By Kinen Carvala

It’s normally not dramatic at the Bison Paddock, but occasionally drama breaks out.

On Dec. 13, 1899, The San Francisco Chronicle reported the difficulty of moving male bison to a new 25-acre paddock. After one of the bison ran away toward the Music Concourse, Capt. Thomson’s officers returned it to the new paddock only for the bison to gore Thomson’s horse after Thomson shepherded the bison with a light lasso slap.

Several other bison escape incidents in the park, including in 1924, 1932, 1940, 1942 and two in 1956, were listed by reporters Tessa McLean and Peter Hartlaub. Escaped bison have behaved variably, from mulling around just outside a paddock gate left open to reaching as far as Fulton Street and Sixth Avenue.

In the second decade of the 21st century, the story got more interesting. The San Francisco Police Department’s Richmond Station’s Twitter account posted on May 18, 2014, the day of the Bay to Breakers footrace, that a naked man was arrested in the Bison Paddock.

The American animal is more closely related to the European bison that disappeared from Western Europe in ancient times but lasted longer in the wild in Eastern Europe. Europeans called the American animal various names including “cattle,” “buffalo” and “bison,” according to Dayton Duncan’s book “Blood Memory.” Perhaps Old-World buffalos like the water buffalo widely domesticated in Asia’s tropical parts were top of mind.

The bison was named the United States’ official national mammal in 2016. Male bison can weigh up to 2,000 pounds and stand six feet tall; female bison weigh up to 1,000 pounds and are four to five feet tall, according to the Department of the Interior. Bison on average live for 10 to 20 years, according to the National Park Service. Bison can run up to 35 miles per hour. (American bison weren’t domesticated by Native Americans; the National Park Service strongly recommends not approaching bison.)

Millions of bison used to roam North America before European colonization, with a couple million east of the Mississippi River and 30 million on the Great Plains, according to Duncan. A bison pelt was one of the gifts for a treaty meeting establishing the British colony of Georgia in 1733, but bison were already hard to find in the region by the 1770s.

For many Native Americans east of the Rocky Mountains before the late 1800s, bison were an important resource. As late as the 1840s, large summer hunts of bison involved orchestrating an entire village to funnel a bison herd onto a path that would suddenly end in a cliff, according to Duncan. Fires set by natives drove bison towards ambushes plus created good grazing land for bison.

In 1846, the Donner Party ate bison meat and broiled steaks over bison dung as they crossed the Great Plains trying to reach California, according to Duncan.

As horses were brought to North America by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s, according to the National Park Service, they bred and spread over the Great Plains, competing against bison for grass to eat, according to Duncan.

In 1886, chief taxidermist of the Smithsonian Institution, William T. Hornaday, realized the Smithsonian had few bison specimens, so he sent off letters to find more. Most correspondents replied that there were no more bison around; only one reply had a bison tip. Hornaday captured some of the last wild bison in Montana and wrote the 1889 book “The Extermination of the American Bison,” that an estimated 1,091 bison were alive as of Jan. 1, 1889. The book created popular support to save bison, according to the Smithsonian.

The first male bison came to Golden Gate Park on Feb. 13, 1891, from a Kansas ranch and spent a week in a Wells Fargo building basement before being brought in a cage on a wagon to Park Superintendent John McLaren, Park Commissioner William Stow, Police Capt. Sam Thompson and Officer T. H. Kennedy, according to the S.F. Examiner. The bison was named Ben Harrison, after the then-president of the U.S.

More than 500 bison calves were born in the Park as part of breeding program that distributed some bison to other zoos. After six calves were born around 1990, the paddock’s dominant male was sterilized and died in 1997, ending the breeding program, reported Marisa Lagos in 2008. Today, the Park’s bison are all female. Five one-year-old bison were added to the paddock in 2020 for the Park’s 150th anniversary, through a donation by Richard Blum, husband of Dianne Feinstein, former mayor of San Francisco and then-sitting senator, as reported by the Associated Press.

Today, about 30,000 bison are in conservation herds while 500,000 are commercial livestock, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo.

San Francisco Zoo staff care for the bison while the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department manages the current 11-acre paddock grounds.

The Bison Paddock is on the north side of JFK Drive between North Lake and Spreckels Lake.