By Peter Hartlaub, Culture Critic Updated Sep 5, 2025 11:03 a.m.
Charles “Buffalo” Jones spent much of his life as part of the problem.
The Midwestern rancher killed thousands of wild plains bison in the 1800s, partaking in a slaughter that decimated the population. In the late 1700s, tens of millions of animals roamed; by 1890, reportedly fewer than 1,000 remained.
Then something changed in the Kansas frontiersman.
Jones brought orphaned calves to his Garden City ranch, built his own replacement herd and started selling buffalo to conservation-minded groups. Among the buyers: the leaders of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
“I resolved to atone for some of my past cussedness,” Jones told the Kansas City Star in 1897, “by saving as many as I could.”
Like many who love the bison herd in Golden Gate Park, I’ve often wondered: How exactly did they get here? The answer goes back nearly 150 years, and the narrative is a cinematic journey across the generations filled with good intentions, violent results, escape attempts, a “Deadwood” season’s worth of larger-than-life frontier characters … and ultimately a species that survived.
Why are bison in Golden Gate Park? We found the story of San Francisco’s first buffalo
Greg
Quick and Dirty
Charles “Buffalo” Jones spent much of his life as part of the problem.
The Midwestern rancher killed thousands of wild plains bison in the 1800s, partaking in a slaughter that decimated the population. In the late 1700s, tens of millions of animals roamed; by 1890, reportedly fewer than 1,000 remained.
Then something changed in the Kansas frontiersman.
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Jones brought orphaned calves to his Garden City ranch, built his own replacement herd and started selling buffalo to conservation-minded groups. Among the buyers: the leaders of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
“I resolved to atone for some of my past cussedness,” Jones told the Kansas City Star in 1897, “by saving as many as I could.”
Like many who love the bison herd in Golden Gate Park, I’ve often wondered: How exactly did they get here? The answer goes back nearly 150 years, and the narrative is a cinematic journey across the generations filled with good intentions, violent results, escape attempts, a “Deadwood” season’s worth of larger-than-life frontier characters … and ultimately a species that survived.
A 1892 San Francisco Chronicle newspaper drawing of Ben Harrison and Bill Bunker, the city’s first adult bison and first calf born in Golden Gate Park.
S.F. Chronicle
The Chronicle broke the news on Feb. 2, 1891: A “splendid specimen” of bison raised on a farm “by one Jones” was being transported west by Wells Fargo. After accumulating 150 bison on his Kansas ranches, then going bankrupt, Buffalo Jones was selling his herd to conservationists and collectors in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Montana, Yellowstone Park and three California locations.
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“A big bull bison is on his way to Golden Gate Park,” the newspaper reported. He “is four years old and is of the genuine simon pure breed, his immediate predecessors having roamed the wild prairies and the mountains and vales of Montana.”
Ben Harrison, as the bull was called, was purchased for $700 — about $25,000 in 2024 dollars — joining deer and antelope in an enclosure near where Kezar Stadium is now. Things got real quickly for park leaders. The ornery one-ton animal, named after the 23rd president of the United States, escaped from the fortified fencing on the first day and went on to maul a San Francisco police officer years later, then move to Monterey, where it killed two other bulls.
Park-goers were charmed nonetheless. Ben Harrison was soon joined by bison cow Sarah Bernhardt, who in 1892 gave birth to Bill Bunker.
“Four little white legs bearing a bunch of yellow wool staggering drunkenly” after Bernhardt, the Chronicle wrote of the new calf, “aided by a remarkably brisk and wiggly tail.”
Not all bison endured in the well-intentioned but often poorly executed pop-up preserves around the nation. A small 1890s herd in New York’s Central Park was quickly moved. The Chronicle reported that a herd near Monterey died en masse, the animals’ digestive tracts fouled by beach sand ingested during grazing.
But the Golden Gate Park herd thrived and grew. Frontier legend William “Buffalo Bill” Cody sold San Francisco a bull in 1903, and by 1913 the herd numbered 50 bison in three enclosures, with residents knowing their different personalities like modern children might know Pokémon characters.
Nov. 1, 1940: The Golden Gate Park bison have escaped their enclosure on a handful of occasions, including after a fence was cut on Halloween.
Associated Press
Cody’s bull, named Buffalo Bill after the celebrity, “sent the birth rate soaring at an almost alarming rate,” the Chronicle reported in 1913. A more gentle bull named Old John came to children when called, and “knew his name as well as any horse or dog.”
That was the high point for the first generations of San Francisco bison. Park superintendent and early bison advocate John McLaren seemed to turn on the animals later in the 1910s, causing a small panic when he suggested slaughtering bison to feed the park’s sad bears.
Bison made headlines for mayhem and a series of escapes from the 1920s to 1940s, including one 1924 breakout where dozens of the massive creatures invaded the Richmond District, devouring flower beds and partying until dawn.
“Hysterics and sobriety pledges followed in the wake of the animals after their escape last night and their unguided roamings through the residential districts,” the Chronicle reported a day later. “It cost the police reserves an all-night hunt before the escaped beasts were returned to their paddocks.”
As decades passed, the herd moved to its current home near Spreckels Lake, a more secure and spacious enclosure that seemed to end the breakouts. The only recent drama has been political: When San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, gifted the politician several bison in 1984, park officials decided the herds couldn’t mix. The older tuberculosis-ridden herd moved to San Francisco County Jail property in San Bruno, and Blum’s group took over the main paddock.
Five bison calves were added to San Francisco’s herd of female bison in 2020.
Liz Hafalia/S.F. Chronicle
The current Golden Gate Park herd, cared for by San Francisco Zoo keepers, includes no descendents from the original 1800s bison.
Today, history mostly shines on the early bison preservationists. Buffalo Jones was labeled an opportunist — indeed his bison preservation intensified only after he failed to breed a “catalo” herd, mixing domestic cows with wild bison — but he became game warden of Yellowstone Park in 1905 and led a successful federal breeding program there before his death in 1919.
The Golden Gate Park herd has shrunk considerably from its heyday in the early 1900s. Park officials decided in the 1990s that most of the bad behavior was coming from the bulls and sent the males to Oregon. Five calves were added to the five grown bison in 2020.
But the national bison breeding program that included Golden Gate Park was a success. While the animals are still almost fully absent from their historic range, bison are no longer threatened with extinction. An estimated 500,000 now live in the United States. Most are livestock, but in Yellowstone, a herd of about 6,000 roams free, just as their ancestors did more than a century ago.
Sep 4, 2025|Updated Sep 5, 2025 11:03 a.m.