Cowboys & Indians / October 2009 / At National Buffalo Museum, rare white bison call pastures home

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At National Buffalo Museum, rare white bison call pastures home

Because of their rarity, white buffalo have a mystical place in Native lore and have been revered by many Indian cultures through the ages.

And now there are three. Three rare, if not unique, white buffalo grazing the prairies of North Dakota halfway between Bismarck and Fargo at the National Buffalo Museum in Jamestown.

First there was White Cloud, born on the Shirek Buffalo Farm near Michigan, North Dakota, on July 10, 1996. She came to the buffalo pasture of the National Buffalo Museum in 1997 and for years was believed to be the only genetically verified albino buffalo in existence.

Then came two little white calves. During Labor Day weekend of 2007, White Cloud gave birth to a white bull calf — her fifth overall, but her first white calf that is presumed to be albino. And on May 31, 2008, a brown buffalo cow gave birth to a white bull calf, also presumed to be an albino. The sire of this calf is believed to be a son of White Cloud.

The calves were named Dakota Miracle and Dakota Legend in community contests in Jamestown. While genetic testing has not been performed, they are presumed to be albino due to their ancestry.

Even with the official genetic jury still out, "Miracle" and "Legend" don't seem to be overstating things. While a white buffalo certainly draws universal interest, it is most often identified with Native American traditions and lore going back centuries. Considered to be sacred signs, white buffalo have great spiritual importance in prayer and religious ceremonies.

"The calf is another sign that God is going to bless our children," says D. Joyce Kitson, a Native American traditional folklorist, artist, and arts-and-humanities teacher at Sitting Bull College in Fort Yates, North Dakota. "We have to come alongside our young to help them become what they want to be. When there is love there, it heals."

Toward that end, Kitson, who is of Hunkpapa Sioux and Hidatsa descent, is working on a calf hide with pictographs depicting the circle of life, a process she feels the white buffalo calves are an important part of.

Because of their rarity, white buffalo have a mystical place in Native lore and have been revered by many Indian cultures through the ages. Albinism in bison is thought to be a matter of inherited traits — similar to the genetic mechanism found in human beings and other animals.

"There is no clear evidence that the frequency of white buffalo has changed over time, and, as with other species, they seem to have always been rare," says Dr. James Derr, professor of veterinarian pathobiology and genetics at Texas A&M. "Some white bison that exist are not albinos. They were produced by backcrossing bison with light-colored domestic cattle such as Charolais and then selecting for the white color in subsequent generations or backcrosses."

Derr looks forward to performing DNA testing on the calves as soon as the museum staff can provide some samples. "All we need to genetically test these animals is a few hair root follicles from the tip of the tail," he says.

In the meantime, White Cloud and the calves have attracted worldwide attention. "They have drawn a phenomenal number of visitors," says Felicia Sargeant, director of the National Buffalo Museum. The healthy calves, who initially did a lot of sleeping and eating "like any normal babies do," are now at home with White Cloud in the National Buffalo Museum herd.

Allowed to live as normal an existence as any fenced herd can, they graze the 200-acre pasture that surrounds the museum, the Frontier Village, and the World's Largest Buffalo, a 26-foot-tall concrete sculpture that has stood above the plains since 1959. As if conscious of their special status, White Cloud and the white calves are often on the edge of the herd or down in the brush and trees in the pasture, Sargeant says.

But they aren't being standoffish: Experts theorize that the lack of pigments in their eyes may cause vision problems in bright-light conditions. Though they seem to hide from the light, the white buffalo are often viewed by visitors from the viewing deck of the National Buffalo Museum and by travelers driving along Interstate 94, which passes directly along the fence of the pasture.

Visitors to the museum can learn about everything buffalo. The 6,000-square-foot facility has been in Jamestown since 1993, paying tribute to the buffalo, the Native American cultures that for centuries relied on the species for survival, and the men who saved it from extinction in the 1880s.

A recent addition — besides the new babies in the albino brood — is a 12-foot traditional Lakota buffalo-hide tepee. Other displays depict the evolution of the buffalo over the eons and the multiple uses of the buffalo in Indian culture.

But as amazing and impressive as the buffalo of old comes across, it's those albinos in the pasture doing most of the public relations for the species.

National Buffalo Museum and Prairie Winds Gift Shop: 500 17th St. S.E., Jamestown, North Dakota, 800.807.1511, www.buffalomuseum.com.

Buffaloed by bison

Those massive shaggy-haired bovines native to North America are, in fact, correctly termed American bison. So why do we have a buffalo nickel and buffalo grass? French fur trappers first called the beasts they found in the New World les boeufs, meaning "the beefs." The term quickly became buffalo, which was a misnomer, because buffalo — a distant relative of the bison — are only native to Asia and Africa.

Filed under: Travel, Outdoors, Western, Native Life, North Dakota, Riding