The author reflects on The Last Buffalo Hunt and Other Stories:

     I have a longstanding interest in the outdoors, broadly defined, and over the years have written many magazine pieces about the American West, natural history and the environment, and hunting and fishing. Many of these were profiles of historical figures, some well known like Daniel Boone, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt, others more or less obscure. I wanted to put the best of these pieces into an anthology that would appeal to readers who share my interest in the historical relationship between Americans and their environment. Assembling them in book form allowed me to revise and in many cases to expand on the originals. It was also an opportunity to indulge other creative impulses — I drew all the illustrations and did the book’s graphic design and layout.
     It’s a diverse and to some extent eclectic collection of profiles and narratives, but with a connecting theme: how the American environment has shaped us as a people, and vice versa. For example, Daniel Boone’s very being was defined by his life as a hunter and explorer in the wilderness of Kentucky, but his actions in turn led to the destruction of that wilderness. Boone himself was deeply ambivalent about his role in westward expansion and, as he put it, what “comes of settling a country.”
     I’m fond of all my subjects, although admittedly some are more likeable than others. Two of my favorites, Daniel Boone and William Bartram, were both Quakers, with what we think of as Quaker temperaments. Bartram was one of our greatest naturalists and a gentle soul whose wanderings in the American Southwest in the 1770s produced Bartram’s Travels, a unique work of American literature. Boone’s Quakerness is seen in his affinity and respect for Native Americans. Unlike many frontiersmen, he never became an Indian hater — remarkably so, given that Indians killed two of his sons, a grandson, a brother, a nephew, and a brother-in-law. George Custer — boastful, mendacious, self-aggrandizing, and a recklessly irresponsible military commander — is admittedly harder to like, but you can admire his high spirits and boundless curiosity about the Great Plains, an environment most Army men loathed. 
     Then there’s Ishi, a California Indian, the last of his tribe, who walked out of the wilderness in 1911 after decades of hiding from the white settlers who had killed off his people. He was adopted by two Berkeley anthropologists and with remarkable quickness made a home and a new life for himself at the university. He taught another Berkeley professor, Saxton Pope, how to craft bows and arrows and how to hunt with them in the foothills of the Cascade Range — modern bow hunting traces directly to their friendship. Ishi too was a gentle soul, beloved by everyone who knew him, who had plenty of reasons to hate white people but didn’t. 
     Not all these stories are upbeat. An undercurrent throughout is Americans’ penchant for environmental destruction — for example, the assault on predators as described in “The Custer Wolf” and the destruction of bison in the book’s title piece, “The Last Buffalo Hunt.” But they also chronicle the birth and development of an environmental conscience through the efforts of Roosevelt, Muir, and writers like Henry William Herbert (alias Frank Forester) and George Washington Sears (Nessmuk). Sears is another wonderful character and a writer whose hard, clear prose echoes his contemporaries Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. The title of my Sears profile, “Call Me Nessmuk,” alludes to the famous first line of Melville’s Moby Dick.