We children used to warble, “Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam | Where the deer and the antelope play | Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word | And the skies are not cloudy all day.”

“Home on the Range” is an indispensable Western theme song, along with Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” and Pete Seeger’s rendition of “Buffalo gals won’t you come out tonight … I danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking, and we danced by the light of the moon.”

Avoiding discouraging words should always be a prime part of the spirit of the West. And buffalo should roam. It’ll never happen, but turning the upper Great Plains back into an unfenced American Serengeti — as some suggest — appeals to the romantic in me. (Some still insist they should be called bison, but that etymological battle is a lost cause.)

The Chinook trade language has a word for buffalo, moosmoos, but this doesn’t mean Indigenous people encountered them here around the Columbia estuary.

Experiments here on our coast have toyed with establishing buffalo. In addition to a more recent attempt in north Pacific County, around 1990 a government grant tried to learn how far west buffalo can do well. For three years, a small herd occupied property along Chinook Valley Road, where they were expected to live off the land without much food supplied by humans. They failed to thrive. Too wet, maybe, or local fodder wasn’t nutritious to such critters. The survivors were shipped to Spokane.

Around 1800, it’s guessed there were 30 million to 60 million North American buffalo. Fewer than 1,000 remained a century later after a campaign of deliberate extermination aimed at destroying the traditional livelihood of Plains Indians.

Army Col. R.I. Dodge in September 1887, observed “the last of the great herds”: “From the top of Pawnee Rock I could see from 6 to 10 miles in almost every direction. This whole vast space was covered with buffalo, looking at a distance like one compact mass.”

This tragic tale of wanton and shameful waste is well recounted by Ken Burns in his 2023 documentary “The American Buffalo,” along with a grace note of eventual attention and partial recovery. In the early 20th century, nostalgia led to many products becoming buffalo-themed, even including Oregon, Washington and Alaska salmon.

Buffalo and me

As a kid, I imagined “buffalo gals” were literally high-kicking hairy beasts in holey stockings, but by the time I was 13 it occurred to me the song might describe easy-going prostitutes like Miss Kitty on “Gunsmoke.” (One of my great-great-grandmothers supposedly had the bordello serving a nearby U.S. Cavalry fort burned down to free the gals from coerced indentures, and then found them husbands.)

Dad was a rock hound and came back from Wyoming’s Red Desert one time with a couple buffalo skulls eroded out from the side of a gulch. I still have one, a very long way from the grass and sagebrush that created it — maybe someday I’ll take it back and rebury it in the red clay of its home, putting at least one ghost to rest.

Buffalo shot by men like “Buffalo Bill” Cody were usually just left to rot, with only their prized tongues cut out to eat. In the couple of decades that followed, millions of skulls were harvested and shipped back east to companies including Detroit Carbon Works, where they were ground up to make fertilizer, dye and bone china. Perhaps some of my wife’s grandma’s boxed-up teacups are made from this cursed material.

Hides were also valuable, and still are. I have a pricey belt made from modern-day domesticated buffalo leather. And to my parents’ horror, in high school I sometimes wore a full-length buffalo stagecoach coat someone gave them. It probably smelled as weird as it looked, and mysteriously disappeared from home one day. Thank you, Mom.

Our family delighted in seeing deceptively docile buffalo a few times a year grazing in a pasture between our home and Jackson Hole/Yellowstone, where there’s virtually a betting pool to determine the day each year when the first incautious tourist is chased away after trying to pet one. Yellowstone is home to one of largest populations of free-range buffalo — fluctuating between 3,500 and 6,000 — recovering from only 23 in 1902. One of my first stories as a young reporter was about a bull who roamed 100 miles south of the park.

The 20th century’s nearly too late affection for them reached its height with the minting of buffalo head nickels from 1913 to 1938. Coins were the first of many things I’ve collected and I still have a few of the nickels in a drawer somewhere. The buffalo on the coin is based on an actual animal, probably but not certainly Black Diamond, a captive in the Bronx Zoo. He was slaughtered in 1915 at age 22, with 750 pounds of his tough meat selling for the then-astronomical price of $2 a pound.

A national icon slain for profit — a cautionary note for our time?