Dayton Duncan on Tragedy, Hope and Duality in New PBS Doc ‘The American Buffalo’

In the 2009 documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, Dayton Duncan quotes the late American author and historian Wallace Stegner about the duality of human beings and our free will. We are, to paraphrase Stegner’s powerful quote, at once dangerous and capable of mercy.

And so it reasons that Duncan, himself a prolific award-winning author and film producer, would bet on the same hand in his latest effort with acclaimed director Ken Burns on a film about what Duncan calls “one of the most profound tragedies of American history,” yet one also full of hope and possibility.

“I told Ken, ‘I’m using Stegner again,” Duncan said. “That’s the story we’re telling.”

The American Buffalo is a four-hour documentary premiering on PBS over two nights on Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 16 and 17. The film tracks how an unprecedented slaughter and America’s insatiable thirst for growth during the 1800s slashed an estimated 30 million bison to less than a thousand in fewer than 100 years. The story is being hailed as an essential work chronicling the near extinction of the American bison, their inseparable relationship with Native American tribes, and the birth of the conservation movement.

“It's operating both on an environmental and societal level,” Duncan said, “because of how intertwined it is with our treatment of Native People. It’s tragic almost beyond belief. At the same time, it didn't end there. And, and it does point us toward hope.”

Burns directed the film and Duncan wrote it along with a companion book published Oct. 10 called Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo. The book follows the same storyline as the documentary but allows for the inclusion of more detail based on the exhaustive research Duncan conducts. It’s a deep dive, he says, and it works for the written word. In film, much of that detail ends up on the cutting room floor.

“To make a two-hour episode, you have maybe 42 pages of a script,” Duncan said. “And so as deep and dense as we hope we can make it, it can't contain everything. Our standard joke is when a scene falls to the editing floor, Ken will pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘Don't worry, that can still be in the book.’”

Blood Memory, Duncan estimated, would equate to a 12-hour film. If you recall, Burns’ and Duncan’s National Parks documentary was 12 hours long, and as in the earlier film, they use the quote again as the basis for their latest project. Stegner’s words are at once haunting and hopeful:

“We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.”

The key word, Duncan said, is chooses.

Dayton Duncan is a chronicler of the American journey. The award-winning author and film producer has written 14 books and collaborated with friend and colleague Ken Burns on 10 films over the past 30 years.

Duncan spoke with Mountain Journal from his home in New Hampshire on Oct. 10, the day Blood Memory was published and the week before The American Bison premiered on PBS, to discuss the story, its themes, and whether it would be a grand finale for Duncan and Burns following more than three decades of collaboration.

Mountain Journal: Welcome, Dayton. This film is generating quite a bit of attention, and your book as well, which was published today. Congratulations.

Dayton Duncan: Today is the official publication date, yes. Thank you for reminding me to raise a glass of a Buffalo Trace tonight.

MoJo: You’re welcome, and thank you for joining us. The film The American Buffalo and its companion book Blood Memory both tell the story of the American bison; of tragedy and destruction, but also of hope and the rise of the conservation ethic. You and director Ken Burns worked on this project for four years. What sparked your interest?

D.D.: I first got fascinated in the book back in the early ‘80s when I was doing research for a magazine article that then became my first book called Out West, in which I retraced the route of Lewis and Clark and the history of the American West. In that, one of the more prominent changes was on the Great Plains, which was abundant with wildlife, many of it new to these easterners. They’d known of bison but hadn’t seen it in the east for [nearly] 100 years. The profusion of wildlife and particularly astonishing numbers of buffalo was a big thing for that whole journey. They were astonished by the sheer numbers of them—they estimated herds of 10,000 and 20,000 and 30,000. Then William Clark said, “I'm gonna give up trying to count these things; they’re uncountable.”

They had to stop their canoes for an hour or more while a herd crossed the Yellowstone in front of them, and when they got to what’s now Montana, [Meriwether] Lewis noted that they were so thick the men had used sticks and stones just to get them out of the way. Then in less than a century, an expedition went out from the Museum of Natural History in New York and spent three months in that same area of Montana and couldn't find a single buffalo. So that gap, which is how we open our film, is the glass of cold water in the face to say, “Woah, what happened?”

MoJo: You’ve referenced bison in some of your earlier projects. Why did you and Ken Burns decide to tell this story now?

D.D.:  We've been wanting to do this story in its entirety for more than 30 years, but other film projects kept intervening. We touch on the buffalo story in a number of our films. In our series on the West, we talk about the hide hunters in the 1870s and the destruction resulting from that once the railroads had arrived in the West. In Lewis and Clark, we dealt with how many buffalo there were when the United States was first laying its claim to the West, and in National Parks we dealt with the situation in Yellowstone, which was the "last refuge" as George Bird Grinnell called it, of free-roaming buffalo on the continent. And in our film on the Dust Bowl, we tangentially talked about how the short-grass prairie in the southern Plains had evolved to withstand in conjunction with buffalo grazing on it.

But we still wanted to do the whole story. In other words, to use a biography, if you will, of an animal as a portal into American history, because it touches on so many different aspects of that.

MoJo: There is clearly a strong Native American component driving the narrative, one that is inseparable from the story of bison. How did you and Burns feel, as non-Native, interviewing Indigenous leaders and writing about the relationship certain tribes had with bison?

D.D.: In the 1980s, my first fascination and really introduction to not only buffalo but the Native perspective on it was through a young person working for the National Park Service, Gerard Baker, who is Mandan-Hidatsa. He was working at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and one of his duties was to oversee the buffalo herd in the north unit. He and I became very close friends, and he tutored me about the notion that the story of the American buffalo is the story of the American Indian and they’re inseparable.

In doing this film, one of our chief objectives was to get that across as clearly and as powerfully as we could. And obviously, the best way to do that was not just to have the narrator talk about it, but to have Native people bring to it their voice, both in terms of historic voices like Old Lady Horse, but also living Native people who could give it that extra dimension because it's so personal to them.

We had a number of Native people as advisors to the film. Richard West, who is a Southern Cheyenne and was the founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, agreed to be the senior advisor. We also had an advisor named Jason Baldes who's from the Wind River Shoshone Reservation. He's got a degree in biology but is also heavily involved with the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council and the return of many more buffalo now to reservations.

MoJo: The relationship between Native Americans and bison that you depict in the film is remarkable. What can folks expect to learn about that connection in the film?

D.D.: The 10,000-year or more relationship between Native people and the buffalo was extraordinary. They depended on it for their survival—for food, and the hides for warmth, clothing, teepees—bones and other body parts where every bit of the buffalo was used. As our friend Gerard Baker says in the film, “We used everything but the snort.”

And even then, Baker says, they used some of the noises they made in their ceremonies, and even the waste wasn't wasted because they used dried buffalo chips for their fires. But equally important was a spiritual relationship. It was wrapped into so much of their view of the relationship that humans have with the natural world, and the bison were particularly crucial in that notion because they were seen as the prime representation of the sun. The most important religious ceremony for many Plains tribes was the Sun Dance, which was a renewal ceremony to renew this kinship they felt toward all living things and the Earth itself, and for that a buffalo needed to be sacrificed.

Then the story we follow is the arrival of newcomers to the continent who brought with them a very different view of human beings’ relationship with the natural world, one of mastery versus co-equal. [These newcomers] viewed buffalo as Exhibit A, as just a commodity.

MoJo: And what did that look like, in terms of bison as merely a commodity to be exploited?

D.D.: Near the end of Episode One, the arrival of railroads and new technology made it possible for tanners to turn buffalo hide into belts that ran all the machinery on the East Coast, in Europe, which created an insatiable demand for buffalo hides. Thousands of men rushed to the Plains to fill that demand and they slaughtered millions upon millions of buffalo, most often just taking their hides, sometimes their tongues which were worth 25 cents each, but leaving the rest of the carcasses to rot.

The only reason it stopped was they ran out of buffalo to kill. I mean, it's an astonishing fact that [bison numbers] could go from an estimated 30 million when Lewis and Clark went through, down to about 540 when William T. Hornaday did a census of buffalo in the late 1880s. And of those 540, just 200 were roaming free and in Yellowstone. The rest were in zoos or in small private herds.

MoJo: It’s frightening how close bison came to extinction. And then 150 years later, in 2016, it was named America’s National Mammal. As you mentioned, with the prevalence of locomotives and settlers slaughtering these animals by the millions for hides, how can we square the irony in this story?

D.D.: It says there's a contradiction here. And there are many contradictions in this story, as there is in every human being and, as we believe, in a clear-eyed accounting of American history. In Episode Two, we tell the story of the Buffalo and Indian Head nickel with the help of Steven Rinella and George Horse Capture, Jr.

The sculptor wanted to pick something that would be uniquely American for this new nickel, and he chose a portrait of a Native American on one side and a portrait of a bison on the other. Steve points out that that the model for that was in the zoo, in the menagerie at Central Park. And not long afterward, it was taken to the Meatpacking District in Manhattan and carved up into meat parcels. And Rinella says, so is this a symbol of our natural world that we inherited or is it a symbol of its destruction? And George Horse Capture takes it to an entirely deeper metaphysical state by saying, “I'm confused. Why do we think we have to destroy the things that we love?” It’s a very powerful moment in the story.

MoJo: The American Buffalo is a two-part documentary that takes viewers through American history to the present day. There are about 350,000 bison in the U.S. today. Does the film suggest what a recovery of the species might look like?

D.D.: In 1933, the American Bison Society declared that, with 4,400 buffalo now in the United States, it was safe from extinction. But as [writer and wildlife biologist] Dan O'Brien says in our film, that's really short sighted. Just having them still existing as a zoo animal is better than them gone forever, but it's really not restoration.

What we would call the “third act” is being written right now which is not just saving them from total extinction. We talk briefly at the end [of the film] about the Inter-Tribal Buffalo Council’s and other nonprofits’ work to try to bring bison back to larger spaces in larger numbers—not only to heal this broken physical connection that Native people had had for 100-plus years after 10,000 years of coexistence, [which is] important for their food sovereignty—but also that it's healing certain parts of the prairie that had lost its keystone species. And that's the third act that we're very excited about.

We brought on Julianna Brannum, a Comanche filmmaker who has done a number of great films for PBS, as a consulting producer. She made a short 18-minute film called Homecoming in which she follows Jason [Baldes] bringing bison from the Denver Zoo back to his reservation at Wind River in Wyoming and how important that is to them, and also some to the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin, which had been separated from buffalo for 200 years. Julianna’s short film will go onto our website as soon as the second episode is broadcast, and we hope that PBS or other stations will want to broadcast it.

D.D.: Here's the thing: we tell historical stories. What we hope is that people can make up make their minds about what that means they ought to do. What I personally think—and Ken feels the same way—is that we hope these efforts continue to expand the number of bison. I don't think there will be 30 million buffalo on the Great Plains in the foreseeable future, but that does not mean there can't be lots of places in the Yellowstone ecosystem and on the Great Plains [where bison efforts can be more] expansive than they are at this moment.

As you say, the bison is our national mammal. Now, on the official seal of the Interior Department is a buffalo with a sun rising behind it—at least I think it's rising and not setting—and the Secretary of the Interior herself is a Native American who has initiated some very ambitious programs to return as many buffalo as possible to their ancestral homelands, on reservations, to reconnect them with the people who suffered a parallel devastation in the late 19th century.

Our hope is that by giving this deeper history of the first two acts, it will help people understand just how important this is and how exciting it could be. But it also requires people to make a choice. The eradication of the Buffalo was not inevitable, right? And their salvation from extinction was also not inevitable; it’s people making choices and that's how democracies work. So, the future of the buffalo, while it's in much better shape than it was in parts of our film, is still underway. And it’s never easy.

D.D.: Thank you very much. Well, I consider this my swan song. But you know, I considered Country Music my swan song back in 2019. I don't have any plans for future films, and Ken's got a full schedule taking him to 2030 and beyond. I have a list of book topics that I’ve postponed because I've done the films and books and the companion books with Ken for 30 years and I need to slow down a little bit. At age 74 I need to spend more time with my long-suffering wife who’s put up with my absences and my obsessions for a long time.

But I'm so overwhelmingly gratified that we've that we finally got this one done. It's so different in certain respects than many of our other films. It’s a biography of an animal but at the same time it touches on so many different aspects of American history.