For thousands of generations, massive herds of buffalo occupied the American plains. The beasts lived and died alongside indigenous people who relied on them for food and shelter, and, in exchange for killing them, they revered the animal.
Numbering an estimated 30 million in the early 1800s, the herds began declining for a variety of reasons, including the lucrative buffalo robe trade, the steady westward settlement of an expanding United States, diseases introduced by domestic cattle, and drought.
But the arrival of the railroads in the early 1870s, and a new demand for buffalo hides to be used in the belts driving industrial machines back East, brought thousands of hide hunters to the Great Plains. In just over a decade the number of bison collapsed from 12 to 15 million to fewer than a thousand, representing one of the most dramatic examples of our ability to destroy the natural world.
By 1900, the American buffalo teetered on the brink of disappearing forever, and Native people of the Plains entered one of the most traumatic moments of their existence.
The American Buffalo, a new two-part, four-hour series, takes viewers on a journey through more than 10,000 years of North American history and across some of the continent’s most iconic landscapes, tracing the animal’s evolution, its significance to the Indigenous people and landscape of the Great Plains, its near extinction, and the efforts to bring the magnificent mammals back from the brink.
The stories of Native people anchor the series, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne of the Southern Plains; the Lakota, Salish, Kootenai, Mandan-Hidatsa, and Blackfeet from the Northern Plains; and others.
Guest:
Ken Burns is an American filmmaker known for his documentary films and television series, many of which chronicle American history and culture. His work is often produced in association with WETA-TV and/or the National Endowment for the Humanities and distributed by PBS.
"The Source" is a live call-in program airing Mondays through Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. Leave a message before the program at (210) 615-8982. During the live show, call 833-877-8255 or email thesource@tpr.org.
This interview will be recorded on Thursday, October 12, 2023.
