A series where we take a #lookback at the stories and history of our community, brought to you by Mick Pryor, Financial Advisor with Edward Jones.
Long before the sagebrush flats of the Wind River Valley took their modern shape, a bison twice the mass of a linebacker moved across this landscape in herds that stretched to the horizon. It was not the animal we know today. It was bigger, longer-horned, and it belonged to a world of American lions, saber-toothed cats, and mammoths. That animal was Bison antiquus, the Ancient Bison, and for tens of thousands of years, it was one of the most successful large mammals in North America.
Bison antiquus dwarfed its modern descendant. Standing up to seven and a half feet at the shoulder and stretching fifteen feet nose to tail, it could weigh as much as 3,500 pounds, roughly 15 to 25 percent larger than a modern American bison. Its skull was longer and less domed, its legs proportionally longer and more slender in the upper limb, giving it a rangier build suited to covering long distances. Most striking were its horns, sweeping out to a span of up to three and a half feet tip to tip, nearly double the spread seen on bison today, anchored to a skull reinforced with thick bone to absorb the impact of clashes between rivals.
The Ancient Bison did not appear out of nowhere. Its story traces back to the Steppe Bison, Bison priscus, which crossed from Asia into North America across the Bering land bridge more than 100,000 years ago. Populations of that animal gave rise to the enormous, seven-foot-horned Giant Bison, Bison latifrons, and later, around 60,000 years ago, to Bison antiquus itself. It was a lineage of downsizing, with each successive form somewhat smaller and better adapted to a changing continent, a trend that would eventually produce the American bison we know today.
By the height of the last Ice Age, Bison antiquus ranged across nearly all of North America south of the great continental ice sheets, from the plains of Alberta to the grasslands of central Mexico, and from the Pacific coast to Florida. It favored open country: grasslands, sagebrush steppe, wetlands, and river valleys, the same kind of terrain that still defines much of Wyoming today. Fossil evidence suggests it was especially abundant across the interior of the continent during the final ten thousand years of its existence, as retreating glaciers opened vast new grasslands to the north.
It was a grazing animal first and foremost, though not an exclusive one. Its teeth show evidence of browsing on shrubs and woody plants as well, an adaptable diet that shifted with the seasons and the region. That size and mobility came with real danger. American lions, dire wolves, and the saber-toothed cat Smilodon fatalis all hunted the Ancient Bison, particularly young calves separated from the safety of the herd. Like modern bison, it likely relied on numbers for protection, moving in large herds where predators had a harder time isolating any single animal, with mature bulls using their formidable horns to defend against attack.
For the first people to reach North America, Bison antiquus was not just wildlife. It was survival. Paleoindian hunters of the Clovis and, later, Folsom traditions built entire ways of life around it. At Jake Bluff in Oklahoma, hunters drove a herd of at least twenty-two bison into a dead-end arroyo and killed them there, leaving broken spear points embedded in the bones. At the Hudson-Meng site in Nebraska, the remains of more than five hundred individuals lie in a single bone bed, evidence of either a massive coordinated hunt or a natural catastrophe scavenged by nearby hunters. These were not opportunistic kills. Bison provided meat, hide for shelter and clothing, and bone that was shaped into tools like awls for sewing. Entire communities organized their seasonal movements around the animal’s migrations, and its remains show up again and again at ancient camps and hunting sites across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain West.
The Ancient Bison’s reign did not last, though. As the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene around ten thousand years ago, North America warmed rapidly. Grasslands that had sustained massive herds contracted and fragmented, broken up by advancing forest and shifting rainfall patterns. At the same time, human hunting pressure only intensified as other Ice Age prey, like mammoths, vanished from the landscape. Squeezed between a changing climate and a skilled new predator, Bison antiquus populations collapsed. But the species did not simply disappear. Over the following millennia, surviving populations grew smaller in body size and horn spread, gradually giving rise to the American bison that still roams parts of the West today, a living link to an animal that once towered over the plains.
That link is closer to home than it might seem. Here in the Wind River Valley, the skulls of Bison antiquus still surface from time to time, worked loose by erosion, spotted along a creek cut or exposed on far-flung mountain ridges, a hunk of ancient bone that once anchored a set of horns twice the width of a modern bull’s. Each one is a small, physical reminder that the ground beneath Dubois carried its own herds of giants, long before anyone was here to count them.
by Michael Baker
Next up for the Fremont County Museum
August 8, 10 am with the Pioneer Museum, “Louis Lake Lodge Trek” Wind River Visitors Council Adventure Trek
August 12, 7 pm at the Pioneer Museum, “Eagle Spirit Dancers” FC Pioneer Association
August 12, 6 pm at the Riverton Museum, “120 Years of Riverton” Wyoming Community Bank Discovery Speakers Series
August 15, 2 pm at the Riverton Museum, “Archaeology Day” (Children’s Exploration Sponsorship Available)
August 15, 10 am at the Dubois Museum, “Kids Corner: Tie-Dye (Children’s Exploration Sponsorship Available)
Daily through December at the Pioneer Museum, “Sweetwater Ranch Life, The Paintings of Jack Corbett” Exhibition Opening
Rare Relics Road Show: Save the Date: Saturday, October 10, 2026, Lander, WY Lander Community Center, You Are Invited! Wind River Cultural Centers Foundation
Call the Dubois Museum 1-307-455-2284, the Pioneer Museum 1-307-332-3339 or the Riverton Museum 1-307-856-2665 for details regarding their programs.
The Dubois Museum, the Pioneer Museum in Lander and the Riverton Museum need your financial support. In the current economic environment, the museums are more reliant than ever on donations from the private sector to continue to provide the quality programs, collections management, exhibits and services that have become their hallmark over the last four years. Please make your tax deductible contribution through the Wind River Cultural Centers Foundation https://windriverccf.funraise.org/ or by sending a check to Fremont County Museums 450 N 2nd Rm 320 or taking it directly to the museum you choose to support.