LARNED –  A sought-after traveling national exhibit becomes available to the Golden Belt public for the Labor Day weekend at the Santa Fe Trail Center and Museum west of Larned.

“Bison: Masters of the Plains” is a national traveling exhibit produced by Flint Hills Design in collaboration with the Kauffman Museum in North Newton that is currently touring Kansas. 

After a Friday select viewing for its association membership, the Santa Fe Trail Center and Museum will open the West Gallery to the public on Saturday. 

The exhibit will run through Oct. 25.

Seth McFarland, SFTC director, sought the exhibit for its relevance, not only in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Santa Fe National Historic Trail, but also as an homage to the animal seen as an important facet to the shaping of commerce and community throughout the Great Plains.

”Before Europeans came to settle and develop this country, the American Bison was an important facet of the ecology of the Great Plains,” McFarland said. “It was important to the native Americans who lived here. 

“More than a century ago, it was nearly exterminated, and but for the actions of a few far-sighted people, would likely have disappeared,” he said. ”This exhibit is a most comprehensive look at that extermination, what happened after and where we are today.”

McFarland also noted the exhibit has undergone an evolution, beginning with its origin as an initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2009, Flint Hills Design partnered with Kauffman Museum expand the traveling exhibit. 

After the pandemic caused a hiatus last year, the exhibit is back on the road, traveling through the Golden Belt.

The current edition consists of 21 stations that trace the stately animal through its function as a primary provider for the first inhabitants of the Great Plains through America’s fledgling Industrial Age to the decimation of the herds. It also cover early conservation and preservation efforts and ends with a look at the national animal as it exists today.

The advent of the railroad from the 1870s to the early 1900s ushered in a period of hunting that reduced herds numbering in the millions to just 325 animals in 1880. Industries that arose from massive hunting also went boom and bust, McFarland  noted.

“The killoff was a major impetus for industry,” McFarland said. “A number of industries formed from the remnants of the animal. They tried to utilize it and they over utilized it.” 

As hunters killed an average of 5,000 animals per day, the hides were salvaged and tanned for a popular mode of dress, bones were ground into meal and exported to make bone china, and the tongues were eaten as a delicacy.

The rest of the animal “was left to rot,” McFarland said.

“Only a very few people saw the writing on the wall,” McFarland said. “If it weren’t for them, those people who took that seed of saving a herd, the bison would have disappeared.

“The U.S. government was using the elimination of the bison as a control for the Native American,” he said. “The Native American was a problem to them at the time and they wanted to be able to get them out of the way.”

It’s that “Manifest Destiny” attitude, that the conqueror will come in and dictate what happens in the future, he said.

“It wasn’t until the Native American was successfully moved to reservations that they then said ‘wait, maybe we should save some of the bison.’”

The actions of a few, such as zoologist William Temple Holladay in the 1880s, saved the species from total annihilation. Conservationists, such as Charles Goodnight and his wife Mary Ann Dyer Goodnight, saw merit in keeping and increasing wild bison in protected herds. 

Today, American bison numbers are approaching 500,000 with the largest herd of 5,000 at Yellowstone National Park.

“I think that this exhibit is a great example giving a concise look at the whole story overall,” he said. What was the bison? Where was this nation going with the bison? How did the European settlement impact it? And where are we today? 

“I think that so many times we are given one aspect of the story and this is a great overall view,” he said.

At the same time, it tries to present a fair story to everyone, he said. “How can we look at this event in history and better ourselves from that?”

The Santa Fe Trail Center is located two miles west of Larned on K-156.