"I sometimes imagine that we saved the buffalo from the brink of extinction for the simple reason that the animal provided a handy mirror in which we could see our innermost desires and failures, and our most confounding contradictions. Our efforts to use the buffalo as a looking glass have rendered the animal almost inscrutable. At once it is a symbol of Native American culture; it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America ; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation. Perhaps the buffalo's enduring strength and legacy come from this chameleonic wizardy, this ability to provide whatever we need at the given moment."
- Steven Rinella, American Buffalo
In 2005, Steven Rinella was one of 24 random winners of a bison permit from the Copper River herd in the foothills of Alaska 's Wrangell Mountains.
Despite the odds--there's only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful--Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia.
Steven Rinella's fascination with buffalo began in the late 1990s when he unearthed a buffalo skull while hiking in the Madison Range in southwest Montana. A Michigan native who grew up hunting deer and honed his skills in the Upper Peninsula, he is a serious hunter and fisherman.
In his previous book “The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine," the author re-created recipes from Escoffier's 1903 classic "Le Guide Culinaire". All meals were prepared using original ingredients, all involving wild game.
One could establish a trivia contest using using Rinella’s research:
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Number of buffalo living in North America today?
Half a million.
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Number of those buffalo in private hands? 96 percent.
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Cost of a "canned-buffalo hunt" on private lands? $4,000.
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Dominant Great Plains buffalo hunting tribes? The Crow, Blackfoot, Sioux, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche.
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Top speed for a running buffalo? Forty miles per hour.
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Number of bulls each year who die from horn goring while competing with other males during mating season? 5 to 6 percent
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Number of visitors to Yellowstone National Park injured by buffalo from 1980 to 1999? Twice as many as mauled by bears.
American Buffalo is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity.
Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion Mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.
Rinella's gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world.
Steven Rinella is the author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine and a correspondent for Outside magazine. His writing has also appeared in TheNew Yorker, American Heritage, The New York Times, Field and Stream, Men's Journal, and Salon.com. He grew up in Twin Lake, Michigan, and now splits his time between Anchorage, Alaska, and New York City.
Steven Rinella will read and discuss American Buffalo Tuesday, January 13th at 7:00 pm at Fact & Fiction, 220 N Higgins, Missoula, Mont.
Barbara Theroux is the manager of Fact & Fiction, now part of the Bookstore at the University of Montana.
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