The Last Herd Standing:

Michel Pablo, the Great Buffalo Roundup, and the Fate of Montana's Bison

Origins of the Herd

The story of the Pablo buffalo roundup begins not with Michel Pablo, but with a Pend d'Oreille man known in historical records by his colonial name, Samuel Walking Coyote, and — according to the oral traditions of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes — more accurately with his stepson Susep Latatí, or Little Peregrine Falcon Robe. In the late 1870s, acting on the counsel of his father Atatice, who had long proposed that the tribes preserve a remnant bison herd west of the Continental Divide, Latatí guided a handful of orphaned calves from the Montana plains to the Flathead Indian Reservation (CSKT Bison Range, "Our History"). The calves were raised near St. Ignatius mission, where they attracted the attention of the entire reservation community. They were, as one early account records, "the last connecting link with the happier past" of the people (Whealdon, qtd. in "Samuel Walking Coyote," All About Bison, allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/samuel-walking-coyote/, accessed 7 Apr. 2026).

By 1884, the small herd had grown to roughly thirteen animals. That year, two mixed-heritage reservation ranchers — Michel Pablo and Charles Allard Sr. — purchased the animals from Walking Coyote for approximately $250 per head, a transaction that Walking Coyote completed without the knowledge or consent of Latatí ("The Pablo-Allard Buffalo Herd and Indigenous-led Conservation," Whyte Museum, whyte.org/post/pablo-allard-buffalo-herd-indigenous-led-conservation, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). Pablo, the son of a Castilian Spaniard and a Blackfoot woman, had grown up on the Flathead Reservation and married Agathe Finley, a woman of Pend d'Oreille descent, in 1864. He was a substantial cattleman; by the early 1900s, his operation ran an estimated ten thousand head of cattle across the Mission Valley ("Michel Pablo: A Composite History," oregonpioneers.com/bios/MichelPablo.pdf, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). Allard, whose mother was Cree from Fort Garry, was a similarly experienced stockman. Both men understood that the plains bison were vanishing. Between 1870 and 1890, commercial hunters had reduced a population once estimated in the tens of millions to fewer than a thousand animals on public lands across North America.

Pablo and Allard released their thirteen bison onto the unfenced grasslands along the lower Flathead River, where the animals ranged across roughly fifty square miles of reservation land. In 1893, the partners added twenty-six purebred animals and eighteen bison-cattle hybrids purchased from Charles "Buffalo" Jones, a Kansas entrepreneur who had been breeding the species in captivity (Zontek, Ken. Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison. University of Nebraska Press, 2007, p. 45). By 1896, the combined Pablo-Allard herd numbered close to three hundred animals — almost certainly the largest single collection of plains bison remaining in the United States. When Allard died that year, his half of the herd was divided among his heirs and subsequently sold to various private buyers, including rancher Charles Conrad of Kalispell. Pablo retained and continued to grow his share.

A Seller Without a Buyer

In 1904, the United States Congress passed the Flathead Allotment Act, which applied the principles of the Dawes Act of 1887 to the Flathead Reservation. The act carved tribal communal lands into individual allotments and opened the remainder to non-Indian homesteaders, directly contravening the Hellgate Treaty of 1855, under which the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes had been guaranteed the reservation for their exclusive use and benefit (National Park Service, "National Bison Range," nps.gov/places/national-bison-range.htm, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). For Pablo, the act meant the effective cancellation of his grazing rights. His bison, now numbering in the hundreds and ranging freely across the Flathead bottomlands and into the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains, could no longer be managed on land that would soon be surveyed, fenced, and sold.

Pablo's first instinct was to sell the herd to the United States government, keeping the animals in the country where they had survived. Federal officials were willing to negotiate, but the price they offered was far below Pablo's valuation. Stung by the government's indifference, Pablo turned to Canada. The Canadian government, under Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver, proved receptive. Howard Douglas, Superintendent of Rocky Mountains Park — now Banff National Park — was dispatched to western Montana to assess the herd and negotiate a purchase. The Canadians agreed to buy every animal Pablo could deliver: bulls, cows, and even newborn calves, at $200 per head plus shipping charges of roughly $45 per animal ("Bringing Back the Buffalo," explorethewhyte.org/buffalo, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). The total Canadian outlay, including transportation, eventually reached between $157,000 and $200,000 — a sum that drew sharp public comment in the United States, where many regarded the transaction as a national embarrassment.

Pablo initially estimated his herd at somewhere between three hundred and four hundred animals. He expected the roundup to occupy one summer, perhaps two. He was wrong on both counts.

The Roundup Begins

The first formal attempt to gather Pablo's herd took place in the spring and summer of 1907. Pablo hired twenty cowboys to move the animals from their range in the Bitterroot foothills and the oxbow bends of the Flathead River down to the railroad loading pens at Ravalli, a distance of thirty to fifty miles. Before a single animal was loaded, Pablo invested in substantial infrastructure. He reinforced the corrals at Ravalli, installed water troughs, extended wing fences to funnel animals toward loading chutes, and strengthened the rail cars with additional timbers. He also commissioned the construction of high-sided wagons, with sides raised to ten feet and heavily braced, capable of hauling a single large bull strapped into a wooden crate (buffalotalesandtrails.com/pablos-great-buffalo-roundup-and-grand-shipment-part-1-pablos-grand-buffalo-roundup/, accessed 7 Apr. 2026).

The first drives revealed immediately that bison behaved nothing like cattle. When riders charged toward a group, the animals did not consolidate and turn; they scattered in every direction simultaneously, breaking through fence lines and outrunning horses across terrain that no domestic stock could negotiate. The Missoula Daily Missoulian, covering the roundup on May 29, 1907, attempted to convey the difficulty to its readers: to understand what was required, one should "take the most ornery range steer, multiply his meanness by 10, his stubbornness by 15, his strength by 40, his endurance by 50 and then add the products" ("Loading the Allard Buffalo for Shipment to the North," Daily Missoulian, 29 May 1907, qtd. in buffalotalesandtrails.com, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). The first summer produced no shipments to Canada at all.

Pablo responded by raising wages to the unheard-of rate of five dollars per day, drawing experienced riders from ranches throughout the Flathead and Mission Valleys. He also elevated Charles Allard Jr., the son of his late partner, to lead the field operations. Young Allard had grown up around bison and understood their behavioral patterns in ways that most working cowboys did not. Under his direction, new corrals were constructed approximately twenty-five miles from Ronan, at a carefully chosen site in the Big Bend of the Pend d'Oreille River. The largest enclosure covered five acres, with wing fences extending outward from the entrance gate and running down to the riverbank. Across the water, abrupt cliffs broke by narrow coulees prevented the animals from escaping in that direction; the geography itself served as part of the corral. Cedar posts cut from groves along the river formed the fencing, and for some twenty-six miles, a guiding fence was constructed to gradually funnel animals toward the gate ("Michel Pablo: A Composite History," oregonpioneers.com/bios/MichelPablo.pdf, accessed 7 Apr. 2026).

Five Years of Resistance

By the fall of 1907, the revised strategy began to produce results. Pablo's crew managed to load two trainloads of animals: 215 cows and calves in July, and 180 more in October. The Canadians, waiting at the other end of a twelve-hundred-mile rail journey that crossed five separate railway lines, were enthusiastic. The bison arrived in Alberta weary but in adequate condition, and William Hornaday, president of the newly organized American Bison Society, publicly called them "the finest buffalo herd in America" (5-1). Pablo predicted that 1908 would see the contract fulfilled. It did not.

The animals remaining after the first successful shipments were disproportionately bulls — the largest, most aggressive, and least manageable members of the herd. Mature bulls could weigh as much as 2,200 pounds, and their capacity for destruction was considerable. They smashed through reinforced fences, overturned specially built wagons, and on multiple occasions broke out of fortified railway cars. When a crew had nearly succeeded in funneling a group into the corral, the animals often turned at the last moment and crashed through the wing fences, leaving the riders with nothing to show for a day's dangerous work. "The cows, calves, and younger bulls were easier to move into corrals but it was difficult to move the heavier bulls," one account records. "Often, when a herd was almost in the corral, they broke and ran leaving only 10 or [a few] remaining" ("Michel Pablo: A Composite History"). In spring 1908 and again in fall 1909, cowboy artist Charles M. Russell joined the crew for the drives. Russell, who witnessed the operations firsthand, described the riders as "all breeds and full bloods, a wild looking bunch that looked good to me" (Russell, Charles M., letter to "Fiddleback," qtd. in Zontek, p. 51).

The loading at Ravalli was equally demanding. Each animal had to be driven individually through a narrow chute, roped around the neck, and physically hauled by a score of men into its compartment in the rail car, where a partition was immediately secured to prevent it from injuring adjacent animals. Animals that went down in the chute sometimes refused to rise; some died of stress before the car doors were closed. Norman Luxton, a Canadian businessman who traveled to Montana in 1907 to observe the first roundup, wrote to his wife from Ravalli on September 19 of that year: "We have had very poor luck with the buffalo, so far only 80 have been corralled, they are just too wild for any thing charging right through a line of horsemen to get back on their range" (Luxton, Norman, letter to Georgina Luxton, 19 Sept. 1907, Luxton Family fonds, qtd. in explorethewhyte.org/buffalo, accessed 7 Apr. 2026).

The photographer Nathaniel A. Forsyth of Butte documented the roundup extensively in stereographic images, most of which are now held in the collections of the Montana Historical Society. His work very nearly cost him his life. During one corral sequence at the riverside enclosure, Forsyth stationed himself in a cluster of trees near the river to photograph animals entering the water. The herd passed beneath him twice as they circled back in attempts to escape; when the animals finally rushed into the corral, the assembled crew expected to find Forsyth "trampled out of semblance in the clay." He was found, according to an account in the Wainwright Star of January 8, 1909, "slightly disfigured, but still hugging his friend the tree in his dishevelled wardrobe," his two cameras destroyed. His reported summary of the experience: "I have had enough buffalo" (Wainwright Star, 8 Jan. 1909, p. 1, qtd. in historyboots.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/the-historical-dangers-of-photographing-bison/, accessed 7 Apr. 2026).

The Political Aftermath

While Pablo's crews struggled in the Flathead bottomlands, the roundup generated considerable political pressure in the United States. Americans who learned that the last large free-roaming bison herd was leaving the country reacted with public outcry that conservation advocates channeled into legislative action. Hornaday and the American Bison Society lobbied Congress directly, with Hornaday writing to Senator Moses Clapp that "many Americans have been greatly disappointed by the sale of the Pablo herd of American bison to the Canadian government" and urging federal appropriations for a permanent bison range on the Flathead Reservation (Hornaday, William T., letter to Sen. Moses E. Clapp, 30 Mar. 1908, Congressional Record, qtd. in allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/national-bison-range/, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). Montana Senator Joseph M. Dixon introduced legislation in March 1908 setting aside 12,800 acres of Flathead Reservation land for a national bison range. Congress appropriated $40,000 for the project; President Theodore Roosevelt signed the bill into law on May 23, 1908.

The establishment of what became the National Bison Range was itself freighted with legal problems that would take more than a century to resolve. The land taken for the range was reservation land guaranteed to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes by treaty; the purchase price was later ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Court of Claims in 1971, which found it below fair market value and therefore a Fifth Amendment taking. In 2020, Congress restored the range to tribal ownership through Public Law 116-260; as of 2022, the site — now called the CSKT Bison Range — is managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' Natural Resource Department (CSKT Bison Range, "Our History," bisonrange.org/history/, accessed 7 Apr. 2026).

The Final Shipments

The roundup continued through 1910 and 1911. By 1912, approximately one hundred bulls remained on the reservation range. Most had proven too dangerous and too wary to be managed. Now seventy-six years old, Pablo acknowledged that the effort was finished. He instructed his riders to stand down; the remaining animals were left on the reservation and eventually placed under the oversight of the American Bison Society. Some were later hunted by tribal members for food after white poachers had begun shooting at the uncollected animals. The final documented shipment of Pablo's bison left the Ravalli depot on June 1, 1912 (PBS, "Buffalo, Salish and Kalispel People, and Bison Range Restoration," pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo/restoration-of-the-bison-range, accessed 7 Apr. 2026). Pablo died two years later, in 1914, having outlasted his herd and watched the landscape he had ranged across for fifty years transform into a patchwork of homesteads.

The total number of animals delivered to Canada came to 716, considerably more than either Pablo or the Canadian government had anticipated at the outset. The American Bison Society's count confirmed that Pablo had underestimated his herd significantly; the final tally exceeded the Canadian government's own projections for what constituted a viable conservation population. The animals were installed at what became Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, Alberta, though the first shipments were held temporarily at Elk Island Park. A small residual population left behind at Elk Island — perhaps forty to fifty animals — eventually became the nucleus from which bison restoration programs across North America continue to draw genetic stock to this day.

A Roundup in Full Historical Context

The Pablo roundup of 1907 to 1912 is most accurately understood as an event produced by the collision of several distinct historical forces: the near-total extermination of the plains bison during the 1870s and 1880s; the federal government's application of allotment policy to treaty-reserved lands; Pablo's own entrepreneurial calculation; and the late emergence of organized conservation advocacy in the United States. The tribal origins of the herd — in the deliberate act of Pend d'Oreille leaders who authorized the preservation of bison calves on the Flathead Reservation decades before Pablo's name became attached to them — are a dimension of the story that standard accounts have frequently minimized or erased.

The roundup drew together an unlikely cast: a mixed-heritage rancher and his son's namesake, a roster of reservation cowboys that included members of the Salish, Pend d'Oreille, and Kootenai tribes alongside men of mixed European and Indigenous descent, the cowboy artist Charles Russell, a Canadian government superintendent, and a Butte photographer who barely survived his assignment. The bison themselves resisted every human plan brought to bear on them for five consecutive seasons. That resistance, and its documentary record in Forsyth's stereographs — now held at the Montana Historical Society — gives the roundup its particular historical texture: not a smooth transfer of wildlife from one jurisdiction to another, but a protracted, dangerous, and often failed negotiation between human actors and animals that had managed, against enormous odds, to survive.

Works Cited

CSKT Bison Range. "Our History." bisonrange.org/history/. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

"Loading the Allard Buffalo for Shipment to the North." Daily Missoulian, 29 May 1907. Qtd. in "Pablo's Great Buffalo Roundup and Grand Shipment -- Part 1." buffalotalesandtrails.com/pablos-great-buffalo-roundup-and-grand-shipment-part-1-pablos-grand-buffalo-roundup/. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

Luxton, Norman. Letter to Georgina Luxton. 19 Sept. 1907. Luxton Family Fonds. Qtd. in "Bringing Back the Buffalo." explorethewhyte.org/buffalo. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

"Michel Pablo: A Composite History." oregonpioneers.com/bios/MichelPablo.pdf. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

Montana History Portal / North Lake County Public Library. "1908 Roundup of the Pablo-Allard Buffalo Herd." Paul Fugleberg Collection. mtmemory.org/nodes/view/79262. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

National Park Service. "National Bison Range." nps.gov/places/national-bison-range.htm. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

PBS / Ken Burns. "Buffalo, Salish and Kalispel People, and Bison Range Restoration." pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo/restoration-of-the-bison-range. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

"The Pablo-Allard Buffalo Herd and Indigenous-Led Conservation." Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. whyte.org/post/pablo-allard-buffalo-herd-indigenous-led-conservation. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

Wainwright Star. 8 Jan. 1909, p. 1. Qtd. in "I Have Had Enough Buffalo." historyboots.wordpress.com/2015/11/13/the-historical-dangers-of-photographing-bison/. Accessed 7 Apr. 2026.

Zontek, Ken. Buffalo Nation: American Indian Efforts to Restore the Bison. University of Nebraska Press, 2007.