Oh, Give Me A Home

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

A bison is silhouetted near Slough Creek overlooking the Yellowstone landscape – its forever historic home. The American bison once roamed across most of North America in numbers that reached into the tens of millions. In the 19^th century as European settlers moved west the U.S. Army began a campaign to remove Native American tribes from the landscape by taking away their main food source – the bison. The rising number of settlers caused much of the bison’s habitat to be reduced and they were eventually hunted to near extinction. By the late 1800s there were only a few hundred bison herds remaining on the great American landscape. Even as their numbers dwindled to being nonexistent, Yellowstone provided a place for sanctuary with about two dozen bison remaining in Pelican Valley. Today Yellowstone is the only place in the lower 48 states to have a continuously free-ranging bison population since prehistoric times. The bison is a timeless and majestic symbol of the American West and on May 9^th, 2016, the National Bison Legacy Act was signed into law, officially making the American bison the national mammal of the United States.