Somebody tell Ken Burns there are free-roaming bison in Utah

“The American Buffalo” is a two-part, four-hour gem of a documentary that tells the story of the bison and the people who revered them. It’s another masterpiece from filmmaker Ken Burns.

But it does seem that his long and expansive research never reached Utah. Toward the end of the two-parter, the question of whether there’s anywhere in the United States where buffalo can roam free is raised — but that’s already the case in Utah, and has been for many years.

Part 1 of “The American Buffalo” (Monday, 8 p.m., PBS/Channel 7) is the horrifying tale of how American settlers all but wiped the buffalo out in the 19th century. There are appalling images of uncounted bison killed and left to rot, and there’s a photo of a mountain of bison skulls that defies description.

In a video news conference with TV critics, Burns acknowledged “it is, at times, incredibly difficult to watch.” The slaughter reduced a population estimated at 60 million animals to maybe 1,000. And it doesn’t reflect well on the United States as settlers moved west.

“We’ve had some embarrassments, but this was a big one,” said Utah’s bison biologist, Rusty Robinson. “It’s the largest land mammal in North America, and we almost totally wiped them out. And on top of that, they had so much cultural significance.”

“The American Buffalo” is almost as much about the Native Americans who lived with, depended on and revered the bison as it is about the bison. “It’s a story of resilience of the species, and a story of resilience of the native people who depended on them for so long,” Burns said.

Part 2 (Tuesday, 8 p.m., PBS/Channel 7) is about the long and difficult effort to save the buffalo. There are an estimated 350,000 bison in America today. Native Americans oversee about 20,000 of them; federal and state preserves are home to another 20,000; and the rest are in private herds, “many of them confined like cattle, fattened in feedlots, raised for slaughter,” according to the documentary.

Are all bison ‘contained’?

Conservationists hope that buffalo once again live on vast grasslands. Historian Rosalyn Lapier, a member of the Blackfeet Métis tribe, told journalists that remaining concerns include “the creation of large ecosystems for bison to live on, and whether or not bison will be free-roaming animals. Right now, they are not. All bison that live in the United States are contained somehow” — other than a few dozen released on the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana.

She’s not wrong about all bison being somehow contained, but the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources does not agree that none are free-roaming. “We have two free-ranging bison herds that reside on public lands,” said Robinson — one in the Henry Mountains, and one in the Book Cliffs. (The bison on Antelope Island are confined there.)

There are 300-400 bison in the Henry Mountains in southeastern Utah, about 260 miles from Salt Lake City, and about 400-450 in the Book Cliffs, about 120 miles northeast of the Henry Mountains. And none of them are behind fences. Theoretically, those buffalo can go wherever they like.

“Obviously, there’s cattle fence,” Robinson said. “But a fence to a bison is nothing. They can push over a fence if they want.” But they’re kept in place by “hunting pressure,” he said. “If we apply pressure on the edges, they’ll go back to wherever we try to keep them.”

A limited number of bison hunting permits are issued each year — it varies year to year, and it’s a lottery. “The odds of drawing [a permit] are very, very low. It’s a high-demand, low-supply opportunity,” said Robinson. (He’s actually the state’s once-in-a-lifetime species coordinator, so-named because he oversees species that hunters can be permitted to hunt just once — bighorn sheep, mountain goats, moose and bison.)

Bison in the Salt Lake Valley

If they were “left to their own devices,” the bison could end up just about anywhere. Robinson said that when they were first transplanted to the Henry Mountains from Yellowstone in 1941, “one of them ended up at Strawberry Valley” west of Provo, “and another one was almost to Arizona. So they can cover some ground.”

According to the National Park Service, bison once ranged through across most of North America. Including in the Salt Lake Valley, according to the Utah DWR, but were “almost entirely killed off in 1833″ by an expedition led by frontiersman Joseph R. Walker. When Latter-day Saint settlers arrived in 1847, the buffalo were gone.

Today, the bison are kept on their remote ranges for their safety, as well as the safety of others.

“Can you imagine if bison just started crossing I-70 every day?” Robinson said. “Trust me, I’d love to have bison everywhere that they existed on their historic range, but the landscape has changed so much. And there’s so much conflict that we have to kind of relegate them to certain management areas. … It’s a balancing act.”

A large part of that conflict is with cattle ranchers. That’s not just something out of the Western movies. “It’s been the same story for a couple hundred years,” Robinson said. “There’s always conflict, for sure. It’s [the ranchers’] livelihood, and you can’t fault them for trying to protect that.”

Bison are back from the brink but, historian Clay Jenkinson says in the documentary, “until buffalo can move more or less at will over a vast grassland, we haven’t restored them at all. We’ve made them a very special, grass-eating zoo creature.”

Robinson is bullish on the future of bison in Utah: “We have three stable, thriving populations. And they’re doing great.”

Buffalo or bison?

There are those who take umbrage when bison are called buffalo. Burns is not one of them. “The American Buffalo” uses the two terms interchangeably.

“Scientists call it bison. People call it buffalo,” he said. “Even the National Bison Refuge has been changed to the National Buffalo Refuge. I don’t think Buffalo Bill would want his name changed to Bison Bill, nor would the second largest city in New York state like to be changed to Bison, New York.”

He acknowledged that bison are “not actually buffalo, but … prairie dogs are not actually dogs.”