An Amarillo teacher and free lance writer has written a first-rate account of the adventure of the Kansas rancher who battled a late spring storm and attacks by wolf packs to rescue eight buffalo calves -- and ultimately save a species threatened with extinction.
Carol A Winn is the author who hits historic paydirt in Buffalo Jones: The Man who Saved America's Bison. Her first published book finds a worthy hero in the person of Charles Jesse "Buffalo" Jones, who saved the buffalo calves who became progenitors of the 25,000 bison that live today in scattered sheltered locations on the vast North American high plains where six million buffalo once roamed.
It was in the late 1880s, only a few years after all but a small remnant of the bison herds had been slaughtered that Buffalo Jones conducted his rescue mission, undertaken with the help of a couple of greenhorns who had no conception of the fierceness of a late spring sleet storm or the threat posed by ravening wolf packs.
Jones, a one-time buffalo hunter who felt guilty about his own role in the slaughter, was well aware of tricks that could be played by winter storms in April. Neverhteless he chose to take advantage of a brief opportunity to rescue a few buffalo calves to take to his spread in Kansas to form the nucleus of a replacement herd.
Winn capitalizes on both the suspense and the humor inherent in the situation in which her valient hero sheds articles of clothing to form an unusual protective armor for the calves he leaves for his helpers to pick up. The pick-up is complicated, both by the weather and by the presence of wolf packs who would have devoured every buffalo calf except for their fear of the "man smell" of Buffalo Jones clothing, some of which was left with every calf.
Buffalo Jones' strip act -- he was barefoot and down to his long handles by the time he roped his last calf -- was a credit to his wisdom in the ways of wilderness predators.
Winn's saga works both as a history of the wholesale slaughter that converted six-million-head of shaggy bison into an endangered species within a few short years in the 1870s and '80s and as an account of the rescue undertaken by a frontiersman with a mission.
William J. Geer, a California artist, did the pen and ink drawings that add a dimension to Winn's book, which is designated to appeal to readers aged 10 to 14.
Actually, it is, as well-known western writer Robert Flynn says, "a book that adults will want to read with their children."
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