Ken Burns, America’s chronicler extraordinaire who has made nonfiction television epics about the Civil War, Benjamin Franklin, jazz, Muhammad Ali, World War II, Mark Twain, the Vietnam War, and much more, has returned with a new two-episode, four-hour film. The American Buffalo documents the huge, hairy, surprisingly swift creatures that roamed the continent for centuries, and the Native nations whose existence was inexorably linked to these beasts. Burns’ documentary also details the mass carnage wantonly inflicted upon bison, the view of Indigenous people as a vanishing race, and their joint struggle to survive and thrive.
The American Buffalo is poetically and vividly told with vintage photos, artwork, and archival footage. Hollywood actors give voice offscreen to texts by various historical figures, including two-time Emmy Award-winners Jeff Daniels and Derek Jacobi, Hope Davis, and Emmy-winner Paul Giamatti voicing Teddy Roosevelt. As Burns explains, “We want the past to come alive. We don’t want it to just be a simple third-party narration, interrupted by talking heads.”
The documentary’s insightful commentators include the Kiowa Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday, as well as author Dayton Duncan, who also wrote the series. Burns’ oft-used narrator, Peter Coyote, is back in the saddle.
The following is an edited version of The Progressive’s telephone interview with Burns.
The Progressive began by asking Burns about a recently surfaced photograph in which he appears with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the late billionaire Republican donor David Koch at Bohemian Grove, a private campground in Monte Rio, California, often frequented by wealthy conservatives.
Q: What were you doing at Bohemian Grove?
Ken Burns: That was more than ten years ago. I was invited to hear a talk on history. There were lots of artists, thinkers, philosophers, and historians there. I went and David Koch, who had helped us with the final funding for a film way back in the nineties, had not yet agreed to help fund the Vietnam film. He said, “Hey, I want to introduce you to Clarence Thomas.” I had no idea the photograph would be out—I’m not going to refuse meeting a Supreme Court justice, or anybody.
I knew how contentious the Vietnam War was so I wanted to balance out several liberal donors with him [Koch]. Because it’s PBS, there’s no influence. It was very important to me that we signal to our audience that everybody across political differences had contributed.
Q: Describe the numbers of buffaloes prior to the arrival of Westerners?
Burns: We’re not exactly sure. Some pre-Columbian estimates are sixty, seventy million. Thirty to thirty-five million survived when Lewis and Clark began exploring the region of the Louisiana Purchase [between 1804 and 1806]. Lewis and Clark talked about throwing rocks and waving sticks to get buffaloes to move out of the way.
The American Buffalo documents the huge, hairy, surprisingly swift creatures that roamed the continent for centuries, and the Native nations whose existence was inexorably linked to these beasts.
Q: What was buffaloes’ importance to Indigenous people?
Burns: It’s very different for every tribe. There were 300 different nations in [what is now] the continental United States. In the Great Plains, they were dependent—the buffalo was their entire material subsistence. They used every part of the animal, from the tail to the snout. It also was an important part of their lifeways, folkways, and religious spiritual practices. The buffalo is at the center of the Kiowas’ creation story; their Sun Dance involves the buffalo. It’s just a very painful, traumatic cultural separation from animals they had an intimate relationship with for ten to twelve thousand years. [This connection was] severed in the nineteenth century.
Q: What were buffaloes’ impact on the environment?
Burns: They were an incredibly important part of a very large ecosystem in the Great Plains. It was a huge profusion of flora and fauna. Buffalo were the largest land mammals. Because of its habit of rubbing in the dirt it created “buffalo wallows” that allowed rainwater to collect. [They were places] that invited lots of plants to thrive. Elk and grizzly bears, which we now think are just mountain animals, were driven there by what turned out to be the greatest slaughter of wildlife in the history of the world. It took place on our watch.
Q: Can you describe the increasing elimination of buffaloes?
Burns: We think by the time the Civil War was over, there were twelve to fifteen million. In the middle of the 1880s, no one could find any. In fact, there were fewer than 1,000 bison in existence, most in zoos and private collections, and in Yellowstone, subject to poachers.
Certainly, there were early pressures for tongues and coats of buffalo. It wasn’t until after the Civil War, when the great industrial demand for leather to run the belts of the machinery of the Industrial Revolution, that slaughter took on an industrial scale . . . . Eighty-five years [after Lewis and Clark], an expedition coming out to find buffalo for an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Natural History couldn’t find any. The buffalo were gone. It’s just a startling decline.
"Eighty-five years [after Lewis and Clark], an expedition coming out to find buffalo for an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Natural History couldn’t find any. The buffalo were gone."
Q: How did this decline impact the tribes?
Burns: The absence of the buffalo is the absence of their subsistence. Many of them starved. It forced many Native people onto reservations. While it wasn’t the official policy of the U.S. government to understand that the slaughter of the buffalo would contain the Indians, it was articulated by everyone, no less than by Teddy Roosevelt, before he was president. He laments that the buffalo was going to go extinct, and that’s a sad thing—except it will go a long way to solving our Indian problem, and white advancement, as he puts it. Everybody saw it as a way to tame Native Americans, in addition to satisfying the market pressure.
Q: Was the mass slaughter of buffaloes deliberately done to undermine and devastate Indigenous people as white invaders continued to steal their land?
Burns: I wouldn’t go that far. Remember, it’s the market pressure, the demand is for the hides to run the belts. As one of our commentators says: “It was a twofer. You got the market satisfied but you also controlled the Indian.”
Q: As this sorrowful saga unfolded, who emerged to try to save the buffalo?
Burns: Quanah Parker was a leader of the Kwahadi band of Comanches. They attacked white settlements because of the decimation of buffaloes and fought back against it. He led his people voluntarily into the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma and helped them make the transition. He was an effective, articulate spokesman for the preservation of the buffalo and Teddy Roosevelt spent a night on his porch and let Quanah know he was authorizing the first wildlife refuge in the Wichita Mountains. Roosevelt became a great conservationist president.
Buffalo Bill Cody slaughtered buffaloes to feed the rail crews, then made lots more money staging his Wild West extravaganzas in the United States and Europe, and he needed buffaloes. So, he realized the buffaloes can’t go extinct, he’s got to preserve them.
William T. Hornaday was the chief taxidermist for the Smithsonian. He went out and had difficulty finding buffalo for an exhibit. He suddenly realized anytime an animal is commodified and subjected to market pressure, that animal is going to go. He started the National Zoo and is first director of the Bronx Zoo, and he argued for some restraints on hunting and some of the early conservation measures. He and Roosevelt co-founded the American Bison Society.
Hornaday’s also doing this in the name of white supremacy and believes in the horrible eugenics movement. I have to say that I didn’t think after directing The U.S. and the Holocaust that I’d be coming back to eugenics anytime soon, but there it is, rearing its ugly head.
From an original Illustration by John Pepion
George Bird Grinnell was a wonderful person, the Yale-educated son of a banker raised in New York. He made trips out, lived with Native Americans, listened to their stories, learned their languages. He took over Field & Stream magazine and became a leading proponent of conservation. He and Theodore Roosevelt formed the Boone and Crockett Club. A good deal of the conservation movement was born with hunters, people who wished to kill certain animals that were prey to wanton slaughter. The market slaughter of them would make it impossible to [hunt].
Q: Is there anything you’d like to add?
There’s a moment when the buffalo get dwindled down, and just like the landscape itself, Americans have an identity crisis about who they are. They begin to save land for national parks, to set aside things for national monuments and create wildlife refuges. They also begin to romanticize and fetishize the very entities they spent the last century destroying. In 1913, we came out with an Indian head nickel and on the back is a buffalo. The sculptor [James Earle] Fraser said he wanted to create a coin that couldn’t be mistaken for any other country—the symbols that meant we were us.
Maybe it was a pang, a prick of conscience. But as the Aaniiih member George Horse Capture, Jr. says in the film: “I just have to ask a question: Do you always have to destroy what you love?”
The good news is this story is also a parable of de-extinction, and the buffalo are saved and protected.
The American Buffalo premieres on October 16 and 17 at 8:00 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App. For more info click here.