Flappers & Fiction

The water at Calf Creek had become thick enough to slice, forcing the expedition to move camp toward the shelter of the Porcupine. In this concluding chapter, the hunt transforms into a race against both the elements and history. Between blinding blizzards and alkali pools, the narrator chronicles the final pursuit of the majestic bos Americanus across the High Divide. It is a triumphant yet melancholic account, capturing the precise moment the thundering herds vanished from the West, leaving only silence and snow in their wake.

By 1886, the thundering herds were gone, leaving only silence across the Montana badlands. To save the American bison from total oblivion, the Smithsonian ordered a mission with a cruel, necessary irony: hunt down the last survivors to preserve them for science. You see, if the museum didn’t claim them, the coyotes or careless poachers would. This is the fascinating, slightly heartbreaking account of that final expedition, featuring a golden calf named Sandy and a team racing to immortalize a species before the sun set on the frontier forever.

Canton in the 1880s is a city that swallows a visitor whole, and one American, armed with nothing but curiosity and a guide named Ah Chan, lets it. The workshops alone could occupy a fortnight: silk embroiderers producing peacock tail-feathers so faithful to nature that the birds seem ready to lift off the cloth, ivory carvers nesting six balls inside a single tusk. But the city saves its strangest hospitality for last, and the lunch Ah Chan orders at the restaurant near noon is a meal our Yankee cannot name to this day.