When we reintroduced bison to Red Canyon Ranch we had an emotional as well as intellectual interest. Humans came within a whisker of exterminating the bison. There might have been two thousand left when General Phil Sheridan lobbied the Texas legislature in the late 1800s to kill a bill that would have protected the bison. Somewhere around one thousand bison survived in the United States and Canada. From them we have rebuilt the North American herds until over three hundred thousand are living — mostly on private ranches — in the U.S. and Canada.