Don’t Fence Me In

“Try and picture them all. On his first visit to the Waterton area in 1865, John (‘Kootenai’) Brown wrote: ‘The prairie as far as we could see east, north and west was one living mass of buffalo. Thousands of head there were, far thicker than ever range cattle grazed the bunch grass of the foothills… None of our party up to this time had ever seen a buffalo.’ They were seeing a doomed species. Deliberately and wastefully slaughtered by a newcomer people, within barely two decades North America’s great bison herds—once totalling more than 30 million—were all but gone. Only empty grasslands and bleached bones remained.”

 

Kevin Van Tighem – Alberta Views – July 2018

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