American Buffalo: In search of a lost icon

In 2005, Steven Rinella was one of 24 random winners of a bison permit from the Copper River herd in the foothills of Alaska 's Wrangell Mountains. Despite the odds--there's only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful--Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Steven Rinella's fascination with buffalo began in the late 1990s when he unearthed a buffalo skull while hiking in the Madison Range in southwest Montana. A Michigan native who grew up hunting deer and honed his skills in the Upper Peninsula, he is a serious hunter and fisherman. American Buffalo is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion Mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.