FORT BENTON — Chouteau County was once plentiful with bison. So it served as a fitting place for the writer of Ken Burns latest project, “The American Buffalo”, to speak with residents about the upcoming film.
“The American Buffalo” is a four-hour, two-part documentary that chronicles over ten thousand years of what has become our national mammal.
Filmmaker Ken Burns likens it to the first two acts of a three-act play.
Act One starts with the early years leading up to the animal’s near destruction, Act Two shows efforts to bring the bison back, and Act Three remains to be written.
“Now, I think we have to ask ourselves much larger questions about that, that it's not enough just to save the animal as a kind of a zoo species, but how to figure out how to return it to the grasslands it knows in its muscle memory and its blood memory,” said Burns during a promotional event in Lewistown last Friday.
Burns was joined at events in Lewistown, Missoula and Moiese by the film’s writer, Dayton Duncan and the film’s director, Julie Dunfey.
The film’s writer noted author Dayton Duncan —who has collaborated with Burns on several projects including “The Dust Bowl”, “The National Parks”, and “Lewis and Clark” — was recently in Fort Benton to give residents a closer look at the project.
“We took a species that existed in uncountable numbers and at least 30 million of them in 1800 on the Great Plains and in the space of less than a century, reduced them to fewer than a thousand,” said Duncan.
Montana is featured prominently in the project. Leading Native American Scholars, land experts, and Tribal Nation members also offer their insight. They include Rosalyn LaPier of the Blackfeet of Montana and Métis, Germaine White of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and George Horse Capture, Jr. Of the Aaniiih.
Duncan spoke to a big crowd at the Fort Benton Museums and Heritage Complex and told them the film features the efforts of William Hornaday, a taxidermist for the national museum.
“In 1886, when William T Hornaday came, it took him three months to kill 24 Buffalo to make exhibits that would show what the buffalo once was for future generations,” said Duncan. “He said, ‘We got here just in the nick of time because the 40 or 50 that might still be left in Montana, I think they'll be gone by the next year.’”
The museum’s Hornaday Smithsonian group of six bison is considered by many the most significant collection of the animal in the U.S.
Burns says his films share discoveries, and he and others say the American Buffalo had many of them.
“The last few days I've been thinking about something that is said in our film by one of our on-camera commentators, Dan Flores, who said that this is the largest destruction of wildlife in the history of the world,” said Burns.
Dunfey said she had a pretty good idea of the fate of the bison in the 19th century but was still amazed at what she learned.
“The industrial beat of it, the relentlessness of the slaughter, and how systematic and thorough it was, I think was really, really shocking and dismaying and surprising to me,” said Dunfey. “But also just coming to a deeper understanding of how much indigenous people's lives had been completely intertwined with the buffalo.”
Duncan says the bison's comeback is far from complete and they will likely never number in the millions like they once did. He says words from writer and historian Wallace Stegner say it best, pointing out man’s destructive, yet restorative capabilities.
“But we are also the only species when it chooses to do so, is capable of saving what might otherwise destroy,” said Duncan
The American Buffalo premieres on PBS on Oct. 16 and Oct. 17, 2023.
