Daphne Bramham: The old West gives way to a new and wilder one

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VAL MARIE, Sask. — Two bison lay in large prehistoric piles. With giant heads and shoulders perched on spindly hips and spindly hind legs, they look like a triumph of imagination over engineering.

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Nearby, a third rolled clumsily, kicking up a cloud of dust that flaked off its thick hide as it struggled to its feet.

Although there were only three of them, it was exciting to see wild, unfenced plains bison. It bears the Latin name of bison bison bisonthey were nearly extirpated in the late 19th century, despite numbering in the tens of millions before the arrival of Europeans.

Fortunately, two ranchers from Montana captured the few that were left and brought them to their ranch. In 1907, the Canadian government purchased and eventually shipped more than 700 of them by train to Elk Island National Park near Edmonton. Their survival is one of Parks Canada’s success stories that has enabled the reintroduction of these potentially ferocious but funny-looking creatures to other national parks, including Waterton Lakes, Rocky Mountain House, Prince Albert and Banff.

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five years later Grasslands National Park was established in 2001, a herd of 71 (30 bull calves, 30 female calves and 11 calves) was released to graze 181 square kilometers of dry, rolling hills in the western block of the park. Now they number close to 500.

Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re easy to find in such a large area. We were just lucky that this trio chose to graze just over a mile from where we had crossed the Texas Gate that marks the entrance to the park’s 12-mile ecotourism loop.

He had visited the area decades before. Covering the Grasslands National Park hearings was my first out-of-town assignment as a summer reporter intern at the Regina Leader-Post.

Despite many assurances that the land would not be expropriated and would only be bought from willing sellers, the proposal to “rebuild” it, a term that was not coined until more than a decade later, was controversial.

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Ranchers with weathered faces in jeans, boots and buckles turned out to be opposed. But there weren’t many of them because this land never supported many settlers.

Most came from families who had worked there since the early 1880s, long before the Canadian government began dividing the land into 160-acre farms, at a time when the prairie was unfenced and cattle grazed freely. and free of charge on hundreds of thousands of acres.

The park threatened their way of life just as the arrival of their ancestors wiped out what little remained of the traditional life and livelihood of the indigenous people.

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I don’t recall a single indigenous person making a representation to the commissioner, even though their ancient land use is still obvious today with over 12,000 teepee rings, stone burial mounds and “driving lanes” of bison still visible in the park.

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Ranchers were worried not so much about the reintroduction of the bison, but about the return of the hated black-tailed prairie dog. Larger than gophers, they live in noisy, barking, merry “villages” punctuated by mounds of earth dug into extensive underground tunnels.

They are the bane of existence for ranchers, who have spent most of the last century trying to eradicate them, reducing their numbers in North America to the point that prairie dogs are now endangered, with a population less than three percent of the historical population. levels

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Predictably, the ranchers wanted nothing to do with being brought back.

Like all rodents, they eat and reproduce voraciously, as well as boring holes into the ground large enough to pose a danger to cattle and horses. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that they are known to have fleas infected with bubonic plague.

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But they are an integral part of the grassland ecosystem. They are the gardeners, they dig the earth and grow the plants closely, which increases the protein and nitrogen yields of the plants for the benefit of the herbivores: cattle, bison, elk or antelope.

As a second-generation Western Canadian, I was intrigued and baffled by the proposal.

My paternal great-grandmother died less than a year after arriving from England. When I visited her cousin in Wales in the 1980s, almost the first thing she said was: “That terrible country killed poor Jane.”

My maternal grandmother lamented that her life would have been easier if she had remained a housekeeper in the city instead of raising six children during the Depression on a farm.

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His family never went hungry, but they fought. The oldest daughter dropped out of school after eighth grade to work as a housekeeper on one of the large ranches that now border the park. It meant a little money to share and one less mouth for Grandma to feed.

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Because of these stories, the romance of settling in the West largely escapes me.

But the grandeur of so much sky is embedded in my heart and soul, along with the sound of the wind, the rustling of the grass, the calls of meadow larks and the barking of gophers.

Still, I wasn’t the only one wondering during those hearings who would want to visit such a barren and forbidding landscape, scraped and shaped by Ice Age glaciers.

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Mistakes were made. Ranchers were not mistaken in believing that grazing by more than a few hundred bison was necessary for the prairies to thrive. So Parks Canada granted an exemption, and for most of the last decade, cattle have returned to grazing in parts of the park.

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As time has passed, older ranchers whose children prefer high-speed networks and cities to the silence of the prairie, some of the darkest skies and some of the best stargazing in North America have sold out to the park. Even so, there is still some way to go before it reaches the proposed size with the east and west blocks joined.

Turns out people want a glimpse of what the West once was and will risk stumbling upon more evidence of dinosaurs where T-Rex once roamed.

It has helped the small community of Val Marie stand firm when so many other towns have faltered and fallen.

the Convent now it is an inn. the pleasantly wooded campground takes the overflow of visitors unable to safe places in the park. There is no staffed gas station yet, but there is a well-stocked grocery store and the artisans have started to move out.

This is not the old West, but it may be the harbinger of an even older and wilder future.

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Twitter: @bramham_daphne