American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Manufacturer: Spiegel & Grau

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A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.

In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. 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. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness.

American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it 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 erudition and exuberance, combined with his 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. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.

Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: Before the 18th century, the American buffalo was the largest land mammal in North America, largely predator-free and roaming the continent in numbers estimated in excess of 40 million. In just over a century, widespread slaughter reduced the population to a few hundred head, and the American West lay beneath a till of bleached bones. When Steven Rinella stumbled over a buffalo skull in Yellowstone National Park, it sparked an obsessive search for the beast's past, from its migration across the Bering land bridge to its near extinction at the hands of western settlers. American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon is his fascinating chronicle, beginning with a search for Black Diamond (the doomed model for the Buffalo Nickel) and including an exploration of "buffalo jumps" (where thousands were run over cliffs by Native American hunters), and tales of bone piles--harvested from the plains for a thriving fertilizer industry--stacked 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and a half-mile long. Rinella's history is deftly interwoven with his own literal buffalo hunt in Alaska's Wrangell mountains, complete with grizzly bears, raging, ice-rimmed rivers, and bouts of hypothermia and frostbite. Written in a spare style appropriate to the rigors of the frozen wilderness, American Buffalo is engrossing, informative, funny, and a welcome achievement of both natural history and outdoor adventure. --Jon Foro

American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

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Customer Reviews / American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

Don't let this icon become lost. This book is an excellent account of the buffalos history.
Very informative is parts, very disturbing in others.

Buffalo are most famous in today's world for their appearance on the buffalo nickel. That they once roamed the North American plains by the millions is known only from movies, books, and oral histories.

Rinella does an excellent job of detailing his obsession with the buffalo, starting with his winning of the lottery to hunt buffalo in Alaska, then interspersing the story of his hunt with the history of buffalo and their predation by Native Americans and later immigrants to the US.

The style reminded me very much of Krakauer, specifically Into the Wild, his tale of a young man who dreams of living off the land in Alaska. Unlike the subject of Into the Wild, Rinella is an accomplished hunter and outdoorsman and his narrative underscores the brutality of the hunt along with his appreciation for the buffalo.

This book was a great escape from mundane winter days and taught me a lot about both the buffalo and American history.

While Steven Rinella's "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" might appear to be nothing more than a book about hunting and successfully killing a buffalo, the reader needs only to delve into the first few pages to realize that this ain't just another episode of Buck McNeely (non-hunters will probably miss this reference). In reality, Rinella's book is about a successful hunt, but it is about much, much more as well. The book begins with Rinella having successfuly bagged his target and debating on what to do with the meat now that nightfall is approaching and bears pose a potential threat. From there, the story reverts back to the days, weeks, months, years, decades and centuries (and even millenia) that precede Rinella's hunt.

The reader learns about the American buffalo's rise to power on the continent of North America. We visit its ancestors in the Pleistocene era. We also learn of the ways that those ancestors could have been pushed to extinction or intermingling. One can draw the belief from facts presented that American Indians were as wasteful of the buffalo as the white Europeans have been accused of being.

The reader will also learn about a number of individuals who played a big role in the advancement of the study of the American buffalo whether they knew it or not. Names like George McJunkin and Colonel Richard Irving Dodge might not mean much to you now, but after reading this book, you'll appreciate their seemingly small contributions to science.

From the relationship between buffalo wallows and frogs to buffalo hunters with colorful names like Buckshot Roberts and Prairie Dog Dave, Rinella covers a wide swath of the buffalo's history. One of my favorite parts is when Rinella runs off a litany of uses that American Indians made of the various parts of the buffalo.

Then, of course, there's the actual hunt. Rinella spreads the actual hunt across the 250+ pages of his book by interspersing the numerous facts and stories he's collected over the years. He does a fine job of describing the hunt. As any real hunter knows, there are many monotonous moments in the field. Rinella leaves most of these out and only uses them when needed.

I should state that Rinella's story is very descriptive. From the fine details of cleaning a buffalo to the grotesque manner in which some buffalo hunters met their fate, "American Buffalo" leaves little to the imagination. With that said, squeamish readers or animal rights activists might want to steer clear of this book.

Overall, Rinella has done a fine job of blending the hunt and the history of what truly is an American icon, the American buffalo. While there's one moment near the end of the book that seems almost like an attempt to appease the anti-hunting crowd, the rest of the story more than makes up for this one mistake. Highly recommended.

This book, on the face of it an account of the author's successful solo buffalo hunt in Alaska, is a surprisingly good read. I expected a sort of elongated article from Field & Stream, but I got a whole lot more.

Steven Rinella, a writer originally from Michigan, was a winner in a lottery to hunt buffalo in Alaska, whose herd is sizable enough to cull through hunting. Only 24 permits were issued; only 4 hunters actually bagged a buffalo. And it isn't a job for sissies; Mr Rinella's account of the trek in to where the buffalo were - to say nothing of his solo hunt, the dressing, and the load-out, deep in the wild and all alone until the very end - is nothing I would consider doing for any amount of money. Arduous, cold, wet, dangerous - there were still grizzlies around - it is the kind of hair-raising tale where you keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Thankfully, Mr Rinella, and his companions who went with him for the first few days, are consummate outdoorsmen. I would still be sitting in the car waiting for them to come out.

But "American Buffalo" is far more than an account of a gonzo hunter. Mr Rinella put a great deal of thought into the writing and content of this book, and I was fascinated. He leaves no stone unturned on the history and existence of the buffalo in America. His interest was first piqued by finding a buffalo skull during a hike in Montana years before; and he went to great lengths to determine the age and era of his buffalo skull's time on earth, even going so far as to taking it to England to consult with a geneticist specializing in buffalo. (I can't imagine the difficulties he encountered getting a buffalo skull through customs.) Along the way, he provides a concise history of the buffalo's contact with man, from earliest human hunters in America to the egregious killing sprees of the white buffalo hunters of the late 1800s, complete with some pretty amazing photos. It seems clear that his sympathies lie with both the buffalo and the Native Americans who first hunted them, while not holding back on the fact that the Native Americans could be pretty wasteful with the buffalo as well, sometimes only harvesting certain parts of the buffalo, a far cry from the picture that has been painted of their using every part of the buffalo - which I always took to mean EVERY animal they killed. As it happens, they did make use of all of it; just not all of each one, all the time.

The greater part of the book deals with Mr Rinella's investigation into the age of the skull he found, with the great asides of buffalo stories and history, and he writes exceptionally well. The final quarter of the book is almost exclusively his personal hunt, and as said before, it is a gripping and at times amusing tale of one man in the wilderness. Even with 21st Century camping equipment, it's still a tent in the woods with bears nearby, and I was on the edge of my seat reading it. The account of the successful kill, and the subsequent butchering, is not for the squeamish, nor indeed for those of tender sensibilities or anti-hunting leanings; but it was informative, and it is also clear that Mr Rinella knew what he was doing. I worried about him until he got out of the woods, and that tale too is a wild ride, but it was made very clear early on that he is a conscientious and thorough hunter who can handle himself and disturb the area as little as possible.

I found I could not abandon this book for very long, and was sorry when it ended. Informative, well written, with a wry self-consciousness and an enjoyment of life that was refreshing to read, I can recommend it to anyone interested in a good yarn about hunting that incorporates all aspects of the animal hunted, along with an honest account of the huntsman's foibles along the way.

Steven Rinell'a American Buffalo is a wonderful piece of modern literature about the history of the Old West. While not rising to the unbelievable heights of Hampton Sides, this book evokes thoughts of "Of Blood and Thunder," the most powerful modern work on the history of the Old West. Buy this book, you won't be disappointed.

American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

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