"This is the best book I've read about American bison and their habitat. It is vivid, concise, witty, erudite, first-hand, and up-to-date. Most important, it argues convincingly that the only way to assure survival of bison and their habitat in the wild is to establish a Great Plains National Park at least 5,000 square miles in extent."—David Rains Wallace, author of The Bonehunter's Revenge: Dinosaurs, Greed, and the Great Scientific Feud of the Gilded Age "Dr. Lott's scholarship is strong and thorough. American Bison presents an extensive, state-of-the-art review of key points of American bison that are unaddressed or under-addressed by previous books. Moreover, it does it in a popularized, often narrative form that makes the material comprehensible to the educated lay reader as well as to the bison scholar."—James H. Shaw, Department of Zoology, Oklahoma State University
In a Chicago junk shop three small-time crooks plot to rob a man of his coin collection, the showpiece of which is a valuable "Buffalo nickel". These high-minded grifters fancy themselves businessmen pursuing legitmate free enterprise. But the reality of the three--Donny, the oafish junk shop owner; Bobby, a young junkie Donny has taken under his wing; and "Teach"; a violently paranoid braggart--is that they are merely pawns caught up in their own game of last-chance, dead-end, empty pipe dreams.
From the host of the Travel Channel’s “The Wild Within.” 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.
Photographs and text trace the cultural and natural history of the North American bison, looking at how the U.S. government practically eliminated the buffalo in the mid-1880s in an attempt to force Native Americans onto reservations, and discussing later conservation efforts.
The near disappearance of the American bison in the nineteenth century is commonly understood to be the result of over-hunting, capitalist greed, and all but genocidal military policy. This interpretation remains seductive because of its simplicity; there are villains and victims in this familiar cautionary tale of the American frontier. But as this volume of groundbreaking scholarship shows, the story of the bison’s demise is actually quite nuanced. Bison and People on the North American Great Plains brings together voices from several disciplines to offer new insights on the relationship between humans and animals that approached extinction. The essays here transcend the border between the United States and Canada to provide a continental context. Contributors include historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, and Native American perspectives. This book explores the deep past and examines the latest knowledge on bison anatomy and physiology, how bison responded to climate change (especially drought), and early bison hunters and pre-contact trade. It also focuses on the era of European contact, in particular the arrival of the horse, and some of the first known instances of over-hunting. By the nineteenth century bison reached a “tipping point” as a result of new tanning practices, an early attempt at protective legislation, and ventures to introducing cattle as a replacement stock. The book concludes with a Lakota perspective featuring new ethnohistorical research. Bison and People on the North American Great Plains is a major contribution to environmental history, western history, and the growing field of transnational history.
Miniature bonsai are tiny--several inches or less. Unlike their larger relatives, these smallest of the small can be potted, shaped, and pruned in an hour or two, and can be transported and managed easily. Creation, care, and maintenance concerns are thoroughly covered in this profusely illustrated guide for the novice. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
