In the late 18th century, tens of millions of buffalo lived in North America. By the mid-1880s, they were on the brink of extinction. For the white settlers who sought to "conquer" the American west, and the Native people whose way of life depended on them, the plight of the American Buffalo was more than a story of one species of animal. As Dayton Duncan writes in the prologue of his new book Blood Memory, the buffalo has "emerged as an embodiment of the nation's contradictory relationship with the natural world: venerated and mercilessly destroyed, a symbol of both a romanticized frontier and the callous conquest of a continent." In this episode, Dayton joins us for a conversation about the Buffalo (aka American Bison) and how the story of one animal can tell us so much about American history.

Dayton Duncan is an Emmy award-winning writer whose most recent collaborations with filmmaker Ken Burns are the book Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023)and the new documentary The American Buffalo (2023) which is available right now at pbs.org.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our previous conversation with Dayton Duncan in RTN #229 on Benjamin Franklin.

This episode originally aired as episode 285 on October 2, 2023. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.