On June 4, 1888, the Barnum and Bailey Circus rolled into Keokuk, Iowa with all its wonders — hyenas, lions, leopards, a whole contingent of elephants, trick ponies, trapezists, contortionists, leapers and tumblers and trained monkeys — in tow. But the circus’s manager, J.A. Bailey, the same Bailey of the name Barnum and Bailey, saw something in unassuming Keokuk that he wanted for his own collection: A pair of American buffalo (species: Bison bison), male and female, that lived in Keokuk’s Rand Park.
The zoological park held deer, elk, bears and at least one camel, but the buffalo were especially magnetic. At the time, buffalo were nearing extinction. Populations estimated to be greater than 40 million pre-colonialism had dwindled to less than 1,000 individuals, thanks largely to white settlers’ over-hunting and extermination projects.
But in the late 1800s, Keokuk was lucky to have a few of the animals in Rand Park, and their park commissioner, recognizing like Mr. Bailey the value of the charismatic megafauna, turned down Bailey’s $1,000 offer for the bison pair.
Two years after Bailey’s offer, almost to the day, the Keokuk Constitution-Democrat reported that Rand Park’s buffalo had produced a calf. Locals flocked to the park to see the new little female, who the paper described as “frisky and gay.” It was 1890 and the tiny herd would stay safely in Rand Park while across the country nature enthusiasts and sportsmen called for national conservation efforts that would slowly take hold over the next few decades.
By 1905, William T. Hornaday, Theodore Roosevelt and a few others would form the American Bison Society, an organization dedicated to saving bison from extinction. When the American Bison Society called for a national census of America’s extant buffalo in 1913, Keokuk’s Rand Park was able to proudly report four animals, two female and two male.
Biologists in the early 1900s spent a lot of time arguing about whether or not bison were native to Iowa. The confusion stemmed partly from the dwindling number of bison found in Iowa by the time colonial settlers arrived. Even though the species wouldn’t be near extinction until the late 1800s, their numbers had already dropped at the century’s beginning because of increased demand from European hide and meat trades and pressure placed by Indigenous nations on food sources as white settlers forced them into smaller and smaller areas. By the time white settlers reached Iowa en masse in the early 1800s, bison were functionally extinct east of the Mississippi River, so people just assumed they never had been there.
The debate, which seems a bit silly today, was settled by the 1930s: bison were native to Iowa, and they had existed east of the Mississippi long before white settlers arrived.
Nearly 150 years after Bailey’s offer to purchase Keokuk’s buffalo, on Oct. 14, 2023, Iowa PBS and the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge hosted an early screening of Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary, The American Buffalo. The documentary, which aired on Iowa PBS in two parts on Oct. 16 and 17, covers the history of the plains bison. From precolonial, Indigenous bonds with bison to the modern era, Burns’ documentary is a broad examination of America’s relationship with these massive mammals, and the choices of white settlers that nearly brought them to extinction.
Plains bison are the darling of the conservation world. They’re a real comeback story. Today, the buffalo population that once dipped into three digits has climbed back to the tens of thousands. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a little more than 20,000 buffalo are currently held in conservation herds across America while another 420,000 individuals live in commercial bison herds. The magnitude of their recovery is absolutely staggering.
Even though bison aren’t in danger of extinction, they’re considered ecologically extinct in most places. This means they don’t play the ecological role they used to. Bison were a keystone species for America’s prairie ecosystems, supporting the entire biome — they carried seeds across land in their fur, created habitats for specialized plants with their wallows which also collected water, supported plant diversity with their grazing patterns, and shaped the landscape in a myriad of other ways.
The buffalos’ historic relationship with the land has been lost in many places. Tallgrass prairie, the ecosystem most commonly associated with buffalo conservation, is one of America’s most threatened ecosystems. Less than 4 percent of tallgrass prairie remains, most of it in Kansas’s Flint Hills. Iowa has saved less than 0.1 percent of its tallgrass prairie.
Despite this, different organizations have made concerted efforts to conserve Iowa buffalo and their tallgrass prairie habitat. Iowa’s largest conservation buffalo herd, the Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve herd managed by the Nature Conservancy, includes 200 individuals, brought in as a herd of 28 in 2008. Broken Kettle is Iowa’s largest remaining prairie, according to The Nature Conservancy.
Iowa’s oldest conservation herd, the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge’s herd, was established in 1996 in what was then called the Walnut Creek National Wildlife Refuge with 14 individuals. It has since expanded to 60.
The Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge and the Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve also work in partnership with the Intertribal Buffalo Council (ITBC). ITBC is an Indigenous organization and “a collection of 80 tribes in 20 different states that facilitates the management of over 20 thousand buffalo,” according to their website. The Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge and the Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve both regularly exchange bison with members of ITBC. The Meskwaki Nation in Iowa, a member tribe of the Intertribal Buffalo Council, manages a herd on 205 acres. Exchanging animals encourages healthy genetic diversity in herds and supports continued Indigenous-bison relationships in Iowa and across the country.
Scott Gilje, refuge manager of the Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge, believes firmly in the value of bison conservation. Gilje talks passionately about the bison’s role in restoring the refuge’s prairie land. His staff has found plants evolved specifically to grow around bison wallows that didn’t grow on the refuge before the bison. The wallows are also catching rain, creating a water network on the prairie just like they used to. With help from the resident elk who eat the woody vegetation that could otherwise overtake the grassland, the prairie is really coming back.
It’s been a long road for the refuge to get this far, and it all started with big conservation dreams.
“[The Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge’s] herd was brought onto the refuge in 1996 B.S. I always tell people that stands for ‘before Scott,’” Gilje laughs. “The manager at the time had two goals for the bison. First, they wanted the bison to support the process of natural prairie restoration and, second, they hoped bison would draw the public to the refuge.”
Gilje reports that the bison have been successful in both of their jobs. The public adores them and the animals have made public education more accessible and engaging. Now, Gilje is submitting proposals to expand the herd’s conservation land from the current 800 acres to 1,600. He hopes this will allow the refuge to double their bison population, from 60 to 120.
“Many of our visitors are students from Des Moines,” Gilije explained. “People from urban areas often haven’t seen bison before.”
“Statewide bison conservation is the pie-in-the-sky dream,” he continued. It’s a difficult dream to follow, largely because Iowa is deeply invested in industrial agriculture. Most of Iowa’s land is dedicated to farming, so conservation outside of strictly defined boundaries would require a lot of work and compromise with local farmers.
There is hope, however. “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife program already does some work with farmers,” Gilje said, “but statewide conservation would require a lot more.”
It’s easy to dream big when thinking about the bison. They’re big themselves — up to 2,000 pounds — and they used to be almost everywhere on this continent in huge numbers. If anything can bring them back at that scale, it’s a lot of small efforts from a lot of people, building over time.
“I just want to get the word out that Neal Smith exists,” Gilje said. “We’re here. We have the bison and the elk.”
It’s hard not think back to the little bison calf in Keokuk’s Rand Park, whose birth brought visitors from far and wide. Three bison is more than two; 60 is greater still.
A shorter version of this article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2023 issue as a part of Peak Iowa, a collection of fascinating state stories, sites and people.