The Return of the Buffalo: Restoring the Great American Prairie (2008) - full transcript

Once they roamed the Great Plains

of the American Midwest in their millions,

from the Rockies to the Mississippi,

from Canada to Mexico,

until settlers arrived

and the Plains became a killing field.

In 1870, hunters got $3.25 for a buffalo hide.

The carcasses were left to rot.

The effect was devastating.

Towards the end of the 19th Century,

the bison was nearly extinct.

Of the 50 million which once roamed America,

only 800 were left alive.

Today, nearly 150 years later,

scientists consider the near annihilation of the bison

to be the most costly mistake in U.S. history.

What can America do?

Is there any hope that one day huge herds of buffalo

will roam the Plains again?

The American heartland has many names:

the prairies, the Great Plains,

but they are desolate and deserted.

They make up a fifth of the American land mass,

but are home to less than 2% of the population.

This is the city of Ardmore in South Dakota,

just a few miles from the Nebraska border.

Ardmore is a ghost town.

It's even listed as one on the maps.

A ghost town?

Well, not completely.

Ardmore does have a population.

Of one.

Meet Loren Hartman.

She's 89 years old

and has lived in Ardmore since she was first married,

69 years ago.

They used to have a Kaylene plant over there

and they worked in there, you know,

and then my heart and my father-in-law

had that store uptown there.

And he'd run that for a good many years.

And they had little, just, machine shops

and just things like that around here.

And they had, um,

where they had the water tower down there.

They'd pump water up to town here

at that time, but they haven't had it here for years,

you know.

But it's just been just off and on

and it just got so there was no work here,

so the people would just leave, you know.

I'm the only one living here right now.

And then that, like I said,

that one comes and goes, that Calvin up there.

He comes and goes.

He doesn't stay here,

but I'm the only one that lives here now.

So I got nobody to fight with.

You're a very brave woman.

Am I?

Oh, I don't know.

It's not scary living here or anything, you know.

The famous Union Pacific Railway

no longer stops in Ardmore.

But in 1927, the train brought President Calvin Coolidge

rolling into town during his election campaign.

The town survived the Great Depression

without one family on welfare.

Frank and Deborah Popper confirmed

that Ardmore was once a bustling and vibrant city.

On their first trip to the Midwest, 20 years ago,

the Poppers also traveled from New York by train.

Frank is a professor of land management,

Debra, a geography professor

specializing in population trends.

This is Fairburn, South Dakota,

200 miles north of Ardmore.

Today it's another shrinking community,

but in the 1920s, Fairburn was an important stop

on President Coolidge's campaign trail, just like Ardmore.

20 years ago, Frank and Debra Popper

were the first scientists to highlight the economic downfall

of the Great Plains.

The white settlement of the Great Plains was quote

"the largest, longest running agricultural

"and environmental miscalculation in American history."

What's happened in the Plains over the last 20 years

in terms of the continued, depopulation of the region,

young people leaving, the region becoming older,

increased erosion, the dropping of the soil,

the dropping of the groundwater tables,

and the increase of agricultural subsidies

to support this fiasco,

I think, proves our point.

All of the pressures, economic pressures

and environmental pressures,

basically kept reducing and reducing

the number of people who were here.

The people who were doing well told their children

to go get educated and go elsewhere

and not come back.

But one of the children returned home.

Dan O'Brien used to raise cattle on the Southern Plains,

but switched to farming bison 10 years ago.

He calls his project Wild Idea.

Dan O'Brien owns about 600 bison

and he says that his herd are the wildest buffalo

in the wild west.

His animals roam and forage freely.

Dan doesn't provide any supplementary food or medication.

We're still in South Dakota, close to Fairburn,

and in the shadow of Bear Butte,

a sacred native American mountain.

10 years ago, Dan started with just 10 buffalo.

He sold his cattle and bought his first stock

from a neighboring ranch.

My dream is to have, someday,

a big buffalo commons, if you will,

or a buffalo park of some sort

out here on these plains.

And, you know, we're probably talking about thousands,

tens of thousands of buffalo in a million acres, say.

And, you know, if we could do that,

those million acres would be healthier

than it has a chance of being now.

And I would have done my part, so.

Buffalo Commons,

a land only for buffalo.

A land where they can roam and live freely.

A land which belongs to the people,

but is left to the bison,

just like it was in the days before the settlers arrived.

Dan O'Brien's dream matches those

of New Jersey professors Frank and Deborah Popper.

We thought that as a result of depopulation,

depopulation pressures, ecological pressures,

say like soil erosion, water table dropping,

that new land use would have to emerge between,

somewhere between standard agriculture,

standard ranching on the one hand,

and wilderness on the other.

We call that vision, the Buffalo Commons.

It relies very heavily on things like

new forms of agriculture

involving new kinds of production techniques.

It relies very heavily on ecotourism as a replacement,

as an economic linchpin of the Plains

for the traditional agriculture.

And it involves generally treating the land of the Plains

more sustainably than it had been

during the previous hundred plus years of white settlement.

Buffalo Commons, land of the buffalo.

And as buffalo returned to the Plains,

so do other species.

Prairie dogs were nearly exterminated by cattle ranchers

because of the fear that their burrow holes

could trip and break the cattle's legs.

But with the huge bison,

the tiny holes caused no problems.

We wanted something symbolic of the plains.

That's why we chose the buffalo.

We could have picked, say the prairie dog,

but they're not quite as charismatic,

although the preservation of the prairie dog

involves important ecological environmental issues.

Likewise, we could have, I suppose,

called it the Grasslands Commons.

Again, grass is very important in the ecology

and environment of the Plains.

But buffalo are,

buffalo draw more people than either prairie dogs or grass.

And the Buffalo Commons aims to try to undo the damage

of that over pressuring of the land

over all these generations.

It's basically,

it's essentially a plan B for the economic development

of a region whose plan A has clearly,

over and over and over again, different times,

different ways, failed.

Native Americans called

the buffalo bull Tatonka,

the holiest animal of the Lakota, Dakota,

and Cheyenne tribes, weighs nearly a ton.

The number of Native Americans living on the Plains

has steadily grown since the buffaloes return.

Every year, many Native Americans celebrate the battles won

in the wars against the white settlers,

like the Battle of Little Big Horn.

On July 25th, 1876, the Lakota and the Cheyenne

beat the white invaders under the leadership

of legendary Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

But after Little Big Horn,

the U.S. Army fought even harder to force

the remaining Lakota and Cheyenne onto reservations.

Jay Red Hawk is proud to be a Lakota.

One, two, three.

Jay Red Hawk is one of the first Lakota in modern times

to hunt buffalo with a bow and arrow.

In two years time, his eldest son will join him.

There you go.

Jay Red Hawk teaches his sons

to be prepared for when their quarry approaches

by placing their arrows in the ground

and setting their bow on top.

Here, the Army and the United States government,

it was policy, General Sherman wrote a letter

to General, to President Grant, who is on the $50 bill.

He said if you want to exterminate the Sioux,

kill all the buffalo.

They did it on purpose.

They killed, they murdered our relatives first,

and then they murdered us.

And the population of the buffalo

is going to depend on how many Lakotas there are.

And how many Dakotas there are.

How many Cheyennes there are.

That's the way it is.

When there's a lot of buffalo, there's a lot of us, okay?

And so, for a long time there was very little buffalo

and there were few Lakotas.

And now, the buffalo are coming back in your lifetime,

in your generation,

and the Lakota are coming back

and the Cheyenne are coming back.

There's more buffalo and there's more of us.

And so what's going to happen?

We have to hunt that buffalo and respect it

and do all the ceremonies and pray

and respect it so that it always comes back and feeds us.

Because we believe when we kill a buffalo,

where does he go?

The spirit world.

The spirit world.

And he tells the other buffalo, what does he tell them?

Does he tell them if we're treating them good or not?

And if he says, "They're treating us good down there,

"the Lakotas and Cheyennes are treating us good,"

what do the buffalo in the spirit world tell that buffalo?

Go back and be born again

and feed the people so they can live.

Buffalo Bill Cody...

A memorial in Kansas.

One with a built-in radio station.

It's not the buffalo which are honored,

but William Cody, otherwise known as Buffalo Bill,

The man the Kansas Pacific Railroad employed

to supply workers with buffalo meat.

By his own count, he killed 4,280 bison in just 17 months.

Here at the memorial, Buffalo Bill's story

is proudly told to every visitor.

In north Kansas, the prairie has been abandoned.

Farms without farmers.

Like here, the town of Lebanon in Smith County.

The average age in Lebanon is 56.

There are no stores.

The town's gun shop was the last to close in 1999.

Today, only a few members of the town's

Methodist church congregation remain.

Glenn Patterson is their pastor,

but he lives far from town.

Every Sunday, Reverend Patterson drives 100 miles

from his home in Plainville to Lebanon

and 100 miles back again, just to visit two churches.

But this is his last trip to Lebanon.

With a heavy heart, he has to give up his position

because the community was unable to raise

the money for his salary.

From next Sunday on,

he will drive just as far, but in another direction,

to a larger town, which needs a new pastor.

The harsh laws of supply and demand

even effect the ecclesiastical job market.

There's not enough families to support the salary.

Right now, the salary package is, uh,

for a full-time clergy is about 30,000

plus health benefits, so total package for a clergy

coming into a church is about $60,000,

so small churches just can't afford it.

They just don't have the money to pay that kind of salary.

Reverend Patterson has driven

to the Christian Church in Lebanon

and to the Union Chapel, just outside the city,

every Sunday for two years.

But the number of churchgoers continues to fall.

There was one family that I visit and he said

when he started farming 30 years ago,

the land he farms today supported 15 families.

Now he farms all that land.

So there's a lot of families that have sold out.

On a regular basis, you'll have two to three farms

that will sell out per week or month, you know,

it just, uh,

a lot of farms close out.

Oh, definitely within 20 years,

Lebanon will be assigned to Smith Center

And I would say in 20 years,

Lebanon will probably be closed.

I would say Union Chapel will probably be closed

within less than five.

They'll close within less five.

This is the Union Chapel,

standing just outside the town gates.

It's over 100 years old,

built around the time white settlers conquered the prairies

and slaughtered the buffalo.

Barely a handful of Methodists attend the church.

But that's common in Kansas and other Plains communities.

Upon those whose name this day

on our lips and our hearts,

whether joys...

Lebanon's faithful few have known

for a long time that Reverend Patterson won't be replaced

and the Union Chapel will close.

Thy will be done

on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Nancy Morgan will soon be playing her piano

in Lebanon's last church and the knowledge

that her town's days are numbered.

♪ Standing on the promises of Christ, my savior ♪

Phyllis Bell, a journalist from Lebanon,

knows that her town has no future.

Phyllis takes a break from chronicling life in the town

to visit her parents' house.

This was built by my grandfather, William Schroeder,

in 1875 from cottonwood trees.

He came to the United States from Prussia

and he settled in New York for five years.

And when they opened up the homesteads for 160 acres,

why, he decided to come out here.

The Homestead Act was the biggest

government land settling project in American history.

Free land was offered to settlers

so that the Plains could be colonized

and the Native Americans driven away.

The race was on to establish new homes and new lives.

Each settler received 160 acres of prairie land as a gift.

The first to ram his fence post into a patch of prairie

became the proud owner of that piece of land.

Plowing started right away,

so that cornfields could replace the wild buffalo grass.

It was a huge mistake.

The grass's long roots were the only thing

keeping the prairie's sandy soil anchored in place.

Plowing the prairies sowed the seeds of a disaster.

Equipment abandoned by settlers from Germany,

Scandinavia, and Ireland still litters the Plains.

Silent relics from a failed colonization.

The settlers dream of fertile farmland

finally ended with an unprecedented sandstorm,

which swept across the country in the 1930s.

I lived here during the drought and the Dust Bowl days.

I was, uh, in first grade, I think it was,

and I was walking home one day from school

and I thought it seemed kind of strange.

No one had seen a storm

like the Great Dust Bowl before.

In 1930, prairie sand was whipped up by the wind

and carried the breadth of the country,

all the way to New York

and far across the Atlantic Ocean.

That night, the wind came up and blew some dust in and

we had to take a light to see our way to bed

and we covered our faces up with wet cloths,

so as not to breathe so much of the dust.

And we had so much dust blow that

it covered the fences up.

And I didn't have to crawl through the fence

when I went back to school,

I could just walk right over it.

So that caused a lot of farmers

that ran aground to leave to find jobs in other places.

A lot of them went to Oregon and California

and places like that.

50 years ago or more, we had like 700 people in our town

and now it's down to about 250.

It's been, you know, it's been gradual over the years,

but every year we have a census, it's always down.

Lebanon will be a ghost town in a few years.

Over half the houses are already abandoned.

The state bank was sold three years ago on eBay

for just $5,000.

The new owner lives in California

and is believed to have earned his millions

through computer software.

This millionaire bidder from Silicon Valley

had never been to Lebanon,

but is supposedly proud to own a bank building.

Just for fun.

Cemeteries have proven to be one helpful way

to measure when the colonists arrived

and when they left.

The Poppers frequently visit the Great Plains ghost towns.

Over the years, they have recorded

rapidly falling populations in every single community

on the Prairies.

The spark for the settlement of the Great Plains

was the passage during the Civil War of

the 1862 Homestead Act.

By the early 1870s, white settlers were

flooding out onto many Great Plains places.

They had a few good years,

a sort of short boom period,

but by the say, by roughly 1890,

many of the places were experiencing a bust.

There were a few good years again through World War I,

but then in the 1930s hit the ecological catastrophe,

the world scale ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl,

and many populations have been, in many places,

declining ever since.

As a result, the small family farms that developed

out of, and ranches, that developed

out of various Homestead Acts could not make it economically

as a result.

Naturally, the farm sizes grew,

technology encourage that further mechanization,

things like the tractor,

required fewer and fewer people on larger and larger

plots of land producing actually ever larger amounts

of breadbasket style production.

Cattle, corn, cotton, or wheat, whatever.

And this trend keeps going on to this day

and is also since the 1930s, very heavily subsidized

in monetary terms by the federal government

and does not seem likely to stop anytime soon.

For Phyllis Bell, giving up is not an option.

People living on the Plains are used to hardship

and many won't entertain moving away.

It's a Midwest mindset.

Alone, but undaunted, Phyllis produces Lebanon's

only daily newspaper, "The Lebanon Times."

She believes a proper town needs a proper newspaper.

We have 600 papers printed

and so we have about 250 subscribers

that get the paper here in town

and we had some papers in the store

that the others that don't subscribe can pick up.

And then we have about that many subscribers

that take the paper away from here.

They, mostly people that have lived here and

they want to know what's going on back in the old hometown.

When are you going to retire?

I think mainly that'll depend on my health.

As long as I can keep working, I probably will,

because I don't know who'd take my place.

And I, you know, our town's lucky to have a newspaper.

As long as I can do it, I guess I probably will.

Bob Levin used to be the caretaker

at Lebanon Grade School.

He liked the job, liked the children,

but over the years, one teacher after the other

lost their jobs.

Bob was the last to leave.

They closed school here in 1984.

Why?

Lack of pupils.

Just not enough, uh,

not enough pupils and not enough kids here

to keep the school viable.

Do you think they'll come back?

I don't, I don't think that's going to happen.

I don't see any indication that that's ever going to happen.

What does it mean, a community without kids?

Well, it's an old community and it's,

it's a very aged oriented community.

We don't have anything going on here for children.

Just don't have any children here.

There's nothing for them to do.

And it's just the older generation living here.

Younger people move away

and get a taste of city life, I guess,

and they stay.

That's where their livelihood is.

I don't think there's much of...

I don't think there's much of a future here,

to be truthful with you.

'Cause everything, everybody's getting older and

when they pass away, why,

there's nobody to take their place.

Lebanon sits right at the heart

of the United States.

The land surrounding the town belongs to the Warner family,

who still believe there is a future for farmers.

They want to stay,

even though their neighbors

have long since given up and gone.

This is Randall Warner and his youngest son, Travis.

Travis is 19 years old and Randall's last hope.

30 years ago, Randall took the farm over from his parents.

Besides the new equipment he invests in every year,

he leases or buys land which once belonged

to farmers who've called it quits.

Randall now owns 3,000 acres of land,

but he works from dawn to dusk.

Despite using the latest agrochemicals and fertilizers,

his earnings from the land shrink every year.

It's all an economy of scale because

the prices we receive for our products don't go up much.

And all of our input cost just have escalated

in the last few years.

I mean, quadrupled.

Fuel is part of the reason for that.

Fuel's higher, fertilizer's higher.

You can't make a wrong move today,

or you've lost many dollars.

And that's another reason that young people

aren't coming back,

is the economic benefits and the returns are small.

But yet it's pretty demanding on their time.

We're not talking an eight hour day.

In June, father and son work 16 hours a day.

19 year old Travis studies animal husbandry

at a college 350 miles away,

but during the holidays helps his father.

Back home on the family farm, Travis is unhappy

that the girl next door lives many miles away.

There's people that I see and talk to,

but it's not like you step next door

to talk to the neighbors for 15 minutes here.

You know, the neighbors are four miles away.

I am playing legion baseball this summer,

so I see those guys twice a week or whatever.

They're my age.

By the time he was 14,

Travis was already an expert tractor driver.

I'm here and I already know how to do this.

And I've already done it.

So I guess it's a young mind, but it's like it's old news

and a little part of me wants to just move on

and try new things.

Think your dad would be very disappointed?

Yeah, I think he would be.

I think he would be.

Travis's elder brothers and sisters

have long since left.

They think there's no future in farming.

Randall would be sad if his third and youngest child

gave up the family business, too.

Travis doesn't discuss his plans for the future

with his father.

They've agreed he will tell Randall his decision

when he finishes his studies in about two years' time.

Until then, Randall is full of hope.

He's his own man

and he can do what he wants.

But I believe he'll be back here.

I've seen enough of what he does and how he, uh,

how he acts and his love for the business

that he'll be back.

You can take, the old saying, the cliche,

you can take the boy away from the farm,

but you can't take the farm out of the boy.

And I just hope in this instance

that the farm won't be taken away from the boy

and he'll be able to come back.

And I think he will come back.

800 miles north, in South Dakota,

meet Flower.

The little orphan eagerly awaits his twice daily feed.

Flower is fed by Dave Schroth,

the manager of the 777 Ranch.

Dave returned to South Dakota and to his first love,

raising buffalo, after completing his studies.

I found her out in the pasture,

near about two and a half months ago.

We were checking on the buffalo herd

and she was by herself, so.

I don't know if her mom just left her,

if she was a young cow or what,

but we've been bottle feeding her ever since.

She'll actually stay here on a bottle

for about another two months.

And then, hopefully in another month after that,

we'll turn her back out into the herd.

And she'll just be a cow after that.

Dave keeps roughly 3,000 bison

on the 777 Ranch.

He doesn't know exactly how many animals he has.

It's hard to keep count on over 50 square miles of prairie.

The 777 Ranch was one of the first ranches

to successfully switch from raising cattle

to raising bison instead.

In Frank and Deborah Popper's eyes,

the 777 is a prototype

for the possible economic regeneration

of the whole of the Plains.

This is Pat.

He was raised by hand, too.

He has no natural fear of humans.

He certainly seems pleased

to see the man who used to bring him his daily milk bottle.

The young bull seems to think

the camera is even more attractive,

which makes the camera man just a little bit nervous.

Try and chase him off without him getting mad.

Dave gently shoos the wild animal away.

He explains later that you can never tell with a bull

whether he wants to play or not.

Over the past 20 years, the Poppers have watched

as buffalo grass has once again spread across the Plains.

Each blade of grass has roots stretching about six feet,

one square yard of grass equals several miles of roots,

keeping the sandy soil anchored in place.

Thanks to the grassroots,

there will never be another Dust Bowl.

One of the functions of the buffalo

in walking around among the grass is to,

just by their leg action, scatter seeds of grass

and allow the grass to proliferate

just by moving around, walking around.

They do that.

Also buffalo need relatively little water to survive

compared to cattle,

which makes them historically better suited

to the very dry, very water variable conditions

of the Plains.

One of the things that's really important

is the mix of grasses, of native grasses.

The native grasses themselves have roots

that go down 12, 15 feet and anchor that soil in place.

And that gives them the ability to withstand drier,

dry seasons and seasons with rain.

So they just, they hunker down and they stay.

And it's just an absolutely wonderful feature of them.

The bison actually, and this is one of the important things

about how we think about the prairie,

eat a very interesting mix of the grasses

and the, and the Forbs, the wildflowers,

that keeps that mix going so that there's

lots and lots of health to the Prairie.

The cattle of their own volition would be much,

have a much narrower range or different range,

and so they, in fact, tend to expose the soils

differently from the bison.

So, a native prairie is, in fact,

a place that's developed with the bison.

And so keeping that mix of grasses and wildflowers

that the bison select for

is one of the things that keeps the health of the soil.

Close to the 777 Ranch are the fabled Badlands.

This is the hallowed place where,

according to Lakota mythology,

the buffalo descended from the spirit world

to offer himself as food to the humans.

It is still a place where Native Americans

thank their creator in a holy ceremony.

Native Americans of the Plains were once totally dependent

on the success of the buffalo hunt.

Besides food, the animals provided the raw materials

for clothes and footwear, weapons, tools, and teepees.

Even their droppings were a priceless source of fuel

in the vast tree-free plains.

Surviving on the prairies requires a complete,

efficient use of every resource

for humans and animals alike.

Although the Badlands are extremely dry,

millions of buffalo once lived here.

Bison, unlike imported foreign cattle,

make much more efficient use of the scarcest water supply.

You see, today, it's a hot day.

And so as a result, they're up here on this hill.

Cattle would never do this.

Cattle would be standing down in the water,

in the riparian zones where, you know,

all these different plants,

there's a different plant ecosystem around water.

Here in the Plains, we're short of water.

So this ecosystem grows

and cattle need to get in there when it's hot.

Just for their own metabolism.

And as they do that,

they destroy that habitat for hundreds of other species.

Buffalo don't need that.

They're insulated, they get up on top of the hill,

you see their tails going.

They're flipping flies away.

They're up in the little breeze.

They're fine.

The same thing is true in the wintertime,

you know, when it's cold out,

the cattle need to be standing in the trees

so that it breaks the wind.

These guys will stand right out here, no problem

And as a result, the cattle destroy the trees,

the buffalo don't.

And with the trees goes all different,

another whole suite of species gets destroyed.

The buffalo's innate ability

to survive with only meager water supplies

was one reason Duane Lammers was able to implement

a very successful bison resettling project.

Duane, the former manager of the 777 Ranch,

is in great demand as a buffalo expert in the United States.

He operates as an advisor for many Hollywood productions

and as a consultant for a government agricultural policy.

Although retired from the day-to-day business

of running the ranch,

he still flies by occasionally in his private plane

to check on the fences of the 777.

In 1984, Duane took charge of his first bison

from Yellowstone Park.

He soon found out that they were no work at all,

compared to the cattle he had bred for years

and discovered there is more money to be made

breeding buffalo than cattle.

Duane saw for himself how buffalo can survive

the sudden and dramatic changes in prairie weather.

There's a lot of people think the bison are

a lot harder to handle than they really are.

A lot of people think you need very high fences.

They see the eight foot high woven wire fences at parks

and they think that's the kind of fence you need

for a buffalo.

They, uh...

You know, they think they're hard to handle and actually,

my experience is,

in many ways they're much easier to herd than cattle.

But I can also tell you

I've had a lot of hard times with them early on.

I mean, we tend to,

we tended to try to handle them too much like cattle.

Uh, you know, now I've actually moved this whole herd

of 2,000 head by myself on foot

from one 3500 acre pasture to another.

It took me about three hours.

But we really focused on how to understand these animals

and their behavior.

So when we gather them in a corral like this, for instance,

we don't have animals running into fences.

We have the animals staying calmer.

You know, some people would say these animals are domestic

versus ones in parks.

I've been around a lot of the park animals.

I've been around these animals.

They're the same animal.

You know, it's, uh...

You know, the bison learn that

if they go up a dead end canyon,

they understand that's a dead end canyon.

And they also know if it's a canyon they can go through,

they can go through that canyon.

And really we're just, with fences here in the corral,

we're creating artificial canyons.

About nine years ago we had a very bad winter

that really tested all that.

Almost a half million cattle died

in the state of South Dakota

because of the very severe cold and snow.

And no buffalo were lost.

The critical temperature for a beef cow

is about 13º centigrade.

That's where they need to take on feed to stay warm.

And for a buffalo, it's -45.

Now, it actually may be colder, but the only,

the equipment they had that they could test with

only went to -45, so.

But I've seen days when it's 70 below Fahrenheit wind chills

with buffalo standing out on a side hill,

grazing and seem impervious to the weather.

You know, one of,

you know, part of all that is trying to figure out

all the different uses for the bison.

Not only is it a great quality meat,

but we work with marketing the leather

for several things.

The leather in the testing we've done has

twice the tensile strength of beef hides

and takes twice as much to rub through it as a beef hide.

We've worked with marketing the hair and down

off the animals.

It makes it very nice cloth that makes felt hats.

In fact, we've used,

we've had a use for every part of the buffalo.

If there is a buffalo capital

in the United States, it's Rapid City, South Dakota.

The Prairie Edge grew on the site of a closed liquor store

in the center of town.

The shop is part of the 777 Ranch

and specializes in selling anything buffalo.

Native American artists were welcome at the Prairie Edge

from the day it opened.

This was a place where they were paid fairly

for their traditional art.

The most common design now, as then, is the sacred bison.

As the buffalo return to the Plains,

so do the Native Americans.

Jay Red Hawk, the Lakota, is hard at work making bows

and arrows for the Prairie Edge.

A few years ago, he came from the west to South Dakota

to live in the sacred home of his ancestors.

This way of life that's happening nowadays

is a very destructive way of life.

And now our buffalo hunting grounds are Super Walmart.

This is where we see all our relatives on the prairie,

at Super Walmart.

This is where we get our meat

and our pop and our chips and our food.

And this is why we have diabetes, heart disease,

and all these types of things, kidney problems.

So during the winter we'll hunt deer with rifle or bow,

we hunt buffalo,

and sometimes nowadays we have to buy the buffalo

and we'll go to a ranch like Dan O'Brien's,

who is a good man, and he really supports

us trying to have our traditional culture.

But he gives us a good deal and we go down there

and we shake hands and we work together.

We'll hunt the buffalo.

And the whole family will pitch in the money

and then we'll butcher it.

We don't go to a butcher.

We do it ourselves.

Never once have I been sick from a deer or an elk

or an antelope or a buffalo that I've butchered.

But I've been sick from McDonald's and Jack in the Box

and all these places.

Burger King, all that.

Millions of buffalo once lived

on these vast plains,

but the bison are returning.

Once again, a rarely seen courtship ritual

lights up the plains.

The dance of the bull.

120 years ago, just 800 were left alive.

The species was nearly exterminated in just 30 years.

And now the fact that today nearly 150,000 bison exist

can be credited to the initiative of just a few.

The return of the buffalo happened

without any government backing.

We are a Jeffersonian country,

a country in part founded on the ideas of Thomas Jefferson.

One of whose key statements was that government,

that government governs best which governs least.

The idea of federal land use planning in any field,

in any, for any kind of land use, not just the Great Plains,

is very uncomfortable for Americans, a lot of ways,

so that proposals for federal land use planning

either don't happen or get watered down

or pass, but are never really enforced terribly well.

Fred DuBray, a Lakota from the Cheyenne River Reservation

on the Missouri, didn't rely on government funding.

Fred dedicates his life to reintroducing buffalo

to the land of his forefathers.

He believes that the fate of Native Americans and buffalo

are closely intertwined.

If you think about the history of the United States,

I mean, they tried to settle this land

when Europeans first came over

and several times they passed through

and they overlooked the Plains area.

People didn't want to settle here

because it wasn't what they were accustomed to.

They were accustomed to nice bottom fertile farm lands,

trees and rivers and mountain streams.

Those are the kinds of things that people wanted to see

and where they wanted to settle.

So after they settled all those places,

then there were still more people coming through.

There was no more room for those kinds of places,

so the government saw that they had overlooked this area,

that people had gone through here and, you know,

pretty much chose not to settle there.

So they started giving incentives to settle

and they said, well, we'll give you the land.

We will, we'll have the Homestead Act

and we'll give you, you know, several hundred acres of land

if you'll live there.

And if you want to farm it,

we'll give you some farming tools

and we'll give you all these things.

And that was all just a means to convince people to move

out here onto the land.

Once they got here and started farming it,

they realized the soil wasn't productive enough to farm.

But the government kept subsidizing it

because it was important for them to have

these European people living here

to displace the Indian people.

Which is very unfortunate for us because

it was to break up our patterns that we had with the land.

And we're still here, so I think there's still promise

that we can turn things around,

but that's part of what has to take place

in order to get buffalo back on land,

get Indian people in a more productive way

of looking after the land.

And I think the benefits are for everybody.

Like many resident Native Americans,

Fred DuBray worked on Kevin Costner's

multi-award winning historical epic "Dances with Wolves."

He was employed as the wolf trainer.

Nowadays, he is the executive bison manager

of the Cheyenne River Reservation.

He owns more than 800 animals

and that number grows every year.

He studies and admires the buffalo's

complex social behavior.

My wife and I, one time,

we watched out of the window of our house.

This poor little calf had broken its leg and

so the herd was all there

and they were trying to get the calf to follow along and

decided they're going to leave.

And the mother, of course, was torn between

going with the herd.

And that's real powerful pull

because they're real social animals.

They don't like to be alone.

So when the herd starts leaving,

they all want to go together.

So the poor mother was torn between

going with the bunch or caring for her calf,

which couldn't go.

So she'd run back and forth.

You could just see the conflict.

She'd run and go with the wild,

then she'd run back to her calf and

try to nudge it along and the poor little calf

just couldn't go.

And finally, she chose to go with the herd, so.

She went about 10 minutes later, well,

the herd was about a mile away

and here 10 young bulls come on a dead run

and came back to the calf

and they all started nudging it, trying to pick it up.

They'll actually get their horns underneath one another

when they're hurt, lift each other up and help them along.

And they were doing that with this calf.

There'd be a couple on each side have their horns under it

and then kind of picking it up

and another one behind it nudging it along and

trying to get it going.

It just couldn't do it.

And finally the little calf just gave up

and flopped on its side and

so then just that quick, the bulls just turned on it

and killed it.

And they took off back to the bunch again on a run.

So about 10 minutes later,

all of a sudden here come the whole herd come back.

Then single file, every one of them went up to that calf

and sniffed at it, paying their little respects,

and then they went on.

And we sat there and watched that whole thing.

It was a real powerful experience,

to see those and witness those kind of ceremonies

is just awesome.

And to realize that, you know,

the power and strength in that social structure

and to realize that that's where we learn from ourselves

and that makes it even more meaningful.

Over time, Fred DuBray finally convinced

more than 70 Native American tribes that buffalo breeding

is much more profitable than cattle breeding.

Not only from a financial point of view,

but also from a spiritual one.

Bison and Native Americans have been inseparable

since the first day of creation.

I don't think the buffalo are going to be able to exist

without the help of the tribes.

And the tribes aren't going to be able to exist

without the help of the buffalo.

That's just the reality.

So however it goes, you know,

they're both going to have to be involved because,

like the elders say, we've been one and the same, you know.

So our lives are entwined, you know, ever since day one.

The Poppers' idea to make

the Midwest attractive again through revitalizing nature

is feasible to Native Americans living on the prairies.

Without the Native Americans,

the Plains would have been impossible to save.

I've always been a dreamer and, you know,

I feel kind of cheated, actually,

not being able to see 50 million buffalo

out here on the landscape.

Because that's what this country needs.

And so, you know, I've pretty much dedicated my life

trying to get as close back to that number as I could.

And, you know, whether or not we'll ever see 50 million

or a million, you know, it remains to be seen,

but that's kinda what I'm all about is that

I think that we can probably do that in some way.

Millions of bison roaming the Plains again?

Why not?

20 years ago, it seemed impossible to dream of thousands.

Now that dream is a reality.

As the buffalo slowly return to their rightful home,

it's hoped humans will follow.