The Pablo-Allard Herd:

How Two Flathead Reservation Ranchers Saved the American Bison from Extinction

Introduction

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the American bison stood at the edge of biological disappearance. Where tens of millions had once moved across the plains in herds so vast that observers described them as darkening the horizon, fewer than a thousand animals remained in North America by 1890, the wreckage of a slaughter driven by commercial hide-hunting, military policy, and westward railroad expansion. That the species survived at all owes an outsized debt to a small, semi-wild herd raised not by the federal government or by wealthy eastern conservationists, but by two mixed-heritage ranchers on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana. Michel Pablo and Charles Allard built, over some twenty years, the largest privately held bison herd on the continent. Its eventual sale to Canada, forced by the collapse of open range on the reservation, would become one of the pivotal events in the history of North American wildlife conservation, and one whose Indigenous origins have often been underplayed in the telling.

Origins on the Flathead

The story of the herd begins not with Pablo or Allard but with a man most commonly identified as Samuel Walking Coyote, a Pend d'Oreille tribal member living on the Flathead Reservation. Regional accounts differ somewhat on the precise sequence of events. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes' own institutional history credits a man called Little Falcon Robe with receiving tribal leaders' approval to bring orphaned bison calves west across the Continental Divide for the purposes of subsistence and conservation, after mass slaughter had put the species in danger ("Our History"). The Flathead Beacon's account is more specific still, tracing the idea to a tribal elder named Atatice, or Peregrine Falcon Robe, whose son Latati, or Little Falcon Robe, carried orphaned calves back across the Divide during a buffalo hunt, and whose stepfather later sold the resulting herd to Pablo and Allard without Latati's consent ("Return of the Buffalo"). Whichever version is emphasized, the animals were nurtured into a small free-ranging herd on the reservation during the 1870s and early 1880s, tended informally by Walking Coyote and other tribal members.

In 1884, Michel Pablo and Charles Allard purchased this herd, then numbering roughly thirteen animals, from Walking Coyote. Sources place the price at somewhere between two thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars for the group, or roughly two hundred fifty dollars per head ("Michel Pablo's Impact on Historical Buffalo Herds"). Pablo, the son of a Blackfoot mother, and Allard, the son of a French-Canadian father and an Indigenous mother, were both in their thirties, both married into the Confederated Salish community, and both already established as reservation stockmen with substantial cattle and horse operations. They turned the small herd loose on unfenced grassland along the lower Flathead River, an open range of perhaps fifty square miles, and let the animals multiply largely on their own.

Pablo and Allard Build an Empire

The partnership expanded its stock deliberately as well as naturally. In 1893, Pablo and Allard purchased additional animals, reported as forty-six head, from Charles "Buffalo" Jones, a Kansas bison breeder who had been working to preserve captive stock ("Michel Pablo's Impact on Historical Buffalo Herds"). By the mid-1890s, contemporary press accounts described the reservation herd as the largest collection of bison in the United States, a claim later corroborated by institutional histories describing it as the largest in the world by the close of the century ("Our History"). A Missoula newspaper account from the period, preserved and excerpted in later archival compilations, described the Flathead Reservation as home to "the largest herd of buffalo in the United States," then estimated at roughly fifty head under Allard's ownership alone at that earlier point in its growth ("Michel Pablo's Impact on Historical Buffalo Herds"). By 1896 the combined herd, according to multiple sources, numbered close to three hundred animals, a scale that made Pablo and Allard, almost by accident, the custodians of a meaningful fraction of the entire surviving bison population of the continent.

The two men managed the herd with a light hand characteristic of open-range livestock operations of the era. The bison ranged freely across the river bottoms and coulees of the reservation, breeding without close human intervention, protected chiefly by the partners' insistence that neither their own hands nor outside hunters take animals from the herd for meat or robes. This informality would later complicate accounting: neither Pablo nor Allard appears to have kept a precise, verifiable count of the herd's total size at any given moment, a gap that would matter considerably once the animals came to be sold by the head.

Division and Uncertainty

Charles Allard died in 1896, and this event marked the herd's first major disruption. His estate divided his roughly half-share of the animals, and a portion, generally described as around one hundred fifty head, was gradually sold off and dispersed over the following years (Bringing Back the Buffalo). Some of these animals passed to Charles E. Conrad, a prominent Kalispell rancher and businessman, in a sale that most regional sources date to around 1901 ("Return of the Buffalo"). This Allard-descended remnant, held separately by the Conrad family, would prove historically significant decades later: when the National Bison Range was established near Moiese in 1908, its founding stock of thirty-six animals was drawn from the Conrad herd, meaning the same bloodline that Pablo and Allard had assembled on the reservation eventually helped repopulate a federal conservation herd on that same land, a genealogical irony noted explicitly by the Flathead Beacon in its retrospective coverage of the Bison Range's history ("Return of the Buffalo").

Pablo, meanwhile, retained and continued to build his own portion of the herd. By his own later estimate, made around 1906, he believed he owned approximately four hundred animals, though this figure would prove to be a substantial undercount once an accurate tally was eventually taken (Galt Museum and Archives).

Allotment and the End of the Range

The herd's fate turned on federal land policy rather than on any decision made by Pablo himself. In 1904, the United States government moved to open the Flathead Reservation to non-Indian homesteading under the Flathead Allotment Act, a policy that dismantled the open range on which Pablo's semi-wild herd depended ("Return of the Buffalo"). Pablo's grazing privileges were canceled, and he faced the loss of the unfenced land across which his animals had roamed for two decades. He first approached the United States government, reportedly hoping the federal administration under Theodore Roosevelt might purchase the herd for conservation purposes; Congress declined to appropriate funds for the acquisition (Galt Museum and Archives). Pablo then turned to Canada, whose government, acting through Dominion Parks official Howard Douglas, agreed to purchase the entire herd for delivery to a new bison sanctuary at Wainwright, Alberta.

Accounts of the exact terms diverge somewhat. The Galt Museum and Archives records the agreed price as two hundred fifty dollars per animal delivered to Wainwright, while a contemporary Edmonton newspaper account put the total transaction at one hundred thirty thousand dollars for an initially estimated seven hundred two animals, a per-head figure closer to one hundred eighty-five dollars ("Albertans Join Controversial Final Hunt of Wild Buffalo," cited in Buffalo Grande coverage). This discrepancy, appearing in only one source each, likely reflects the difference between an initial per-head contract rate and the final blended price once the true, larger size of the herd became apparent; it is presented here as an unresolved point rather than a settled figure.

The Great Roundup

What followed was a roundup that took far longer, and proved far more difficult, than anyone anticipated. Pablo had substantially underestimated his own herd. Rather than the roughly four hundred animals he believed he owned, cowboys working under his direction, and later under his son-in-law Charles Allard Jr., eventually gathered more than seven hundred bison from the reservation's coulees and river bottoms. Figures for the total shipped to Canada vary by source, ranging from 702 to 716 to 709 animals, a discrepancy attributable to different accounting points during a multi-year, multi-shipment process rather than to any single error (Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies; "Michel Pablo's Impact on Historical Buffalo Herds"). What began in 1907 as an operation Pablo expected to complete in a single summer stretched into a five-year undertaking, with animals driven overland to rail pens at Ravalli, Montana, loaded into specially reinforced railcars, and shipped north across the international border.

Because the new Buffalo National Park at Wainwright was not yet fenced when the first shipments arrived in 1907, the animals were temporarily unloaded at Elk Island, near Edmonton, a detour that proved fortunate. When Canadian officials later moved to transfer the herd to Wainwright in 1909, Frank Oliver, the Canadian Minister of the Interior, ordered thirty to fifty animals left behind at Elk Island (Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies). This residual population became a critical genetic reservoir, and its descendants have since been used to restock conservation and tribal herds across North America, including, in 2016, a return of animals to the Blackfeet Nation in Montana, not far from where the herd had originated a century before.

Legacy

The Pablo-Allard herd's dispersal marks the closing chapter of a story that began with tribal members preserving a remnant of a vanishing species largely outside the notice of federal wildlife policy. The herd's descendants populate conservation and tribal herds on both sides of the border to this day, at Elk Island, at Buffalo National Park's successor sites in Alberta, at the National Bison Range near Moiese, and, through periodic repatriation, on the Flathead and Blackfeet reservations from which the animals first came. It is a history that resists simple narration: an act of Indigenous conservation, an entrepreneurial ranching venture, a consequence of federal allotment policy, and a Canadian conservation triumph, all bound together in the movement of a single herd of bison across the Flathead Valley and, eventually, across an international border.

Works Cited

"Charles Allard: Life and Legacy Explored." All About Bison, allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/charles-allard/. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

"Bringing Back the Buffalo." Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, explore.whyte.org/buffalo. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Bison Range. "Our History." CSKT Bison Range, bisonrange.org/history/. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

"Michel Pablo's Bison Herd." Galt Museum and Archives, collections.galtmuseum.com/link/descriptions89716. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

"Michel Pablo's Impact on Historical Buffalo Herds." All About Bison, allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/michel-pablo/. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

"Pablo's Great Roundup and Shipment—Part 2." Buffalo Grande, 14 Dec. 2024, www.buffalogrande.com/buffalo-tales-blog-1/pablos-great-roundup-and-shipmentpart-2. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

"Return of the Buffalo." Flathead Beacon, 25 May 2022, flatheadbeacon.com/2022/05/25/return-of-the-buffalo/. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.

"The Buffalo in Canada." Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, www.whyte.org/the-buffalo-in-canada. Accessed 9 Aug. 2026.