The American Bison: A Symbol of Resilience, Strength, and the American Spirit

There is a creature that once thundered across this land with a majesty so complete, so raw and magnificent, that the very ground shook beneath its hooves. Long before there was a flag to plant, long before there was a Constitution to sign or a republic to build, the American bison ruled a continent. From the Appalachians to the Rockies, from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian plains, an ocean of dark, shaggy backs stretched as far as any human eye could see. To stand at the edge of that great herd — and men did stand there, trembling — was to understand something primal about this land. Something that does not bend. Something that endures.

That animal is the American bison. And its story — of abundance and near-extinction, of destruction and miraculous recovery — is nothing less than a story about America itself.

A Nation Before the Nation

Scientists and historians estimate that when European explorers first pressed westward into the interior of this continent, somewhere between 30 and 60 million bison grazed the North American plains.¹ Thirty to sixty million. Let that number settle in your mind. They moved in herds so vast that early travelers reported it took days — sometimes three or four days — for a single herd to pass by on the open prairie. The sound alone was said to be like the rolling of distant thunder that never stopped.

The Plains Indians — the Lakota, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Blackfoot, and dozens of other nations — built entire civilizations around the bison. The animal gave them food, shelter, clothing, tools, and spiritual meaning. Every part of the bison was used: the hide for tepees and robes, the bones for tools and sleds, the sinew for bowstrings, the stomach for cooking vessels, the dung for fuel.⁸ The bison was not merely hunted. It was revered. It was woven into their prayers and their ceremonies, their stories and their songs. To the peoples of the plains, the bison was a gift from the Creator — the very foundation of life on the open grasslands.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out in 1804 on their great journey of discovery, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to map the vast Louisiana Purchase and document its wonders, they encountered bison in numbers that staggered their imagination. Lewis wrote in his journal that the plains were "black with bison" — that the herds were so enormous as to seem more like the ocean than any creature-filled landscape he had ever seen.² The young republic they served was just beginning to understand what it had inherited.

The Great Slaughter

What came next is among the most sobering chapters in the American story. It is a chapter we must not flinch from telling.

With the expansion of the railroads across the Great Plains in the decades following the Civil War, the bison became both an economic target and a military instrument. Buffalo hunters — some skilled professionals, some opportunists, some outright profiteers — descended on the plains with high-powered rifles and a commercial hunger that consumed everything in its path. The hides were valuable. The tongues were considered a delicacy. And the bones, once the flesh was stripped away, were ground for fertilizer and sold by the ton. A skilled hunter could kill dozens of bison in a single stand without moving from his position, simply reloading and firing until the animals — confused by the noise and the smell of blood, unaccustomed to the crack of a rifle — simply stood and died around him.

The most famous of these hunters was William Cody, known to history as Buffalo Bill. Cody became a legend — a showman, an American character of the first order — but the industry he represented was devastating.³ By 1880, the great southern herd had been virtually eliminated. By 1889, the entire population of wild bison in the United States had been reduced to fewer than a thousand animals. Some estimates put the number as low as three hundred. The thundering ocean that had defined a continent for ten thousand years had been reduced, in little more than two decades, to a whisper.

The near-extinction of the American bison was not an accident. It was not simply the unfortunate consequence of commerce. It was, in part, a deliberate policy to strip the Plains Indians of the foundation of their way of life — to force their submission by destroying the very source of their food, shelter, and spirit. Whatever judgment history renders on that era, we must be honest enough to name what happened: a treasure of the American land, irreplaceable and magnificent, was brought to the very edge of oblivion.

The Men Who Saved the Bison

But this is America. And in America, when the worst has been done, there are always those who refuse to let the story end there.

The man who perhaps did more than any other individual to rescue the bison from extinction was a zoologist named William Temple Hornaday. In 1886, Hornaday — then the chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian Institution — traveled to Montana to collect bison specimens for the museum. What he found horrified him. The animals were nearly gone. He returned to Washington with a fire in him that would not go out. He lobbied, he wrote, he organized, he argued with the passion of a man who understood that time was running out. In 1905, he founded the American Bison Society, with the express purpose of saving the species from extinction.⁴

He found a powerful ally in the White House.

Theodore Roosevelt — rancher, hunter, naturalist, and one of the great Americans of any era — shared Hornaday's alarm and his resolve. Roosevelt had seen the bison on the open range as a young man, and he had seen the destruction too. He brought to the presidency a conviction that the natural inheritance of America — its forests, its rivers, its wild creatures — was not merely a resource to be exploited but a trust to be preserved. Roosevelt established the National Bison Range in Montana in 1908, one of the first wildlife refuges in American history specifically dedicated to a single species.⁵ He understood something that every generation must relearn: that stewardship is not weakness. It is the mark of a civilization that intends to last.

Slowly, painfully, the work of recovery began. Small herds were protected. Breeding programs were established. Ranchers — private citizens, American individuals taking responsibility for their land and their heritage — joined the effort. The bison that had been hunted to three hundred animals began, generation by generation, to come back.

Yellowstone: The Sacred Remnant

In the high plateaus and valleys of Yellowstone National Park, there survived something extraordinary: a herd of bison that had never been entirely destroyed. Through the worst years of the slaughter, a small group of animals had retreated into the remote backcountry of what would become America's first national park, and there they held on. Poachers pursued them even into the park's boundaries, and for a time it seemed even this last refuge might not be enough. But soldiers of the United States Army were deployed to protect them — American soldiers standing guard over America's national animal — and the Yellowstone herd endured.

Today, the Yellowstone bison represent the only continuously wild, free-roaming herd of bison in America that has never been supplemented by domestic cattle genetics.⁷ They are, in a very real sense, the living descendants of the original great herds — an unbroken thread running back through ten thousand years of American history. To see them in Yellowstone today, standing in the snow or crossing the Lamar Valley at dusk, is to see something ancient and irreplaceable. It is to feel the continent as it once was.

America's National Mammal

On May 9, 2016, President Barack Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act into law, making the American bison the official national mammal of the United States.⁶ It was a recognition long overdue. The bison had already appeared on the official seal of the Department of the Interior, on state flags and state seals, on nickels and bills. But now it had the formal designation its story demanded: the national mammal of a nation that the bison, in so many ways, helped to shape.

The bison joins the bald eagle as one of our great national symbols — and it is instructive to consider what they represent together. The eagle soars above, sovereign and free, a symbol of aspiration and liberty. The bison stands on the earth itself, rooted and powerful, a symbol of endurance and strength. Together they tell the whole story: a nation that reaches for the heavens and yet remains planted in the deep soil of a hard-won land.

The Recovery: An American Comeback Story

Today, the American bison has come back from the brink in a way that few would have dared to predict in 1889 when the count stood at barely three hundred animals. Across the country, there are now approximately 500,000 bison — on public lands, in tribal herds, and on private ranches.⁹ It is one of the great conservation success stories in the history of the world.

But numbers alone do not capture the full meaning of this recovery. What has been restored is something harder to quantify. The Lakota Sioux, the Assiniboine, the Blackfoot Confederacy, and dozens of other tribes have worked for decades to restore bison to their ancestral lands. The InterTribal Buffalo Council, a coalition of more than sixty tribes, manages herds on tribal lands across the country. For these communities, the bison's return is not simply an ecological achievement. It is a spiritual restoration. It is the mending of something that was broken — a reconnection to a heritage that was nearly stolen forever.

This, too, is the American story. Not the story of unbroken triumph — we have never been that kind of nation, and we should never pretend otherwise. But the story of a people who, when they have done wrong, have the capacity to acknowledge it, to fight to correct it, and to build something better from the wreckage. The bison's return is proof that this capacity is real. That stewardship is possible. That what is lost need not be lost forever.

What the Bison Teaches Us

There is a quality the American bison possesses that I think speaks directly to something deep in our national character. When a winter storm rolls across the Great Plains — and those storms can be merciless, with howling winds and temperatures that drop to frightening lows — other animals turn their backs to the cold and drift before the wind, trying to escape what cannot be escaped. The bison does the opposite. The bison turns and walks directly into the storm. It plows through the deepest drifts, lowers its great shaggy head, and moves forward into the wind and the snow until it comes out the other side. Scientists call this behavior adaptive. I call it American.

We have been a nation that has faced storms. We have faced them in the winter at Valley Forge, on the beaches of Normandy, in the economic wreckage of the Great Depression, in the grief of September mornings when the sky went dark with smoke. And again and again, this nation has done what the bison does. It has lowered its head and moved forward. Not because the storm was not real. Not because the danger was not genuine. But because turning away was never who we are.

The American bison stood at the edge of oblivion and did not vanish. That, in the end, is the lesson. Strength endures. Character endures. A people who know who they are — who hold fast to what they value and fight for what they believe — endure.

A Living Promise

When you see a bison — whether on a coin in your pocket, on the great seal of a government agency, or in the flesh on the grasslands of the West — I hope you will pause for a moment and let the full weight of that animal's story settle on you. Here is a creature that shaped a continent, that sustained civilizations, that was brought to the very edge of destruction and then — through the stubborn love of men and women who refused to give up — was brought back.

Here is a living promise that America makes to itself and to the generations that will come after us: that we are not merely consumers of this inheritance but its custodians. That the land and its creatures — the bison on the prairie, the eagle in the sky, the salmon in the river — are part of what it means to be American, and that we intend to pass them on.

The road to 250 years of American independence runs through every chapter of our story — the glorious ones and the painful ones alike. The bison stands in all of them. It stood on the plains when the first explorers came west with wonder in their eyes. It nearly fell when our worst impulses had their season. And it stands today — half a million strong, still breathing, still shaggy, still magnificent — because enough Americans decided that some things are worth saving.

That is who we are. That is who we have always had the potential to be.

God bless the American bison. And God bless these United States of America.