Other than the occasional powerline or barbed wire, there are subtle changes in the landscape, the most prominent is a center pivot irrigation system that now occupies the center of the frame. Rain is collected in reservoirs from snowpack runoff from Elk Mountain in the early spring and is carried through irrigation canals that have existed since the early thirties, around the time the diorama was in the planning process.
Today the same irrigation network feeds the 312,000 acre ranch which raises approximately 2000 head of cattle and hosts guided game bird hunts. The water is fed through a network of center pivot irrigators. Informally called walking water, they are slim horizontal trusses that glide on a series of variable speed wheels that adjust pace to the concentricity of their rotation and obstructions in the terrain.
From the vantage which James Perry Wilson made his original study, the land peels away from you. The breadth that the original ‘38 work captures is expansive. It is wider than our field of vision, requiring you to twist to consume the view. As you pivot, grasses are combed nearly flat by the wind, in unison with each gust. The wind is constant and strong. Soft ochers envelope your view and they grow in intensity when the sun finds its way through clouds that hang in the sky. On the horizon is a collection of landforms: from the left deep red bluffs cleave from the rolling prairie forcing the landscape up above your eye level. The bluffs are briefly underlined by the green of the North Platte River marking the crossing of the Overland Trail. As you continue your pan, the bluffs to the right hang in the air then drop blending escarpment with the prairie, panning further the prairie softens into rolling knots of foothills of the Sierra Madre. The landscape is fluidly orchestrated, the elements of Perry Wilson’s background painting fully present. As you approach the site, each element of the terrain slowly locks into place, as if arranging itself for a family photo, some kneeling below, others peering over the shoulders of those in front.
We didn’t come to this view immediately. Henry, our viewfinder, had surveyed the ranch before we arrived using photos we had sent. Henry pulled off the graded gravel road and onto the high-altitude sagebrush desert as we approached the first site. I didn’t understand how varied the ground was until we drove off-road. On foot, simple changes in grade: excavated dirt from a prairie dog den, windswept dunes, clefts in the terrain and mineral obstacles were easily navigated. In a vehicle we couldn’t avoid obstacles and we continued directly over them, our forward motion was a graph of the ground below us. Henry dropped his speed and let the suspension do the work. The truck, a quadruped, with the suspension of each wheel reaching out to the land below. The body of the vehicle halted fluidly with each adjustment, some are slight but more often than not the land drops out from under us rocking me and the other occupants in the truck’s cab.
Finding a single vista in five hundred square miles is overwhelming. With each shift of our bodies the perspective scrambled as we adjusted the earth’s antenna to get a clearer picture. When two or three landforms fell into place, the mountain I had turned my back on moments before is now mildly misaligned. Moving into the view stretches the perspective, pulling features away from each other, stepping back blends them together while stepping left or right spins the world on its axis. We would drive to a potential viewpoint where Merica and I would get out of the truck and survey the area on foot referencing images from Perry Wilson’s original outing. The sky was beautiful with the sun low and on the verge of storming, the light cast the world in half, two sides: one light the other a backdrop of dark. The landscape was at once capacious and coy with landforms coming into prominence as the sun hit then slipping out as the shadows overcame them. With each shift in light, we were given a new landscape to draw in. We took out our equipment, calibrated it, checked the exposure, checked and rechecked the framing as batteries quickly fade and clouds began to spit. It took us four sites before we were comfortable we chased Perry Wilson’s shadow, all the while we were stalked by a thunderstorm approaching from the south west.
Here the land shaped the wind, it is a thick film that coats the surface of the earth. It is a constant that is both arrogant and aggressive, always there, airy to the touch but forceful in mass. When geological surveyors first came out here they struggled to keep their equipment steady requiring them to work in the early morning or at night when the winds calmed. (McPhee 323). The refrain goes, In Wyoming, a wind gauge is an anvil attached to a chain. We worked during the day and our camera tremored as the air wrapped around it. Merica crouched down and straddled the tripod as she hung onto the base as a counterweight. It was my parents’ tripod that I grew up recording my sister’s ballet performances on. By that I mean it is shitty. I held higher, near the neck, attempting to stabilize the camera itself, all the while our movements were as disruptive as the wind, we held our breath steady it further. The winds were absent from the diorama back home, classes one through seven, the preserved blue grama and buffalo grasses stood lifelessly still behind the glass. The winds are the most striking omission from the diorama. On the excursion in 1937 they bought an artist, a mammalogist and a botanist but who they really needed was a anemologist. In our recordings every wisp was captured whether intentional or not. It shows itself both in the flow of the grasses and the flickering of our frame, the wind was an inescapable actor constantly reminding the viewer that it was there. It’s easy to imagine how Anschutz came to the idea to harvest wind from this place, package it, and sell it. It is ever present.
Anschutz first proposed the farm in 2006 and over the last ten years the Power Company of Wyoming and The Overland Trail Cattle Company has been in a lengthy review process with the State of Wyoming, The Fish and Wildlife Service, The Bureau of Land Management, The United States Forest Service. The checkerboard that allowed him to access 115,000 acres of public land for private use created a high-bar in terms of environmental regulation. The Power Company is mandated to prove that the benefit harvested from the land outways the imprint left on it. Turning class six winds into 2000 megawatts would leave a large visual presence for a relatively invisible transaction of wind into electricity. The result of regulation is a scientific inquiry that the original planners of the dioramas would never have conceived of; carried out seventy years after the fact. Since 2006, the Power Company of Wyoming has produced a holistic narrative of the ecological impact of the Chokecherry Sierra Madre Wind Farm. In its totality, the study is broad and encompassing. It is a geological prehistory, a habitat analysis, a mapping of potential mineral and petroleum resources, historic wind analysis, threatened species management protocols, a visual resource compendium, ecological and vegetation surveys, the list goes on . It provides a comprehensive view of the landscape of the Sage Creek Basin: a complete refresh to the diorama.
From big game, to bats, to raptors to reptiles and furbearers the report is an exhaustive ark. It describes how each species will be affected by development. Species that responded to vehicular travel. Species that will suffer direct habitat loss due to the destruction of sagebrush. Habitat fragmentation of species from the construction of access roads and the presence of human on site. Mortality rates of species due to direct contact with turbines or transmissions lines. Species hundreds of miles downstream that will be affected by additional sediment deposits in the North Platte or by lower water level caused by water extraction on the site that will be used during construction to keep dust levels low. For each is a description of its habitat, the methodology used to establish its presence on the site, the range of consequences for the species, and how multiple turbine layouts yield the most ideal scenario for the health of the species or habitat. While the report has a veneer of bureaucratic due diligence, the by-product of the bureaucracy is striking, a systematic process that outputs an answer to the fundamental question: Should we build and where?
The answer to this question starts at the BLM field office for southern Wyoming in Rawlins, about a twenty minute drive from the site. It’s a new building with an oversized lobby where in the center is a taxidermied mountain lion climbing a chunk of granite. Under it is the seal of The Department of the Interior with the state and national flags flanking it. To the left is a desk with an obliging attendant with a hairstyle grafted on. To the right is a reading room where visitors can browse maps and documents produced by the local field office. It wasn’t until I had to use the restroom that I noticed a small vitrine next to the water fountain, within the plexiglass enclosure was the first and only greater sage grouse that we would see. A mini-diorama unto itself, the deceased bird was relaxed with its chest sacs deflated so that they had retracted into its mane of white feathers. While it was on display, it was decidedly not.
The grouse is out of sync with its time, the males especially, whose plumage is an assortment of feather motifs. Its tail is alternating bands of browns and whites and when fanned they create a pointed rosette framing the bird’s body. Its wings and midsection are pheasant, normal and expected. Not its chest. Its plush downy mane of white feathers envelopes its chest sacs. With the exception of the turkey, its plumage isn’t common to the modesty of North American animals. The two translucent pale yellow sacs on their chests inflate to the size of small watermelons. They show during an elaborate mating dance where males defend a small claim of the lek, the grouse’s courtship ground. Leks are a clearing in the prairie where gatherings between 25 and 30 males strut to be evaluated by hens as a potential mate. The hens are discriminating, they have been documented travelling up to eight miles, visiting multiple leks before settling. Often only the most dominant male will mate, the rest will likely never mate in the four years of their lives.
The sage grouse, as it’s name implies, is sagebrush obligate. It only makes sagebrush plains home. It is a territorial bird, it nests on the ground and often these nests are returned to every year. The tallest objects in its habitat, the brush, isn’t much taller then the bird itself. Accustomed to the uninterrupted plains, it is timid, fearful of tall structures that predators perch on. The introduction of turbines and transmission lines to the prairie creates perches for raptors constricting the habitat of the grouse leaving it vulnerable in a landscape that was once open.
The bird skirts federal endangered lists. It has yet to be proven to need protection but more than once in the last decade it has been docketed for review. Starting in 2010 there was a landscape scale conservation effort involving 11 states over a 173 million acre range to preserve the greater sage grouse sagebrush habitat. It came at the petition for the Fish and Wildlife Service to review listing the greater sage grouse as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. Treating the entire range as one functioning landscape, it was the largest land conservation effort in United States History bringing together government agencies at state and federal levels as well as private landowners throughout the 11 states. It was a project Bruce Babbitt would have admired. He served as the secretary of the Interior under Clinton from 1993 to 2001 and advocated an ecosystem approach to the management of lands in the Public Lands System. Babbitt viewed the terrain of public land management from an aerial view and all the actors within that landscape were not drivers but residents within it. The Sage Grouse Initiative was the continuation of this paradigm. The use of public-private partnerships with landowners throughout the American West enlisted the cooperation of 1100 ranchers. Through the Sage Grouse Initiative the Natural Resource Conservation Service established Candidate Conservation Agreements with private landowners that allowed them to have lighter level of regulation if they employed sage grouse conservation measures prior to the ESA ruling. Through these preemptive efforts private landholders could protect their land from future regulations once the species was listed by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.
In Wyoming, over a half million acres of privately held land are enrolled in the Candidate Conservation program. If the grouse slips into endangered status state lands that were once used for energy extraction run the risk of closing because of the presence of the bird. As a right-leaning state Wyoming is in a sort of limbo where it finds itself fighting for conservation laws in order to preserve energy extraction. Traditionally that extraction has been fossil fuel based but in this case it is wind power. This conflict pits conservation against conservation, climate against habitat. The livelihood of the grouse imperils the wind farm as well as the other way around. So with every nest found a turbine is repositioned. It is an impasse between habitat conservation and climate conservation as they are both vying for the same terrain.
The physical effects that the study will have on the land starts with the turbines and transmission lines as the most visible change. But there are subtler shifts affecting habitat, from the increased amount of dirt particulates in the air that will affect the ozone to habitat avoidance where animals are indirectly affected the presence of humans alone. It’s a landscape of special effects where the movement of every molecule is coordinated and the implications each has on the greater sage grouse is accounted for. Approximately 50 birds were captured and tagged through a technique described as hoop-netting where scientists wait for the sun to set and they seek on the birds on ATVs. Once found they spot them with a light which freezes the bird and then a second scientists approaches the bird with a net hoop and gently nets the animal. The bird is tagged with a GPS platform Terminal that is attached simply with a teflon harness that sits behind the wings of the bird and is located discreetly on the underside of the animal. In this process the sex and age of the bird are taken.
The first known experiments in bird tagging, or bird-banding, were undertaken by the French American ornithologist John James Audubon in 1803 on a group of Eastern Phoebes, a small grey flycatcher with a black cap. It migratory range ranges from Central Canada to Central Mexico. By tying a small wire around the bird’s leg he observed their nesting patterns as they returned to the same site every year. It wasn’t until the 1950s that radio-telemetry was first applied to wildlife monitoring in marine sciences where traditional monitoring efforts were undertaken in inaccessible underwater environments. Radio telemetry existed as early as 1874 when French engineers used it on Mont Blanc where they streamed snow depth measurements over radio waves back to Paris. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that GPS tracking devices became small enough to make them accessible to researchers studying the migratory patterns of species such as the sage-grouse. Since, this methodology of monitoring has taken the mantle of standard bearer for the scientific community and it only increases in popularity as SMS and cellular is integrated. In the immediate future monitoring will only become smaller. Quantum dots, infinitely small microscopic probes the size of only a few atoms, taint organisms with trackable fluorescent dye.
At the site, radio telemetry is used to record the seasonal ranges of the sage-grouse to get a sense of the scale of conservation on the site. The ranges in the fall and winter tend to be larger than the summer range and the range during brooding season. Depending on the season grouse range ranged from 38,000 acres during nesting season to 163,000 acres in late autumn.
In addition to the location data of the bird itself, the habitat of the grouse is established from the extents of sagebrush habitat. Since plants don’t fly away from you vegetation monitoring is decidedly more tactile and hand-ons involving field-oriented practices. The first is a protocol named the Daubenmire Frame first devised in the 1950s it estimates the cover and height for a landscape. The frame is constructed more often than not out of thin PVC tubing that has been marked with alternating bands of white and black dashing that has become ubiquitous with scientific field measurements. It is a simple rectangle that is approximately 20cm to 50 cm in size but can be adjusted match the rangeland that it is intended to measure. The landscape is gridded out into quadrants and the overall composition of vegetation in the landscape is a simple multiplier of the vegetative make-up within the Daubenmire Frame. A similarly analog tool is the Robel Pole which is a vertically oriented rod that is split into four equal segments with 18 increments within each, it is used to measure the height of forage after grazing.. A four meter string is attached one meter up the pole and the reading is taken at eye-level from the taught end of this string. From this height reading it is then interpolated with an area measurement for the site to get an estimate of forageable vegetation. The instruments are beautifully analog. Simple and stark, they are made to stand apart from the landscape while engage it intimately. The data which they extract is paired with the digital GPS output, an invisible data stream that is captured through the airwaves. The GPS output is a series of points and interpolated line segments on and arcs on maps as well as number sets organized into a spreadsheet. The last method involves lying prone in a hunting blind in the early morning, spying through spotting scopes and binoculars to count the number birds, male and female, at the leks. There were between 35 and 53 lekking sites that were observed during the study on the Chokecherry Sierra Madre Wind Project site. Counts were conducted at sunrise and sunset and at times went into the night as grouse continued their performances under full-moon light. The human equivalent would be scientific headcounts at bars and clubs noting who went home with whom. Counts are conducted in early April, the season for sage-grouse courting in Wyoming.
The document that records this data is the an Environmental Impact Statement compiled by the Bureau of Land Management. ON the day before Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency he signed a bill into law on January 1, 1970 called the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Within the act was a requirement for every major Federal action that significantly altered the environment an environmental impact statement would be undertaken. The statement would outline the effects that the government was planning to commit to the environment, if they had considered any alternatives and what the detrimental effects to the environment might be. The Act gave was bureaucratic and gave no legal authority to stop an action. In the first five years since the act had been established the BLM only delivered an EIS on ninteen occasions, a little more than four a year. It was until the litigation of a case involving the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a pipeline that connected drilling in the Prudhoe Bay in Alaska through the state 800 miles to the port of Valdez. Advocates argued that the pipe would melt vulnerable permafrost that lay under it. They also argued that the EIS that was completed was done without scientific conviction. They felt that the EIS was only done to confirm premeditated conclusions. Through a series of lawsuits the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia mandated that a comprehensive EIS. It was after this that the EIS became ingrained in the culture of the BLM as an independent environmental review process of all major federal projects. To further buttress the environmental arsenal, the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, a tool that environmental group weaponized by using it as a threat to shut down cast tracts of federal land if environmental concerns were not addressed by private industry. This effect was vaulted into prominence by a case in Oregon that sought to protect the spotted owl. A bird of prey, that if it was listed as endangered would shut down huge swaths of critical lumber habitat. The environmental review that was undertaken in the Sage Creek Basin to determine the fate of the greater sage grouse was first mandated by these acts in the 1970s and since has been a staple of the BLM’s motivation to manage lands at the level of an ecosystem. It is the same document that provided a comprehensive refresh to the diorama, flushing out the impact on every atom within the landscape of South Central Wyoming.
In the back conference of the field office is empty with the exception of a map on the wall depicting the nesting sites of all the recorded greater sage grouse in Carbon County. It becomes clear that the greater sage grouse defines the sage creek basin. In 1937 it was the American bison and the pronghorn antelope that defined this place for the planners at the American Museum of Natural History. The shift from bison to grouse is symptomatic of a cultural shift over the last seventy years in American conservation where big game mammals are no longer considered indicative of the health of an ecosystem. Instead, in the Sage Creek Basin the mantel of umbrella species falls on animals diminutive in stature whose presence would not command the frame of a diorama. The black footed ferret which is the only listed federally as endangered on the site. It first saw its decline as a result of the extermination of the whitetail prairie dog in the plains which ranchers viewed as a non-contributing nuisance. The ferret, a carnivore which feeds almost exclusively on prairie dogs, quickly declined as well and has yet to recover from extermination. While there is only one federally listed species there is a collection of sensitive species listed by the BLM. The pygmy rabbit, white-tailed prairie dog, Wyoming pocket gopher, columbian sharp-tailed grouse, the greater sage grouse, mountain plover, and northern leopard frog. There is also extensive protection for the golden eagle and bald eagle, it is a federal crime to kill either and the only substitution for their mortality is to show that you tried to do every thing you can to prevent the death. Scientists are employing avian radar that blips with each bird that then must be spotted and identified by a scientist on the ground. Neither of the primary animals of the diorama, the pronghorn or the american bison are listed as threatened or endangered and the reason is severely different
The pronghorn is not listed because it has recovered.
The pronghorn did not exist in this place when the diorama was first constructed. In 1900 pronghorn numbers were around 15,000 down from estimates in the Great Plains of over 35 million. The pronghorn is native to the Great Plains and challenges the claim to fastest mammal on earth, able to maintain speeds of sixty miles an hour. The backend of the pronghorn is white and furry like the grouse and they are easy to spot because of their motion. Its hind legs pitch up and down making its white fluff on their ass bob as they cross the plains. Since the early 1900s the pronghorn numbers have recovered as a result of conservation efforts. Working with local ranchers the BLM instituted pronghorn friendly fencing that removes the barbs and raises the lowest strand a minimum 15 inches from the ground. This simple practice has drastically helped pronghorn numbers by creating continuity in its habitat. The recovery of the pronghorn is considered a success here with a current population nearing one million. Riding to the site with Henry and seeing the pronghorn cross in front of us it was clear that locals have a casualness with their presence as if they have always been there and will always be. They had stepped out of frame for a second and now are back as if time had recovered itself and was looping a reel of the past.
The bison isn’t listed because it isn’t here.
The bison is a bovide, like a cow, it feeds on grasses and has a four chamber digestive system. They also share the same genetic provenance, both originating somewhere in Indo-China and as the continents split cows went to europe and bison crossed the Bering Land bridge onto the North American Continent. Because of their shared genetic history they are suited to similar environments and that is why eurasian cattle can exist in the landscape that was once populated by the American bison. Unlike the greater sage grouse, the american bison is not American Plains obligated, they can survive in other ecosystems, but they do have traits that enhance their stay here. The first is its burly coat that sustains it through Wyoming’s harsh winters and winds. The second it bathes in dirt to protect itself from insects. This act of coating itself in soil shapes the grasslands by creating bare patches in the landscape that are fertile areas for young plants to grow or for water to pull. These patches help create biodiversity in a landscape that runs the risk of homogeneity as grass species edge out other flora and fauna. (Savage 111-113). Yet while the bison is made for this place, they no longer exist here.
The fate of the American Bison destruction is a product of a confluences of factors that by the end of the 19th century saw a population of drop from anywhere between 20 - 35 million bison that roamed the Great Plains in large herds to a few hundred by the 1880s. The natural factors that the bison would have to overcome ranged from wolf predation to the harshness of their chosen habitat. Droughts were recorded throughout the 19th century with exceptionally notable decade long drought from 1822 to 1832. While the 1830s were abnormally trying, bison had existed in this region for thousands of years and most likely faced equally trying times. The real shift in the bison was cultural. Eastern Woodland Indians who made the forests of the original Northwest territory home were pushed west as Euroamerican settlers began to claim their land. Indians who traditionally were not nomadic shifted were forced to adopt a transitory lifestyle when they came to the great plains. The iconic image of free-ranging indians hunting bison from horseback didn’t exist until the late 18th century. The horse was only introduced to the Great Plains from Mexico earlier that century. With European expansion from the east coast the Indian expansion made a relatively open region decidedly less as tribes competed for hunting territory. The congestion of habitat paired with an east coast fashion appetite for bison robes, the burly winter coat of the bison, fueled an Indian economy that shifted from hunting and gathering to strictly hunting for profit and would quickly begin the decline of the American Bison. The fur trade was the foundation of the Indian economy in the mid 1800s and harvests were vast and indiscriminate with the corpses left with only the hyde and tongue of the bison extracted. An infamous harvest at Ft. Pierre, South Dakota, a marketplace central in the robe trade where indians would interface with Euroamerican traders, left a landscape of 1500 bison corpses. Yet the systematic destruction of the bison was yet to come and it came in an especially disturbing form.
As a big game trophy animal it's comforting to think that the bison’s eradication was a result of something as innocuous as the market forces of the robe trade. Rather, what should weigh on our collective conscious is a much more violent history rooted in the systematic extermination of the american bison as a tool for the eviction of native tribes from the American Plains. The United States and American Indians were engaged in conflicts throughout out the Great Plains that came to a head over the Bozeman Trail, a route from Ft. Laramie to Gold mines in Montana. After a critical loss to the Sioux who ambushed and destroyed an eighty man cavalry unit, Generals Ulysses Grant and William Sherman persuaded the US congress to makes peace with the plains nomads. The US met with representatives of the Comanches, Kiowas, Southern Cheyennes, and Southern Arapahos in the Valley of Lodge Creek as a peace commission they signed the Treaties of Medicine Lodge. The treaty called for the exit of American hunters from Indian territory but laced into the language of the agreement scientific exploration, land grants and mining claims were still permitted. On top of this the agreement only expelled Americans from the region as long as there were bison to hunt, once the bison expired so would the agreement. What ensued was a systematic destruction of the bison, a clearing of the plains in order to usher in Euroamerican settlement. All the while the market was still a motivating force, the sinew of bison hides were strung through the machinery of the recently industrialized East coast. The tanned hides were ideal for belts that transferred steam power to rotate the loams and mills of the east. With the exhaustion of the bison the federal government commenced the confinement of plains nomads to Federally created Indian reservations. The era of free-range tribes forever ended with the demise of the free-ranging bison. The prairie clearing freed contested lands for continued homesteading, harvesting of mineral resources and the completion of the transcontinental railroad. It would also end half a decade of conflict that entangled the U.S. military resources with plains nomads. The result were mass killings. Bison were harvested from moving trains their bodies left in the prairie to rot as visual persuasion for native tribes to leave where four decades earlier, bison were seen by emigrants on wagon trains that filled landscape for as far as they could see.
We had one bison encounter. The main street of Saratoga is two blocks long and lined with small shops that cater to tourists. The first we stopped in resold artificial animals hides owned by a lady from New York who had used to work in the garment industry on the east coast, she needed a change so she set up business in Denver importing artificial furs from Europe and reselling them to larger vendors in throughout the United States. While her headquarters are in Colorado the storefront in Saratoga was a rustic outpost in a beautiful place. She described to us a few of the other stores on the main street and insisted that we visit an antique shop owned by, in her words, the only Indian in the town. We went, there was nowhere else to go to.
He was sitting behind a jewelry counter at the front of the shop filled with a silvers and turquoises filling the case. Behind him was the rest of the shop with wrangler shirts, used cowboy boots, navajo beadwork boots, boots, jeans, most everything was overpriced. As we were leaving we described to him why we were there, showed him the pictures of the diorama and explained how it was less than ten miles away. It became clear to us why the lady in the fur shop sent us to him, there was a softness to him that drew you in, made you comfortable. After hearing the story that we had pitched up and down main street for the last three days he asked us to wait a second and drew away to a corner of the store. He came back with a bison horn that he had found on a ranch north of Saratoga. The horn was nearly unrecognizable, it resembled tree bark, dark and splintering. The horn he said, was over one hundred years old and that he wanted us to have it. We asked how much, he said he wouldn’t take any cash for it, that he had been waiting for the right people for it and he had always planned to give it away. Reluctantly we accepted.
James Perry Wilson’s background painting that fictionalized herds of thousands of bison roaming the prairie suddenly had the fiction bleached from it. This horn impregnated the myth we were chasing with a small semblance of truth, bison once were here. Yet whatever drama we were playing out in that shop quickly fades when the romance of the horn confronts its history. In the 1880s the destruction of the bison was so complete that it left a deathly landscape of skeletons so prevalent that settlers were hesitant to sow the land. The country was recently plagued with a recession starting in 1873 culminating in the Long Depression that wouldn’t end until 1893 leaving many searching for a way to survive. The landscape of bones was harvested by scavengers who sold the remains to fertilizer companies in Michigan and Illinois. The last remains of the bison fed the production of the rapidly developing fertilizer industry in the Midwest. Our treasured token was an omnipresent nuisance in the 1880s like bottles around New York City, there was a refund on deposit. Today it is a reminder of the institutionalized Indian removal carried out by the near annihilation of a species. Today we our guilt free. We can overlook the horn’s troubled past because we have reconstructed the cultural myth of the bison as well as the West, re-inventing both as a cradle of Americanism, we entrust our identity in this animal and this place. Yet the horn should haunt us, many of the scavengers were Indians coming to terms with the collapse of the fur trade economy, there were no more bison to harvest. Indians who refused the reservation were left in a wasteland of bones with little but the skeletons to support themselves. One hundred and fifty years later, the cashless transaction in that small shop on the main street of Saratoga hauntingly mimed the scavenger transaction. The indian found the horn lying to waste and free to pick in the landscape. I, the mid-westerner, brought the horn back with me, it protectively sat on my lap in coach class of the airplane as I was afraid to place it in the overhead compartment, contents tend to shift in flight. It was in a turquoise plastic bag wrapped in turquoise tissue paper. Today, I keep the horn on a shelf in my apartment here in New York, a reminder to me of a trip that I cherish in part because of a small act of kindness of a shopkeeper in Wyoming.
The cradle of American conservation is in the destruction of the bison. The roots of American conservation start in england in the 1820s with groups who sought to prevent cruelty to Animals. Upper class easterners in the United States adopted these european attitudes as a reaction to rapid industrialization, the first groups were primarily women's social clubs that started with the SPCA in New York City in 1866 which spread to other cities and by the mid 1870s there were thirty chapters all with the mandate to protect animals from the cruelty that was a result of perils of industrialization and urbanization. The reform movements were primarily situated in urban centers where concentrations of the intellectual elite began to form reactionary movements to the ills of contemporary society. Bison preservation was different from the SPCA, it was primarily a male undertaking and focused on the cultural imagination of the bison as much as the animal itself. As early as 1832 George Catlin proposed the idea of a bison park, he envisioned a place where both the animal and the place were preserved together. It wasn’t until 1902 when the first bison preserve was established under the American Bison Society. The Society, was as much as a force of mammal preservation as it was a form of preservation of the myth of the west. The image of the free ranging landscape where man was as free as the animals that roamed it. A tide of nationalism at the turn of the century led figures such as Teddy Roosevelt and William Temple Hornaday to reaffirm American masculinity. While prominent proponents of bison preservation such as Roosevelt, John Muir, and George Bird Grinnell held the belief that the eradication of the bison was necessary step in the progression of civilization, a casualty for a greater cause: American progress, (Isenberg) it was also the conduit to the reclaim the country’s cultural identity. Horace Greely’s “Go west young man” was as much as an affirmation of the individual as it was a search for the image of the country as a whole. This image was in a precarious limbo: the bison’s total loss would be a death of an American cultural icon, while at the same time it's near loss solidified its nostalgic popularity. The project to save the bison was a project to save the West as well.
The last grasp on the country's collective masculinity was a reserve of bison collected from Texas ranchers and a herd that was genetically diverse, a domesticated bastard herd. The ranchers, James McKay and William Alloway had created the herd from wild bison they had captured and raised alongside their cattle. The recovery of the bison was as much a product of the mythology of the eastern intellectual elite as it was the industriousness of western ranchers seeking profit. (Isenberg 176). In 1908 Hornaday persuaded congress to establish the National Bison Range in Montana, the same reserve that in the 1930s the American Museum of Natural History would harvest eight specimen to be included in the Bison Pronghorn Diorama in New York City. The herd came from a group of 34 originally purchased from McKay and Alloway. The Bison that we see there today are part of a thin thread of American Conservation, one of the first acts of habitat and species conservation in American history. Our modern ecological refresh of the bison in the great plains would forever be tainted by domestication and habitat fragmentation and the bison will never recover to the numbers of the early late 1700s and early 1800s. Yet the image that is here, in the diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, reminds us of what early emigrants saw crossing the great plains of the 1820s. It is a diorama depicting the mythologization of a lost continent. It is a snapshot of a fleeting marker in time capturing the precise moment that the American frontier closed and American conservation opened. A eulogy to Manifest Destiny and a preface to American Conservation.
The bison have recovered in the American West, but not in the Sage Creek Basin. Other than one specimen that a few farm hands recounted seeing on the property of the Bolton Ranch bison don’t exist here. We flagged them down on our first attempt to find the site. A few miles after we crossed the river at Pick Bridge we notice in our rearview mirror a truck barreling towards us. With the hope that they could help us find the site we pulled to the side of the road, gravel crunching beneath our tires and flagged him down as he pulled beside us. He spoke no english, but with some hope he pointed to a vehicle that had just breached the horizon coming in the direction he had just come from. We waited as the vehicle approached. When it stopped and pulled beside us I pulled out Stephen C. Quinn’s book on the dioramas at the natural history museum and point to the Bison Pronghorn diorama. He see’s the picture and says “Booffalo” ladened with a strong accent. I repeat back, yes a bison, but then tried to describe to him it isn’t the animal that we are looking for, but rather the landscape behind it. This doesn’t get through and he continues to tell Merica and I a story about a rogue buffalo that escaped from a domestic ranch nearby and wanders the land alone. Bison are not solitary creatures. The don’t feel safe alone and the animal the farm ranch hand described is most likely stressed in its solitude in a place this vast. Bison elsewhere have recovered and their status is no longer endangered, but thriving to the point that the Fish and Wildlife service is opening hunting to wild bison. The cultural shift in conservation from bison to grouse may simply be a result of which species are in the most need, but there is also a sense that the Greater Sage Grouse defines this place because this is the only place where they can survive. Today the legacy of the bison lies in their domestication for agricultural production, we are starting to see them throughout the country not just the Great Plains. Their novelty is no longer site specific. The Grouse on the other hand, afraid of tall objects, is stranded out here. It can make no other place then the American prairie home. While the bison is the image of North America, the greater sage grouse is the image of the American West.
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Diorama Diary is a project to get comfortable with the idea of moving Upstate. It was created by Mike Robitz as he looks for land and the complimentary utilities needed to be comfortable within it. If you have suggestions on places/services for him to get comfortable, email him: here.
