there's also an author's note with a the bibliography of nine books on references to hornaday expeditioncan which is a buffalo hunt sponsored by the smithsonian and the ouachita incident, an attack by custer's seventh calvary on an indian village. they figure largely in the book and they will offense. harry had very real offense that has been turned into a truly lovely, engrossing, readable novel that we are here to find out how that happens, starting with where you got your ideas and why were you thinking your parents and grandparents? >> yeah, great questions. thank you, barbara for that introduction in december at the book i wish i could memorize that. i think my parents and grand parents because they're a big storytellers. my great grandfather on my father's side homesteaded in north dakota in 1883. there's a family legend that i think is true in 1884, which was one year after he began homesteading the land in southeastern dakota that one morning a bison wandered up to a stock tank behind the sod farm he built and he shot the bison and that was probably the last wild buffalo east of

in the mid-90s i came across this hornaday story. the curator and taxidermist for the smithsonian institute in washington d.c. in 1886 of the national museum. he realized one morning in the spring of 1886 that he did not have one good specimen of the bison in a natural history part of the museum. he also knew because he was a great conservationist that the bison was all but extinct in the north american continent at that point. the last of the many hunters wiped out the herd in 1884. so while the many hunters had gone home. the bison was gone. and so what he did was he managed to get funding for the war department and he organized an expedition into the montana territory in the fall of 1886 and he had hunters and cowboys than a military escort and they would did to the badlands northwest of miles city, montana, for two and a half men in search of live animals. they did find enough to harvest 25 animals, 25 of the last of the wild rice in. so you know, the irony is just too rich. to hornaday's credit, after he put together taxidermy a