When the gates to the bison’s pen opened, some sauntered onto the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s lands in South Dakota. Others ran for the 8,500 acres of newly fenced prairie. Some circled the pen four times before heading out to the open range. As these new residents settled in, they formed the herd that launched one of the most ambitious tribally managed bison reintroduction projects in the United States and restored a species that had been missing from these lands for more than a century.
