The American Buffalo w/ Dayton Duncan
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 28 July 2025
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In the late 18th century, tens of millions of buffalo lived in North America. By the mid-1880s, they were on the brink of extinction. For the white settlers who sought to "conquer" the American west, and the Native people whose way of life depended on them, the plight of the American Buffalo was more than a story of one species of animal. As Dayton Duncan writes in the prologue of his new book Blood Memory, the buffalo has "emerged as an embodiment of the nation's contradictory relationship with the natural world: venerated and mercilessly destroyed, a symbol of both a romanticized frontier and the callous conquest of a continent." In this episode, Dayton joins us for a conversation about the Buffalo (aka American Bison) and how the story of one animal can tell us so much about American history.
Dayton Duncan is an Emmy award-winning writer whose most recent collaborations with filmmaker Ken Burns are the book Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023)and the new documentary The American Buffalo (2023) which is available right now at pbs.org.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out our previous conversation with Dayton Duncan in RTN #229 on Benjamin Franklin.
This episode originally aired as episode 285 on October 2, 2023. This rebroadcast was edited by Ben Sawyer.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer, and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:08.5 | This week on the show, we discuss one of the best documentaries I've seen in a very long time, |
| 0:14.7 | Ken Burns, the American Buffalo. |
| 0:16.6 | Our guest is Dayton Duncan. |
| 0:18.5 | He's a writer. |
| 0:19.4 | He's worked with Ken Burns on many documentary series, |
| 0:22.5 | including Benjamin Franklin, which we discussed in the past. |
| 0:26.3 | And this documentary is not only informative. |
| 0:29.5 | It is incredibly moving. |
| 0:30.8 | And Bob and I were fortunate enough to speak with Dayton |
| 0:33.8 | just after the documentary came out in October of 2023. |
| 0:40.9 | So today we are resharing that wonderful conversation. |
| 0:48.2 | If you miss this documentary or you missed this episode, you're in for a treat because both are powerful. |
| 0:54.7 | And if you listen to this, I guarantee you you're going to want to watch the American Buffalo, which is streaming right now on pbs.org for free. |
| 0:56.0 | So a shout out to the support for public broadcasting. |
| 1:01.0 | Maybe we could use some of that back. |
| 1:02.7 | Anyway, hope you're all doing well. |
| 1:04.6 | Thank you to all the patrons who keep us going. |
| 1:07.0 | Patreon.com slash the road to now. |
| 1:09.1 | If you're already there, thank you so much. Bob and I are lining |
| 1:12.6 | up new episodes, which will be coming at you soon. We're excited about those. And we hope your |
| 1:17.0 | summer's going well. Take care. I'm Bob Crawford. I'm Ben Sawyer. And this is The Road to Now. |
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