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the great plains--

for thousands of years this sea of grass

has covered the center of the North American continent.

Home to countless numbers of American bison--

better known as buffalo.

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Up till the early 19th century, around 30 million buffalo

roamed in great herds over these vast prairies.

Then, in less than a hundred years,

hunters exterminated all but a few hundred.

And as buffalo stood on the edge of extinction...

This man set out to hunt the very last few animals.

His name, William Temple Hornaday...

Chief taxidermist at the Smithsonian institution

in Washington, DC.

He wanted them as specimens for the u.S. National museum.

Yet this experience would change his life forever.

Instead of a buffalo hunter,

he would become the savior of these last buffalo.

This is the story of the fall and rise

of an American icon.

As the wild frontier was shrinking,

buffalo numbers fell.

They became symbols of that lost frontier--

a world that defined the American nation.

Buffalo appeared everywhere...

On the nickel...

On stamps...

And in 1910, on the ten dollar bill.

These images of buffalo were drawn from famous specimens,

like the big bull that Hornaday brought back

to the u.S. National museum.

What is it about the buffalo

that makes it such a potent symbol?

Even a single animal stands for power and strength--

the bulls weigh in at around 2,000 pounds...

Enough to shake the earth.

Buffalo were more than just symbols of the wild prairie--

they help create it.

Even as buffalo were disappearing,

William Hornaday realized how important they were

to the prairie.

Hornaday put together

a display of the American bison

that is intended to represent

not only the specific species of bison

but also the prairie ecology

and bison for all time, past, present and future.

Time was there were so many buffalo--

and so many mouths grazing the land--

they shaped the nature of life here.

They were a keystone species, at the center of a complex web

connecting with other prairie animals...

Like prairie dogs.

Prairie dogs like a home with a view--

with no tall vegetation--

so they can keep watch for predators.

And they often build their towns in places

where the buffalo have already eaten the grasses down.

Then the prairie dogs take over.

They get busy, clipping away any vegetation around their Burrows,

keeping their sightlines open.

And they also eat the grass--

which stimulates more grass to grow...

Fresh, new grass, which buffalo love.

So buffaloes like to graze around prairie dog towns.

And as they do, they fertilize the grass with dung and urine,

which is good for the buffalo and good for the prairie dogs.

Life on the prairies depends on these intimate relationships,

and at their center stands the buffalo.

But everything that lives here

is at the mercy of the great plains climate.

When a drought comes, the grass dies off--

and the buffalo have to move on, to find better grazing.

These migrating herds covered vast distances,

and there was a time when they blackened the plains.

An army colonel in Kansas wrote to Hornaday

of a herd that was 25 miles across

and took five days to pass.

On the plains, droughts can last for decades,

making life hard for the buffalo.

Then it all changes.

Rain comes to the prairies--

slaking the parched ground and creating a sea of grass.

In the past, rain brought a time of plenty for the buffalo...

And for the many tribes of plains Indians

that depended on the migrating herds.

There were no boundaries.

Where the buffalo went, we went.

And it provided for US in so many ways.

They were the main source of food,

and then the hides were used for clothing, lodges.

The bones were tools, weapons.

We depended on this animal so much

that it became a spiritual connection.

There's something in your heart that tells you

this is our brother, this is our family.

That sacred relationship

was reinforced by dances and ceremonies.

A painted buffalo skull carried prayers,

to draw the wandering herds close to the village

and offer thanks for a successful hunt.

But this sacred bond between buffalo and the Indians,

along with the world they shared, was under threat.

Within a few decades

in the second half of the 19th century,

the herds would be gone.

William Hornaday documented this disaster

in a book published in 1889

called "the extermination of the American bison,"

in which he wrote...

"The primary cause of the buffalo's extermination

was the descent of civilization,

with all its elements of destructiveness,

upon the whole of the country inhabited by that animal."

That "descent of civilization" onto the great plains

didn't really get going until the 19th century.

And even then, colonizing the plains wasn't easy.

The plains Indians fought hard

for their land and their way of life.

They were more than a match for settlers,

even for the u.S. Army.

Sure, the army won a few skirmishes,

but they were losing the war for the west.

Then everything changed.

The civil war ended, and two key generals,

Philip Sheridan and William Tecumseh sherman,

were now free to march on the Indians.

They already waged total war on the south--

a scorched earth campaign,

destroying crops and food stores--

starving the enemy into submission.

Why not use the same tactic against the Indians?

Starvation.

So generals sherman and Sheridan declared war on the buffalo.

They encouraged hunters to kill as many buffalo as they could.

But another weapon was about to be unleashed on the buffalo--

a weapon even more powerful--

capitalism.

The market economy.

There were lots of uses for a dead buffalo.

Hides, dried meat-- called pemmican by the Indians--

to feed fur traders...

Leather to drive machinery back east and in Europe.

Then, the railroads came...

Bringing hundreds of buffalo hunters,

and they just kept on killing.

Mountains of skulls and bones

became raw material for the bone China industry.

And the slaughter went on and on.

General sherman wrote to general Sheridan,

"invite all the sportsmen of england and america this fall

for a great buffalo hunt

and make a grand sweep of them all."

Hornaday reckoned that in the three years from 1872 to 1874,

more than 3 million buffalo were killed.

Years later, an assiniboine chief called ochankugahe

recalled as a child he could walk across the prairie,

jumping from buffalo carcass to buffalo carcass,

they were lying so thickly on the ground.

Mark azure is also assiniboine, living under the vast skies

of the fort belknap reservation in Northern Montana.

The extermination of the great herds

changed his culture forever.

Well, it meant our way of life was gone.

The things that we had known and been taught and understood,

all of a sudden it was gone, and then where do you go?

You're lost in every aspect of your life

from the practical uses to the spiritual, cultural uses,

those were just taken away,

and you were, you were being told

now how you're going to live without that,

something that's been a part of you since your existence.

Hornaday had carefully described the buffalo's decline

in his book.

Way back, 30 million animals roamed

over much of the North American continent.

By 1867, Hornaday thought only 1.5 million remained.

By the 1880s, there were likely only a few hundred left

in the whole of North America.

Those still alive were hiding in the most remote spots,

where they wouldn't be found.

Running for over 120 miles through the Texas panhandle,

palo duro canyon is often called the Grand Canyon of Texas.

No one came out here much,

and the canyon was big enough

to hide the last few buffalo of the mighty herd

that once ruled the southern plains.

Here they could breed and raise their calves,

out of sight of hunters and their guns.

Further north in Wyoming,

a few buffalo had found another place to hide.

Back in 1872, an area of hot springs and geysers

had been declared america's first national park.

Yellowstone.

The park was created to protect this unique scenery.

But there were also buffalo here.

Beyond the spectacular geysers and boiling pools

there were huge tracts of rolling grassland,

grazed by buffalo.

But these scattered herds

in places like the Texas canyons and Yellowstone were tiny.

It wouldn't take much

to push the whole species into extinction.

And just as buffalo stood on the brink of oblivion,

William t. Hornaday came to the Smithsonian.

In 1882, he was appointed chief taxidermist

to the u.S. National museum.

He was dismayed by all the killing

happening out there on the plains

and wrote to many people in the west,

desperately trying to work out how many buffalo were left.

He was stunned by what he found.

"I received a severe shock as if by a blow on the head

from a well-directed mallet.

The bison millions were not only going, but gone."

By his reckoning

there were only a few hundred buffalo left.

But then he realized the museum didn't have

any good specimens of this icon of the west.

He was the chief taxidermist--

it was his job to make sure they did.

He hated that there'd been so much killing--

at how much wildlife had been slaughtered

through the 19th century,

but he needed good buffalo specimens for the museum

more than he needed to keep the last ones alive.

He understood people see it as ironic

that someone who is interested in saving wildlife

would go and shoot some of the last members

of a disappearing species.

Their mission was to go out and get specimens to bring back,

so that the public in the cities

could appreciate what was in nature.

The buffalo had become

such a powerful symbol of america

that Hornaday wanted the museum to have the best specimens,

before it vanished forever.

Such a memorial was so important to the American nation,

the secretary of war gave him some help--

the u.S. Army.

After a lot of asking around,

Hornaday heard that there might be a few buffalo remaining

in eastern Montana.

So, on may 9, 1886,

Hornaday found himself in miles city, Montana.

- How are you, sir? - Mr. Hornaday.

He met with a local rancher

who said he'd heard rumors

of a few buffalo on the high divide

between the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers.

This was harsh and difficult backcountry,

but with an army escort from the 5th infantry

from nearby fort keogh, they set off.

They made camp under a sheltering bluff

and rode out to begin the search.

It seemed impossible, to find a few tens of buffalo

in this vast landscape of around 1,000 square miles,

and the signs didn't look good.

Hornaday encountered a grim scene on the prairies,

and he describes it best in his later publications:

"We were seldom out of sight of bleaching skeletons,

and often 40 or 50 were in sight at one time.

This was once a famous buffalo range;

now the bleaching skeletons

lie scattered thickly all along the trail."

But then, Hornaday stumbled across a cowboy camp.

Steady, sirs.

I'm looking for buffalo. Have you seen any?

A good hour's ride up the draw.

They said they'd seen around 30 animals--

somewhere in the nearby canyonlands.

The only thing Hornaday could do

was set off on long scouting trips,

in the hope they'd come across the buffalo.

But all they found was one solitary calf, clearly lost.

So they captured it alive.

They kept searching for another 10 days

and eventually found an adult bull.

But it was shedding its long winter coat

so looked too shabby to represent its species

as part of a mounted display back in Washington.

Hornaday prepared its skeleton instead.

By now he'd realized it was the wrong time of year

to find any beautiful specimens.

He'd have to wait until fall,

when they'd grown their magnificent winter coats.

Hornaday decided to leave and return later in the year--

hoping that some of the buffalo would still be there.

Apart from a couple of skeletons,

all he had was the calf,

that he called Sandy, after its pale coat.

But this little animal would play a big role

in saving its species,

because it inspired Hornaday to change the way he was thinking.

At that time Hornaday had designs on that small calf

becoming the nucleus of a breeding herd of bison.

I think he saw the potential in the calf

as a symbol for the future of the bison.

Hornaday put Sandy on display

on the national mall in Washington, DC,

and attracted huge crowds.

Seeing this perhaps started him thinking more

about a living collection for the museum.

This idea would eventually blossom into the national zoo.

But for the moment, fate put any such plans on hold.

Only a few months later, Sandy died--

though he did become a specimen in the museum.

The loss of the calf

deeply affected William Hornaday.

I think it set him on a trajectory

toward his later work with living animals.

But for now, Hornaday still needed specimens of cows

and hopefully a big mature bull to complete his mission.

So, on September 24, 1886, Hornaday was back in miles city,

planning for a longer buffalo hunt.

Again they established a base camp.

And again, they began to search the high divide--with no luck.

Had the local cowboys

shot the last remaining buffalo for sport?

We've seen buffalo! Buffalo!

The answer didn't come until October 13th,

when the resupply wagon arrived.

All right, you hear that?

The wagon team had spotted seven buffalo

hiding out in a canyon.

Got ourselves a big old herd of buffalo back over there.

Finally, the news they'd been waiting for.

They soon found the buffalo...

But the first shots missed.

For hours, they tracked the buffalo

and eventually caught up with them.

This time the buffalo wouldn't escape.

Several animals fell to their guns.

And back at camp

Hornaday could practice his art as a taxidermist

and prepare the skins.

But, even though he kept searching for two months,

he was still missing his centerpiece.

The expedition was nearly over

before Hornaday finally found a magnificent bull.

He shot...

But he only wounded the animal,

and when it couldn't run anymore,

it turned and just stood, exhausted, in front of him.

Not wasting the opportunity,

Hornaday took out his sketch pad and drew the buffalo,

giving him a reference to use

to get his skin mounts more accurate.

Once he'd finished, he shot the animal dead.

It was the biggest buffalo they'd found,

and it became the focal point of his planned museum display.

This display was groundbreaking for its time--

animals in natural poses and in a natural setting.

It caused a sensation.

When the display went public in march of 1888,

many people turned out to see it on opening day,

there was a great to-do in the newspapers.

The Washington star on march 10, 1888, wrote--

"a bit of the wild west reproduced

at the national museum--

real buffalo grass, real Montana dirt,

and real buffalo.

It's as if they had been struck motionless by some magic spell."

Part of its power

was in capturing a scene from a lost world,

one that might never be seen again.

But these dead specimens were to play a crucial role

in saving the last few living buffalo.

Creating this display was to be the turning point

in Hornaday's life.

The impact of this hunt on Hornaday himself, the man,

was profound.

I think that when he witnessed the scale of the carnage...

He was shocked and dismayed at the waste of the wildlife,

bison carcasses everywhere.

The heads left unskinned with the hair drying down

and the skin drying down on the bone.

He spent the rest of his life, I believe,

trying to atone for what had happened,

what had been allowed to happen to the prairie species.

Seeing such wanton carnage,

Hornaday's career changed direction.

And he was helped in his new goal--

to save the buffalo from extinction--

when his display caught the attention

of a man that would become his staunch ally.

While putting the finishing touches on the display,

Hornaday had a visitor who asked some very shrewd questions.

Hornaday asked him who he was.

He said, "my name is Theodore...Theodore Roosevelt."

And they were friends from that day.

The two worked together

throughout the remainder of Hornaday's career

and did go on to do great things together.

People like Hornaday and Roosevelt

began to change the way we saw nature.

By the end of the 19th century,

america's plains and forests were nearly empty of wildlife,

but out of that carnage, Hornaday, Roosevelt and others

began to forge a philosophy

that became the roots of modern conservation.

The destruction was so shocking

that many people were receptive to these new ideas,

even some very unlikely ones.

In 1882, general Sheridan led an expedition

that blazed the trail from Jackson hole to Yellowstone.

But when he got there,

to the only place where buffalo were meant to be protected,

he found that poachers were still slaughtering

the last remnants of america's big game--

buffalo and elk.

Like buffalo, elk had been reduced

to a fraction of their former numbers.

Towards the end of the 19th century,

this was one of the few places

which still echoed to the bugling of rutting elk...

As bulls defended their herds of cows...

And thrashed the vegetation, showing off their virility.

But for how much longer?

Sheridan's enemy had been the Indians, not the buffalo.

He was now disgusted by the slaughter

of these great symbols of American wilderness.

So in 1886 Sheridan sent the army into Yellowstone--

this time on the side of the buffalo!

The man who had helped push the buffalo close to extinction

was now fighting to protect it.

Yet even protected by the army,

there were only 23 animals left in Yellowstone.

They were right on the brink.

One bad winter could wipe them out.

And these were the last of the truly wild buffalo.

The future of the species might depend on a few animals

that had survived elsewhere

in very different circumstances.

The vastness of palo duro canyon in Texas

had protected a few buffalo

through the worst of the great slaughter.

But even here they were now threatened

by ranchers and hunters.

Yet it wouldn't be the army that saved these buffalo,

but one woman.

These buffalo lived on the ranch of Charles goodnight,

which sprawled over the Texas canyonlands.

Charles' wife, Molly goodnight,

rescued some of the calves and hand-reared them.

Charles goodnight realized that buffalo adapted well

to this new semi-domesticated life,

and before long the goodnights had a captive buffalo herd.

Across the country, a few other ranchers did the same.

But in the late 19th century,

goodnight's herd was one of only five captive herds of buffalo,

along with the last wild animals in Yellowstone.

The experience of ranchers like Charles goodnight

showed Hornaday that buffalo were easy to breed in captivity.

He decided to set up his own captive breeding herd

so he could begin to restock the great plains.

And that's how a few buffalo ended up living

at the very heart of the nation's capital.

His first animals were penned in on the national mall,

just outside the Smithsonian castle,

in what Hornaday called

the department of living animals.

Just as Sandy the calf had drawn crowds,

so these animals also caused quite a sensation,

and the public flocked to see them.

It showed how popular these displays could be,

and Hornaday's department of living animals

soon became the national zoo,

with Hornaday as its first director.

The idea that began with Sandy the buffalo calf

had finally been realized.

The buffalo were moved from the mall to their new home,

and the zoo quickly acquired other animals.

Today the national zoo is home to over 400 species

and is a center for global conservation.

But since it began with a small group of buffalo,

to Mark its 125th anniversary in 2014,

the zoo built a new buffalo enclosure.

The first buffalo attracted huge crowds,

and now this new buffalo exhibit does the same.

This symbol of the west is as powerful today

as it was a hundred years ago.

But Hornaday's plans for a breeding herd

didn't get very far.

The strong, determined personality

that had got him to this point finally tripped him up.

He was an extremely ambitious man,

a man of high energy, of great determination,

of wonderful skills,

but what Hornaday gained in personality

he lacked in tact.

He was known as a rough, abrasive man,

and when he had an objective, he went straight for it,

and if someone got in his way,

he went right through them or over them.

But when that someone was Samuel pierpont Langley,

secretary of the Smithsonian institution,

Hornaday found himself leaving the Smithsonian

in anger and frustration.

Later, Hornaday described this

as the best thing that could have happened.

It marked the end of his career as a taxidermist

and the beginning, as he put it, of his "real life work"--

William t. Hornaday, one of the first conservationists.

But that "real life work" didn't start until a few years later.

His pioneering conservation work had to wait until 1896,

when he was offered the post of director

of the Bronx zoo in New York.

Here, the campaign to restock the west with buffalo

really got under way.

In 1905 he and Roosevelt, who was now president,

established the American bison society

to promote the return of the buffalo.

And in 1907, 15 animals from the breeding project

were returned to the southern plains--

to the Wichita mountains wildlife preserve in Oklahoma.

This is now the Wichita mountains wildlife refuge,

where stony mountains rise out of forests and grassy plains.

These were the first buffalo to graze these grasslands

for over 30 years.

Those original 15 animals bred,

and today the herd is 650 strong.

After success in the Wichita mountains,

buffalo were transported across the nation,

starting new herds across their original range.

Now there are perhaps half a million

roaming the plains.

But this isn't enough.

We've yet to restore the buffalo

to its true place on the prairie.

These herds are all tiny

compared to the numbers recorded in Hornaday's book.

The biggest problem facing buffalo today is space.

Even Yellowstone is too small

for really large herds of buffalo.

In the past, buffalo survived

by migrating huge distances to find grazing--

much as the famous herds of the serengeti still do today.

Now, only tiny fragments of the prairies exist.

Where the buffalo's world once knew no boundaries,

today it's bounded on all sides by agriculture.

Their refuges might seem large to US, but not to buffalo.

Custer state park in the black hills of south Dakota

covers 71,000 acres.

It supports one of the largest public herds in the country,

around 1,500 animals.

But this is all it can support.

Which means that each year some animals must be removed

and sent to new herds elsewhere.

The only way to do that

is to round up the whole herd into corrals,

in what has become a spectacular public event.

Even before dawn, south Dakota's roads, normally empty,

are already choked with traffic.

Just as thousands once visited

Hornaday's display of mounted buffalo,

today thousands turn up for this roundup.

The buffalo is still an American icon.

This is a glimpse of the past as the herd thunders

over the rolling hills at full gallop--

"prairie thunder,"

as the pounding hooves shake the earth itself.

But this is only 1,500 animals.

What must it have felt like

to see a hundred thousand or more...

Or watch a herd that stretched to the far horizon.

Even so, to see this spectacle today,

you might think that Hornaday had achieved his aim

to save the buffalo.

I believe that Hornaday in his own day

felt that he had achieved the salvation of the bison.

But we're still asking the question today

about the future of the American bison.

Certainly they have increased numerically,

but only about 4 or 5% of that number exists

in anything that approximates a wild condition.

The only way to ensure the long-term survival

of that important grazing species

is by recovery of wild herds of bison on a large scale.

But if even places like Yellowstone

aren't big enough for wild buffalo,

what can we do?

There is a solution--

reunite buffalo with the people

that shared their grassland home for thousands of years.

Fort belknap Indian reservation, in Northern Montana,

is home to the assiniboine and gros ventre tribes,

one of many reservations

across the plains states

with vast expanses of grassland.

As part of the inter tribal bison cooperative,

Mark azure has been working to bring buffalo back

to these northern plains.

These particular animals here came out of Yellowstone,

and then in August of 2013

they were brought back here to fort belknap,

and the significance of bringing them back to fort belknap

is up here in the northern plains of the United States

was the last location of the free-roaming herds.

So they've come full circle, and now they're home again.

It's a first step

in bringing back truly wild buffalo.

What we'd like to see

is this thing spread all across Indian country

and every tribe

that had a history and a culture with the buffalo,

to have it back.

If enough Indian nations

bring buffalo back to their lands,

and grassland corridors can be opened up

to connect them with each other,

buffalo can once again roam freely over the prairie.

But this is much more than a conservation project.

It's also re-forging an ancient and deep spiritual connection

between Indians and buffalo.

It does bring that sense of pride

and that sense of healing of a people

and who we were, who we are today,

and it feels good to see it

back out here on the prairie again.

Hornaday never understood that deep connection

between the plains Indians and the buffalo.

Yet his groundbreaking display

captures something of that spirit,

of the deep interconnections of life on the prairie.

And this group standing on its naturalistic pedestal

represents the prairie itself.

And Hornaday's buffalo group still exists.

It was dismantled in 1957 and the specimens scattered,

until Doug coffman helped to reunite them

at fort Benton, Montana,

in the museum of the northern great plains.

And like the fort belknap buffalo,

they, too, have come home.

They were collected about 120 miles from here,

so I can't think of a more fitting place.

These animals were some

of the last few buffalo alive at the end of the 19th century,

yet putting together this display inspired Hornaday

to devote his life to saving the species.

And his display should still inspire conservationists today.

These specimens were the last of the truly wild buffalo,

roaming the boundless prairie.

The future for the buffalo as a wild creature

is still very uncertain.

The bison need the prairie

to continue to be bison,

otherwise they become something else,

and without the bison,

the prairie cannot truly be the prairie.

Let's let them be who they are--they're buffalo.

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