By the close of the 1880s, there were estimated to be slightly over 500 buffalo left alive in North America. Inconceivable. A noble creature which had sustained generations of Native Americans through the centuries and had numbered in the tens of millions only a century earlier had been driven to the point of extinction by greed and a despicable desire by some to expedite what they considered the inevitable annihilation of everything and everyone which had come before. Native Americans were the intended target. The wanton and wholesale slaughter of the American buffalo was merely a means to an end. They were considered collateral damage. The lamentable state of the bison was the abhorrent result of deliberate commercial and political efforts designed to hasten the encroachment of what many considered civilization and progress. As their complete extinction seemed certain, unpreventable and imminent, some believed the buffalo could be saved by crossbreeding them with cows. Others considered the very idea sacrilegious.
Through the dedicated efforts of President Theodore Rosevelt, William Hornaday of The American Bison Society, the iconic rancher, Charles Goodnight, Comanche leader, Quanah Parker, and numerous others who's timely and compassionate intervention combined to build scattered remnants of what were essentially pet buffalo preserved in private collections into eventually viable herds, the noble creatures would one day roam free and unmolested in numbers reminiscent of the vast herds which once carpeted the plains. Mankind, who had deliberately brought the buffalo to the verge of extinction, would repent, rally, and make reparations. Mankind was once more somewhat redeemed. The Indians paid a terrible price for what some considered progress, but the buffalo would be back, and not as cows.
(Insert as paragraph four of episode 50 of MIAH.)
