Ken Burns looks at history through the eyes of its national mammal in 'The American Buffalo'

Documentarian Ken Burns has long chronicled chapters of American history, both writ large and in tiny, telling detail, connecting the dots from one scale to the other.

This week, he turns his eye to the epic saga of our national mammal, "The American Buffalo," in a two-part, four-hour documentary for PBS premiering Monday. The story is, as he says, mostly a tragedy, but one with a surprising twist. Whereas once there were untold millions of the animals roaming from sea to shining sea, integral parts of the lives and cultures of many Indigenous tribes, "by the middle of the 1880s, nobody can find one," Burns says of the buffalo, whose population declined sharply because of westward expansion. The animal's numbers have since climbed back from the edge of the abyss, thanks to the efforts of many, including some unlikely benefactors.

Burns' documentary isn't just about that near-extinction, however, but what the buffalo has meant to the country and its people. When he was working on the series "The National Parks," he suddenly found himself in the wintry wilderness of Yellowstone National Park, amid about 500 of the creatures, "all of them dusted with the confectioner's sugar of snow. And you thought you were back in the Pleistocene.

"I mean, it was turn off the engine and just nothing. And they're