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Last Stand by Michael Punke may easily be dismissed as another account of the American West—covered wagons and railroads, cowboys and Indians, adventure and lawlessness. But Punke does more than string together events like an old western TV series: he tethers it all together by providing the story of one little known man. This history—another exploration of an over-explored subject—manages to uniquely braid the formative years of what we affectionately call “The West,” with the life of George Bird Grinnell, an unexpected son of America’s gilded age where wealth and wastefulness ran rampant, and his quest to postpone the final hours of freedom for all things wild and native—in particular thebuffalo.
In brief, Punke highlights the efforts of Grinnell — a young student of Lucy Audubon, a paleontologist, sportsman, and eventual editor of Forest & Stream — to prevent the buffalo’s extinction. Most impressive about Punke’s telling is his ability to connect the dots. Rather than merely present snapshots of events in Grinnell’s life, he shows how each thing affects the next. He weaves everything into a comprehensive moving picture. While ultimately following one storyline, Punke’s narrative seamlessly flows, backtracks, and draws connections, instead of seeing them as the segregated events in a history book’s timeline.
In the first half of the book, Punke gently sets the scene. He carries the reader to the turning point in Grinnell’s life, when he “would commit himself to reversing the grim prophecy that he himself had projected for the American West” when, through his new position as editor, “Forest & Stream gave him a megaphone on a national stage”. The build-up is so well crafted that the change in direction from Grinnell’s development as a child of the Gilded Age to his matured decision to fight for environmental sustainability is almost palpable. Punke demonstrates the power that exists behind widely read and well-written prose as he follows Grinnell’s work through the magazine to turn the tide of public opinion and influence policymakers to stand up for the survival of the American bison.
Just as Grinnell used the magazine for his mouthpiece while staying behind its cover, Punke uses Grinnell’s life as a backdrop for the events of the era. His decision to not focus on Grinnell on every page, or even each chapter, accentuates the most critical events of the time, but always with Grinnell as the first of two major unifying factors. The second is a character just as omnipresent: the buffalo that stretched from Canada to Mexico City. Describing “the modern buffalo” as “winner of a brutal contest that wiped out hundreds of other species” and “a survivor of stunning physical attributes,” Punke croons a sweet love song to this great animal, making its demise all the more melancholy. When Punke first visited the plains in his young adulthood, millions of these majestic creatures still roamed free; by the time he became an outspoken advocate for their survival, only thousands remained.
Against these backdrops Punke strengthens his argument that Grinnell was really an integral player in the battle to save the buffalo as well as the fate of the American West, by referencing one after another historical giant with whom he interacted. From the civil war hero, General Sherman, to Buffalo Bill Cody, the infamous General Custer, and a young Theodore Roosevelt, Grinnell was rubbing elbows with the who’s who of the era. Punke’s choices in how he presents each character accentuates how Grinnell was influenced by and affected them all.
Ultimately, this telling of the United States’ tragic romance with the modern buffalo and one man’s quest to save them does not, tarnish the image of the buffalo as a source of national pride, but merely fills it out—puts the meat back on its bones so its no longer merely the flat image on the side of a nickel, but a living testament — beautiful, tortured, and defiant — to a sometimes harsh reality.
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