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Eastern Shoshone Tribe Buffalo Manager Jason Baldes checks the herd at the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative in the heart of the Wind River Indian Reservation on Aug. 15, 2023. Currently the project has about 163 buffalo. When asked how much land they would like to acquire for the buffalo, Baldes replied,"As much as we can get.
Baldes' interest in buffalo restoration started when he was young."Being a kid, we used to hunt and fish, pronghorn, elk, deer — and the buffalo were the only one missing. This is about cultural revitalization, decolonization and community."The land that interested Baldes most, however, stretched beyond the fence. A few hundred yards away stood a white house behind a pasture and a towering irrigation system.
But getting the animals is only half the battle. Virtually all reservations lack the land base that wild bison demand — a legacy of federal policies that have pilfered tribal holdings for a century and a half. Much of the land that tribes retained is managed to raise beef cattle rather than protect wildlife.
Reacquiring the land makes it all possible. Doing so at zero cost to cash-strapped tribal governments with a minimum of political conflict in a region dominated by cattle ranching is pretty much unheard of, but Baldes has managed to do just that. Some neighbors, eager to help, are waiting to sell their properties until the nonprofit can come up with the money.
chunk of the Wind River Mountains from development in perpetuity. Its trout fisheries and mountain vistas attract adventurers from across the country. Modeled on the Homestead Act, the law doled out blocks of roughly 160 acres for farmers and double that for ranchers from tribes’ communal holdings. After exhausting the supply of tribal allottees, the law opened up tribal lands to white homesteaders. Many allottees would go on to sell their holdings under duress, turning them into privatized “fee lands.
Jason Baldes, center, and his sons Dorian, left, and Kenyan, right, on the land of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative, Aug. 16, 2023. Baldes founded the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative. His father, Richard Baldes, a biologist and retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service project leader, taught him about restoration and conservation. Jason is now passing down that knowledge to his sons.
After the state refused to enforce the tribes’ decision, a district court took the unprecedented step of handing administration of the stretch of the Wind River flowing through the reservation’s historic boundaries to the tribes. The ruling dealt a heavy blow to Dick Baldes, who developed ulcers and increasingly butted heads with higher-ups at work whom he viewed as unsupportive of the tribes’ water claims. He was suspended without pay four times — three of them over fights about water, and the fourth after tangling with a regional director over the agency’s decision to shut down field offices on nearby reservations.
It was a fortunate time to make that decision. The organization that would become the InterTribal Buffalo Council had been founded a few years earlier, in 1992, sparking the modern tribal restoration movement. But it gained real steam in 1997, when Montana officials slaughtered hundreds of buffalo outside Yellowstone National Park — the budding restoration movement’s most important source population.
“They’ve got wolves, antelope, grizzly bears, elk ― everything but the bison,” said Keith Aune, the former head of the WCS bison program. “In North America, it was clearly one of the best prospects of bison at scale I had ever seen.”WCS lined up support at Wind River to transfer about 100 of the first buffalo out of Yellowstone’s new quarantine program in the early 2000s.
The Owl Creeks still offer one of the best sites for buffalo restoration in the country, as Baldes noted in his thesis. But he has little interest in resurrecting the conflict over the future of ranching there. Somewhere between 30 million and 60 million buffalo roamed North America at the dawn of the colonial period. Only 400,000 remain, with livestock accounting for well over nine in 10 of them. Early attempts at cross-breeding buffalo with cattle, which are closely related, created viable hybrids that have made genetically pure bison rare even in the handful of wild populations that survived the 19th-century killing spree.
As he cobbles more land together, Wind River stands a chance of building a corridor connecting winter range in the valley with spring and summer green up in the high country that buffalo historically migrated across annually — perhaps the first viable migratory route reestablished for bison since European settlement carved up the landscape with roads and fences a century and a half ago.
Tribal efforts to reintroduce buffalo in the region have so far shepherded about 25,000 wild bison to more than 65 herds on tribal land.Baldes leaned over and picked up a tuft of buffalo fur from one of the wallows and began to shear it apart. Tribes like the Eastern Shoshone used it for all kinds of things — shoe insulation, pillow stuffing, textiles. The herd has seen 1,500 student visitors over the last two years. Baldes will often give young visitors a handful of fur to remember the place.
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