BLOOD MEMORY

Dutiful companion to the soon-to-air Burns documentary series on the fate of the American bison.

American bison, “the largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere,” are no strangers to extinction: The present species represents the fortunate survivors of an earlier extinction event that wiped out kin that were larger still. The prolific grasslands of the North American plains nurtured the species to keystone status, so that by the time Europeans arrived, herds were uncountably huge and seemingly inexhaustible, as well as uncommonly trusting. In his overland journal, Meriwether Lewis recorded that his men had to chase curious animals away with sticks and stones. For many reasons, as Duncan writes in his latest collaboration with Burns, subsequent Euro-American arrivals to the plains were bent on destroying the bison, and just about every central player in the history of the 19th-century West had some part in that destruction: Duncan brings Daniel Boone, Philip Sheridan, George Armstrong Custer, and assorted European noblemen into his account. Duncan borrows a long-standing trope that links the fate of the bison to that of the Native American peoples who once hunted them and whose descendants are now preserving them. As he notes, the National Bison Range is now under Native management, and, after a Lakota woman suggested to a founder of an intertribal council, “it’s best you ask the buffalo if they want to come back,” more than 80 tribes host herds that graze on more than 1 million acres of tribal land. This book is a useful survey, although any number of earlier titles, such as Steven Rinella’s American Buffalo and Dan O’Brien’s Wild Idea, tell the story of near-extermination and recovery more vividly. Duncan draws on their insights along with many secondary sources, as well as the work of cutting-edge historians such as Pekka Hämäläinen and Dan Flores.

A sturdy, reliable narrative that sometimes reads like a data dump of research.