Return of the Bison

July 3, 2023
In this informative history, nature journalist Di Silvestro (Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands) chronicles efforts to protect bison in the American West from the 1880s to the present. The author begins with an account of how naturalist George Bird Grinnell befriended Theodore Roosevelt, who had recently published his first book about hunting big game on the American prairie, and persuaded him to take up the cause of conservation, leading the two to form the Boone and Crockett Club. The group notched such victories as the National Park Protective Act of 1894, which implemented steep penalties for hunting bison—which numbered fewer than 1,000 in the U.S.—in Yellowstone National Park. The federal government became more involved in the ensuing decades, creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and enlisting biologists to study what the bison’s habitat had been like before European colonization so that the parks might be managed to more closely resemble their pre-Columbian days. Private entities played a major role in the second half of the 20th century, according to Di Silvestro, who notes that CNN founder Ted Turner keeps 45,000 bison on his 14 private ranches, though only some are set aside for conservation—the rest are sold for meat. The overview of bison conservation is competent, but the matter-of-fact style can feel a bit dry. The result is a serviceable history of how bison bounced back from the brink of extinction.