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Buffalo used in Dances with Wolves &
Quigley Down Under now at home at Milligan College
MILLIGAN COLLEGE, TN (Jan. 27, 2004) – Standing over seven-feet tall and weighing nearly a thousand pounds, Milligan College’s newest addition towers above the inside entrance of Steve Lacy Fieldhouse. The college proudly introduced their recently-acquired American Plains buffalo at the Buffs’ first home basketball game of the spring semester on Jan. 13.
The buffalo, which made appearances in the major motion pictures “Dances with Wolves” and “Quigley Down Under,” did not come to Milligan in an ordinary way.
Milligan athletic director Ray Smith received a message on his answering machine one day in early December 2003 that started the buffalo’s journey to the Milligan campus. The call came from former Elizabethton resident Tom Gentry, whose daughter, Missy Rotenberry, works at Shelor Chevy Corporation and Memory Lane Antique Mall in Christiansburg, Va. The antique mall had strangely found itself in possession of the buffalo, which carried a $15,000 price tag, after its taxidermist-owner traded the buffalo as a down payment on a Chevrolet truck.
Originally from an Indian reservation in the plains of South Dakota, the meat of the buffalo was given to the local tribe according to their law and traditions when the buffalo was killed in 1990. Over 400 hours of taxidermy work then went into restoring the buffalo for display.
After displaying the buffalo in the front window of the antique mall for a few years, Gentry and Rotenberry decided that they wanted other people to be able to enjoy the buffalo, too. After the thundering herd of Marshall University declined the gift because they already had a buffalo, Gentry remembered that the mascot of Milligan College was the buffalo, so they called Milligan athletic director Ray Smith.
“I grew up as a little girl in Elizabethton and I remembered the Buffaloes of Milligan College. I know that Milligan will be a good home for him and he will be enjoyed by many people,” Rotenberry told Smith when they donated the buffalo to Milligan.
Getting the buffalo from Christiansburg to Milligan College proved to be another task. Smith had to locate and rent a truck with a door large enough to fit the 7’1″ buffalo inside. With his wife and daughter, Smith made the two and a half hour trip to Christiansburg on New Year’s Eve to pick up the buffalo. Several men and a lot of patience were needed to steady the weight of the buffalo and his oak-trimmed base while the truck’s hydraulic lift did the rest of the work.
“The size of this buffalo is really very striking,” said Smith. “It is so majestic.”
Known to members of the Shelor Corp. as “Jerry,” the buffalo now makes his home above the revolving doors in Steve Lacy Fieldhouse on Milligan’s campus. A new name for the buffalo has yet to be determined, but Coach Smith foresees a “buffalo naming contest” in the future for the students.