Well, I am thrilled this afternoon to be joined by the preeminent storyteller of the American

story, the greatest documentarian filmmaker in American history, the one and only Ken Burns.

Ken, welcome and thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Steve.

I'm so happy to be with you. You have a new documentary coming out. I do. It's called the American

Buffalo. It is hard to imagine what America looked like. That's right. Physically, in the latter part of the 19th century, 1860s, 1870s, given that there were somewhere

between 30 to 50 million of these animals spread out across the American West.

What did it look like?

It's a pretty great question.

You know, there were probably 60 to 70 million before Columbus arrived.

By the beginning of the 19th century, we think that there were that 30 plus by the mid-century, because of market

pressures, there were maybe 12 to 15. By the end of the 1880s, there are none. I mean,

literally fewer than 1,000, alive, most of them in zoos and private collections. We can imagine

maybe 20 wild and free in

Yosemite. But let's paint the picture before that. Most of the travel across the continent

involve going past the Great Plains. You're going to Santa Fe for business. You're going to

California for gold. You're going to Oregon for land and converting native populations to Christianity, all sorts of

reasons.

But the center of the country, the Great Plains, the American Serengeti, is still controlled

and populated by dozens of native tribes.

The place itself is alive with animals and plants.. The, it is like an unbelievable place. The grizzly bears are down

there. The elk are down there not having retreated yet to the Rocky Mountains. You've got,

you know, all of these creatures because the buffalo are there, they've created all of these little tiny wallows from there

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