Scrub Hub: IU's new bison mascot links back to a forgotten piece of Indiana history

Indianapolis Star

2 days ago

After decades with no furry beast repping its athletic department, Indiana University recently adopted an official mascot.
Once again, it's a bison.
The two-thousand-pound animals used to roam the Indiana landscape en masse, packing down the earth beneath their feet and creating paths as they shuffled along. Indiana University referenced perhaps the most famous of these trails — the Buffalo Trace — in their Star-Wars-style announcement video last month.
But after almost 200 years without a bison in sight, it can be hard to imagine how they could have permanently altered the Indiana landscape.
So, this edition of Scrub Hub, we spoke with Clark County Surveyor David Ruckman and Director of the Buffalo Trace Land Trust Elizabeth Winlock to help us answer the questions: What is the Buffalo Trace in Southern Indiana, and why is it so ingrained in our state's history?
Upwards of 60 million bison used to plod across the North American landscape. The enormous, horned beasts were integral to prairie ecosystems: they fed on grasses and sedges, helped create water sources and fed the people living nearby.
They were often on the move. Large herds of hungry buffalo traversed Indiana, constantly sniffing out their next meal.
Bison huffed up upland ridges to graze during the warm months and when the temperatures dropped, they trotted back down into large river valleys toward insulated forests. As they crossed the state, their path was likely directed by where they could find salt licks and water sources.
Over the years — and underneath thousands of hoofprints — paths formed across the southern Indiana landscape. The largest came to be known as the Buffalo Trace.
Indigenous groups, like the Miami Tribe, were likely the first people to move across the region on these trails. But as Europeans began to colonize North America, more humans found the trace, and soon, it became a bustling trail from Louisville to Vincennes.
After President Thomas Jefferson bought 530 million acres through the Louisiana Purchase, he focused on the Buffalo Trace as a way to access it.
'Jefferson immediately saw that and said, 'Hey, we've got to control this buffalo road, whatever it is, because that's our way west,'' said David Ruckman, a surveyor for Clark County, who helped re-plot the trail as part of the Hoosier National Forest Service's effort to preserve state history.
But the trail didn't stay a buffalo road for long. As European immigrants settled in North America and pioneers traveled west, they killed tens of millions of bison. The slaughter coincided with the young nation's plans to eradicate, assimilate, and relocate local Indigenous tribes, many of which relied on the creatures as a food source.
By 1830, the last wild Indiana bison was killed.
The Buffalo Trace became a very different place: pioneers, wagons and horses — but no more buffalo — crossed the trail, heading west.
Settlements and farms cropped up alongside of it. And due to the sheer amount of traffic, pieces of the trace quickly became unrecognizable.
'It was just a dusty path, right? A hard-packed path,' said Ruckman. But as wagons began traveling over wet dirt, ruts began to form. 'And those ruts just kept going deeper and deeper. Some places they're eight and ten feet deep.'
The trace has continued to evolve.
Today, some sections are smothered in concrete or asphalt, underneath county highways. Other chunks pass through rural farmland, alongside high schools and down the main streets of small towns. But the remnants of the trail still connect communities across southern Indiana.
'We kind of take for granted just how special some of this is,' said Elizabeth Winlock, the Director for the Buffalo Trace Land Trust in southern Indiana.
It's not the flashiest natural landscape or a bustling metropolis, she added, but she thinks the long history of buffalo, Indigenous people and settlers using the trail as a trading and migration route is worth paying attention to.
'Just being able to slow down for a second think about the land that you're on and the other animals and other people that came before you,' said Winlock. "I think all of that is valuable.'
IndyStar's environmental reporting project is made possible through the generous support of the nonprofit Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust.