No More Than 30

The story of the American bison has been documented many places, from books and articles to movies, and I had thought I knew it. But when I was researching for Nothing Short of Wondrous (out next week!), I learned a few things that surprised me.

You may have read that once vast herds of these majestic creatures roamed the Great Plains. Historians estimate there may have been as many as 60 million, and they lived as far east as the Appalachians. Loss of habit, competition from cattle, and overhunting by nonindigenous hunters decimated their ranks.

So, here’s the first thing that surprised me. I tend to think of late-Victorian era hunters as starting the trend in killing massive numbers of bison. The hunting actually began as early as 1830. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Hudson’s Bay Company on the West Coast traded 75,000 buffalo-hide robes in 1844 alone.

Here’s another thing that surprised me: By the 1870s, bison hides were being tanned for leather and their bones were being used in making fertilizer and bone china (that mountain of bison skulls is horrifying!). Because they were becoming valuable, ranchers began picking up stray calves and starting their own herds. Wealthy hunters also moved in for the kill. At one point, 5,000 bison a day were being killed.

As early as 1886, fewer than 350 bison remained in wild herds. The largest single group may have been the one in Yellowstone National Park.

It numbered no more than 30.

That number stunned me. Small wonder my heroine, Kate Tremaine, will do anything to protect them. Kate loves her wilderness home and the others who live beside her.

She may be fictional, but a number of real-life people felt the same way. The turn of the century saw conservationists around the country coming together to protect the bison. By 1910, numbers had increased to more than 2,000 in the US and Canada. Ten years later, that number was more than 12,000.

Today, the Yellowstone herd alone numbers around 5,000, and estimates of other herds on public and private lands are closer to 500,000 total.

Now, that’s a comeback story!

I hope you’ll come back next week when we celebrate the launch of another story, Nothing Short of Wondrous.

Pictures from Wonderland

First—thanks to Roxanne C, for your comment last week. Contact me at reginascott@owt.com. I know you mentioned you had a copy of the book you won. Let’s see what else I can find you.

The heroine of A Distance Too Grand, Meg Pero, is a photographer, specializing in stereographs, those double pictures that allowed people to approximate three-dimensions in her time. But when I was researching Yellowstone National Park for the second book in my American Wonders Collection, Nothing Short of Wondrous, I discovered another early photographer had made his mark there.

Frank Jay Haynes was born in Michigan in 1853. He didn’t do well at his first profession, traveling salesman, so, when he went to live with family in Wisconsin, he took the opportunity to apprentice as a photographer. F. Jay opened his own studio in 1876 in Moorhead, Minnesota. But he wasn’t content to stay there. It seems that traveling part of his salesman’s job stayed with him throughout his life.

Less than a year later, he started taking his equipment on the road, traveling via stagecoach from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Deadwood, South Dakota, taking pictures of the scenery and the people along the way. The next year, he traveled from Bismarck to the Pacific Ocean and followed that up with a tour down and up the Missouri River. His pictures made excellent prints, postcards, and, yes, stereographs.

Perhaps because his popularity was growing, he won a contract with the Northern Pacific Railroad to take publicity shots along the line to Bismarck. With a free pass to ride any train, he could go where he liked, when he liked. Along the way, he met then Yellowstone superintendent Philetus Norris, who invited him to come tour Wonderland and photograph its scenic beauty. During his two months in the park in 1881, F. Jay shot more than 200 pictures. And he came back the next year to shoot more.

Again, his stature grew, to the point that, in August 1883, he was chosen to accompany President Arthur in touring Yellowstone and serve as the official photographer. He still found time to photograph the golden spike ceremony of the Northern Pacific in Montana. But Yellowstone had so impressed him that he applied for and won a concession to be the park’s first official photographer. His studio opened in 1884.

But Yellowstone was only really accessible from May through September. What do to the rest of the year? F. Jay purchased a Pullman car from the Northern Pacific and refitted it as a traveling studio, calling it the Palace Studio Car. He traveled all over the west for the next 20 years in that car, taking pictures of local places and local folks. He was part of the one of the first winter tours of Yellowstone in 1886 and photographed the journey from my native Tacoma to Glacier Bay, Alaska, in 1891 for the Puget Sound and Alaska Steamship Company.

When he passed away in 1921, his son Jack, who had been helping him, inherited his business and carried on the tradition until his death in 1962.

And if you’d like to experience a little of Yellowstone, hop over the Goodreads, where you can enter a giveaway of a print copy of Nothing Short of Wondrous, due out October 20, 2020. 

Picture perfect!