KEN BURNS, the producer and director of numerous film series, including Vietnam, The Roosevelts, and The War, founded his own documentary film company, Florentine Films, in 1976. His landmark film The Civil War was the highest-rated series in the history of American public television, and his work has won numerous prizes, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards, and two Academy Award nominations. He lives in Walpole, New Hampshire.

"Duncan and Burns use firsthand accounts, interviews and marvelous visual images to carry readers briskly from the rise of the bison in the species' ideal ecosystem, through their crucial role in Native American culture, their swift destruction by white Euro-Americans and their current modest recovery."
--Anne Bartlett, BookPage

"[A] panoramic volume rich in images, insights, and extended interviews and history...Writing with his signature lucidity and particular passion, Duncan illuminates the wondrous nature of the bison and details the species' complex role in Native American lives, then turns inexorably to the arrival of whites and the catastrophic slaughter of millions of buffalo in a frenzy of indiscriminate killing industrialized by new high powered guns and the railroads....Fortunately, this tale of conquest, bloodshed, and environmental disaster is also a story of resilience and resistance."
--Booklist American Library Association

"A fitting tribute to the buffalo, telling a compelling story from the time of the Lewis & Clark Expedition to the animal's near-extinction and almost-impossible recovery."
--Leslie Gaines, Outside Bozeman