Lost Tracks: Buffalo National Park, 1909–1939 (review)

Canada's national parks are such permanent fixtures of the public imagination that it is politically almost impossible for the government to remove individual sites from the system. Yet prior to the advent of the environmental movement in the 1970s, the federal government did divest itself of individual national parks in some rare cases, including three antelope preserves from locations spread throughout the prairie landscape (because the species had largely recovered).

Jennifer Brower's Lost Tracks traces the history of the fourth and most important of these ephemeral protected areas, Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta. Founded in 1911, the park became home to a large bison herd the Canadian government purchased from two Americans, a cross-border conservation coup that suddenly placed Canada in control of the largest publicly owned plains bison herd in the world.

Many conservation historians have celebrated this triumphal moment of Canadian bison conservation supremacy, but Brower's work accounts for the rise and subsequent fall of this iconic protected area. Her book provides a richly detailed and thoroughly researched account of management problems and inconstancies that emerged after 1911, particularly the transformation of the key conservation issue from bison scarcity to overabundance as predator-control policies and a fenced range led to a population explosion in the herds. Attempts to deal with the population problem, Brower argues, led to further detrimental management interventions, especially the disastrous transfer of 7,000 plains bison and their attendant diseases of tuberculosis and brucellosis from the Wainwright park to Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta. And in case you thought the park represented an altruistic attempt to save the remnant population of a dying species, Brower documents park managers' attempts to cash in on the bison herds by selling excess bison meat as a scheme to generate revenue, attracting tourists through the construction of a wildlife menagerie, and through bizarre (and unsuccessful) experiments to produce the perfect range animal in the form of a cattle-bison hybrid called the cattalo or the beefalo. By the late 1930s, Brower suggests, the park had become a shadow of its original purpose, with a large population of diseased and hungry bison vying for limited food on an over-grazed range. In 1939 the parks' staff slaughtered all remaining bison and turned the site over to the military for training.

As compelling as this narrative may be, some readers might be scared off by Brower's narrow focus on an individual national park. But Lost Tracks is an exemplary example of a micro-history writ large, in this case on a canvas of national and international histories of wildlife conservation. Brower's work echoes the many recent environmental histories that reveal the strange combination of idealism and crass commercial motives fuelling the early wildlife conservation movement, and accounts for the profound and at times tragic failure of this movement to overcome its own philosophical limitations when restoring plains bison to one small patch of Alberta prairie. Perhaps most importantly, the author's position as interpreter at the historical centre commemorating the existence of the park gives her a passion for the subject matter that is obvious in every one of the book's main chapters.

That being said, Brower might have gone further with her very brief conclusions. She argues that the history of Buffalo National Park is relevant to the contemporary world because it serves as background to ongoing disease-management problems in Wood Buffalo National Park. While this is certainly true in factual terms, it diverts attention from the main object of study. Brower might have taken a few more pages to discuss how the commercial orientation of Buffalo National Park fits into a wider pattern of bison commercialization in North America. The us historian Andrew Isenberg has argued that the bison conservationists largely failed in their efforts to save the species as free-ranging animals because they could not muster the political will to set aside a large enough area of prairies...