Today I’m writing from Lawton, Oklahoma, the place where I grew up and from which I left more than a few years ago. Some of you may be familiar with the Lawton/Ft. Sill area. If so, you will also be familiar with the Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge; if not, perhaps by the end of this article, your interest will be a little piqued, because this refuge is the home of one of (if not) the earliest national American Bison herds. If I remember correctly, this herd was established with about fifteen buffalo shipped by train to Cache, OK in 1905. The small group was then herded about five miles or so from the railway to the refuge area.
Since that slim beginning, that herd has become one of the largest national herds in the country, albeit one of the least known compared, for example, to Yellowstone National Park of WY and MT. The herd has increased to the point that about two hundred animals are auctioned off annually, and buyers come from substantial distances for these animals.
Southwest OK is southern Great Plains and once was the home of serious numbers of buffalo. The Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, situated near the eastern end of the Wichita Mountain Range, is characterized by southern plains pasturage and a very, very ancient red, granite, mountainous outcrop about twenty miles wide and eighty miles long. This outcropping heaved itself up through the extensive and surrounding limestone formation. It is also characterized by a mixed deciduous and coniferous forest in the mountainous areas and by sage, cactus, and mesquite in the grassy, plains areas. The CCC built dams, a few roads, picnic grounds, and a few camping areas throughout about one half of the refuge. The other half has been kept separated from the public use areas. Some ranger guided tours have access there, and some research projects are granted permits; but the primary purpose of the area behind the fence is sanctuary for wildlife, including the geological as well as the plant and animal life.
The differences between this landscape and that of western/southwestern SD are mostly those determined by latitude and elevation: the climate overlaps (longer winter in the north v. longer summer in the south); the flora overlap fairly substantially (lots of the same grasses, quite a few of the same trees, etc.); the fauna overlaps considerably (exclude the Armadillo from the north, the Pronghorn Antelope from the south; the Badlands of SD are one of a kind as are the granite mountains of the Wichitas. The American Bison, however, in both these locations, remains essentially indistinguishable; and I am often struck by how few buffalo are on the route I drive between the Wildidea Buffalo Ranch on the Cheyenne River and the refuge in the Wichita Mountains. The intervening Great Plains between these two places, nearly destitute of buffalo, unfailingly brings home to me a sense of my good fortune to have grown up in the presence of this Lord of the Prairie and in the later stages of my life to live and work intimately with these animals. The time and distance between these two ends (high school graduation and retirement from academic life) somewhat akin to the vastness and variety of the Great Plains, now mostly devoid of buffalo, now being ever so slowly restored to their rightful home.