Re-Bisoning the West: Restoring an American Icon to the Landscape

On November 1, 2015, the first day of Native American Heritage Month as well as National Bison Day, 10 American bison (Bison bison) were released into a 1000-acre enclosure at Soapstone Prairie. Soapstone is a 22,000-acre shortgrass prairie natural area in north-central Colorado abutting the Wyoming state line owned and managed by the city of Fort Collins, Colorado. This release had a significance far exceeding the modest number of animals involved. The Soapstone animals are genetically pure bison; their genome is completely free of cattle genes. The bison are offspring of the herd inhabiting Yellowstone National Park, which is among the few herds with pure genes that survived the great slaughter of the 19th century. Perhaps most importantly, though, the Soapstone animals are free of brucellosis, a disease of cattle, bison, and elk that leads to spontaneous abortions during first and sometimes second pregnancies. The Soapstone bison are descendants of bison that were quarantined for 10 y in Yellowstone to ensure that they were disease-free. The animals were subsequently moved to a breeding facility at Colorado State University. There, the bison cows were either artificially inseminated with sperm that had been treated to kill any brucellosis bacteria, or they were produced by in vitro fertilization using cleansed eggs and sperm; the embryos were implanted in disease-free surrogate bison cows. The original herd at Soapstone has grown during the years since reintroduction. Bison now wander 2600 acres at Soapstone and the adjacent Red Mountain Open Space. Since 2020, Soapstone bison offspring have been transferred to tribal nations, national wildlife refuges, and private preserves in Colorado and Montana. The Soapstone story exemplifies all the issues involving bison reintroduction, and author Kurt Repanshek explores each facet thoroughly in Re-Bisoning the West. The book gets off to a slow and uneven start. A rambling prologue introduces the status of American bison, recent paleontological evidence of the species’ ancestry in North America, and bison’s importance to Native Americans. The prologue is followed by a description of the Great Plains landscape that formed the critical core habitat for the largest herds (though the species ranged from Florida to Alaska). Then, Repanshek pivots to examine the difficulties associated with reintroducing bison to tribal nations, especially those in Montana. Montana state officials staunchly defend the rights of cattle producers and are reluctant to allow the introduction of bison for fear of spreading brucellosis even though elk, an extremely important and lucrative game species, are far more likely to spread the disease than are bison. A thorough examination of the brucellosis issue would have been appropriate here, but Repanshek postpones such a discussion for several chapters. Repanshek finally finds his footing in the third chapter entitled ‘‘The Great Slaughter’’ and carries the momentum and focus forward from this point onward. Of the estimated 10–60 million bison that roamed the plains prior to 1830, the species was reduced to about 500 individuals living in six tiny, isolated herds by the end of the killing spree in the 1880s. To his credit, Repanshek presents a balanced perspective on European as well as Native American complicity in the species’ near-demise.