Near-extinct Beauty

The title is close to literal. An 1889 survey by the zoologist William Hornaday found roughly a thousand bison left in North America.

Hornaday did not stop at counting. In 1905 he joined Ernest Harold Baynes, Theodore Roosevelt and others in founding the American Bison Society. Two years later the society shipped 15 bison from the Bronx Zoo to the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma by cart and rail, the first animal reintroduction in North America. In 1908 Congress set aside the National Bison Range in Montana, and more herds followed.

The numbers have been climbing ever since. Today about 20,500 plains bison live in conservation herds and roughly 420,000 more in commercial herds, and tribal nations have been bringing buffalo back onto their own lands through the InterTribal Buffalo Council. The animal that nearly vanished is now a working part of the prairie again.

The painting is warm where much of this collection is cold. A single bull faces the viewer in tall golden grass, his coat a deep rust brown, beard heavy, pale horns curving up and inward. Behind him the plain runs flat to a line of blue-gray hills under an amber sky. It is a quiet, steady picture that sits well with wood, leather and lamplight.