When the U.S. Census announced in 1890 that the Frontier was over, America was plunged into a period of anxiety. As evidenced by the grand Indian photographs of Edward Sheriff Curtis, western nostalgia became a dominant theme of art, film, and pop culture. Another artist of the age, though, showed that the West endures into the modern age.

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When the long-term market exploitation of wildlife was joined by a form of elite safari hunting known as “field sports,” a massive destruction of western animals threatened to destroy millions of years of North American evolution. Teddy Roosevelt’s and George Grinnell’s Boone & Crockett Club wasn’t perfect, but it helped government usher in a new stage before Wild Wild West anarchy could run its course.

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America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brought down by a federal conspiracy that plotted the animal’s demise to undermine Native cultures. With an animal this important to American and western history, understanding the more realistic and accurate version of its 19th and 20th century story seems a critical step as we figure out how to go forward in returning America’s most iconic mammal to the modern West.

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