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In Search of a Lost Icon
Spiegel & Grau
December 2008
On Sale: December 2, 2008
288 pages
ISBN: 0385521685
EAN: 9780385521680
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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