Two families crucial to saving American bison

Jackie Means has only faded memories of her childhood pilgrimages to Custer State Park to view the famous buffalo herd. Her first adult visits, back in the 1960s, remain much more vivid. “There were buffalo all over,” she said. Back then, the herd’s size numbered 2,500, its peak, since reduced to prevent overgrazing its Black Hills refuge. Those glimpses of the buffalo were family reunions of a sort. Means’ paternal grandfather, Scotty Philip, once lauded as “The Man Who Saved the Buffalo,” raised the bison that provided the foundation for today’s Custer State Park herd. The park’s herd started in 1914, three years after his death, with the purchase of 36 buffalo for about $11,000 from the Philip ranch near Fort Pierre. Actually, Philip had a bit of help. He bought 83 buffalo from the estate of another rancher, Fred Dupree, who had rounded up five bison calves when buffalo were on the brink of extinction. But, as descendants of both the Philip and Dupree families attest, there was more to the story of how those two legendary ranchers helped spare the American bison from annihilation. Their wives, Mary Good Elk Woman Dupree and Sarah Philip, were unsung heroines in the saga, largely ignored by historians but credited by their families for their roles. Both women were Lakota, for whom the buffalo are sacred. And both, according to their descendants, helped persuade their husbands to rescue buffalo for their preservation...read more