By the time Christopher Gist mapped what the Shawnee and Delaware tribes called “the great buffalo swamp” in 1751, bison were still plentiful throughout the Ohio country.  According to Ted Franklin Belue’s book The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi, the French who settled the area around today’s Bellefontaine remarked that “buffaloes are always found” at the source of the Miami River.  In 1765, pioneer George Croghan recorded in his journal “a vast migrating herd” of the animals fording the Ohio River at present day Antiquity in Miegs County.

 But in a sad story that would play out across the continent over the next century, white encroachment spelled doom for the bison herds.  By 1795, Ohio bison had become so scarce that when a Gallipolis citizen named Charles Francis Duteil shot one from a small herd found west of town, the event warranted a parade, complete with a marching band of woodwinds and fiddles.  Afterward came three days of gluttony, the entire settlement feasting on meat from Duteil’s kill.

 Given frontier French culinary tastes around “the city of the Gauls,” surely there were boudins, a type of sausage Meriwether Lewis would log into his journal ten years later during the Corps of Discovery’s exploration of President Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.

 An interpreter working for Lewis and Clark, Toussaint Charboneau, Sacagawea’s voyageur husband, stripped out a long intestine of a freshly killed bison and crammed it with seasoned chopped kidney and other meats. Once the ends of the intestine were tied off, Lewis wrote, “… it is then baptised in the Missouri with two dips and a flirt, and bobbed into the kettle; from whence, after it be well boiled, it is taken and fryed with bear’s oil…”

 Back along the banks of the Ohio, statehood marked the final stand of the bison herds.  Belue claims that the last buffalo bagged in the Buckeye State was dropped near Zanesville in 1808.

 But exactly 200 years later, bison would return to “the great buffalo swamp,” fourteen animals  out on Lonesome Road near Thornville, all under the care of two enterprising farmers, Carie and Jarrod Starr.  Their Cherokee Valley Ranch raises not only delicious, low fat, low cholesterol grass-fed bison meat, but also pork and poultry that is an absolute revelation. The special sausage made from their Tamworth hogs will change forever how you feel about “the other white meat,” just as the reservation list for a Thanksgiving Cherokee Valley Ranch turkey lengthens every year.

 Cherokee Valley Ranch is more than just a family business.  It’s a land ethic that treats the food raised there as sacrament.  Read Carie Starr’s own story from The Mother Earth News at http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/bison-homestead-zbcz1310, and stay current will all things Cherokee Valley Ranch at https://www.facebook.com/wildwoolyhorny .

 Want to know why nutritionists refer to grass-fed bison as the original “happy meal”? Visit http://naturalfoodbenefits.com/list-details.php?CAT=3&ID=100

 For further reading…

Belue, Ted Franklin. The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi.  Mechanicsburg, PA, Stackpole Books, 1996.

Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. North Charleston, SC, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014.