Quite
literately, millions of buffalo once roamed North America, grazing the Great Plains
and prairies as well as the mountains to the east. Historical documents from
the time of Columbus's arrival make reference of the animals' importance to the
native people. Accounts of early explorers speak of the American Buffalo as
follows: “the plains were black and
appeared as if in motion” with herds. Weaved into the fabric of the Native
American’s lively-hood for thousands of years, the buffalo was not only admired
but were honored by these early people.
Clearly, it was
no secret that the “new” Americans were aware of the importance the buffalo
held for Native Americans. So what in
the name of Mother Nature do you suppose led to the near extinction event
administered by these “new” pioneers?
Many
knowledgeable scholars suggest that in order to reduce the many risks
associated with “going west”, the US government, by way of the Army, secretly adopted
a policy to exterminate the Buffalo. As the story goes, the extermination of
the Buffalo would in turn mean the demise of Native Americans (Indians) who depended on the Buffalo for almost
every aspect of their existence. In the
very least, by killing off this valuable resource, it would severely reduce the
ability of the Indians to continue with an armed struggle against the United
States. Although the political mind set of the era seems to point to the
existence of an official policy of this kind, the debate about whether one
actually existed lingers still.
Most historians
say that the slaughter of the great Buffalo herds of the West (an estimated 30 million in 1800) took place
between 1874 and 1884 (a period of only 10 years);
but the truth is, even if there was a secret government policy to kill off the
food & clothing supply of the Native American’s, there were also other
issues of the day that must also be considered.
Perhaps the
first group to come into the line of fire would be the newest big “lobby” of
the era; the railroad industry, they wanted bison / buffalo herds culled
or eliminated for their own self-serving reason. Large herds were often a real
problem when it came to RR tracks and engines.
It seems they could damage a locomotive engine when the trains failed to
stop in time to prevent collisions with those unlucky beasts that happened upon
the tracks at exactly the wrong time.
But the primary
reason for the Bison’s (Buffalo’s) near-demise
was plain old commercial market hunting. The fact is that the Buffalo was
hunted almost to the point of extinction in the late 19th century
primarily by what you could call “market hunters”; they were reduced to only a
few hundred by mid-1880. The Buffalo were hunted and killed primarily for their
skins; to the amazement of the typical Indian the rest of the animal was left
behind to decay on the ground as there was no method available to get those
Buffalo roasts and stakes to the available marketplace, absent spoilage.
Turned out, that
buffalo skins were great for clothing such as robes, or rugs and, most
importantly, for industrial machine belts (kind a
like a huge fan belt). A good hide could bring as much as $3.00 in Dodge
City, Kansas, and a very good one (with a heavy
winter coat) could sell for $50.00 back east, in an era when the typical
laborer would be lucky to make one dollar a day.
Then, after the
animals rotted away, their bones gave rise to yet another industry, were in they
(the bones) were collected and shipped back
east in large quantities.
Bones of most
any kind, you see, made an excellent fertilizer and was in great demand during
the late 1880’s and early 1890’s.
Therefore bone gathering and selling began first in the Plains area around
1884, and grew into a thriving industry. As many as four hundred trainloads per
year of bones were shipped back East for the fertilizer market. The average
price for dried bones was $10.00 a ton. This allowed many settlers to “pick
bones” whenever they had the time or you could say “at their leisure”, for
supplementing the family’s annual earnings. Because picking bones was not a
strenuous chore, it was not uncommon for children to participate in gathering
them so as to complement the family’s income.
An interesting side
note regarding the dry buffalo bone supply — it was eventually depleted to the
point that some enterprising bone picker substituted buffalo bones with the
bones of dead Indians taken from ancient burial grounds, his scheme was soon found
out, which pretty much killed the business altogether.
The region known
as the Great Plains stretches from the provinces of Canadian in the north, to
near the Gulf of Mexico in the south; from the Rocky Mountains in the west, to
the Mississippi River in the eastern U S . . . The Native Americans who lived
there became known as the Plains Indians and are still among those which are
most often stereotyped in the movies and other media as representing all
Indians or Native Americans. To those
people, the horse, the tipi, and especially the Buffalo were all central items to
their cultures.
Yes, for the
Plains Indians, the buffalo provided them with food, shelter, tools, and even
spiritual guidance. A few of the Plains
tribes, such as the Blackfoot, actually considered the Buffalo to be “real
food” and all other flesh, such as elk or wild turkey as being, well,
inferior. And then there’s this: For the
typical Indian, Buffalo hunting was not a sporting event, but were harvested so
that “the people” could live.
Practically
every schoolchild is taught that before the arrival of whites, Plains Indians
lived in perfect harmony with nature and were the ultimate socialist
ecologists. As the typical story goes, Indians had little private property, were
not burdened by capitalism, and they hunted and killed only what was required for
them to live comfortably. Then the Europeans arrived on the scene, using
industrialized hunting methods that nearly eradicated the North American bison,
also known as the Buffalo. In the late 1800’s, hunters, such as William
Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody, slaughtered the animals to meet market demands
until the bison were nearly gone. Then, just in the nick of time (the story line continues), the U S government
stepped in and saved the buffalo from total extension by sealing the remaining
few off from hunters in Yellowstone National Park; a national treasure located
primarily in present day Wyoming, but also extending into Montana and Idaho.
Yep, that’s sure
an opportune and easily told storyline, but it has left many of us, well,
buffaloed! If nothing else it has
certainly caused the story of the Buffalo to be misconstrued.
Of recent date,
a number of scholarly studies have materialized, and they universally provide a
much more complex depiction of the Great Plains in the late 1800’s. Among other
things, the revisions address the nature of Indian Buffalo hunting, and
nonhuman factors affecting herd sizes. The studies also show that the real savior of the Buffalo was not necessarily
the government, but, believe it or not, the free market.
The authors of
the aforementioned studies include: Author, Teacher, and Historian, Dan Flores,
of Texas Tech University before moving to the University of Montana in Missoula
where he retired in 2014; Shepard Krech III, an anthropology professor at Brown
University; and Andrew C. Isenberg, a professor of history at Princeton . . .
point being, these guys are not a group of white elitist, simply trying to
“whitewash” history.
The first
shattered myth is that of the “natural” Indian living in perfect harmony with
nature — unlike the greedy Europeans who came, seen, and conquered the
continent. To the contrary, each of the authors revealed evidence of communal
economies that engaged in large-scale burning to "clear" forests and
kill game. “Organized” burns often got out of control, and without modern
firefighting equipment, destroyed everything in their path. Birds, deer,
beaver, and all sorts of wildlife were already on the road to extinction in
some areas; a result of over hunting done by Indians, natural predators and
disaster thinned herds.
Further, the
selected Buffalo hunting techniques, while productive, were less than, shall we
say “animal friendly” to the casual observer. Simply put, Indians used the tools at
their disposal, which was mostly fire, together with a good bit of cunning, to
hunt buffalo. A hunting method known as “Box Burning,” was one a common tactic
which involved setting simultaneous fires on all four sides of a herd. Charles
McKenzie, while crossing the plains in 1804, observed entire herds with flanks charred
from Indian fires. Yet another favored hunting tactic, the “Buffalo Jump,”
involved luring a herd to follow an Indian dressed in a buffalo skin. At a full
run, the brave led the herd to a high bluff, where he jumped to a small hidden
but adjoining ledge while the buffalo careened over the edge of the cliff to
their demises. Both methods actually led to horrible waste and inefficient use
of resources.
Another powerful
myth is that the Indians “used every part of the buffalo,” suggesting that the
Plains Indians used all of the Buffalo they killed. Sorry, that’s not the case. In the 1850’s and
before, it’s estimated that Indians harvested roughly 450,000 animals per year,
and some believe the figure was far high.
Typically, after stripping the best meat and some useful parts, then
leaving the remainder to rot—in truth they had little choice, in that they
lacked a reasonable method for effectively preserving the kill. The stench engulfed
the prairie for miles, and many a pioneer reported coming across acres of bones
from buffalo killed by the Indians before (the
pioneer) continuing west.
It’s doubtful,
at best, whether the slaughter of the Buffalo by the Indian alone would have
made the buffalo extinct, but if combined with natural factors such as wolf
predation, drought, and wild fires, the Indians’ annual harvest almost
certainly surpassed the ability of the Buffalo herds to maintain themselves. Perhaps
even of more significance, as Isenberg points out, “Even had they recognized a decline, the inherent instability of the
nomadic societies made it difficult always to enforce the mandates against
waste.” And lest we forget, many Indian religions held that nature provided
an unlimited supply, and thus it was impossible to “overhunt.” To put it another way, the bison were already
doomed before the white man even arrived on the continent — regardless, is
would have taken decades longer.
In any event,
westward expansion of whites and trade between whites and Indians produced two
noteworthy changes, one more destructive than the other. First: The typical Indian shifted from farming
to a nomadic, hunting lifestyle. Second: As American pioneers pushed west,
both the Indians and the buffalo constituted an obstruction to more expansion.
In truth, a thriving buffalo-hide trade already existed between Indian hunters,
however by the 1860’s, a new wave of white hunters, using modern firearms and
industrial processing methods expanded the slaughter of the Buffalo / Bison.
This activity had three primary purposes: (A) it fed railroad workers and a few
western markets; (B) it supplied robes and hides to tanneries and provided the
industrial market with “fan belts” and fertilizer; (C) finally, it cannot be
denied that it was a cruel method for getting rid of the Indian by eliminating
his food supply.
There is little doubt
that market forces nearly marked the end of the sooner than had buffalo been
left to the handy work of the Indians alone. As was evidenced as early as 1832
when George Catlin— American painter, author, and traveler who specialized in
portraits of Native Americans— warned that the days of the Buffalo were. Forty
years later, Yellowstone National Park
provided the only public sanctuary for Buffalo beyond city zoos. Trouble was, the public park constantly had a
real difficulty in keeping hunters or poachers at bay. You see, private herds
had value, and thus were well guarded. But Yellowstone was “open season” for
poachers, despite repeated efforts to raise penalties for killing Buffalo inside
the park.
So the real credit
for saving the Buffalo should go to the private sector; first through formation
of the American Bison Society in 1905, whose members were frequently from New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or the New England states. A few sought to develop Cattle-Buffalo
hybrids called “Beefalo,” yet others, including banker J. P. Morgan, focused on
creating open-range reserves where “the buffalo roam.” He funded a 20,000-acre expanse
in Colorado and stocked it with Buffalo.
Meanwhile,
western ranchers such as Charles Goodnight started capturing buffalo calves in
1878 because he, like others, believed there just could be considerable value
in private Buffalo herds. As a result, many of the Buffalo that eventually
populated government preserves descended from the herds of but a few enterprising
Montana ranchers.
Undoubtedly, profit, was the primary reason behind
the “keepers” of the Buffalo, just as it was for hide hunters years earlier.
One particular rancher advertised, “We
Supply Buffalo for Zoos, Parks, Circuses, and Barbecues.”
Yellowstone aside, the private sector
saved the buffalo. By the 1990s, more than 90% of the Buffalo in North America
were in private hands, rather than publicly owned.
Without
question, market forces had contributed to the near-extinction of the Buffalo,
along with the political objective of destroying the Indians by eliminating
their food source. But that is well known. What is almost never mentioned is
that it was market forces-ranchers, hunters, tourism developers, railroaders,
and philanthropists-that ultimately saved the buffalo as well.
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