What I Read in November 2009

Reading this past month reflects the Bison Bison project, my book groups, and preliminary reading for a future course on Louisa May Alcott and Zora Neale Hurston.

Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
Ernle Bradford, Ulysses Found
Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People
Stephen Ambrose, Crazy Horse and Custer: the Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman behind Little Women

I have posted on all of these except Olive Kitteridge. That book was a disappointment.

With my course over for now and the book groups taking some time off for the holidays, I look forward to some different kinds of reading.

What I Read in October 2009

I have posts on all the books I completed this month:

William Cronon, Changes in the Land - it does change, and Cronon explains how New England’s current landscape got that way.

Anton Chekhov, Four Plays – the thing is, see them if you can.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Good Husband of Zebra Drive – an entertaining series, but the author is beginning to repeat himself.

Shaffer and Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society – the best novel in letters I have read since 84, Charing Cross Road.

Homer, The Odyssey – We did this as a class – the best way, because of the discussions.

John Updike, Rabbit at Rest - both Updike and Rabbit are now at rest.

Tom McHugh, The Time of the Buffalo – all about Bison Bison.

The Time of the Buffalo

I am still on the trail of Bison bison, and Tom McHugh’s The Time of the Buffalo has been an important trail guide. If you remember the Disney film The Vanishing Prairie with its buffalo and prairie dogs, then you have seen the work of Tom McHugh, as he was the principal photographer.

The Time of the Buffalo is not a picture book, although it has some neat pictures.

It is a survey of all that we know about Bison bison, its natural history and its human history, that is, the history of its interactions with us. After professional hide hunters almost exterminated the animal in the 1870s and 1880s, a few devoted naturalists managed to save a remnant herd from which today’s buffalo population descends.  Writing in 1972, McHugh says

Such losses cannot be redeemed later; once an animal is gone from the earth, it is gone forever. In an effort to save the threatened species, a few men are working to undo the errors of the many. They are engaged in a fierce struggle against our culture’s reckless disregard for rare widlife, primitive peoples, and irreplaceable timberlands, marshes, seashores, and other domains.

The buffalo flourishes now, not by accident, but as a result of dedicated effort. Other species have not been so fortunate. McHugh give us a warning, but he also gives us hope.

What I Read in August 2009

The reading list below contains two books about buffalo (Bison bison). I came back from our trip to South Dakota and Montana all charged up about the animal, so of course I had to read about them and do some Internet research. In one of the places we visited, Custer State Park, we saw lush prairie with buffalo.

The song says “where the buffalo roam” but these contented animals weren’t going anywhere. I learned, however, that every September the Custer Park people have a buffalo roundup. They inoculate the new calves and cull the herd.

Calvin Trillin slipped by, but otherwise I have posts on all of the books I read this past month:

Diane Johnson, Lying Low
Anne Matthews, Where the Buffalo Roam
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
David J. Goldberg, To the Promised Land
Julie Powell, Julie and Julia
Faye Kellerman, The Burnt House
Calvin Trillin, With All Disrespect
Steven Rinella, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon

In 2005 Steven Rinella won a buffalo-hunting permit in an Alaskan lottery. Hunting a buffalo (or Bison bison) is like the old recipe for rabbit stew which begins, first catch a rabbit. Rinella, accompanied by his brother and two friends, sets off in the wilderness of Copper River to find his buffalo. He tells the story of the quest for the beast he had a permit to kill. I’m not much for hunting stories, but long before his lottery number came up Rinella was already “In Search of a Lost Icon.” He investigated the biology and history of the animal, visiting places like Folsom, New Mexico,  where the bones of Bison antiquus were found embedded with the weapons on the Paleoindians.

The ancestor of today’s buffalo crossed the land bridge from Siberia between ice ages, probably followed closely by hunters who were the ancestors of the American Indians. Ever since that first crossing, our two species have evolved together on this continent. The history of this  unique cultural connection includes how the Indians pursued the buffalo, what the buffalo hunters did with all those animals they shot, how New York Zoos helped to restore the buffalo to the West — as well as where the animals are today and what they are doing there. Among other things, Ted Turner owns the largest buffalo herd in the world. For a price, you can visit a buffalo ranch and shoot your own specimen. But that was not Rinella’s game. He played fair with his permitted execution of an animal he revered.

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…. At once  it is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it’s a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture…; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.

For more about my own researches, and some pictures, see Bison bison.

Where the Buffalo Roam

About 20 years ago (1987) Frank and Deborah Popper, geographers at Rutgers, proposed the Buffalo Commons, their answer to land-use problems in parts of the American West. The subtitle of Anne Matthews’ book about the Poppers and their plan is appropriately The Storm over the Revolutionary Plan to Restore America’s Great Plains. Written in 1992, only five years after the initial proposal, Matthews follows two earnest academics to conferences and town meetings where they propose, explain, answer questions and receive abuse.

The Poppers observed that, in response to the repeated boom and bust cycles of drought on land which should never have been plowed, many areas of the Great Plains were depopulating, back below the level of six persons per square mile which had caused Frederick Jackson Turner to declare the end of the Frontier in 1893. The return of the buffalo is a metaphor for a return to sustainable land use, as in the time of the buffalo. Stop plowing, return the land to the prairie, and let the buffalo roam free.

The Poppers’ proposal was just that, an attempt to get those responsible for agricultural and land-use policies to accept the realities of what the dry lands west of the 98th meridian can sustain. The residents of Oklahoma and Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana, did not greet the proposal in that spirit. The almost usiveral reaction was to admit the facts, but to resist the conclusions and suspect a plot to turn them off the land. But, as Deborah Popper says,

“This generation of ranchers and farmers cannot be the ones to accept it,” she points out. “They’re already locked in to and rewarded by an agriculture based on heavy inputs of capital, fertilizer, pesticides, intensive grazing. But their kids, who go off to the land-grant schools and learn to think about sustainable agriculture and active management, will have to bring home a new sensibility.”

Even during the time that Matthews tracked the Poppers she found a gradual shift in opinions. Now, 17 years further on, I found during my own recent visit to South Dakota and Montana that the buffalo is coming back and that land-use is being reconsidered. Besides the national and state parks, non profit groups like the Nature Conservancy and the American Prairie Foundation are acquiring grasslands and placing there that symbol of the strength of the Plains, the buffalo.