A Home Where the Buffalo Roam
by
Joe Dan Boyd
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play;
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day
---from the song, Home On The Range
I never expected a home where the buffalo roam, especially not here in East Texas , and most especially not here on the Old Tinney Home Farm where I was born and raised.
After graduation from Winnsboro High School , I left the Tinney Chapel community for Texas A&M, never dreaming that I would return in 1997, to search for greener, more creative, pastures, the same primal urge that had attracted my maternal grandfather Ambrose Tinney from Alabama , more than a century earlier.
Both Ambrose and I, each in our own tableau and time, experienced inner discovery and the tectonic shift of paradigms, as the beckoning of our creative pastures eventually became the green, green grass of home!
And, here in December, 2006, I seem to work harder than ever under the rubric of “retirement,” a concept that only gained universal currency during early discussions of Social Security, a New Deal concept that came of age during my childhood, a simpler time when unstructured play by youthful males hereabouts almost always meant pretending to be cowboys, like Gene, Tex or Roy, and even occasionally singing their songs, like Home On The Range.
Even today, during my occasionally performed program of stories and songs that I call “The Cowboy Way,” a verse-and-chorus tribute, delivered in the standard guitar tuning of G, describes an imagined, but intensely unsettling idea of buffalo that actually roam.
Unsettling ?
I suppose I am influenced by the knowledge that, as suggested in another verse of this old Western ballad, “the red man was pressed from this part of the West,” and that genocidal goal was accomplished in part by the white man’s systematic extermination of the buffalo, which originally provided the red man with sustenance, shelter and a certain spiritual connection.
Then, too, there is the equally unsettling knowledge that some Native Americans later believed, for a while, in the supernatural return of the buffalo, regarded as a necessary prerequisite to their earlier lifestyle of living in a harmonious balance with nature
Imagine then my confused sensibilities upon seeing for the first time, through a window of my own house, the roaming of buffalo in a pasture on the other side of the road, FM 312, both sides of which had been a part of the Old Tinney Farm remnant, a little over 150 acres, whenI first lived here as a boy with my Grandmother, Elizabeth Tinney, second wife of Ambrose, in a rambling farmhouse at the then-unmarked, unpaved intersection of what is now FM 312 and CR 4620.
For this entirely unexpected experience of a home where buffalo roam, I am indebted to neighbor Renee Williams, a twenty-something buffalomeister, cattlewoman, electrician, custom hat maker and practicing renaissance woman who never ceases to amaze those of us with far more experience but much less exuberance.
When Renee recently offered a tour of her 16-head buffalo herd, contained by sturdy fence poles and strong strands of barbed wire, I was grateful for the opportunity to see these majestic animals at close range and to ask her a few questions about their nature and temperament when compared with more conventional, domesticated ranch stock.
“It’s like the difference between Andy Griffith and John Wayne,” she explained. “ Buffalo have absolutely no reason to fear humans, and they don’t, so they are actually fairly docile unless provoked, pretty much like a John Wayne movie character.” Only when provoked, or genuinely spooked, says Renee, is a buffalo likely to charge or otherwise do any damage. I thought of the Roger Miller song title, You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd.
At the beginning of our tour, the buffalo herd bull stood aloof and apart from his harem and their calves, but curiosity soon prompted the big bison to move toward us. I asked if he had a name: “Billy Jack,” said Renee, who named the bull for the lead character in a long-ago 
movie about a Native American determined to stand up for his rights. Billy Jack seems aptly named: cool, confident and a tad cocky. Justifiably so.
I asked Renee about her long-term plans for the herd: Perhaps they would eventually become low-cholesterol, high-priced delicacies on the menu of fancy restaurants?
Not a chance, Renee assured me: “These animals have so much Native American history and are such majestic creatures that I couldn’t bear the thought of them ending up on someone’s plate.”
When she decides to sell this herd, Renee says it will be as breeding stock to someone who appreciates their history and heritage, someone who has a hankering for the promise of an old familiar musical melody: Oh, give me a home, where the buffalo roam.
Joe Dan Boyd Communications