The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [393]
On December 8, 1905, at the Bronx Zoo, Hornaday announced the creation of the American Bison Society (ABS), which was to be based in New York. His cofounders included Roosevelt and Charles J. “Buffalo” Jones. With determined earnestness the ABS demanded that the American people protect bison herds.107 Their mission was to numerically increase buffalo herds throughout the Great Plains and Rockies. The ABS simply refused to accept the possibility that buffalo were doomed and could survive only in taxidermy, photographs, or pictographs on cave walls. The Wichita Forest and Game Preserve was the opening salvo of the “buffalo common” movement. Hornaday and Roosevelt were now committed to having large swaths of the bison’s historic range restored. Centuries earlier, Father Marquette had drawn a picture of a wild buffalo he saw as far north as Green Bay, Wisconsin; ABS wanted the buffalo to range that far north once again. The ABS would also educate citizens about the bison’s endangered status. And large-scale bison conservation was now deemed a national imperative, arousing serious new scientific interest in grassland ecosystems.
On March 4, 1907, all forest reserves were renamed national forests, so the area became the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve. On October 11, 1907, the fifteen buffalo from the Bronx Zoo were loaded onto a train at Fordham Station in New York, bound for Oklahoma’s national forest. Accompanying them on their journey were Frank Rush of Ponca City, Oklahoma, to tend the animals; Elwin R. Sanborn, to write about the event; and H. R. Mitchell, the New York Zoological Park’s chief clerk, to manage all the details. A steel woven fence seventy-four inches high was strung up in the Wichita Forest Reserve along oak posts. Sturdy gates were also built, to withstand a charging buffalo that might want to bolt. Congress had appropriated $15,000 to construct the high fence around 8,000 acres of an ideal Oklahoman buffalo habitat. The huge steel fence had been erected in the Winter Valley part of the Oklahoma reserve; what was unclear about this fait accompli was whether it was meant to keep the buffalo in the reserve or the poachers out. The Biological Survey conducted tests to inoculate the buffalo against the dreaded Texas fever. Large areas of the new buffalo reserve were burned to kill off ticks, which carried the fever. Eventually a dipping vat was constructed to eradicate the ticks. Rush also decided that the best way to protect the buffalo from ticks was to spray them with oil. Eventually the herd would become immune to Texas fever.108
Hornaday saw to it that each buffalo had a padded compartment in Arms Palace cars from the Bronx-to-Ft. Sill, the kind used for the most valuable show horses. No crowded or foul, manure-filled quarters were tolerated; after all, these were Mr. Roosevelt’s buffalo. While the train was switching lines in Manhattan, Sanborn wrote excitedly about how revolutionary Roosevelt and Hornaday’s plan was. “It was a bit awe inspiring,” he wrote from Grand Central Terminal, “to realize that in the midst of this vast station with its multitudes of people, its coughing, booming trains, in the center of the greatest city in the new world, were fifteen helpless animals, whose ancestors had been all but exterminated by the very civilization which was now handing back to prairies…a tiny remnant born and raised 2,000 miles from their native land. Surely the course of Empire westward takes its way.”109
Hornaday, who always wrote copiously, left notes about the fifteen bison he selected for Roosevelt’s bold reintroduction plan. Because he had hand-fed the herd, these bison had become like pets to him. They had been pampered. And four were named in honor of the great Indian chiefs Lone Wolf, Geronimo, Blackdog, and Quanah.110
Seven days after leaving the New York Zoological Society the fifteen bison arrived on rolling boxcars in the hamlet of Cache, Oklahoma.