06/07/2026
This is a great read…….
In February 1893, twelve bison were loaded onto a boat and moved across the frozen Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island. Four bulls, four cows, and four calves from a Texas herd. The total North American bison population at the time was estimated at fewer than a thousand animals. Someone put twelve of them on an island.
The man selling was William Glasmann, an Ogden publisher who had tried running a tourist attraction called the Utah Buffalo Zoological Gardens on the mainland south shore and failed to draw crowds. The men buying were John Dooly and J.H. White, who owned Antelope Island and wanted to stock it with game for commercial hunting. The bison were not being saved. They were being moved to a place where rich men could pay to shoot them.
The island changed the math.
Antelope Island is roughly forty-two square miles of rugged terrain rising out of the Great Salt Lake. No bridges connected it to the mainland in 1893. No large predators occupied it. The grass was abundant. The bison had water, forage, space, and isolation from everything that had been killing their species across the rest of the continent. They bred. By 1896, the herd had grown enough that a group of Salt Lake City hunters shot a 2,317-pound bull after ranch managers reported it was becoming savage. By 1910, the herd numbered roughly a hundred. By the early 1920s, it fluctuated between a hundred and four hundred animals.
Buffalo Bill Cody visited the island with English investors and reportedly offered one million dollars for the property. The owners refused. They had their own plans for the place.
In 1923, Paramount Pictures used the Antelope Island herd to film a buffalo stampede for The Covered Wagon, one of the first major Western films. Three hundred and fifty bison were driven across the island for the camera. The film helped create the visual language of the American Western, including the circling wagons trope. The bison that nearly went extinct on the Great Plains were now being stampeded for entertainment on a salt lake island because there were not enough of them left anywhere else to film.
Then the island's owner decided the bison had to go.
A.H. Leonard purchased Antelope Island and wanted to clear it for cattle. He tried selling the bison to zoos. No takers. He tried selling the entire island to the Department of the Interior as a national park. No deal. In November 1926, he organized a public hunt.
Three hundred dollars per person, roughly five thousand in today's money. The hunt made national news. Utah Governor George Dern received protests from the American Humane Society, the governor of Massachusetts, and the mayor of Boston. Time magazine covered it. The protests did not stop it. The island was private property and the bison were private animals.
The hunt reduced the herd from several hundred to fifty-five. Thirty cows and twenty-five calves. The same arithmetic that had nearly erased the bison from the plains played out on a forty-two-square-mile island in Utah, driven not by industrial slaughter but by one man's preference for cattle over buffalo.
The herd survived because fifty-five animals on an island with no predators and abundant grass will grow back if nobody kills them again. Nobody killed them again. The island changed hands multiple times. Anschutz Ranching acquired the southern portion and the herd in 1972 and donated it to the state of Utah in 1981. Antelope Island became a state park. The bison became public property.
Today the herd numbers between 550 and 700 animals. Every October, the entire herd is rounded up by riders on horseback and ATVs. Each animal is run through a chute, vaccinated, checked for pregnancy, weighed, and fitted with an identification microchip.
Surplus animals are sold at public auction in November, generating roughly $120,000 per year for the park. Six bison hunting tags are issued annually, adding another $8,000. The herd that started as a failed tourist attraction, survived a commercial hunt, and was filmed for a silent movie is now managed with the same precision as a cattle operation, because without management, 550 bison on a forty-two-square-mile island with no predators would eat themselves out of grass within a decade.
Every bison standing on Antelope Island traces back to the twelve animals that crossed the frozen Great Salt Lake in February 1893. Four bulls, four cows, four calves. They were not placed there for conservation. They were placed there for profit. The profit failed.
The island held. The bison did what bison do when nothing is killing them. They multiplied. And the twelve animals that a publisher could not sell tickets to see became one of the oldest and most genetically significant public bison herds in the United States because a salt lake and forty-two square miles of stubborn terrain made them harder to erase than anyone expected.
Source: Utah State Parks, Antelope Island History / Utah Division of Wildlife Resources / KSL News / Time Magazine, 1926.
Image is for illustration purposes only
