When the Prairie Starts to Thunder: Inside South Dakota's Great Buffalo Roundup

There are mornings in America when getting out of bed requires faith, coffee and a compelling contractual obligation. Then there is the last Friday in September at Custer State Park, when 1,300 bison come thundering across the South Dakota prairie and suddenly nobody needs reminding why they woke before sunrise.

The annual Custer State Park Buffalo Roundup began at 9:30 this morning, although sensible spectators arrived hours earlier, carrying folding chairs, binoculars, layered clothing and enough coffee to irrigate Nebraska. Parking opened at 6:15. By the time the herd began moving, as many as 20,000 people could be gathered along the viewing areas.

And then the prairie starts to move.

First comes dust. Then shapes. Then horns, enormous shoulders and the peculiar rolling gait of an animal that looks as though evolution designed it after a particularly ambitious lunch.

Behind them ride cowboys, cowgirls and park staff, pushing approximately 1,300 bison five miles toward the corrals. Horses turn. Riders shout. Dust rises into the Black Hills air. Thousands of hooves make the ground feel less dependable than it did five minutes earlier.

It is magnificent.

It is also work.

That distinction matters.

The Buffalo Roundup is a genuine wildlife management operation. Once the animals reach the corrals, crews begin sorting, testing and treating them. The herd has to remain at a level that Custer State Park's grasslands can support. The spectacle happens because the work needs doing.

The story began modestly in 1914, when 36 bison from the Scotty Philip herd near Pierre were brought into what was then the Custer wildlife preserve. By 1924, there were 100. Today the park manages a herd numbering well over a thousand.

This is particularly striking when you consider what had happened to the species during the previous century. Millions of bison once moved across North America. By the dawn of the twentieth century, they had been driven perilously close to extinction.

Custer's herd became one small part of their recovery.

There is something moving about watching that recovery at full gallop.

Custer State Park sprawls across roughly 71,000 acres of the Black Hills, which is enough country to make you suspicious of anyone who says they saw it all over a weekend. There are granite pinnacles, ponderosa forests, streams, lakes, open grasslands and roads that appear to have been designed by someone who regarded straight lines as evidence of weak character.

For much of this, we can thank Peter Norbeck.

Norbeck was South Dakota's governor and later a United States senator, but his greater talent may have been recognizing that scenery ought occasionally to be left alone.

He helped shape Custer State Park and championed the extraordinary roads threading through the Black Hills.

Needles Highway, completed in 1922, is only 14 miles long. Allow an hour. Allow considerably longer if you have any instinct for stopping.

Norbeck helped plot the route on foot and horseback through granite formations that most road engineers would have sensibly gone around. His approach was different. The road squeezes through tiny tunnels, curls around rock spires and wanders through forests with the confidence of a man who has nowhere urgent to be.

Nearby Iron Mountain Road carries the philosophy further. Its pigtail bridges loop over themselves as the road gains and loses elevation. Three tunnels deliberately frame Mount Rushmore in the distance.

Norbeck believed travelers should slow down.

It may be the finest piece of tourism advice ever offered by a politician.

The landscape has another presidential footnote. In 1927, Calvin Coolidge spent three months at the State Game Lodge, turning it temporarily into the Summer White House. One imagines Coolidge appreciated the Black Hills because they provided tremendous scenery while making very little conversation.

The lodge still stands.

So does much of the infrastructure built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the 1930s, when young men planted, built, cleared, quarried and constructed their way through the park. Their work remains embedded in roads, lakes, buildings and overlooks.

This is why Custer deserves more than a morning at the roundup.

Drive Wildlife Loop Road afterward, slowly. Bison have an endearing habit of regarding traffic laws as an interesting regional custom. They may stand in the road. They may cross it. They may remain exactly where they are while thirty rental cars accumulate behind them.

Let them.

The park recommends staying at least 100 yards from bison, elk and other large wildlife. This is sound advice. A bison can weigh roughly as much as a small automobile and possesses none of an automobile's enthusiasm for insurance paperwork.

Then drive Needles Highway. Walk around Sylvan Lake. Stop at the State Game Lodge. Hike if your boots are willing. Stay overnight if you can.

September is a particularly fine time for all of this. Summer crowds begin thinning. The air acquires an edge. Aspens and birches start turning. Morning light comes sideways across the grasslands, making everything look briefly as though somebody has spent the night polishing South Dakota.

The roundup also coincides with an arts festival featuring more than 100 vendors, bringing another part of Western culture into the park. Painting, leatherwork, photography, jewelry and craft sit naturally beside ranch horsemanship because the West has always produced things as well as myths.

That may be what makes Custer so satisfying.

There are plenty of places where the American West has been preserved as decoration. Here it remains inconveniently alive.

The bison are not props. The horses are working. The grass has limits. The roads were designed to make people look at mountains rather than hurry through them. The old lodge still receives guests. The wildlife occasionally stops traffic.

And once every September, before an audience clutching coffee cups in the cold morning air, 1,300 bison come over the prairie in a cloud of dust.

For a few minutes, the Black Hills seem unimaginably large and the modern world wonderfully far away.

Then someone in front of you raises an iPhone.

This is America, after all.