated buffalo and, now, one of the oldest in existence. Those buffalo have contributed to populations in Texas, Nevada, New Hampshire, Kansas, Montana, New Mexico, and New York, as well as in other countries such as Canada and Germany.
Source: fox44news.com
Photo Credit: GettyImages-mysticenergy
Categories: Kansas, General, Livestock, Dairy Cattle