Customer Reviews

Buffalo Book: The Full Saga Of The American Animal

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See a camel, think of the Sahara; see a kangaroo and think of Australia; see a buffalo and your mind will wander to the American West. No other animal is as emblematic of the region -- and (to the best of my experience) no other book offers as thorough an exploration of this animal as does The Buffalo Book. This is excellent reading in several fields: zoology, wildlife conservation, history, Native American culture, and -- by no means least -- plain old entertainment. If your literary tastes lean towards any or all of the above topics, don't miss The Buffalo Book!

This is one of the better and more complete books about the American Bison, aka buffalo. The author starts with the forerunners of the modern day buffalo, about 10,000 years ago, and works his way up to the present. Along the way he has chapters about the Indians and their use of the buffalo, the slaughter of the buffalo for its hides in the 1870s, and the rescue of the buffalo from extinction. He draws his material from an enormous number of sources, interspersing eye-witness acounts of the buffalo with scholarly observations. Several dozen photos, some of them historical, enhance the narrative.

The most interesting material in the book is the story of the buffalo's salvation from extinction. One authority estimated that 75 million buffalo lived in North America before the white man arrived, but only 800 buffalo survived in 1895. That small group has grown to a present population of about 100,000. The story of saving the buffalo tells of Eastern idealists and Western ranchers with characters like "Prairie Dog" Morrow, Charles Goodnight, and "Buffalo" Jones playing important roles.

This is a fine book of Western Americana and natural history which even includes a mini-cookbook for buffalo meat in an appendix.

Smallchief

David Dary's book is unique among wildlife history sagas in that it provides exactly what the title suggests- " the full saga of the animal" We are treated to a natural history of the American Buffalo from its ancient ancestors up until the animal's current resurgence as a popular food source. In between, the reader is treated to well-composed and down right interesting images of the great bison herds of the midwest- (numbering in some 75 million), and mounds of bones and skulls left over from the great slaughter at the end of the nineteent century. We learn of the Native American reliance upon the great bison...and that without the use of bison as a food resource, the West might never had been won. Dary's book is a must for History buffs and general readers who want a well-written and competantly documented saga...of the animal that really should be the actual symbol of America.