The title is a bit of a mystery, considering that Diane Swanson’s text describes the decline of the buffalo from a time when there were millions, to the bleak years early in this century when the sighting of a buffalo was rare. Buffalo Sunset would be more like it.

Swanson’s text, however, is well-researched and tightly crafted, complimented by excellent photographs and interesting archival illustrations. The five chapters deal succinctly with a number of topics, most of them bearing on the relationship between buffaloes and humans. Only one chapter is devoted to the natural history of the animal. The others discuss the buffalo as a life-sustaining resource for native peoples, and the object of successive waves of native and European hunters. Also examined are the buffalo’s eerie physical legacy, in the form of bones and beaten trails, left behind when the great herds were annihilated, and, finally, the measures taken to preserve the survivors.

The relative paucity of information about buffalo biology constitutes a defect for students trying to answer questions such as: How long do buffaloes live? Can an infant buffalo walk when it’s born? At what age can it fend for itself? What animals prey on buffaloes? On the themes she develops, however, Swanson is very good. Readers get a vivid reconstruction of the buffalo jump and the life of the native peoples who employed it. Similarly, the lives of European settlers, and the role they played in the near elimination of the buffalo are evocatively described. These descriptions are provided, as is customary now, non-judgementally. This authorial neutrality is most striking in a section detailing the disposal of the last remnants of the plains herds. Piles of buffalo bones 12 feet high and just as wide, Swanson writes matter-of-factly, were transformed into fertilizer and china. That there was nothing tragic about this is implicitly affirmed by the chapter’s merry title, “Helpful Ghost,” which sounds a bit like Casper.