All My Relations
ACOUPLE OF YEARS AGO, Patti Baldes’ phone rang. “Patti? The buffalo are out,” said someone from the Wind River Reservation’s Tribal Fish and Game Office. “Are they yours or are they Jason’s?”
“They’re probably mine,” Baldes recalled saying. Hers, in that they belonged, like she does, to the Northern Arapaho Tribe. Jason Baldes, Patti’s husband, is Eastern Shoshone. The two tribes share the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming, and each has its own buffalo herd on separate pastures.
By mid-morning, a crowd had gathered along the edge of U.S. Highway 26 to watch the 11 fugitive buffalo. About a dozen teenagers arrived with horses — members of a tribal youth group that teaches horsemanship. The old man in charge of the program instructed his students to smudge with sage as they readied their horses and prepared to herd the buffalo back to their fenced enclosure.
The buffalo had escaped onto land leased for cattle on the northern part of the reservation, where a pair of two-lane highways weaves between foothills, cradling 70,000 unfenced acres of pale Wyoming steppe between them.
“We were secretly just so happy,” Patti Baldes said. “But scared.” Happy, because after years working to restore wild buffalo to the reservation’s open range, they had succeeded. For a tenuous moment, “there were buffalo out there and kids on bareback horses running around.” It had been 135 years since Native people had herded buffalo in the Wind River Valley. “It was the most amazing thing ever.”
But there was also fear. As soon as the buffalo broke free of their enclosure on private property, they entered a jurisdictional no man’s land. The tribal game code, which regulates hunting on the reservation, made no mention of buffalo. “If we didn’t get them in, there’s no way we could protect them,” Jason said. “People could shoot them, and there would be nothing we could do.”
Before the riders approached the buffalo, Jason laid down some ground rules. “I did my best to explain that we needed to keep it low-key and quiet.” Instead, the riders gave chase, and the buffalo took off across the open range. “They were treated like cows,” Patti said. “Like they could be herded.”
“The horses started running,” Jason added. “Pretty soon the buffalo were running all over the place. Cars were following the horses through the sagebrush.”
Jason, sitting at a dining room table with a cup of coffee above and a snoring dog below, spoke soberly about the escape. Standing opposite, Patti offered her own version of events and occasionally smiled, savoring the memory. They share a sense of pride and responsibility: Their work led to the reintroduction of buffalo on the reservation following their near-extirpation by colonists in the late 19th century.
The effort began with a partnership between the two tribes, the National Wildlife Federation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Jason led the work wearing two hats; he’s both
