A look at Kane County’s first bison herd

They waited four hours, jammed into the tiny parking lot at Burlington Prairie as 15-mph winds whipped across the snowy, flat ground outside. With the temperature in the teens, about 50 Native Americans from different tribes idled in their cars watching for the trailers containing the bison to arrive.

As a group, they had been waiting a long time — generations, in fact. Until December, it had been 200 years since a bison set foot on Kane County tallgrass prairie.

Many of these urban Natives had never seen an American bison in person. Some tribes saw their federal recognition “terminated” by the government in the 1950s; grandparents or parents were relocated to big cities like Chicago, home to the country’s third largest Native American population, with 65,000 people representing 170-some tribes.

Finally, on this December day, a long aluminum trailer slowly crunched up the limestone access road. A smudge stick was passed around the trailer, then the doors were swung open. Amid a clatter, a single bison emerged to cheers. Then a second. Finally, with a tremendous racket, the remaining four leaped off the trailer in a dead run. To honor the animals, the onlookers sang, drummed and recited a prayer, some with tears in their eyes.

“My little boy, who is 10, got to see that,” said Jessica Walks First of the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. “I’ve waited my whole life for that.”

Here in the Prairie State, less than 1% of true prairie remains. One experiment to address that loss attempts to recreate the authentic ecologies that were in place before European settlement — and in the process, build a more sustainable cycle of life.

In northern Illinois, that means propagating the native plants and animals that sustained the tallgrass prairie. So while the return of bison to a former soybean field is an occasion filled with meaning for Indigenous Americans, local officials are also counting on the spectacular-looking animal to give them a hand with prairie restoration, and to draw a fascinated tax-paying public off their couches.

The pride of the prairie

For thousands of years, tens of millions of American bison thundered over the prairie and through the forests across North America. In just two decades, they were reduced to an estimated 500, starting in 1870 as the Transcontinental Railroad sliced across the West, spurring wholesale slaughter by hunters, travelers and U.S. troops.

This keystone species provided Native peoples meat for food and skins for housing and warmth and served as an integral part of the life cycle of many plants and animals. The Lakota called them tatanka, and their absence further weakened the Plains Indian tribes, who were fighting off federal efforts to forcibly move them into Western reservations.

When Jay Young, a Citizen Potawatomi and co-executive director of American Indian Center of Chicago, heard about a chance to bring the bison back to the Midwest, he was intrigued but a little mystified. The Forest Preserve District of Kane County was seeking a partner for a prairie restoration project and was running out of time; it had promised residents that the herd would be in place for spring 2026, and a first candidate had fallen through. Young scrolled through the email for the deadline.

“We’re a little nonprofit organization,” Young recalled thinking. “We’re not a tribe, we don’t have any land. What are we going to do with bison? That's crazy. We live in the city.”

There were lots of reasons to simply hit the delete button and continue to focus on beading classes, drum-making and powwows back at Chicago headquarters. But encouraged by his wife, who is also a board member, Young and the group found reasons to say yes.

“My people were here when the glacier receded,” said Walks First, who is president of the AIC’s board. “We live in a concrete jungle. Having land to steward gives us a chance to get those things back. We can see bison at the zoo, but it’s not the same experience. It’s reactivating something in our DNA. We can’t wait to have our entire community experience that.”

The American Indian Center will start taking care of the bison this spring on a 40-acre preserve under the tutelage of the current herd manager, the family-run company Ruhter Bison. The bison were donated by The Nature Conservancy out of its Nachusa Grasslands herd near north-central Franklin Grove, and the AIC pays Ruhter a discounted fee for their care, along with a $10 per acre grazing fee to Kane County.

Handling bison is not like raising cattle. Although they are independent and low maintenance, bison manager Matthew Ruhter said, they are cantankerous wild animals. North America’s largest land mammal, currently numbering an estimated 500,000 in herds across the country, weighs about a ton, can run 35 miles per hour and jump six feet off the ground.

Almost daily, handlers check the electric fencing, behavior, food and water levels and even the consistency of “bison patties” – that’s their poop – for health issues.

“Once the critter is in the field, if something goes wrong, then you’ve got a big problem,” Ruhter said. “Because bison don’t want to cooperate.”

A step toward restoring Native lands

One January day, the animals moved steadily around a wooded wetland area, then back to a corner of the paddock where the supplemental feed was dropped off.

They were curious about a small group of visitors, nudging each other and sidling up to the fence to pose for photos and videos.

Residents had been waiting too. The district’s voters in 2024 supported a $5 million tax increase dedicated to land acquisition and improvement in public lands. According to Forest Preserve Director Benjamin Haberthur, one of the most anticipated projects was the herd.

Naturalists believe that bison can assist the restoration and biodiversity of the prairie by eating the taller grass to let low-lying plants grow, by wallowing on the ground and creating small depressions where water can pool and by distributing natural fertilizer throughout the ground.

This new partnership accelerates Young’s goal of getting what he calls the “urban Natives” of Chicago into nature. Native Americans are a people of the land, he said, but for most in Chicago, they know more about bus schedules and parking meters than the grazing practices of bison and little bluestem grass.

“Bison are relatives,” Young said, who became co-executive director at the center about two-and-a-half years ago and is trying to steer the organization toward more stability after a period of internal dissension. “They are not a resource. We have a responsibility to take care of them.”

The bison have generated intense interest in both Kane County and from Native Americans; an AIC Facebook post generated 50,000 reactions. In the spring, both the preserve and the American Indian Center will roll out guided and self-guided programs at the prairie, telling the story of the bison and Native Americans and teaching about Indigenous foods and medicine.

Native Americans will conduct “citizen science” projects, said center community engagement coordinator Dnisa Oocumma, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, to chart the transformation of the prairie.

“This is something our community has been missing for a long, long time,” Oocumma said. “I feel personally very honored.”

Until spring, the prairie access road is closed. But that hasn’t stopped hikers from traveling a mushy half-mile road to get a sneak peek. On an unseasonably warm weekday in January, as part of his spur-of-the-moment outreach program, Haberthur spent a few minutes with each visitor and reminded a dog owner to keep a short leash.

He credited the 2023 Ken Burns documentary “The American Buffalo” with solidifying his commitment to working with Native Americans on the project.

“If you don’t have a Native American partner, you’re not doing this right,” Haberthur said he was told. “This is exactly what we were looking for.”