I’d been on a long, sweaty driving trip for two weeks, and when I started noticing come-ons for the World’s Largest Buffalo 100 miles west of Jamestown, North Dakota, I understood immediately that it was my destiny to visit it.
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Almost everything is strange about a 26-foot-tall, 60-ton cement buffalo with a bad paint job. That someone had the idea to build such a thing and was able to persuade the town council to allocate a significant amount of money for it is mind-boggling. But what I found most unsettling was how isolated the World’s Largest Buffalo seemed. In the 36 years it had been there no one had ever found it necessary to place the big guy in any context. He stood alone in the middle of a broad half acre of cement, without so much as a shrub nearby. There was no appropriately oversize ecosystem–no 26-foot-tall stalks of big bluestem, no five-foot-wide leaves of prairie dock, no 100-pound butterflies. And apparently nobody had convinced the town leaders that, since bison were herd animals, they ought to raise taxes to pay to construct another dozen buffalo. The disturbing absence of context led to the 120,000-pound question: why a bison?
The most obvious reason for the existence of these prodigious beasts is that they induce people to leave the interstates and visit towns and cities they might not otherwise. I understand that. But it’s hard to get around the fact that it’s still a weird plan. If it seems ordinary to you, you must be a native-born American who went on a lot of road trips as a child. And if you doubt that creating unseemly sized statues of animals or pieces of food to attract visitors is uniquely American, try imagining a town in France that would invite clientele to its vineyards by erecting an enormous cement grape in a city park.
