Ok, people, Pop Quiz! Ready….?

What’s a nickel and the Wyoming Flag have in common? Buffalo, you say?? WRONG!

Well, we’ll give you half credit. You see it is properly called the BISON.

Some estimate that there could have been 50 to 60 million of them. Even the most conservatively reasoned estimates put the number in the tens of millions

To put that in perspective, there are less than a million elk in America. There are only about 30 million cattle in all of America – and Bison generally were concentrated in the plains states!

The historical journals tell stories of encounters with herds of buffalo that were 25 miles across and 50 miles long. We’re talkin’ Rhode Island size! Talk about a traffic stopper!

The bison was a grazer who moved in herds. They went where feed was good, and couldn’t have left much behind. Many would have been migratory, following spring greenup and fleeing winter’s snows.

Huge changes in this young nation’s west; white man, railroads, disease, fences, all brought their numbers down into the thousands, and the role they played in the rangeland ecology of the west now rests largely in cattle.

The bison, memorialized in nickels and flags, seem to be a curiosity to much of the nation today.

From the University of Wyoming CES, I’m Eric Peterson