By Patrick Springer, Special to the Journal
BLACK HAWK — Jackie Means has only faded memories of her childhood pilgrimages to Custer State Park to view the famous buffalo herd.
Her first adult visits, back in the 1960s, remain much more vivid.
“There were buffalo all over,” she said.
Back then, the herd’s size numbered 2,500, its peak, since reduced to prevent overgrazing its Black Hills refuge.
Those glimpses of the buffalo were family reunions of a sort. Means’ paternal grandfather, Scotty Philip, once lauded as “The Man Who Saved the Buffalo,” raised the bison that provided the foundation for today’s Custer State Park herd.
The park’s herd started in 1914, three years after his death, with the purchase of 36 buffalo for about $11,000 from the Philip ranch near Fort Pierre.
Actually, Philip had a bit of help. He bought 83 buffalo from the estate of another rancher, Fred Dupree, who had rounded up five bison calves when buffalo were on the brink of extinction.
But, as descendants of both the Philip and Dupree families attest, there was more to the story of how those two legendary ranchers helped spare the American bison from annihilation.
Their wives, Mary Good Elk Woman Dupree and Sarah Philip, were unsung heroines in the saga, largely ignored by historians but credited by their families for their roles.
Both women were Lakota, for whom the buffalo are sacred. And both, according to their descendants, helped persuade their husbands to rescue buffalo for their preservation.
So a bit of spousal prodding, it seems, helped to save the buffalo.
“She kind of lived both lives,” Means said of her grandmother, who was of Lakota and French ancestry. “The buffalo were quite predominant at that time. She always bemoaned the loss of the buffalo. She even wept once.”
In response, as the story was related by Means’ parents, Scotty Philip decided to do something.
“Our grandfather said, ‘Well, we’ll see if we can find some buffalo.’”
Undoubtedly, commercial motives also played a part, said Means’ cousin, Cathie Draine, also of Black Hawk. She recently edited a volume of her grandfather George Philip’s letters, with reminiscences of his days working on his uncle Scotty’s ranch.
Bison, which once roamed the prairies by the millions, were by then scarce but sought after by a handful of ranchers because of their impressive hardiness and adaptation.
“Scotty felt that the buffalo were remarkably suited to the northern Great Plains,” Draine said. “My instincts tell me Scotty was a first-class businessman and clever enough to read the writing on the wall. It just made good sense to save them.”
Whatever his motivations, Scotty Philip knew where to find buffalo: the neighboring Dupree Circle D Ranch on Cheyenne River Indian Reservation.
Fred Dupree, a French Canadian and former fur trader at Fort Pierre Chouteau, was by the 1880s enjoying a second career as a successful cattle rancher.
In one of history’s ironic twists, a man who once traded in buffalo robes — the industry that almost hunted the bison to extinction — would become an important figure in the animal’s resurrection.
In the winter of 1881, a hunting party from the Cheyenne River reservation set out in pursuit of a huge movement of buffalo, the remnant of the once-great northern herd.
Donovin Sprague of Rapid City, a historian and the great-great-great grandson of Fred and Mary Dupree, believes the inspiration to take several buffalo calves coincided with that hunt, which took place between the Moreau and Grand rivers.
The hunters had to rove far afield to find buffalo to shoot. Sprague believes the hunters found most of their prey near the Slim Buttes in Harding County.
“It’s kind of an oasis there,” said Sprague, who is director of education at Crazy Horse Memorial and also teaches history at Black Hills State University.
The hunters, including a couple of Fred Dupree’s sons, ultimately killed 2,000 buffalo. After two decades of intense hunting pressure, it seemed clear to anyone who was paying attention that the buffalo’s days were rapidly dwindling.
Perhaps the following spring, Fred Dupree sent a party, including two of his sons, to locate what remained of the buffalo herd, this time on a mission to capture calves.
The rescue party managed to get seven calves, by one account, taken while their mothers slept. Two calves died in captivity, but five survived — the forebears of today’s Custer State Park buffalo herd, estimated at 1,330 head at last month’s roundup, and unknown thousands of other bison.
Once again, a wife would play an important but unheralded role in saving the buffalo. Sprague said that the impetus to capture the calves came from Good Elk Woman, for whom the buffalo was central.
“It’s unimaginable to think what Lakota society would be without the buffalo,” Sprague said.
By the time of Pete Dupree’s death in 1898, the buffalo herd had grown more than tenfold. Philip bought them all, and later, his ranch hands, with help from a couple of Duprees, somehow managed to drive 57 buffalo to Philip’s neighboring ranch 100 miles away.
“That must have been a bucket of laughs,” said Draine. “Sadly, we don’t have any family papers chronicling that experience.”
When stragglers were added later, the acquired herd numbered 83. After Scotty Philip’s death in 1911, the once-modest herd grew considerably, exceeding 900 by some estimates. The ranch hosted buffalo hunts, with 200 set aside for slaughter, but sold 36 head to Custer State Park.
That founding nucleus herd quickly grew after settling on its Black Hills sanctuary. Three years after arriving, the herd grew to 50, and to 70 by 1919, almost doubling its original size.
By 1951, the herd acquired 60 buffalo from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, which had received surplus animals from Wind Cave National Park, to introduce new bloodlines.
The sale of surplus bison became an important way to raise revenue and to prevent overgrazing, and annual live auctions after the fall roundup began in 1965.
For more than 40 years, bison auctioned from Custer State Park have helped to start or expand countless park and ranch herds throughout the West. Ranchers will be among the bidders for 200 to 250 surplus bison at this fall’s auction Nov. 21.
“A lot of the private herds out there have some Custer State Park background,” biologist Gary Brundige, the park’s resource program manager, said.
After 43 years of auctions, the park has supplied between 16,000 and 17,000 buffalo to other herds, by Brundige’s rough estimate. There is no way to tell how many offspring those buffalo later produced over multiple generations.
But it’s easy to see that the historic Custer State Park herd has played a major role in preserving the bison, now estimated to number 500,000 — a dramatic recovery from the estimated 1,091 buffalo living in 1889.
“The park’s pretty proud of that,” Brundige said. “The park was a big player in the recovery of bison numbers.”
The Dupree and Philip families naturally share some of that pride. For Donovin Sprague and other Lakota, it helps keep a culture vital. For Jackie Means, 85, the Custer State Park buffalo herd is a living legacy of the grandfather she never knew and the grandmother whose memory she keeps.
Her heirloom family photos were lost years ago in a fire, and her grandmother’s stately mansion near Fort Pierre is gone. Its upstairs balcony offered a view of the site occupied by Fort Pierre Chouteau, where Fred Dupree once worked in the fur and hide trade before turning to ranching.
But now, when Means views the buffalo grazing the park’s pastures on her occasional visits, Scotty and Sarah Philip’s granddaughter can watch something more vibrant than a fading photo album.
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