Dan Brister has been working with the Buffalo Field Campaign since December of 1997. He alternates winters on the Yellowstone boundary with falls in Missoula, Mont., where he is earning an MS in environmental studies. Dan can be contacted at dan@wildrockies.org.
Monday, 13 Mar 2000
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont.
Our patrols are on their way into the field along the western boundary of Yellowstone National Park. We wake each morning at 4:30 and ski into position before sunrise.
Today I’m in the office helping with communications between our patrols, monitoring law enforcement bands on the police scanner, and writing on the computer. If Montana Department of Livestock (DOL) agents come out to kill, capture, or haze buffalo, it will be my job to ensure smooth communication between patrols, alert people in the main cabin of the need for backup shifts, and make calls to the press. I am also responsible for writing the press releases which let the world know of every action taken against the buffalo. This is my third consecutive winter with the Buffalo Field Campaign, the only group working in the field, everyday, to stop the slaughter of Yellowstone’s wild buffalo. More than 300 volunteers from around the world have come to defend America’s last wild buffalo. We are currently more than 40 volunteers strong, and expect 20 new arrivals by the end of the week.
Montana ain’t land of the free for buffalo.
Photo © Buffalo Field Campaign.
We are all very thankful for the mild weather which has kept most of the buffalo safe inside the park. In the past two winters, I have watched the DOL kill 120 buffalo. The year before that, during the wicked winter of ’96-97, they killed 1,083. My sleep is still haunted with memories of buffalo being forced through narrow chutes inside the Duck Creek trap, men posed above them shouting “yee-haw!” as they whacked the buffalo, over and over, with shovels swung like golf clubs.
The Yellowstone herd is the only herd descended from continuously wild buffalo in this country. They are the direct descendants of just 23 wild bison that escaped the 19th century slaughter by finding refuge in Yellowstone’s remote Pelican Valley. Today they are at the center of a complicated management controversy. Treated as wildlife and allowed to roam free under the park’s natural regulation policy, they become “livestock” when they cross the arbitrary border into Montana and are chased through deep snow, baited with hay into traps, and corralled like cattle — or simply shot dead in the field for following their instincts.
The buffalo appear every fall, trickling from the park at Duck Creek, Cougar Creek, and the Madison River. When winter turns fierce and snow obscures the grass their bodies are built from, the buffalo pour out, migrating along the watercourses down to lower elevations outside the park. Unfortunately, this is usually a one-way migration, as most of the buffalo meet their death in Montana and never make it back to the park.
This bull is no sitting duck.
Photo © Tiffany Brown 2000, BFC.
Because of the mild winter this year, there is currently just one buffalo — a huge bull — outside the park. He’s been grazing in a meadow along the Madison River on the Gallatin National Forest since mid-January. The DOL has harassed him on five separate occasions, firing cracker barrel rounds from shotguns while chasing him with snowmobiles. Whether they intended to haze him back to the park or to their buffalo trap at Duck Creek, we don’t know. The bull has outsmarted them every time, taking refuge in trees too thick for the DOL snowmobiles to penetrate and causing them to get stuck in the deep snow, or swimming across the Madison, forcing them to drive two and a half miles back out to highway 191, over the bridge, and back in along the river’s opposite bank.
Buffalo once ranged from the eastern seaboard to California; from Great Slave Lake in northern Alberta to northern Mexico. Although no one will ever know exactly how many bison once inhabited North America, estimates range from 25 million to 70 million. William Hornaday, a naturalist who spent considerable time in the West, both before and during the most severe years of the slaughter, commented on the seemingly infinite bison population and the impossibility of estimating their quantity:
It would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes living at any given time during the history of the species previous to 1870.
Cattle were in a large part responsible for the 19th Century buffalo slaughter, and they are behind today’s slaughter as well. In 1876, while the buffalo were being killed by the millions, General Nelson Miles predicted: “When we get rid of the Indians and buffalo, the cattle will fill this country.” He helped make his own prophesy come true.
The livestock industry is directly responsible for today’s slaughter of the Yellowstone buffalo. Lee Alley is chairman of the U.S. Animal Health Association, a government agency with close ties to the livestock industry, an agency whose actions have helped spur the Yellowstone slaughter. In 1998, he said that if it were up to him, “the herd would be depopulated, the animals destroyed, all of them.” In the past decade alone, more than 2,000 buffalo have been “destroyed,” all in the name of protecting cattle.
The radios have been quiet all morning. Our volunteers were blessed with another tranquil sunrise on the Madison River. The bull grazes — undisturbed for another day — on the meadow where he’s spent the past two months. Though I know it’s unlikely, I can’t help but hope that the remainder of the winter will continue to be this calm.
Tuesday, 14 Mar 2000
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont.
It has been snowing for the past few days. I wonder where the herd is. We did a flyover of the park a few weeks ago and found more than 50 buffalo within several miles of the boundary. Will this snow trigger a mass exodus? Wishing for buffalo to stay where they are seems inherently strange and counter to the rest of my beliefs. I want them to be free to go where they want, like deer and elk, yet I find myself wishing, for now, that they’d stay where they are. I don’t want to see bloody buffalo this spring. I don’t want to spend days on end awake, like last winter, when the Montana Department of Livestock (DOL) seemed to be slaughtering buffalo every other day, and we were out on skis around the clock at Duck Creek, trying to deter 80 hungry buffalo from the hay-baited trap.
These buffalo (at Duck Creek in Yellowstone) could soon be up a creek.
Photo © Dan Brister, BFC.
Just one bull outside the Yellowstone boundaries, and I am tired. Free of the mayhem and despair of the kill, we’ve been shifting our focus, working to strengthen our community support, building alliances with other groups, writing editorials and letters, making press contacts, preparing ourselves, as much as we can, for what may lie ahead. We are stronger now than we’ve ever been, with more than 50 voluntee
rs on hand, many willing to sacrifice their freedom and go to jail for the buffalo, because they know the killing is unjustified.
The state of Montana justifies the slaughter on the unfounded grounds that the buffalo pose an unacceptable risk of transmitting the disease brucellosis to cattle. Brucellosis is a bacteria that can cause domestic cows to abort their first calf. The disease, which originated in European cattle, is fairly common in many wildlife species such as elk, deer, moose, coyotes, and bison, though it doesn’t affect them.
Livestock producers in states recognized as “brucellosis-free” by the federal government are allowed to export their cattle without having them tested for the disease. According to federal regulations, a state cannot have its brucellosis-free status revoked merely on the presence of the disease in wildlife. There must be an outbreak among cattle.
Loading a bison carcass, shot dead before it was tested for brucellosis.
Photo © Brian O. Daly 1997, CMCR.
There has never been a documented case of brucellosis transmission from wild bison to cattle. In Grand Teton National Park, where bison and livestock have co-mingled for decades, cattle have never contracted brucellosis. During the winter of 1989, more than 900 Yellowstone bison left the park and grazed with livestock just to the north. The state tested 20 cattle herds and found no trace of the disease. According to John Mack, a National Park Service wildlife biologist, “There is no evidence of wild, free-roaming bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle. The state is saying this is a grave threat, and here you had all these bison mingle with livestock and nothing happened.” Dr. Paul Nicolletti, a leading expert on brucellosis, concurs: “The threat doesn’t seem to be there.”
Control of disease transmission is not Montana’s true motivation for killing buffalo. If it were, the state would address the presence of the disease in elk and other wildlife, which it currently ignores. Though there are more than 10 times as many elk as bison in the park, and elk are known brucellosis carriers, they are not targeted by the DOL.
Because the only possible avenue for brucellosis transmission between bison and livestock is through the ingestion of afterbirth or aborted fetal material, bull bison, non-pregnant females, and calves — which do not produce fetal material — pose no risk of passing the bacteria. Even the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the federal agency responsible for downgrading a state’s brucellosis-free status, has said it will tolerate the presence of infected bulls and other “low risk” bison, such as non-pregnant cows and calves. Yet the state doesn’t discriminate in its policy of killing bison wandering into Montana. All bison, regardless of the level of risk, find themselves within the crosshairs of the state’s rifles. Montana has killed more than 500 bulls in the past three years.
West of the park, where all the killing has taken place in the past two winters, bison and cattle do not intermingle. Because of the severity of the winters, cattle are only present from June to September, when the buffalo occupy their summer range inside the park. The brucellosis bacteria, which dies after just four hours of exposure to sunlight, provides the livestock industry with a convenient but unconvincing excuse to kill bison, which threaten ranching’s subsidized monopoly of public lands.
Wednesday, 15 Mar 2000
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont.
Today I drive to Missoula — my other world. I’m going to show Buffalo Bull, our documentary on the bison slaughter, at the University of Montana. After yesterday’s brucellosis discussion, I feel the need to write more freely, to open up a bit and share what it is like to live and work here with the buffalo and alongside the people who have answered the call and come to help.
Volunteers perched in the blue sky last winter to stop the slaughter.
Photo © Matt McGovern-Rowen 1999, BFC.
We have 45 volunteers here now. Fifteen more, a college group on spring break, will arrive on Sunday. Most sleep in the main cabin — really a large log house — which sits on a hill overlooking Hebgen Lake. We also have a 21-foot campaign tipi at Horse Butte, the buffalo’s favorite winter range. Six of us, who will be here all winter, live in smaller tipis set up on the 20 acres we rent. Across the frozen lake, the Madison Range reaches for the sky, which this morning is that perfect blue I have only seen in the northern Rockies. As I emerged into the morning through the door to my lodge, I felt as if I could reach over and touch the snow-laden peaks, the day is so clear.
The moon illuminated my tipi through the canvas last night. The woodstove kept the circle warm. Before January, I had never slept in a tipi. Now I can’t imagine sleeping anywhere else. I love living in the round, surrounded by canvas walls, horizons of my own little sanctuary.
Last year on this day, the Montana Department of Livestock shipped two buffalo to slaughter. I scratched the following words in my journal on March 13, 1999, the day they were captured:
Watched again today as DOL tested buffalo — three calves, a bull, and a cow — running them through chutes, poking with cattle prods, and hazing with a bobcat tractor. The bull, confined to an impossibly small space, moved the only way he could, up. Banging its head hard, over and over, on the metal rack of the trap. Each clash of horn and steel, each crash, sent a cold bolt down my spine. From high in a tree in the park, I shot video, witness to the horrific scene. Two state cops strolled over to our side of the trap, smiling. A DOL agent asked them, “Did you see the hippie up there?” One of the cops answered, “No, but I sure smell him.”
This, under the circumstances, infuriated me and I shouted, “Why are you helping them kill?” The police, our public servants, hollered back, “Shut up, tree hugger!” I lost my composure and yelled something back, then fell quiet, sad and surprised at myself for losing control of my tongue. Except for the five days this winter when the DOL came out to haze the Madison bull, our patrols have been quiet. Once in a while I’ll hear a new volunteer complain of the winter’s lack of action, and I feel bound to remind them how lucky we are to be blessed with peaceful days and still nights, how good it is to have made it to mid-March without a single buffalo killed.
DOL, hazing bison on horseback.
Photo © Buffalo Field Campaign 1998.
We have a group meeting every night before dinner. Assembled in the cabin’s living room, we share reports from the day’s shifts, decide strategy, and sign up for the following day’s patrols. This is also our time to iron out problems and discuss issues related to community living. Decisions are reached through consensus.
Donations sent by people from around the world who hold the buffalo close to their hearts provide the food, clothing, and supplies required to keep us healthy and strong on our daily patrols. These people, who number in the thousands, are as important to what we do as the volunteers who have come in person to help us bring this slaughter to the attention of the world.
This is my third straight winter with the Buffalo Field Campaign. Because we are all working together under similar values, believing that the slaughter is inherently wrong and must be stopped, we are a family like n
one I’ve ever known. People come from all over the country and the world. Right now, there are people here from places as far-flung as Ireland and South Africa.
Time to close the journal and drive to Missoula. I hope tonight’s showing is well attended. The more people that know about this slaughter, the sooner it will stop.
Thursday, 16 Mar 2000
MISSOULA, Mont.
Last night, we showed our video, Buffalo Bull, to students at the University of Montana. I spent the night at the headquarters of one of the groups that sponsored the showing, Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers (CMCR). Without CMCR, there would be no Buffalo Field Campaign.
Carnage from the winter of ’96-97.
Photo © Richie Doyle 1997, CMCR.
CMCR has produced dozens of video documentaries on a wide array of environmental issues. The group’s videographers have been documenting the slaughter of Yellowstone’s buffalo since 1990. Mike Mease, one of BFC’s co-founders, was working with CMCR during the winter of 1996-97, when 1,083 bison were slaughtered, the bloodiest year for the buffalo since the 19th century.
Mease sent footage of the carnage to members of the Lakota tribe in South Dakota. Rosalie Little Thunder, a traditional Lakota elder, was outraged at the images of the Montana Department of Livestock’s disrespectful treatment of the sacred buffalo. Little Thunder and other tribal members organized a Day of Prayer for the Buffalo, which was held in March of 1997.
The sanctity of the ceremony, attended by spiritual leaders from various tribes, was shattered by the violence of rifle fire, as the DOL gunned down 14 buffalo just a few miles away.
Little Thunder left the ceremony to investigate the shots, and found DOL agents standing over the slain bison. Wishing to pay the animals respect and send them into the next world properly, she approached the carcasses and began to pray. Rosalie was arrested for criminal trespass.
To Little Thunder and other tribal members present, the fact that the DOL chose to shoot during the prayer ceremony was no coincidence. “They shot the buffalo because we were at that place on that day at that time,” she said.
Roam on, little buffalo.
Photo © Buffalo Field Campaign 1998.
After her release, Little Thunder and Mease decided to form a group that would maintain constant vigilance on the frontlines, performing nonviolent direct action and documenting every move made against the buffalo. The Buffalo Field Campaign has grown out of this vision. Little Thunder has since left the organization to focus on tribal organizing around the buffalo, demanding that Native Americans be given a voice in management decisions affecting the herd. The BFC remains committed to helping ensure the Native perspective is honored.
The following story was told to me by Scott Frazier, a Santee/Crow who advises us on spiritual matters concerning the buffalo and Indian peoples. It illustrates the genesis of the sacred human/buffalo relationship and the original sacrifice the buffalo made for the humans.
The story begins after the world was formed but the people live in the world. The buffaloes were sacred and we tended them. We fed them a food that was like clouds. The life we had was sacred but some of the people wanted to see what lay outside the tunnel to the surface. One of those who decided to go up the tunnel was named To ka hey, “the first one.” He went to the surface to look around. He came back with wonderful stories. The people were curious but decided not to let on that they were going to the surface. Seven families left. Soon the buffaloes realized what had happened. They went to the surface. What they saw made them sad: the people had nothing to eat, they were cold, without shelter. The buffaloes decided that though the people had been foolish, they would go to the surface to help the people. The buffaloes knew that if they went to the surface they could not return to the life they knew within the earth. The buffaloes gave up their life within the earth so that the people could have food, clothing, and shelter. What they did was holy.
One of the greatest travesties concerning the current slaughter is the absence of Native Americans from decisions affecting the buffalo. The influence of the cattle baron is heard loud and clear, while the Native voice falls on deaf ears. To the Western cattle rancher, the cow represents an economic interest and way of life that are barely a hundred years old. To Native Americans, the buffalo represents the essence of their social, cultural, and spiritual identity going back thousands of years. That the tribes have been absent from the table while the ranchers and politicians decide the fate of the buffalo reflects both the lack of wisdom and the utter disrespect of those in charge.
Friday, 17 Mar 2000
WEST YELLOWSTONE, Mont.
When I first joined the campaign more than two years ago, I fell in love at once with the Fir Ridge ski shift. Sunrise at Fir Ridge, overlooking Duck Creek drainage, reminds me how the continent might have looked a few hundred years ago, before our European ancestors arrived. Almost every morning I’ve been there, the valley has teemed with wildlife. Herds of elk 200 strong, surrounding more than 80 bison, are a common sight from Fir Ridge. Some mornings coyotes and wolves circle the great herds.
Buffalo at sunrise.
Photo © Dan Brister 1999, BFC.
The Montana Department of Livestock (DOL) keeps a capture facility on private land owned by Dale Koelzer, who doesn’t like bison. His property abuts the park and straddles Duck Creek, the migration corridor for the majority of the herd. Koelzer shot and killed a bull in September because “it was bothering [his] truck.”
Our main job on these early mornings is to survey Kolezer’s land and make certain no buffalo have wandered onto it during the night. We communicate via radio with a car patrol parked across the creek, at a place we call “the perch,” which offers a view of Koelzer’s yard and the trap that we don’t get from the park.
The memory of helping save 16 buffalo, just four days after my arrival, remains fresh in my mind. Peaches had noticed two DOL trucks at Koelzer’s the night before. We knew they were here to capture buffalo because one of the them was towing a livestock trailer, which the DOL uses to haul the animals to slaughter.
Ski patrol at dawn.
Photo © Tiffany Brown 1998, BFC.
We parked at the roadside, put on our skis, and headed toward the park, reaching the top of the ridge before sunrise. Taking four sweeping strides and shooting off the ridge, I flew down the hill with my stomach in my throat and coasted halfway across the valley floor. I skied onto a small bluff overlooking the buffalo trap and waited for my friends.
Derick arrived beside me, fumbling through his pack for the walkie-talkie. He turned it on and said, “Backcountry to perch, do you copy?”
A voice responded, “This is the perch. See anything yet? Over.”
Kristen, meanwhile, was skiing further along the bluff. She came back and told us she’d found buffalo beside Koelzer’s house. At the same moment, the perch patrol spotted them: “We have 16 friends
practically sitting on Koelzer’s porch. DOL is up and about. Looks like this is it. Over.”
“We better move,” Kristen said. “It’s almost light.” Derick agreed to wait on the hill, providing lookout and radio support, while Kristen and I skied in.
We moved beside the trap and into a grove of trees, the only cover on the property, and surveyed the scene. The buffalo were bedded down on a small rise behind a fence, 15 feet from Koelzer’s front door. A mound of hay lay beside the porch.
“That’s why they like it here so much,” Kristen said. “They’re baiting them.”
Shadows shifted in the house. “We’d better move or we’ll be caught in daylight,” I whispered. Adrenaline flowing, I gave the buffalo plenty of room and skied to within five feet of the house. Covering my face with my ski-mask, I passed before the sliding glass door.
“Hayyaa!” I shouted, clacking my poles together. The buffalo reacted quickly, rising to their feet. Several bulls jumped a small fence and headed toward the park. Most walked around it and slowly followed the others. I skied behind them, making sure they didn’t drop down to the creek or double back around us. Human voices sounded somewhere behind us, but we didn’t linger to hear what they said.
“I’ll get you, you wascaly buffawo!” DOL agents, going nowhere fast.
Photo © Jeremy Oday 2000, BFC.
The buffalo walked around the trap and into the park. We trailed them and rested, safe. I’ve never seen a DOL agent on skis, and since snowmobiles are not allowed in the park’s backcountry, we knew they wouldn’t chase us.
We followed the animals up the creek, hanging back at least a hundred yards. They lumbered through the heavy snow in single file, the leader breaking trail for the ones behind. When the one in front grew tired, he’d step aside and let another take the lead. The buffalo splashed through the creek and into a sheltered meadow with tufts of grass poking from the snow.
This scene unfolded over two years ago, yet it remains etched in my mind. Duck Creek has been quiet this winter, with just a few buffalo in the great meadow just inside the park. This morning’s patrol reported one bull dangerously close to the boundary and the trap at Koelzer’s.
Koelzer goes to trial next Wednesday for poaching a bull. Our volunteers discovered the carcass on his land, its head, hide, and genitals missing. Koelzer initially denied any involvement. He changed his story after the head and hide were recovered from his barn. Because of his cozy relationship with the state (the DOL lives in his basement and keeps their equipment in his barn), it is unlikely he will be found guilty for this crime.
I encourage you to keep informed and share your knowledge with as many people as possible. If you’d like to stay up to date on the fate of the bull and the rest of the herd, please sign on to our listserve. We send out regular updates from the field. If you want copies of our newsletter or Buffalo Bull, our award winning documentary, contact me at dan@wildrockies.org.
