Fred and Mary are my great-great-great-great-grandparents, and they were living on the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in the late 1800s when Mary Good Elk Woman had a dream about saving the buffalo. The next morning, when she woke up, she told Fred he needed to get their sons and get out there and save the buffalo.

They went out and rounded up some calves. The federal government supported efforts to eradicate the bison—it was a very purposeful campaign to destroy our food source—but the calves didn’t have any economic value at the time, so hunters left them alone. There were herds of just calves roaming around. Fred and his sons went out, rounded up some calves, and eventually created a herd that helped repopulate the buffalo in parts of the Great Plains.