Charles "Buffalo" Jones

In 1866, at the age of 21, he moved to Troy, in northeast Kansas with little more than the clothing they wore and a sack of Osage orange seeds brought from Illinois.

Jones joined the buckskin-clad cavalcade, and the once-sickly college boy quickly became a seasoned frontiersman and efficient hide harvester.

And once his vision shifted from the momentary gain of slaughtering buffalo to the lasting work of preserving them, he found his true calling—and his legacy.

The Joneses homesteaded 160 acres in Sequoyah (later Finney) County, Kansas, where Jones helped found Garden City.

He lobbied successfully both to bring the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad through town and to have Garden named the county seat.

An alliance with pioneer Texas rancher Charles Goodnight, who'd been following a similar notion, brought him a goodly number of beasts.

Jones launched a buffalo breeding business after surveying thousands of frozen range cattle that perished in the January 1886 blizzard.

Jones figured by breeding cattle with the hardy buffalo he could produce a stock able to survive the high plains, yet gentle enough to herd and brand.

But financial troubles during the hard times of the 1890s forced Jones to sell his herd to pay off his debts.

Jones lost his stock to creditors due to a severe national recession in the 1890s, selling his bison at public auction to pay his debts.

One of the last wild buffalo herds—30 or so—lived in Yellowstone National Park, and poachers were quickly thinning its meager ranks.

Jones petitioned the secretary of the Interior, proposing to “corral the once mighty herds of American bison” and relocate them at Yellowstone.

In 1901 Congress finally acted on the Yellowstone situation, allocating $15,000 for an enclosure and stock to replenish the park's diminished herd.

Jones spent his last years in great demand on the lecture circuit, where he demonstrated his roping prowess and told thrilling—if embellished—tales.

His finest tribute may be a modern one; in 2000 Robert Pickering, a deputy director of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, would write, “Bison may be the first American environmental success story".

[5][6] Popular western novelist Zane Grey wrote about his travels with Jones in his book, The Last of the Plainsmen.