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Pablo ordered twenty-five killed because they were too wild to deal with. In the meantime, the buffalo that remained on the reservation continued to breed. By the time he finally quit trying to round them up, in 1912, Pablo had shipped 695 buffalo to Alberta and had grossed $170,000 on the sale. About seventy-five buffalo remained on the reservation, too wild to catch. A valley that held the United States’ largest buffalo herd just six years before now contained just a remnant.
    The American Bison Society countered the U.S. government’s belief that it already had enough buffalo by arguing that a single prairie fire or an outbreak of disease could easily kill off half of the publicly owned buffalo in the country. This worried President Theodore Roosevelt, who signed legislation enabling the United States to purchase thirteen thousand acres of Flathead Reservation from the Indians for $30,000. The American Bison Society spent over ten grand to purchase the nucleus herd for the Flathead Reservation land. It bought thirty-four animals from the Conrad family of Kalispell, who had purchased them from Charles Allard, who had purchased them from Sam Walking Coyote. Three other buffalo were donated, and two of those were also direct descendants of Sam Walking Coyote’s original six animals. * In October 1909, these thirty-seven buffalo were released into the fences of the National Bison Range and then watched as the remainder of Michel Pablo’s now-wild buffalo were killed off by poachers outside the fence.
    At the end of World War I, the American Bison Society conducted a census and counted 12,521 head in North America. The buffalo had been saved from extinction. Now conservationists who were once worried about too few buffalo were worried about too many. Yellowstone National Park couldn’t feed all of its, despite efforts to farm portions of the park and put up hay. It began slaughtering. The herd in Wainwright grew so rapidly the animals ran out of range. The Canadians slaughtered a thousand in the first batch and then continued butchering all through the 1920s. They turned the meat into pemmican—dried meat mixed with buffalo fat—and sold it at thirty cents a pound in ten-, twenty-, thirty-, or fifty-pound sacks.
    The National Bison Range had similar problems. The founders of the range had thought that the land could support over a thousand head, but in truth it couldn’t hold half of that. By 1924, the range had been degraded by overgrazing. Surrounding cattle ranchers didn’t want wild buffalo running around and trashing their fences, so the range manager slaughtered a few hundred. In general, the public was uneasy with this large-scale buffalo killing. The practice brought back fresh memories from just thirty or forty years earlier, when the last of the millions were killed off for their hides during a ten-year bloodbath. Under pressure, the U.S. and Canadian governments began making room for them elsewhere. Most often, that meant toward the north. In 1925, Canada shipped buffalo to the newly founded Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta, where the government had discovered a remnant wild herd of five hundred buffalo that had somehow survived the nineteenth century. Almost seven thousand buffalo left Wainwright, but no one knows how many survived the trip to the park; it’s been estimated that three thousand died in transit.
    The U.S. territory of Alaska also acquired excess buffalo from the National Bison Range. The acquisition was spearheaded by a group of hunters from Fairbanks, Alaska. They had wanted to introduce Rocky Mountain elk to the region, but at the time no one was selling elk. They settled for buffalo and got a good deal. The range charged only for crating and shipping and sent up twenty-three head. The animals traveled by rail to Seattle, where they were loaded on a barge and shipped by sea up to Whittier, Alaska, near the base of the Kenai Peninsula. From there they rode the train up to