As early as 1701 a colony of Huguenots in Virginia tried their hand at raising buffalo. They settled on the James River above Richmond and were able to capture several buffalo calves in the vicinity, but had to kill them off in two or three years because they had become unmanageable. At about the same time, Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, governor of the new colony of Louisiana, proposed bringing buffalo from the plains to the lower Mississippi so that they could be raised for wool and meat. There is no record that this project ever went beyond the planning stage.
In 1786 farmers in West Virginia tried crossing buffalo and cattle. According to Albert Gallatin, they succeeded in producing several hybrid calves. Stockmen farther west in the Ohio Valley also tried crossbreeding, with indifferent results. Robert Wycliff, near Lexington, Kentucky, began his program in 1815 and carried it on for thirty years. He induced at least one neighbor, Thomas Corneal, to help him for a while.
The next well-documented attempt to produce cattalo was that by Sam L. Bedson at Stony Mountain, Saskatchewan. In six years he had a herd of twenty-five hybrids with his fifty-eight buffalo. He then sold all his buffalo to Buffalo Jones, who by that time had a herd of fifty-seven in Kansas, some of them old enough to breed. Jones sold off part of his herd from time to time, sending five pairs of buffalo to England, and selling twenty-six buffalo and eighteen cattalo to Michel Pablo. In spite of experiments over a period of twenty years, Jones was never able to produce a hybrid that could reproduce itself.
During this same period Charles Goodnight, who had a small buffalo herd on his cattle ranch in the Palo Duro Canyon, bred some cattalo. In 1896 Mosson Boyd, of Bobcaygeon, Ontario, secured some buffalo and bred hybrids for nineteen years, producing about one live animal a year. Then he quit and shipped all his stock west to the National Bison Range at Wainwright, Alberta.
One difficulty confronted the breeders from the first: buffalo bulls were reluctant to serve domestic cows, and domestic bulls showed little interest in buffalo cows. Only when the bull in either case had been raised with the cows away from his own kind could he be induced to cover the strange cows. Once they were properly served, both the buffalo cows and the domestic cows produced calves.
This brought to light a second difficulty: about two-thirds of the domestic cows aborted or produced stillborn calves, and more than half the cows died. In western Montana the ranchers were convinced that the heads of the buffalo calves were too large, while others insisted that it was the hump that caused the trouble. However, closer study revealed that the heads were really quite small at birth and that the hump did not start to develop until the calves were several months old. To add to the confusion, the buffalo cows bred to domestic bulls, usually Hereford or Angus, had no trouble in calving and produced healthy calves.
After the Canadian government had its buffalo herd well established at Wainwright, it instituted a scientific program of crossbreeding that was carried on for twenty-one years, 1920-41. The careful, detailed work here showed that the domestic cows died of an excessive amount of amniotic fluid produced during pregnancy and that it was not desirable ever to cross a domestic cow with a buffalo bull.
The healthy calves produced by the buffalo cows grew well and produced a good grade of meat. All the females were fertile and could be crossed with either buffalo or domestic bulls, but hybrids bred back to buffalo bulls had a high rate of abortions and stillbirths. All the male hybrids were found to be completely sterile, incapable of producing any sperm cells. Hybrid males with 3/4 domestic breeding could produce some weak and imperfect sperm cells, but to secure males with normal, healthy sperm cells it was necessary to dilute the buffalo strain until the hybrid was 31/32 domestic breeding. The offspring of such hybrids showed practically no advantage of any kind over the pure domestic breeds, and were of no interest to the cattlemen. The Canadian experimenters concluded after their twenty-one years of work that crossbreeding of buffalo and domestic cattle was biologically feasible but economically undesirable.
The buffalo, then, is an interesting wild animal, unfit for domestication or crossbreeding. It can thrive on the open range with no more attention than being protected from men. The species is picturesque, an important feature in our western parks, but of little economic value to civilized man even though it was the staff of life for many thousands of hunters on the western plains for 10,000 years or more.
26. Preservation of the Species
The initial problem in the effort to save the buffalo from total extinction was learning how to handle the animals on a controlled, protected range. Many different men over a period of 350 years had determined that the buffalo could not be domesticated, nor could it be successfully crossed with cattle. Buffalo had to be handled like animals in a zoo, and it would be difficult to get enough initial breeding stock from the open plains to stock the fenced ranges.
The first attempts to manage buffalo as domestic stock were made on the plains east of the Pecos River by pioneer settlers from the Rio Grande Valley who expected to become wealthy stockmen overnight, with their great herds fattening on the free grass of the Great Plains. They expected to choose their initial range stock from the immense herds of wild "cattle," the cibolas, which, they reasoned, should need only to be corraled and supervised. A well-organized party of mounted men should be able to round up enough buffalo in one day to stock a large ranch, an initial herd of perhaps 10,000. In 1599 sixty men set out for the plains on just such a mission, and soon found the buffalo herds. Don Juan de Oñate gave this account:
Next day they went three more leagues in search of a convenient and suitable site for a corral, and on finding a place, they began to construct it out of large pieces of cottonwood. It took them three days to complete it. It was so large and the wings so long they thought they could corral ten thousand head of cattle, because they had seen so many, during those days, wandering so near the tents and houses. In view of this and the further fact that when they run they act as though fettered, they took their capture for granted. It was declared by those who had seen them that in that place alone there were more buffalo than there were cattle in the three largest ranches in Spain.
The corral constructed, they went next day to a plain where on the previous afternoon about a hundred thousand cattle had been seen. Giving them the right of way, the cattle started very nicely toward the corral, but soon they turned back in a stampede toward the men, and, rushing through them in a mass, it was impossible to stop them, because they are cattle terribly obstinate, courageous beyond exaggeration, and so cunning if pursued they run, and that if their pursuers stop or slacken their speed they stop and roll, just like mules, and with this respite renew their run. For several days they tried a thousand ways of shutting them in or surrounding them, but in no manner was it possible to do so. This was not due to fear, for they are remarkably savage and ferocious, so much so that they killed three of our horses and badly wounded forty, for their horns are very sharp and fairly long, about a span and a half, and bend upward together. They attack from the side, putting the head far down, so that whatever they seize, they tear very badly….
Seeing that the full grown cattle could not be brought alive, the sargente major ordered that the calves be captured, but they became so enraged that out of the many which were being brought, some dragged by ropes and others upon the horses, not one got a league toward the camp, for they all died within about an hour. Therefore it is believed that unless taken shortly after birth and put under the care of our cows or goats, they cannot be brought until the cattle become tamer than they are now.