Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife, wild places, and the people who dedicate their lives to conserving both.

I'm your host, Lake Pickle. Today, I want to talk to you about one of the most iconic species in all of North America, bison, or buffalo.

But we're going to explore their history in a place that is often forgotten, the eastern

United States.

It's mid-April, and the sound that you're hearing is me and my friend Jeremy French from the southeastern Grasslands Institute, hiking down a hill towards a large flowing creek.

It's slightly overcast, but besides that, it's a beautiful spring day, and the vegetation that we're walking through is showing it.

Wildflowers starting to bloom, trees along the creek

beginning to leaf out. We even heard two turkeys gobble on our journey down here. As we make it

down close enough to hear the fast flowing water of the creek that will eventually dump into the

Red River, we see what we came for. Man, what a cool place. See this cut through? Yeah. That's your

bison trail. Really? That's entirely open not because anybody maintains it, not because

anybody's doing anything but because it's a bison trail. As we get further down, you'll see where it gets war in.

Now, I know what you may be thinking. Bison Trail. Okay, he's in Yellowstone. He's in one of the Dakotas, or he's out west somewhere.

And to that I say, not so fast. Because I'm in North Tennessee, and now I'm standing in a historic bison trail that has been here for a long long time

Told you you're gonna see anything that someone busted a bulldozer through it. Yeah, so that they just straight up

Bison Trail straight up bison trail now how do they know like how how how did somebody determine that this was a bison trail. Straight up bison trail. Now how do they know like how how did somebody determine

that this was a bison trail? So if we were looking at this a hundred years ago, right,

it would look different than it does today. Because we've had more time of rain and less time

of bison on the landscape, it looks more eroded and washed out but back in the day

these shoulders here would have been much higher and more prominent and then they mapped them all you know

they mapped all the bison trails of like the cumberland settlements gotcha and you know just by the

surviving of those documents we we have an understanding but also if we look with like

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