American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon |  | Author: Steven Rinella
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
List Price: $15.00
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Seller: pbshopus
Rating:  72 reviews
Sales Rank: 59366
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0385521693
Dewey Decimal Number: 508
EAN: 9780385521697
ASIN: 0385521693
Publication Date: September 15, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| • | ISBN13: 9780385521697 | | • | Condition: NEW | | • | Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. |
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, December 2008: Before the 18th century, the American buffalo was the largest land mammal in North America, largely predator-free and roaming the continent in numbers estimated in excess of 40 million. In just over a century, widespread slaughter reduced the population to a few hundred head, and the American West lay beneath a till of bleached bones. When Steven Rinella stumbled over a buffalo skull in Yellowstone National Park, it sparked an obsessive search for the beast's past, from its migration across the Bering land bridge to its near extinction at the hands of western settlers. American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon is his fascinating chronicle, beginning with a search for Black Diamond (the doomed model for the Buffalo Nickel) and including an exploration of "buffalo jumps" (where thousands were run over cliffs by Native American hunters), and tales of bone piles--harvested from the plains for a thriving fertilizer industry--stacked 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and a half-mile long. Rinella's history is deftly interwoven with his own literal buffalo hunt in Alaska's Wrangell mountains, complete with grizzly bears, raging, ice-rimmed rivers, and bouts of hypothermia and frostbite. Written in a spare style appropriate to the rigors of the frozen wilderness, American Buffalo is engrossing, informative, funny, and a welcome achievement of both natural history and outdoor adventure. --Jon Foro
Product Description
A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination.
In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness.
American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel.
Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 72
 Amazing Read December 27, 2009
te2texas (Trophy Club, Tx United States)
This book is well written and keeps moving through the story. I am not a hunter--and have mixed feelings about hunting and this book kept my interest by explaining what it is to hunt. Read it. The book will not disappoint and you will learn a tremendous amount about buffalo. Let them roam.
Loved It! December 27, 2009
Chrissy P. (Naples, Florida)
I ordered the book after seeing it highlighted in Montana Magazine, which I picked up on my first visit to Montana in Oct 2009. I loved the history, insight and "readability". I live in Florida, far from current buffalo country, but I have a great appreciation for the animal. I'll keep my eye open for more from Rinella! Simply an amazing read on so many levels. Thank You!
 A book about bison, a book about hunting. November 25, 2009
Robert Schmidt (Honolulu, HI & Logan, UT USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Steven Rinella's book, American Buffalo: In Search Of A Lost Icon, is two books in one. First, it is a book about Bison bison, his "American buffalo." The bison has influenced the North American landscape and human cultures. When there are tens of millions of animals, they affect everything: species dependent on buffalo wallows, gray wolves, fire patterns and regimes, prairie dogs, and more. In many ways, bison were probably a "keystone" species; take them away (as we did), and the environment changes. Culturally, bison, deer, and elk were important meat sources for native peoples following the extinction of the continent's mega-herbivores some 9000 plus years ago after humans followed the Bering Land Bridge. It is difficult to imagine the "manna from heaven" that bison must have been to these earliest residents, although the movie depictions of bison being killed easily by native peoples on horseback is overdone, I believe. Gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park that feed largely on bison find this a hard life, and wolves are injured and killed during these predation events. Bison are powerful animals.
With Europeans, and their railroads, invading from the east, bison became well known to all. The meat and hides went to eastern tables and tanneries. Bison were part of the popular western stories, early pulp fiction. The story of their commercial extinction was known. They graced our buffalo head nickels for decades.
And then they were gone.
Rinella discusses the history of bison over the past 1000 years. And he also obtains a permit to hunt an Alaska bison. We go with him on this hunt:
"I slip my rifle down from my shoulder and lay it quietly across my knee. I'm breathing slowly as I concentrate on the smells and the sounds of the woods. I move ahead a little more, picking my path very carefully to not make noise. I hear nothing but a distant chickadee and the gurgle of flowing water. The frozen ground is quiet against the knees of my wool pants. I move a little more and then stop. Away from the river, the forest is an impenetrable tangle of young spruce. The odor of the animals is no longer on the breeze. Just as I'm hoping that the buffalo didn't head into the tangle, I hear it. A snapping twig. Then I hear another. I raise my rifle and glance through the scope, but I can't find anything."
[As an aside, you are NOT supposed to search for game through the scope of a loaded rifle. Another hunter could take it the wrong way... I also noted a photo of the author's rifle (assumed loaded, since he discusses his proximity to grizzly bears) propped very insecurely against a tree as his buffalo hide is hanging. Safety issues get forgotten as a person gets tired.]
Expect detail: "I slice through the flesh that lies over the pelvis until I've exposed the fused, cartilaginous joint where the left and right sides join together... Then I reach deep inside the buffalo, putting my arm inside the gutting incision and following the abdominal wall with my hand all the way back until I'm inside the pelvis. I can't see, but I can feel what I'm doing. I locate the bladder and the colon and pull them away from the pelvis while pressing down. I want them out of the way so that I can saw through the pelvis without cutting into them and spilling their contents on the meat."
Rinella finds that lost icon, Bison bison.
Passionate about Buffalo November 11, 2009
rodboomboom (Dearborn, Michigan United States)
Having grown up in state where buffalo is on state flag and neighboring state has Ralphie, a stampeding mascot buff at their football games, and friends of family had large herd from which came meat and other sundry delights growing up, was attracted to this.
Rinella impresses the reader quickly as one who is truly into bison, and has been for sometime, leading up to his obtaining a hunting permit in Alaska. So, this hunt interlaces throughout with various facts and history. This is fascinating reading in a style that shows not only the passion of the author for his subject matter, but also his accumen in assimilating wide variety of inputs and nuggets about this American iconic animal.
Was particuarly impressed with his admission upon hunting this magnificent animal; although not hunter myself, felt he made case for it and had true conscience about what this entailed.
Also provides further resources for those who wish to delve deeper into this. Overall, successful and entertaining read.
Adventure and History October 22, 2009
Tim (Kansas)
Probably one of the most worthwhile books I've read in a long time. Not only is it an interesting hunting adventure, but it makes you think about the land and ecology and how different things were in this country no more than a few hundred years ago. Driving through Kansas (or even in the city), you now find yourself imagining what the landscape looked like as a prairie with millions of buffalo. It makes you open your eyes a bit. Very good read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 72
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