Overall, yes. But on a very limited and very small, uncoordinated basis. There were ranchers in west who saved hundreds as they were using them to breed beefalo hybrids. Here in Montana is the famous story of Walking Coyote. He had bought 13 bison to butter up his wife after she caught him tipi hopping. She didn't buy into it and Walking Coyote ended up selling them where they became the basis of the National Bison herd on the Flathead Reservation right as the slaughter was going on.

There was no nationwide effort. Part of it is happened so quick, with the bulk of the killing taking only a few years after railroads crisscrossed the country. The only way the bison survived was dumb luck. Small pockets like in Yellowstone national park and isolated places like Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake were never hunted. By 1884 there were less than 2,000 left. Here's the really bad news: 90% of the bison today are hybrids. Decedents of the ones that were left creating beefalos.

There is a great book about the bison slaughter, called American Buffalo by Steven Rinella:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001MYA396/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Been a few years since I read it, but that's where the bulk of my information came from.

Texas also briefly considered a measure to protect what was left of the rapidly dwindling buffalo population in late nineteenth-century. In 1875 members of the Texas state legislature introduced a bill to stop the wholesale slaughter of buffalo in the state. This is interesting considering the fact that the buffalo served as a vital resource for Native American tribes such as the Comanche and Kiowa and the ongoing conflict of the Indian Wars had flare ups in Texas through and after the Civil War. When the legislation was introduced it was vehemently protested by General Philip Sheridan who headed up the Department of Missouri (an part of the US Army tasked with managing lands between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains) and who is quoted (sometimes disputed) as saying about American buffalo hunters of the time, “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.” The bill ultimately failed and by the late 1870s the remaining buffalo in Texas would be whittled down to perhaps as few as a dozen or so in a herd owned by Charles Goodnight. The herd that roams Yellowstone today exists in part because of 29 buffalo of the Goodnight Herd that were relocated to the park to help grow the dwindling herd there.