More-than-human animals have long been vital to the history of the Mountain West. The image above shows a "wild" buffalo being fed by its human caretaker. It is part of the Montana State Library's History Portal.

Episode 5 Synopsis - In this episode, Michelle and Emily chew the cud about the furry ungulates who have captivated imaginations, inspired national conservation movements, and stimulated endless debate. In this episode, it is just the two co-hosts who have much to say about the ways in which cows, elk, and buffalo make us rethink binaries and boundaries as they lope through the history of the Mountain West.

Postscript. Click here to listen to our Postscript on the sources that most inspired the stories we share in this episode.

meme via: San Jose State University Writing center

Links and Citations for Learning MORE THAN you already know!

Black Angus grazing on public lands in southern Arizona. Photo by Michelle K. Berry.

• The photo above is from Michelle's book, Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West.

• Public Lands grazing is a topic that could have its own episode. It is an excellent example of how perspective, or positionality, affects how one understands a particular issue. For one perspective on the negative history of public lands ranching see the Western Watersheds Project. For a more positive take, see this video by the American Farm Bureau. For somewhere in the middle, see the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

• Animals drive history. Despite that fact, this is a relatively new area for environmental historians. For a somewhat detailed and specialized introduction to animal history click here!

• Ungulates process grass - something many animals cannot do. That makes them cool! For a beginning explanation of unique cattle digestion, see this site from the University of Minnesota Extension.

  

• Rosa Ficek has written an excellent academic article on the history of cattle as colonizing agents that is free to the public. Read "Cattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene In and Out of Human Projects" here.

• Cattlegrowers came together in political collectivity in the 1950s to adjust to the changing reality in the postwar Mountain West. Michelle has written a book about this - you can check it out! It's called Cow Talk: Work, Ecology, and Range Cattle Ranchers in the Postwar Mountain West. The ranchers' and their associations contributed mightily to archives across the West where the culture of ranching flourished in the mid 20th century (contributing to the continued 'power of the cowboy'), and in those archives we see the boundaries between "wildlife" and domesticated livestock blur as recreationists and agriculturalists increasingly came in contact. Ranchers sometimes had good humor about this as is evidenced by the cartoon below from the Wyoming Stockgrowers' Association Papers at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.

Wildlife "management" has a long history where we can see how animals resisted control and insisted on moving of their own accord. Thus elk, bison, and cattle all blur the boundaries of concepts like "domestic" and "wild." Despite Western tendencies to insist on the juxtaposition of these categories, these animals move among and between the categories more often than not. Elk, in particular, have historically pushed boundaries.

Photo Credit: USFWS/Jessie Stirling

A wonderful example of this can be seen in Glacier National Park where elk management first sought to keep elk "in" the park in the early 20th century and then sought to force elk "out" of the park by the 1950s. In every moment of the management saga, the Blackfeet tribe was robbed of their traditional lands and access to the animals that provided spiritual and physical sustenance. For part of this story, see Louis Warren's A Hunter's Game. For the continued story, click here.

• In New Mexico, in order to better "manage" the "wild" the United States Geologic Survey has conducted fascinating studies of the ways in which elk move in the region. To see the data, click here.

• Antlers are symbols of many things not the least of which is the relationship between humans and animals. To access racks through legal hunting, one must interface with state agencies that have been given ownership of the wildlife (even though those animals move and pay little attention to arbitrary political state lines). Some states emphasize the 'wild' of these animal lives calling themselves departments of wildlife, while others highlight the commodification of the animals and call themselves departments of fish and game. What do those terms mean to you?

  

  Arch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Photo in Library of Congress.

  Perhaps the most legendary symbol of the Mountain West and the Great Plains is the American Buffalo.

  Much has been written and remembered about the buffalo. Many native peoples in the region depended on the animals for spiritual and physical sustenance until they were nearly hunted to extinction by the late 1800s. The Crow Historian Grant Bulltail explains native perspective on the historic importance of buffalo for his people (especially as energy and medicine), and he also discusses the attempt to reintroduce buffalo to the region in the 1930s and 40s. Note how he explains that the reintroduced buffalo "kept wandering off."

  As Bulltail observes, "it is hard to own them."

  Despite Native wisdom that buffalo cannot be owned, western culture continues to try. The buffalo who are part of the iconic herd at Genesee Park outside Denver on Interstate 70 has interesting historic relationships with their human caretakers and their own buffalo ancestors. Nearby the herd is the grave of Buffalo Bill who, without necessarily even intending to do so (you can read that story here), spurred affinity for the animals and created opportunities for the ongoing controversial commemoration of Anglo colonization in the West.

  A particularly well known outcome of Anglo colonization was the wanton hunting of millions of buffalo from the mid 19th to the late 19th century. Iconic images depict the massacre of these powerful more-than-human beings. Like this one from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, 1871:

  

  The collecting of Native artifacts and the taking of photographs and memories (oral histories) of Natives has often been exploitive and extractive, but increasingly institutions that hold those artifacts and memories are beginning to reckon with that legacy. The Smithsonian's Shared Stewardship and Ethical Returns Policy is one example of that:

  "Although the Smithsonian has legal title or custody of collections it holds in trust for the benefit of the public, continued retention or sole stewardship of such collections may cause harm to communities and be fundamentally inconsistent with the Smithsonian’s ethical standards and Institutional values. In these unique circumstances, shared stewardship or ethical return may be necessary to fulfill the Smithsonian’s custodial obligations."

  Digital exhibits offer less well funded institutions an opportunity to write interpretations about historic topics (including the buffalo) that honor Native reverence for the morethanhuman and their resilient insistence that animals are kin. One such artifact that helps to illustrate an informative post from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming is this painting on a buffalo hide by Kadzie Cody, So-soreh (Shoshone) in 1900.

  

  Some Anglo Americans quickly (in the early decades of the 20th century) understood the significance of the buffalo disappearance, and they created the American Bison Society to rectify that reality. The actions of this group were somewhat curious and offer another opportunity to rethink the strict binaries of wild and tame, domesticated and feral...they promoted domestication of buffalo in order to save the "wild" beasts. You can see an early report of the Society here. In the excerpt from that source below, note the author's wonder at seeing antelope and buffalo together, and his suggestion that coyotes should be "controlled" to protect the animals he more preferred. Here we see the power of buffalo (and other ungulates like antelope and elk) to illicit wonder and awe and to inspire humans to not just hunt them but to also save them and promote at least a semblance of relationship between the human and the morethan.

  

  Native peoples have, for two centuries, worked to draw mainstream attention to the importance of buffalo presence on the land. The Kiowa, Sioux, Comanche, and many other tribes are very active in buffalo conservation and restoration. To see a particularly poignant effort in the Mountain West, watch the video below and learn about the Blackfoot Confederacy and their commitment to continuing and restoring the relationship of buffalo, land, and people.

Thank you for tuning in and for wanting to learn MORE THAN you did before!

Join us for the next episode where we gnaw on a history that demonstrates the ingenuity of the morethan. Episode 6 is on beavers.