T oday, much of what the modern Houstonian knows about buffaloes is that they are behind the name of our most prominent bayou and Buffalo Speedway. (And thank you to reader Leslie Orth, whose question about the latter inspired this story.)
But before Houston was Houston, an arrangement flourished here for thousands of years. Herds of buffalo, following the grass and the water, lived on the prairies when the prairies ran from the bayous to the horizon. Bands of Indigenous peoples fished the bays and gathered along the shorelines through the warmer months and then turned inland in the fall to hunt the herds.
The sight of a herd of buffalo had become so rare by the time the Houston area was being settled in the 19th century that one had to write it down for posterity. Eleven-year-old Dilue Rose Harris, who grew up to be a famous memoirist, did so in her diary in 1836 when she watched a herd of a few thousand pass within sight of her family’s house, describing it as a dark cloud of dust.
What happened to Houston’s buffalo?
The Akokisa moved inland every fall to hunt the Katy Prairie where Buffalo Bayou originates, in what is now northwest Harris County. The evidence is in the ground: Archaeologists have found buffalo bones on the prairie and kill sites along the bayous themselves…