Last night I was listening to it rain and watching episode one of Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns’s The American Buffalo. I had about fifteen minutes still to go when a friend emailed and said he had finished the entire two-part, four-hour series. It led to a brief email back and forth in which we agreed that we had both learned some things we had not known. Some of the buffalo story was of course familiar: the centrality of the bison to Native American life for centuries, the land hunger and push ever-westward in the years just before and after the Civil War, the way the railroad companies advocated—successfully—for the annihilation of the great herds. Other parts of the story were less familiar to me, such as the use of buffalo-hide leather in literally turning the gears during the Industrial Revolution. Two years I took a trip to the Mystic Seaport Museum. Until that visit I did not grasp the full role of whaling in the industrial economy. In some ways the whale and buffalo are analogous. For one thing whale oil lubricated the gears rotated by the buffalo-hided belts that turned the spinning wheels on the factory floors of the Eastern mill towns. What is more, the remains of the whale and the buffalo were used in clothing, combs, corsets, jewelry, glue and just about everything one can imagine.
Burns and his colleagues have covered aspects of the buffalo story over what are now decades, most obviously in the nine-part The West (1996) and six-episode The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009). There is a through line in the corpus of work; some of the historical figures and themes that appear in The American Buffalo were naturally present in those earlier projects too. Burns and his colleagues have gone deeper here in this effort and given us a fuller picture. I’m looking forward to learning more tonight when I watch the concluding episode.