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Roosevelt’s instructions, a private buffalo herd was eventually rounded up and moved to this new prairie range.115 Meanwhile, Roosevelt issued a second proclamation in 1906, adding 3,680 acres to the Wichita refuge (the Oklahoma City Club hoped that the reserve would therefore soon be elevated to national park status). By 1908, ABS and the Boone and Crockett Club—backed by the Biological Survey—were able to get Congress to appropriate funds for the creation of the National Bison Range on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.116 (This was, in part, America’s answer to Buffalo National Park in Wainwright, Alberta which had opened in 1907).117 Congress eventually authorized 13,000 acres on the Flathead Indian Reservation for a remnant buffalo herd. The National Bison Range constituted the very first federal appropriation to purchase acreage exclusively for wildlife protection. It eventually grew to be 18,763 acres, protecting not just bison but prong-horns, elk, deer, and bighorn sheep.118

By 1911, Hornaday was able to declare that bison were no longer an endangered species. This was a tribute to the Roosevelt administration’s proactive resolve. Not only had the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve idea worked; it led to the creation of other bison refuges. By 1912 ABS had been instrumental in the creation of the Wind Cave National Game Reserve, with fourteen buffalo donated by the New York Zoological Society. As Roosevelt envisioned it, Wind Cave National Park, which he had established in 1902, needed a secondary attraction besides underground caves. With the naturalist J. Alden Loring of ABS doing the advance work, buffalo were imported to Wind Cave; visitors to the site are guaranteed to see herds.119 Run by the Biological Survey, the new Wind Cave National Game Preserve consisted of 4,000 acres from Wind Cave National Park, six acres from Harney National Forest, and eighty acres from private ranch lands.

Before long the Sioux (Pine Ridge) and Crow also established herds—following Hornaday and Roosevelt’s protocol—in South Dakota and Montana. “The American Bison Society is a splendid organization,” Hornaday said when he retired as president in 1911. “It will go from strength to strength, until the time comes that it is no longer necessary to consider movements for saving of the bison. Then I predict your energies will be directed to saving other species of wild life that at present may be as much threatened with extinction as the bison was three or four years ago.”120 He started crusading to save the whooping crane, the trumpeter swan, the great sage grouse, and the prairie sharp-tailed grouse from extinction.121

Because the buffalo flourished in the Wichita Forest and Game Preserve, Fort Niobrara, and Wind Cave, Roosevelt—after his presidency—began promoting the idea that other big game species be reintroduced throughout the West. The initial results were mixed. In 1911 eleven pronghorns were shipped to the national forest from Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately, they didn’t have the high-quality treatment that the buffalo had been given in transport, and two pronghorns died in their railroad car. The others could not survive the harsh Wichita Mountains winter. Wildlife introduction, then, had its limits. However, Roosevelt also wanted to have Rocky Mountain elk repopulate the Wichita outcrops. A herd from the Teton National Forest was shipped in from Wyoming by the Biological Survey in 1911. A bull was also imported from the Wichita (Kansas) Zoo. The elk thrived, a second herd was acquired from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a new era of wildlife management had begun.

The Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge today is the premier American place to better understand the science of species reintroduction. An odd assortment of wildlife was brought into the Wichitas to have a second chance. A Missouri trapper donated wild turkeys to the refuge, but only one survived for more than a year. The Biological Survey experimented with reintroducing wild turkeys and Rio Grande Bronze hens—they interbred and now thrive on the reserve.