Lost Tracks

While contemporaries and historians alike hailed the establishment of Buffalo National Park in Wainwright, Alberta as a wildlife saving effort, the political climate of the early twentieth century worked against its efforts to stem the decline of the plains buffalo in North America. However, the branch charged with operating the park, the Canadian Parks Branch, was never sufficiently funded and therefore the park was unable fulfill its species recovery aims. And although cross-breeding experiments with bison and domestic cattle proved unfruitful and the attempts at commercializing the herd had no success, the population of the bison did increase as did the hope that this magnificent species might thrive again. By unravelling an intricate web of correspondence and other documentation, Brower reveals the fiscal and corporate management policies that doomed the herd and the park thereby providing important insight into successful wildlife management.