Pennsylvania Game News - March 2020 - 8

declared invalid by E. Raymond Hall
in his 1981 The Mammals of North
America.
Today, taxonomists and geneticists
argue about whether there are even two
subspecies of American bison, wood
and plains bison.
But wildlife agencies that manage
bison populations still use the subspecies distinctions, and wood bison are a
federally threatened species.
Although Shoemaker's books and
stories of Pennsylvania bison were
warmly received by the public for
decades, the scientific community had
its reservations.
One of the first to question their
authenticity was John Guilday, a
research curator of the Carnegie
Museum of Natural History, in a 1963
Pennsylvania Archaeologist article

titled, Evidence for Buffalo in Prehistoric Pennsylvania.
"Shoemaker's accounts wildly distort whatever fact they may be based
on, and, as far as the history of the
buffalo in Pennsylvania is concerned,
must regretfully be discounted," Guilday wrote.
But even Guilday believed buffalo
were part of Pennsylvania's past.
"Scattered bands of buffalo occurred
in the mountain glades and the river valleys of the mountain sections," he wrote
in a December 1956 Game News article
titled Pennsylvania Mammals - A History. "Greater numbers roamed the lake
area of northwestern Pennsylvania."
Guilday and several other researchers who have studied historic bison
accounts throughout the Mid-Atlantic
conclude it's reasonable to assume

PENNSYLVANIA PRESENCE
In response to the rallying cry to conserve
America's remaining plains bison at the start of
the 20th century, General Harry C. Trexler in 1911
purchased two bison for the 1,108-acre game preserve he had established about 10 miles northwest
of Allentown. He bought another pair in 1914. By
1933, the year Trexler died, the preserve had a
herd of 70 bison.
It's unclear whether the Trexler herd ever
provided bison to America's restoration effort. But
the preserve, now known as the Trexler Nature
Preserve, still has bison.
Bison also appeared in Pittsburgh's North and
South parks back in the Roaring Twenties. Author
R. Jay Gangewere captured the coming of bison to
Allegheny County's new parks in the July/August
1986 Carnegie Magazine.
In the parks' early stages of development, "...
it seemed obvious that parks should have wild
animals, and that the ideal caretakers or curators of
wildlife would be real Indians," wrote Gangewere.

"And so, the county commissioners brought two
tribes of Indians from a Montana reservation to live
in the parks" to tend bison delivered there in 1927.
"This was no small affair," Gangewere wrote.
"Thirty-six head of buffalo were trucked in by
means of a motor caravan, led by a tank. Reporters followed in private cars. Deer and other native
wildlife from Pennsylvania were also provided as
part of the Indians' herd.
"But the gesture ended badly. The Plains
Indians found the winters here too severe and
left after one season. In North Park, the Indian
"curators" of the herd did not so much protect it
as use it the way their ancestors would have - for
food and clothing. They were asked to leave. The
romance of the American Indian could not survive
in a county park."
But the buffalo at South Park did; the North
Park bison were transferred to South Park in the
1940s.
They remain an attraction to this day.

Pennsylvania Game News - March 2020

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