Read time: 5 min.

If you look at Indiana’s state seal, you’ll spot a scene that hasn’t existed here in well over a century: a bison galloping across a hewn fence in the wilderness. Once, these massive animals roamed the Hoosier landscape in enormous numbers! Today, though, their presence is mostly symbolic. Aside from a few managed herds, the only place in Indiana where you can reliably see bison is at Ouabache State Park near Bluffton, where a small group lives within a dedicated range. Recently, I got to visit them.

My nine-year-old niece was here from Michigan a couple of months ago, and we were striking out trying to find something engaging. My parents had taken her on a big trip out west a few months prior, but they’d missed seeing any bison or buffalo along the way. That gave my stepdad an idea: some quick research led him to the bison herd at Ouabache State Park. Seeing them sounded like fun. With nothing else pressing that Saturday, I tagged along for the hour-long drive north.

I was pretty sure I’d heard of Ouabache State Park, which I thought was located along the northern bank of Roush Lake in Huntington County. Turns out, I was wrong! Ouabache is close -twenty miles towards Ohio- and sits just southeast of Bluffton. We took State Road 67 to State Road 1, where we passed the remains of the Oak Grove Schoolhouse and the old Goodwill school. After passing through Pennville, Balbec, Fiat, Nottingham, Petroleum, and Reiffsburg, we headed east. 

Ouabache State Park was established as Wells County State Forest and Game Preserve in the 1930s, a time by which the property had largely been cleared for farming. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration reforested the area, built buildings and shelters, planted a nursery, and developed a game preserve¹. You wouldn’t know it’d ever been cleared today. 

The property stopped raising game in the early 1960s, and it was renamed the Ouabache State Recreation Area in 1962. Twenty-one years later, it became a state park with modern amenities like a campground, tennis and basketball courts, picnic areas, playgrounds, and boating and fishing on a twenty-five acre man-made lake². My stepdad, niece, and I were there for the bison, though, and that’s mostly what we saw.

That said, the bison enclosure sits just steps away from a striking fire tower that commands attention the moment you enter into the depths of the park. Rising 100 feet into the sky, it was built in the 1930s under the supervision of Denzel Doggett  -Assistant State Engineer for the Indiana Conservation Department- to help spot wildfires in the surrounding landscape³.

After a restoration in 2019, the tower serves as an observation point for visitors to drink in aerial views of the park⁴. I’m terrified of open stairs, though, so I declined to ascend. For what it’s worth, my sentiments seemed shared by most of the people I observed.

Instead of climbing, we made a beeline for the bison. At Ouabache, a small herd of six to eight roam a spacious twenty-acre enclosure designed to mimic their natural habitat. Trails One and Four loop around the fenced landscape, offering surprisingly close vantage points along the way. Trail Four, in particular, passes right by the feeding station, which is prime viewing territory. That’s where we spotted most of the herd! At one point, a massive bison slowly ambled in my direction.

Like an idiot, I stuffed my hand through the two-layer fence to give the bison a quick pat. My stepdad immediately called me out -“Ted, that’s not a good idea”- but by then my arm was already deep inside. The bison kept moving. For the briefest moment, my fingers brushed its coat. Its fur was thick, coarse, and woolly, like plunging your hand into a dense, living carpet. I yanked my arm back just in time, but my hand got stuck. I was fortunate to retain all five of my fingers.

All told, we spent less than twenty minutes at Ouabache’s bison exhibit since they were spread out pretty thin over the massive plot. Still, it’s one thing to see a bison on a state seal or in a history book, though, when you can feel the heft of its presence up close and imagine herds thundering across prairies home now to farmland and highways. Ouabache may not be the untamed frontier of centuries past, but it briefly offered a tangible connection to that lost landscape. As we drove back home through the string of tiny towns, I couldn’t help but think that, however small, the bison’s quiet return is a reminder of Indiana’s layered history.

Sources Cited
1 Ouabache State Park (n.d.). Indiana Department of Natural Resources [Indiana]. Map. Web. Retrieved October 11, 2025. 
2 (See footnote 1). 
3 Water-Powered Mille Committee Collection, 1840-1893. Manuscript and visual Collections Department. William Henry Smith Memorial Library. Indiana Historical Society [Indianapolis]. Web. Retrieved October 11, 2025. 
4 Iconic fire tower gets new life after community effort (2019, August 23). WANE [Fort Wayne]. Web. Retrieved October 11, 2025.