Buffalo Molly: Tracey E. Fern’s “Buffalo Music”

By Jenny Shank, 5-19-08

Buffalo Music
by Tracey E. Fern
Illustrated by Lauren Castillo
Clarion Books, 32 pages, $16

Last year when I was reading Michael Punke’s excellent Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West, one detail about the how buffalo came to be rescued from the brink of extinction stood out: many of Yellowstone’s buffalo came from a single herd preserved and nurtured by a woman named Mary Ann Goodnight, who settled in West Texas’s Palo Duro Canyon in 1876.  She and her husband Charles raised orphaned buffalo calves left behind after the mass slaughter, and their animals served as crucial breeding stock for the restoration of the Yellowstone herd.

This seems to be the perfect tidbit to interest children in the history of the buffalo in the West, and Tracey E. Fern’s debut picture book for ages 4 to 8, Buffalo Music, tells just this tale of one pioneer woman whose actions helped avert a species’ extinction.

In Fern’s book, the ranch woman is named Molly, and it seems like she’d have enough to do without taking in stray buffalo—Lauren Castillo’s drawings depict her hoeing, hanging out laundry, sweeping, and hauling buckets.  When Molly first comes to the canyon, she works along to “buffalo music”: “the huff-huff of buffalo breath,” “the scritch-scritch of buffalo scratching themselves against the cottonwoods” and “the thunder of buffalo as they drifted like a dark cloud across the prairie.”

“Buffalo are homely, feisty critters with a stubborn streak wider than the Rio Grande,” Molly explains.  “My husband, Charlie, says they remind me of my own self and that’s why I have such a fondness for them.” (Wait, did he just call his wife homely?) The couple begins to hear the firing guns of buffalo hunters, and sees the piles of bones left behind as the animals disappear.  Castillo’s drawing of the gnarled mesquite and juniper trees with Molly’s wash blowing in the dry wind drives home the desolation of the place once the buffalo are gone.

In Fern’s telling, “a cowhand name of Billie” brings Molly a pair of buffalo calves, which she takes in and begins to nurse with a bottle.  Kids will enjoy Castillo’s cute drawings of these curly-hided beasts.  Soon other ranchers bring Molly stray buffalo, and her herd begins to burgeon so that she must fend “off wolves and poachers with the long end of my rifle.” At the end of the book, Molly receives word that Yellowstone wants to rebuild its buffalo herd, and she gladly ships several of hers north in a red boxcar. 

Buffalo Music will help kids understand how the buffalo disappeared from the plains, and this story sets a good example of how the determined actions of one person who disagrees with the destruction of a species can prevent it.