Buffalo for the Broken Heart, by Dan O'Brien

This excellent 2001 memoir chronicles the author’s years as a rancher in South Dakota, restoring a badly-degraded grassland ecosystem into prairie more like the original – before the buffalo were slaughtered, land was fenced off by homesteaders, and cattle pushed out whatever other means of making a living there could have been. O’Brien’s understanding of biology leads him to rotate a small herd of cattle through his pastures, giving the native grasses a chance to grow. But the more he works the herd, the more convinced he becomes that cattle don’t belong on the Great Plains. 

A neighbor raises buffalo, and after assisting in a roundup he impulsively buys thirteen orphaned calves. They’re likely to die, and yet they thrive, teaching him how buffalo live where they have for millennia. They do not hide from the wind. They create seeps by wallowing and digging into low ground with their horns. They play. They belong on this land. 

Even as O’Brien fearfully calculates how much money he’ll have to make selling calves, and how much he’ll have to borrow to buy pregnant mothers, he loves these animals more deeply. Cattle are stupid. Buffalo are wily and wild. Cattle are destructive, trampling streams and denuding the land. Buffalo thrive on prairie they nourish, and in their presence a multitude of other species return – birds, deer, coyotes, cottonwood groves. 

Along with his love of this harsh landscape, O’Brien sketches his fellow inhabitants – ranchers on the edge of failure year after year, mechanics and fence contractors, veterinarians and real estate agents. We laugh along as this fifty-something bachelor hosts a pair of 14-year-old boys for a summer, clueless about how to get work out of them. And as we weep over the tragedies of his neighbors, we watch people pull together. 

He observes the value of a place where old-timers set in their ways clash with newcomers’ dreams and illusions that still manage to introduce enough new ideas to keep the culture alive. He admits how many years it took to cultivate a speaking relationship with a neighbor, and demonstrates that kind of patience in most of his dealings. 

They mostly think he’s crazy to ranch buffalo, and not to sell them to a feedlot their last few months to fatten them up like cattle. After bringing them so far, he can’t do it – it would violate their dignity. He finds a solution in keeping with his deep desire to restore this whole ecosystem to what it was. 

He gives us a taste of hard work in nasty weather, observing that a rancher or farmer spends much of his life acquiring skills he won’t need again for long enough to have forgotten them. It’s Sisyphean. You can buy this book, and bison meat, through Wild Idea Buffalo.