Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

by Michael Punke

Book Overview

The dramatic history of the extermination and resurrection of the American buffalo, by #1 bestselling author of The Revenant

Michael Punke's The Last Stand tells the epic story of the American West through the lens of the American bison and the man who saved these icons of the Western landscape.

Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, an American buffalo herd once numbering 30 million...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062970097
• ISBN13: 9780062970091
• Release Date: June 2020
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

thrilling and inspiring

This is a fascinating look at an overlooked and underappreciated historical figure: George Bird Grinnell, who led the effort to save the buffalo (and later, Glacier National Park). A man far ahead of his time, Grinnell was trying to save the buffalo when most Americans didn't care that they were disappearing, or were eager to kill them off, either as a way to get rid of the Indians, or as a way to make money. Punke takes you on a thrilling journey, describing exactly how the buffalo were killed off and why, with side ventures into the creation of Yellowstone National Park (and the battles to preserve it that follow), the big baron culture of the 19th centure, the emergence and importance of the magazine industry at the time, and the lives of John James Audubon, Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Buffalo Bill and many others. The big will leave you with a tinge of sadness -- we will never again see the wilderness west of the early 19th century -- tempered with hope, that one person can, indeed, make a difference.

A Life Spent Serving Others

Michael Punke has written a very timely account of George Bird Grinnell, the assault on the American buffalo and efforts to keep it from extinction, the creation of Yellowstone National Park, and Grinnell's efforts as a conservationist. Grinnell was able to see into the future to save the buffalo from extinction, and the importance of preserving our environment for future generations. The book deals with poachers who killed buffalo for a living, commercial hunters of birds and fish, and how people felt the supply was inexhaustable. Yellowstone National Park was created in 1872, but many members of Congress voted for it simply because they felt the area was without economic value and setting it aside didn't matter. Grinnell's mentors were Lucy Audubon and Professor Othniel Marsh. Marsh accepted Grinnell as one of a few young men to accompany him out west to search for dinosaur bones. Later Grinnell accompanied George Armstrong Custer's 1874 expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota on a scientific expedition in which Custer searched for gold. Custer later invited Grinnell to accompany his ill fated 7th cavalry into Montana in 1876, but Grinnell had commitments at the Peabody Museum. Grinnell made the most of his life and devoted it to conserving America's beauty for future generations. It's ironic that his beloved Glacier National Park in Montana is now threatened by global warming. We owe it to him to preserve for future generations what he preserved for us. My copy of this book will go to the local high school in hopes that young people will be aware of the importance of preserving our environment.

A Welcome New Chapter in the George Bird Grinnell Story

Considering George Bird Grinnell's impact on conservation, fair treatment of the American Indian, and the national park movement - and those are but three of his many accomplishments - the lack of a full biography of his life seems downright peculiar. Since I first ran into his name more than a decade ago when I moved into an apartment building named Grinnell and wondered who or what "Grinnell" was, I have often pondered why I didn't learn about George Bird Grinnell in school. Surely, his life is as interesting and his contribution to America is as significant as that of Buffalo Bill (whose path he crossed). Consider, this man founded the first Audubon Society, explored Glacier National Park, and would have accompanied Custer at his last stand, except his professor needed his services for the summer at Yale! Until now, the most complete exploration of Grinnell's life - excluding the unpublished, autobiographical "Memories" which resides in original at Yale and in copy or microfilm in several other libraries - was John F. Reiger's "The Passing of the Great West." Reiger allowed Grinnell to speak for himself, filling out the picture with supplementary writings by and about him. Gerald Diettert's "Grinnell's Glacier: George Bird Grinnell and Glacier National Park" focuses on one period in Grinnell's life and William T. Hagan's "Theodore Roosevelt and Six Friends of the Indian" (Grinell was one of the six "friends"), focuses on one facet of it. Grinnell's own writings reveal much about him. He was a prolific writer with a keen eye for detail, but his writings with an autobiographical slant are either difficult to obtain, like "Memories," or scattered in various places, such as magazine articles about his home in Audubon Park or the semi-autobiographical series of "Jack" adventure books, which he presumably wrote for his nieces and nephews to acquaint them with the "olden days." While Michael Punke's "Last Stand: George Bird Grinell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West" is not a complete biography of Grinnell, it is a thorough examination of Grinnell's development from a wealthy and somewhat aimless young man to a mature thinker who grasped the concept of animal extinction and found in himself both the perseverance and tools to combat it. As Punke succinctly states, "If there were two moral poles in the world of George Bird Grinnell, Cornelius Vanderbilt stood at one of them" and Lucy Audubon, the widow of naturalist and painter, John James Audubon, stood at the other. Punke develops this theme confidently and convincingly throughout his book. Lucy Audubon, who was Grinnell's first teacher and near neighbor in what was then known as Audubon Park, taught him the value of self-denial, which is at the heart of conservation: deny today and preserve so that future generations may enjoy. True, Grinnell probably learned similar lessons from his father, whose reputation remained untarnished and unchallenged (except in

Relevant History

Michael Punke is fast becoming one of the most reliable authors for accessible, fascinating books about the west. He's a vivid writer who really knows how to construct a story. I highly recommend it.

Excellent historical read;

By 1902, the US Army estimated that only 23 wild buffalo remained alive in Yellowstone National Park - the pitiful remnants of the massive herds that once blanketed America. How the buffalo came to teeter on the brink of extinction is the subject of Last Stand by Michael Punke - a gripping historical account of the eradication of the buffalo and the founding of Yellowstone National Park. Last Stand, by Michael PunkeIn Last Stand, Punke details early conservationist George Bird Grinnell's battle to save both the bison and newly formed Yellowstone Park from hunters and powerful railroad interests. It opens with a bang; Punke leads with a chilling account of a hunter killing 107 buffalo without leaving his stand, setting the stage for his narrative about the death of the American west. A better story than most of the fiction I've read, Punke's book focuses on George Bird Grinnell - a man largely responsible for the conservation of much of the American west, but whom remains mostly unknown today. Opposing him were all the usual suspects: short-sightedness, a belief that the frontier was infinite, a desire to deal with the "Indian problem," commercial interests, and of course, naked greed. Punke does a commendable job of weaving together the myriad storylines affecting the west, connecting threads from Lewis & Clark to Custer to Bird's battle against congressional inaction in the face of a strong railroad lobby. George Bird - editor of Forest and Stream magazine - was an early convert to the cause of preserving the American west, and the climax of the book details his last-ditch efforts to preserve the handful of remaining buffalo. With the help of a US Army Captain fighting a wave of poachers in the park, Bird marshaled his few allies in congress, beat back the railroad lobby (who wanted half of Yellowstone for their own use), and finally - with the help of an outraged public - succeeded in legislating protections against poaching in the National Parks. The rapid decimation of the buffalo herds is a recurring (and distressing) theme in Punke's book: "The numbers paint the stark picture at the end. In 1882, the Northern Pacific Railroad alone shipped 200,000 hides to eastern processing facilities, an amount that filled an estimated 700 boxcars. In 1883, the railroad shipped 40,000 hides. In 1884, the total harvest fit in a single boxcar, and according to a Northern Pacific official, `it was the last shipment ever made.'" Punke even details the lamentable efforts by many hunters to be the "last to kill a wild buffalo." Hunters acknowledged the damage done in pursuit of what quickly became a marginal commercial enterprise, but shrugged off the buffalo's impending eradication and decided to get what they could while they could. It's impossible to read Last Stand without drawing some parallels to the perils facing today's parks and wilderness areas - privatization, commercialization, and how to preserve wild game stocks in the face of e