“You can’t make a buffalo do anything.”
Words of wisdom from Marty Homola, who has been caring for the herd at Genesee off Interstate 70 for 35 years. His response was to a city slicker’s question about how he makes the buffalo go here, go there, do this, do that.
He stared out from the spattered windshield of his big Ford pickup and looked at the herd of 24 cows, two bulls and 13 calves clustered in a pasture, eyeing him warily as he circled closer and closer. Their furry heads were as big as jumbo Weber kettles, their dark eyes rimmed in red. They grunted and snorted.
“You wait for them to make a mistake,” the buffalo man said, “and finally they go where you want them to go.”
It’s the only job he’s ever really had. Homola, 55, came to Colorado in 1970 from Michigan, where his family were farmers. He was 20 years old, newly married. One day he was standing in line at the Denver employment office and heard the clerk telling people in front of him there was a job with the parks department, “but it’s up in the foothills, at Genesee. Everybody was saying, that’s too far, forget it. I knew what I was going to say.”
He stayed at a nearby Girl Scout camp for the next four months while he learned the job, then moved permanently to the Patrick House, an 1860 white clapboard farmhouse visible from the interstate, just across a dirt road from the land and the animals he cares for. He raised his family there and still lives there with his wife, on the old stagecoach road at the Lazy G Ranch, surrounded by Ponderosa pine and heavy equipment, the constant roar of the superhighway his neighbor too.
When he’s not tending to the bison and the elk herd he also manages, and the 14,000 acres and 26 miles of road within Denver Mountain Parks, Homola collects old bottles, the kind you have to dig up out on the prairie or at old battlefields and campsites, the kind where the thick wavy glass has raised lettering that says, “Hair Elixir.”
Besides that, should you ever require a stagecoach driver, Homola’s your man. He used to drive the coach at Four-Mile House in Denver, and often drove one in parades.
He keeps Denver Mountain Parks humming with the help of seven other permanent and four seasonal workers. They grade and plow the roads, handle drainage, maintain picnic sites, build and repair fences, and a lot of other duties. In fact, keeping the bison going is only a small part of their jobs.
Bison aren’t much work in the summer months, especially like this one, when generous rains have made the timothy grass they graze on high and thick. Homola checks on the herd daily, but he won’t have to bring them hay or prod them into “Elkatraz”- the maze-like holding pen high up in the middle pasture where they’re vaccinated and tagged – until winter.
Right now he opens and closes gates to move them around and they roam at will, from the trees down to open areas, where tourists pull over and gawk at the beasts through the 8-foot fence.
There’s a tunnel under I-70 expressly for the bison. The best viewing, if they happen to be on the north side, is up along Mount Vernon Country Club Road at the Genesee exit off I-70. A sign warns people to keep 3 feet back from the fence. With good reason.
“They’re not domesticated by any means, and they’re unpredictable,” Homola said, probably speaking of the bison, not the tourists.
Bulls weigh up to a ton and males and females alike have horns. He and his crew have found wristwatches tangled in the fence, apparently from the curious who jerked their hands back.
“Cows’ll pretend to be grazing along the fence and then slam into it,” Homola said, smiling a little. “People try to climb the fence sometimes.”
Not a good idea. A mature bison, the heaviest land animal in North America, can move at up to 30 miles per hour. Though the animals know him, Homola never approaches too close on foot. “Common sense,” he explains. “The older I get, the closer I stay to the truck. They aren’t like cattle.”
Bison are survivors. Indians and settlers killed them for their hides, their meat, and used their chips for fuel. Up to 70 million roamed the Great Plains until the 1870s, when the great slaughter began. As railroads pushed westward, a million bison were wiped out each year, killed for sport, profit, food, clothing and heat.
Buffalo Bill Cody bragged he killed 4,300 bison in one year. He’s buried a few miles from the Genesee herd.
By the time the 20th century rolled around, the bison was nearly extinct, down to fewer than 1,000 head. In 1914, Denver city officials, eager to preserve and promote their city’s western heritage, imported seven bison and 23 wild elk from Yellowstone National Park and put them on 160 acres at Genesee. They brought the starter herds up to the mountains in circus wagons, legend has it.
“We have a direct lineage from the females (in the herd today) to the Yellowstone herd,” said Denver Mountain Parks superintendent A.J. Tripp-Addison. The Denver herd is carefully bred and managed to keep the animals as they would be in the wild, rather than as they would become if they were bred strictly for meat, he said. Bulls are traded and bought from various sources. Calves and adults, too, are auctioned off each March to keep the herd to about 25 head, which is what the 1,000 acres they roam on can sustain.
Denver Mountain Parks keeps another bison herd of the same size on 850 acres at Daniels Park in Douglas County. Those animals came from the Genesee herd in the 1930s.
The cost of keeping the
herds runs about $25,000 a year, and the city made $16,000 this year at the
bison auction.
But this isn’t about money.
“It was done originally for species preservation,” Tripp-Addison said, “and that is still our philosophy. You can’t just drive around looking at bison any old where. This is part history, part tourism, part cultural.”
These are Plains Bison, evoking the eternal question: bison or buffalo?
Homola nods and chuckles. “Well, the scientific name is bison, but buffalo is the common term. I mean, it’s not Bison Bill.”
A few years ago, some fourth-graders petitioned to have the highway signs at Genesee changed to read “Bison Herd Overlook.” But it would have been too expensive, Tripp-Addison said, so a new sign – “Bison: Monarch of the Plains” – was added at the fence, explaining the terms.
There are no actual buffalo (wild oxen) native to North America; the hump-backed, shaggy-maned, chocolate-brown horned beasts roaming beside I-70 and depicted on the old U.S. five-cent piece are American bison.
But try to find bison meat on a menu or at the supermarket. It is bison, but it’s called buffalo.
And no, Marty Homola doesn’t eat it.
…
Bison fast facts
Number in North America: About 350,000
Weight/full-grown bull: 2,000 pounds
Weight/full-grown cow: 1,100 pounds
Weight/newborn calf: 25-35 pounds
Average life span: 20-25 years
Top speed: 30 mph
Type of animal: ruminant; they’re a cud-chewing mammal
Source: National Bison Association, bisoncentral.com
Whatever happened to Nickel?
Nickel was the baby buff Marty Homola and his family hand-raised in the late ’80s after the calf’s mother died giving birth. Nickel became a local celebrity, gulping down cream sodas the Denver police brought him, taking milk from a bottle, following the family dogs into the house.
Sadly, Nickel has passed on. Homola found him dead of a broken neck in the tunnel beneath I-70 one day in 1999. Apparently, he slipped on some ice.
More information about Denver Mountain Parks: denvergov.org/dephome.asp?depid=88
The Denver Mountain Parks Foundation is an advocacy group on behalf of the parks. Visit denvermountainparks.org
