The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal by David A. Dary (review)

314 Western American Literature the great unknown were all developed by the experience of the West. These values are all here in the writers chosen for consideration in these pamphlets. It is time the meaning of the West received the respect and consideration in literary criticism that it has in other disciplines. It is to the merit of this series that the editors have chosen a range of writing to reflect all of the West and picked critics who understand the good medicine of the Western life style, with all the tensions of its polar vision. PRISCILLA OAKS, California State University, Fullerton The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal. By David A. Dary. (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1974. 374 pages. $15.00.) In 1966, when he was a freshman in college, Wayne Gadient decided he would like to own a herd of buffalo. Four years later he and a friend, Gerald Ryan, bought three of the shaggy animals in South Dakota and put them to pasture on Ryan’s farm near Goodhue, Minnesota. Since then additions have been made to the original nucleus, and two of Gadient’s high school friends, Wally and Roger Bucholz, have also gone in for buffaloraising . By late 1974 more than fifty bison were grazing on the rolling terrain of Goodhue township, where they have not roamed in the wild for nearly two centuries. It is some indication of the comprehensiveness of David Dary’s new book that both the Gadient-Ryan and the Bucholz herds are listed, together with more than four hundred other public and private buffalo herds in the United States and Canada. When I showed it to Gadient recently, he asked, “Is it a good book, or just a lot of malarkey?” I told him that, in terms of what it tries to do, The Buffalo Book is indeed a good book. The qualifying phrase is important, for Dary’s is not a scholarly treatise but a popular book about the buffalo. In its less than three hundred pages of text proper (plus four appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index) Dary has managed to cram a great deal of information about his subject. In the first nine chapters he provides a chronological history of the buffalo, from Bison latifrons, the earliest of its race in North America, down to the use of the bones that were left after the great slaughter of the seventies and early eighties. We learn what happened to the bison in the East, what the great beast meant to the Plains Indian, and what became of the buffalo of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains when the white man invaded the trans-Mississippi West. The next ten chapters deal with such varied topics as the fighting abilities of bulls, the speed and direction of the buffalo’s periodic movements. Reviews 315 efforts to save the species, the legends surrounding the white buffalo, attempts to breed bison with domestic cattle, and the use of the buffalo as a symbol on postage stamps, a ten-dollar bill, and official state seals, as well as in advertising material and a variety of other places. A short final chapter considers the future of the American buffalo. In telling his story, Dary makes extensive use of previously published anecdotes, some occupying as much as three or four pages of text. Enter­ taining though most of them are, the reader may have the sense of wading through a compendium of excerpts from other books. Since many of these are not readily accessible, however, and since Dary’s notes usually identify his sources, his predilection for giving warmed-over information is not a serious defect in the book. There are minor errors of course — the dis­ tinguished frontier historian Wilbur Jacobs turns up in a note as Wilbur “Jones” — but the number is not excessive. Not an encyclopedic work like Frank Gilbert Roe’s The North American Buffalo, nor even quite what the subtitle calls it — “The Full Saga of the American Animal” — Dary’s book is a handy collection of information, eminently readable, well illustrated, and equipped with sufficient documen­ tation to lead the serious reader to the primary sources...