In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, an American buffalo herd once numbering 30 million animals was reduced to twelve. It was the era of Manifest Destiny, a Gilded Age that treated the West as nothing more than a treasure chest of resources to be dug up or shot down. The buffalo in this world was a commodity, hounded by legions of swashbucklers and unemployed veterans seeking to make their fortunes. Supporting these hide hunters, even buying their ammunition, was the U.S. Army, which considered the eradication of the buffalo essential to victory in its ongoing war on Native Americans.

Into that maelstrom rode young George Bird Grinnell. A scientist and a journalist, a hunter and a conservationist, Grinnell would lead the battle to save the buffalo from extinction. Fighting in the pages of magazines, in Washington's halls of power, and in the frozen valleys of Yellowstone, Grinnell and his allies sought to preserve an icon from the grinding appetite of Robber Baron America.

Grinnell shared his adventures with some of the greatest and most infamous characters of the American West—from John James Audubon and Buffalo Bill to George Armstrong Custer and Theodore Roosevelt (Grinnell's friend and ally). A strikingly contemporary story, the saga of Grinnell and the buffalo was the first national battle over the environment. In Grinnell's legacy is the birth of the conservation movement as a potent political force.

Audubon Magazine, Editors' Choice:
"Michael Punke’s meticulously researched Last Stand chronicles the transformation of the Great Plains from untouched wilderness in the mid-19th century to a land, less than 30 years later, where the future of wildlife hung in the balance. Punke, a Montana native and a former Washington lawyer, clearly describes the forces that brought the buffalo to the brink of extinction, the individuals who fought to save the species, and how these events helped give rise to America’s first wave of conservation."  

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: 
"Punke deserves great credit for resurrecting Grinnell from the scrapheap of history and fostering new respect for a person whose name adorns landmarks in Glacier National Park, another legacy."

NewWest.net:  
"Last Stand is a page-turner... I rushed to get through the nail-biting chapters that detail the efforts of Yellowstone’s rangers to prevent poachers from killing the few remaining wild buffalo while they waited for political support from Washington...  This is great stuff... the book offers an inspiring message about the possibilities for conservation that can still exist even after all hope seems lost, as long as a few passionate individuals persevere until the general public is swayed."

Alan K. Simpson, former US Senator from Wyoming:
"Last Stand is all that Western history should be:  a good old rip-roaring adventure with buffalo, Indians, Yellowstone, cavalry, hunting, Cody, Custer, Roosevelt -- why, hell, there's even dinosaurs!" 

Dallas Morning News:
"Author Michael Punke of Montana, where buffalo have always roamed, has caused George Bird Grinnell to spring to life in this masterful portrait of a protector of buffalo and the true 'Father of American Conservation.'"

Missoula Independent:
"Last Stand reads like an action novel bolstered by exhaustive first-rate scholarship."

Vic Smith, a hunter, lifted his head above a rise on the plains floor, peering down at several hundred buffalo in the valley of the Redwater River.  The Montana winter of 1881 was frigid, all the more so because Smith lay prone in the snow, two Sharps buffalo rifles and several bandoleers of cartridges spread out on a tarp beside him.  Smith was careful to stay downwind and wore a white sheet to conceal him from the nearest animals, three hundred yards away.  For a while he just watched, his experienced eyes studying the herd – picking out the leaders, anticipating movements, carefully planning his first shot.  It all looked perfect, the ideal stand.

Finally Smith reached for one of the Sharps, working the lever to chamber a four-inch brass shell.  Supporting the stout barrel across his arm, Smith sighted carefully on the old cow that he knew led the herd.  He aimed at a spot just in front of her hip, then he fired. 

The report of the big gun thundered across the wide plain and a cloud of acrid smoke temporarily obscured the herd.  Smith did not look to see if he had hit his target – he knew he had.  Instead he set the smoking rifle on the tarp and loaded the second gun, then pulled it snug to his shoulder.  He alternated rifles each shot; otherwise the barrels became so hot that they fouled.  In Texas, he’d heard, buffalo hunters sometimes urinated on their guns to cool them, but in Montana, winter did the work.

The second Sharps ready, Smith looked up to find exactly what he expected.  His first shot had found its precise target in front of the cow’s hip.  When hit in that spot, Smith knew, the animal could not run off, but instead would just stand there, “all humped up with pain.”  As Smith intended, other members of the herd – the old cow’s “children, grandchildren, cousins, and aunts” – were already starting to mill about, confused, some sniffing at the blood that seeped from the cow. 

Smith now sighted on another old cow on the opposite side of the herd, marking the same target in front of the hip.  He fired again.

Smith worked deliberately, never rushing, a shot about once every thirty seconds.  Every bullet was strategic.  Most of the early targets were cows.  Occasionally he picked off a skittish bull that looked ready to bolt.  “After placing about fifteen shots where they were most needed,” he would later recall, “I had the herd stopped, and the buffalo paid no attention to the subsequent shooting.”  Experienced hunters like Smith called it “tranquilizing” or “mesmerizing” the herd. 

An hour later he was done.  Below Vic Smith in the valley of the Redwater lay 107 dead buffalo.  In the 1881 season he would kill 4,500.

* * *

The story of how the buffalo was saved from extinction is one of the great dramas of the Old West.  More profoundly, it is a story of the transition from the Old West to the New – a transition whose battles are still fought bitterly to this day.  The story is personified in a man, little known today, by the name of George Bird Grinnell.  Grinnell was a scientist and a journalist, a hunter and a conservationist.  In his remarkable life, Grinnell would live the adventures of the Old West even as he helped to shape the New.