Wild Bison Boulevard is a one-man art exhibition on October 6th, 2024 celebrating the crossing of America’s ancient herds of migratory bison from Indiana into Louisville, Kentucky at the base of the Great Falls of the Ohio River. The exhibition consists of an educational story trail stretching along the main walkway of the 56-acre Portland Wharf Park with 20 exhibits accompanied by narrative set of 120 walkway guideposts.
This nature trail begins at the entrance of the flood bank road at Northwest Parkway and North 31st St. leading down to the Ohio River, celebrating the contribution that American bison made over tens of thousands of years towards creating the agricultural fertility of America’s Heartland. It speaks to the deep history of our land, our wildlife and our own humanity.
Presented in cooperation with Portland Museum, Wild Bison Boulevard is landscape literature — a howling of the land unfolding its pages alongside the Portland Wharf Park pathway, designed to encourage the ecological literacy and personal resiliency humanity needs to face the upcoming environmental challenges in our future.
Wild Bison Boulevard takes a curated look into the life of our land long before modern humanity spread across the Earth, and speaks of how the great herds of megafauna built a foundation of agricultural fertility on the American Prairies.
Most importantly, it tells the story of how we might return our damaged lands back to their original biological wellness.
Artist’s Statement
Lying in plain sight by the side of the Ohio River is a little-known tale from the deep history of Kentucky.
Here lies Kentucky’s historical Buffalo Trace, where great herds of wild bison once crossed the Ohio from Indiana after feeding on the grasslands of the Great Plains in Illinois. Fat and glistening from a long summer on the tallgrass prairies, they crossed the Ohio River near where the original Portland Wharf was constructed.
The path rising up from the river shares the muddy hoofprints of a past era when Portland Wharf Park played an important role in the development of America, long before America knew her name. Our story unfolds along this path, as we enter a time— not that long past— when Kentucky topsoil was 18 feet deep and where herds of wild bison, mammoth, and wild horses grazed upon our grasslands. This was the American Serengeti— the most fertile agricultural land on Earth.
The Kentucky grasslands were indigenous to this land hundreds of thousands of years before any humans arrived. They mark a time when thundering herds of bison wandered freely across America’s Heartland.
Bison played a keystone role in building the structure, depth and quality of the topsoil across America. Over the centuries, tens of millions of these powerful mammals roamed across our continent, cultivating the vast grasslands of America with their grazing practices. The interrelationship of large herbivories with the grasslands built a foundation of fertile soil— inch-by-inch, century-by-century, as bison fed, ground and manured our grasslands— transforming glacier-fed gravel into the eighteen feet of topsoil that Europeans found when we arrived here.
The contribution of bison to the web of prairie life creates a cascade of environmental conditions that benefit countless other species. When allowed to roam freely across expansive landscapes, they improve the quality and sustainability of American soil with grazing practices that stimulate prairie grass growth, much like careful pruning, creating pasturelands that require no additional fertilizer inputs.
From a grasslands point of view, the most valuable thing humanity can do to protect the vitality and resiliency of its food production capability, is to return the American Bison to its original role as grassland guardians, where they offer the delivery of cost-effective agricultural sustainability to a post-oil economy. Their services are integral to the goal of replacing chemical farm inputs with native grassland species and free-roaming megafauna.
Let us begin this job by adapting America’s public land base to accommodate the free movement nature’s original eco-engineers, reintroducing wild bison to our farmlands to restore grassland ecosystems damaged by destructive grazing practices, tillage erosion and nutrient depletion.
Let us renew the original migratory routes of American bison by forming a series of bison grazing corridors between grassland habitats across America’s public lands, welcoming wild bison back as strategic partners in the job of reversing biodiversity loss and ending topsoil degradation.
And let us begin now, to reframe humanity as a partner in the ecological stewardship of our lands rather than a colonial oppressor, and join with Americans from all walks of life working together— working for our grandchildren’s food security by rebuilding America’s original agricultural wealth.
Together, we are the voice of the land rising up to heal ourselves.
For more information, please contact:
Ken McCormick
misterorganic@hotmail.com
www.redironcaves.com
