Bison in Decline

Preface

We cannot know with certainty how many bison there were in North America at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We do know, however, that the very earliest Europeans to arrive on this continent saw them fairly near the eastern and gulf seacoasts. We also know that that throughout the 18th century, settlers along the frontier kept their bellies full of bison meat, and their bodies clothed in bison robes, until they could begin raising their own domestic herds and cultivating their favorite crops. Whereupon bison became nuisances to be driven away. They were mammalian “weeds,” bovine “rats.”

We know, too, that wild bison were absent from Virginia by 1730; from the Carolinas and eastern Georgia by 1760. After the Revolutionary War, settlers crossing the Appalachians likewise took their toll in meat and hides, and the surviving herds retreated steadily toward the setting sun. The animals were gone from the Ohio River valley by 1790, and from Pennsylvania by 1801. The last wild bison living east of the Mississippi River was shot in 1832.

At that moment, no one knew how many bison lived west of the Mississippi, and none cared but the half million or so native North Americans who still lived among them, and through them. Still, there were enough to amaze the first Euro-Americans who entered the Great Plains, and to spawn some tall tales. The supply was inexhaustible, like that of the similarly ill-fated passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius); which, incidentally, Lewis and Clark also observed, and ate, as far west as today’s Missoula, Montana.

More certain, now, is that beginning around the middle of the 19th century, new circumstances emerged that doomed the species throughout North America. These included changes in climate, habitat, demography, technology, politics, and economics. By the end of the 1880s there were thought to be only 835 wild bison left in the United States.

In the following interview, Dan Flores, A.B. Hammond Professor of History at The University of Montana, sets the scene at the time of Lewis and Clark, then discusses some of those circumstances which brought the the American bison to the brink of extinction.

Transcript:

An American Serengeti

One of the wonderful things about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, of course, is the image of America as the Garden of Eden that their journals present. I think one of the ones that’s resonated a lot for people over the years, reading their journals, is the image of a kind of American Serengeti, from North Dakota across the Montana plains to the Rocky Mountains.

No American Serengeti, of course, is complete without vast herds of buffalo, and you have descriptions of those kinds of herds throughout the Lewis and Clark journals, from the time they reached the borders of Montana right on through the Three Forks of the Missouri and beyond, basically to the Continental Divide.

And then, one of the things lots of people noticed over the years is that if you follow Lewis and Clark across the Continental Divide, down into the Bitterroot Valley, then over the Lolo Trail into Idaho, progressively, the images that you get are of fewer animals. In fact, the accounts of Lewis and Clark crossing the Lolo Trail, of course, is an account of people who are basically having to eat their own horses. Once they arrive among the Nez Perce they’re purchasing dogs in order to eat. And one of the interesting new developments in Western environmental history that sort of reflects on the differences between what Lewis and Clark saw east of the divide, and what they saw west of the divide, has to do with an argument that centers around something called Indian buffer zones.

If you remember from reading the Lewis and Clark journals you know that after they leave the Mandan Villages . . . after the winter of eighteen-four/eighteen-five . . . they journey for more than a thousand miles up the Missouri River, and never see an Indian. They don’t see Indians again until they cross over the Continental Divide and encounter Sacagawea‘s band of Lemhi Shoshonis.

So, one of the arguments that scholars are making for the tremendous abundance of animals east of the Divide,as opposed to the relative paucity of animals west of the Divide, is that those two situations reflect as much as anything else the different diplomatic situation of Indians on the two sides of the Divide. East of the Continental Divide, the Blackfeet for several generations had done everything they could to keep other tribes out of the great bison region along the upper Missouri River. The difference in animal populations, in any case, east and west of the Divide, a lot of people are arguing now, has a good deal to do with the idea of buffer zones.

The distinction is this: The tribes west of the Divide were mostly at peace with one another—when you consider the Salish, the Nez Perce, the Cayuse, and the tribes along the Columbia River—those people were able to move freely through the mountain country and the plateau country to the west of the mountains without fear of getting involved in skirmishes with one another. As a result of the relative peace west of the Divide, then, animal populations could be hunted throughout that region, and were, to the point that Lewis and Clark encountered relatively few animals.

East of the Divide, however, what scholars call buffer zones existed in several places along the Great Plains, and one of the areas where there was a major buffer zone in the 19th century—especially the early part of the 19th century—was along the upper Missouri. In that region, the Crows,the Arapahoes, the Mandan-Hidatsas, and the Blackfeet, all competed for buffalo. And in those regions where tribes competed for buffalo,you found, usually, no people living permanently—groups living out on the far periphery of those areas, and only making forays—hunting forays—into the interior, and often those forays ended up producing skirmishes with other tribes.

So the evidence is that the reason Lewis and Clark didn’t see anybody from the Mandan Villages to the Continental Divide had a great deal to do with the fact that this was a contested region.

In fact, on the way back down the Missouri River in 1806, William Clark noted in his journal that, after traveling all the way to the Pacific Coast and back, they had encountered larger wildlife populations, as he put it,in regions that are contested by the tribes, than anywhere else. So that’s an explanation for why so many animals in Montana and on the upper Missouri. That sort of Garden of Eden look probably didn’t prevail everywhere across the Plains, but Lewis and Clark happened to travel right through the middle of one of the regions that presented this image of America as the Garden that we’ve all absorbed and loved, ever since.

A Peaceable Kingdom

I think one of the things that Lewis and Clark observed is the tameness of animals in the west. They’re sort of constantly speaking in their journals of literally having to chase wolves out of their camps. And that also, I think, has to do with—lots of the animals they were seeing, particularly in eastern Montana, were not hunted very much. Whenever they were in the vicinity of Indian villages, for example, farther down the river, they had very different experiences with animals—deer that fled from their approach at considerable distances; buffalo that acted wary; wolves that didn’t really come too close.

But predators, by and large, like wolves and bears, were usually not hunted very much by Indians. Wolves were very rarely hunted by Indians, in any case, and bears were sometimes hunted, but more or less in the same way that a Zulu warrior goes out and takes on a lion. It was to prove one’s mettle as a warrior, and nothing like the later campaigns of extermination by stockmen against bears and wolves.

So those animals, I think, would’ve routinely been fairly tame. But that buffalo and deer and sheep, and so forth, were often quite tame, bespeaks, once again, evidence of animals that weren’t hunted very much, and probably that’s a buffer-zone condition that they were finding.

Food for Thought

What happened to the buffalo in American history? That’s one of the great stories of American environmental history in the West. And as I’ve said before, I think we’ve simplified it in a way that a close examination simply doesn’t support. What we’ve tried to argue happened to buffalo, what most of the books—even some fairly recently published—have argued, is that buffalo existed in fairly undiminished numbers until after the Civil War. And then they were wiped out—however many a particular scholar argues there were, 40 million, or 60 million, or whatever—by the hide hunters, who were killing them for hides, for the market in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s.

When you look at the story of the buffalo in the 19th century, though, from a close and considered perspective, and especially when you use Native American sources to do it—that’s one of the great lacks, I think, in a lot of the works done up till now, is that they didn’t closely examine the Native American accounts—you begin to create a different picture of the buffalo.

First of all, and sort of fundamental to the whole story here, is that there probably were never, at any time in the history of buffalo in North America, 75 million of them, or 60 million of them, or even 40 million of them. And the simple reason for that is that when you look at the carrying capacity of the grasslands of North America—simply speaking, even in times of good weather—the grasslands of North America would not have supported that many buffalo.

The best way to do a determination of the grassland carrying capacity is to use the agricultural censuses for the 19th century. The good ones for the West start about 1890, and you can look at the censuses, for example, of 1890, 1900, and 1910, and extrapolate from livestock numbers—from horses, sheep, and cattle—and fairly quickly come to the conclusion that it simply wasn’t possible for there to have been upwards of 40 million buffalo in the West. In fact, the grassland carrying capacity for large bovine animals probably was not much more than—depending on the weather cycle—between about 20 and 30 million animals.

So I think one part of the story is that we’re almost certainly dealing with fewer animals than we thought before.

Change in the Weather

Those earlier figures, by the way, were pure ballpark estimates, usually derived from a scholar saying, “Well, so-and-so sat on the banks of the Arkansas River and counted buffalo going by for five days and said, gee whiz, there must have been three million of them. And if there were three million on the Arkansas River, and you start looking at every river in the West—boy, there must have been 60 milion of the things.” But those figures were basically just wild guesses. And so, if you scale the numbers back to something like between 20 and 30 million—which is still a lot of animals—you start approaching something more like the reality of what the buffalo herds were like.

Then, when you start looking at all the factors that could possibly have had an impact on buffalo on the 19th century, you begin to discover that there were a lot of things that were influencing buffalo populations.

One of them is this: A fluctuating climate. We’ve sort of looked at buffalo in the 19th century as if the climate were exactly the same on the Great Plains year after year after year, with never a variation. But anybody who has lived on the Great Plains in the 20th century knows that the Great Plains are marked by cyclical droughts. They hit significantly enough to dramatically affect economic patterns, human economic patterns, every 20 to 40 years.

And when we look at the long history of dendrochronology—tree-ring information—on the plains, and pollen analysis on the plains, and a variety of other factors, it becomes fairly obvious that climate has fluctuated considerably. Wet climates grew more grass; those climates produced more buffalo. Droughts shriveled the grass, and grasses that were hit by droughts—especially droughts that lasted any period of time—produced small herds of buffalo.

One of the great hallmarks of the climate story in America is that at about the time Europeans were arriving in considerable numbers, a major climatic anomaly known as the Little Ice Age struck the northern hemisphere. It seems to have set in, in North America, somewhere around 1550, and it lasted about 300 years. It was a time of abnormally high rainfall; a time when, especially in the American West, there were probably bumper crops of grasslands, year after year. And so, during the time when Europeans were here, and becoming Americans, and the time when horses were reintroduced to America, when many Indian groups in the West were adopting horses and becoming Plains Indians, the buffalo herds were really at a peak.

However, the Little Ice Age had to come to an end sometime, and unfortunately it did. And it happened to come to an end sometime, in the American West, in the 1840s and 1850s. At that point you begin to see a fairly rapid and dramatic decline in annual precipitation on the grasslands. And I think it’s probably no accident that when you begin to look at the Indian documents, particularly calendar robe histories, kept by groups like the Kiowas, one of the things the Kiowas noted in their calendar robe histories were years of many buffalo. And the Kiowas report a year of many buffalo only one time after 1841. That happens to be the very point at which, I think, a confluence of different factors, including the end of the Little Ice Age, began to play a role in bison populations.

Competitors

Some of the other factors that were involved in this shrinking of the bison herds by the middle of the 19th century include things like this: Horses had been absent from North America for about 10,000 years. They had become extinct during the Pleistocene extinction. They had survived in Asia and Africa, astonishingly enough, but horses had all become extinct in the Americas. When the Europeans arrived, though, they returned horses. And in one of the interesting ecological stories of the American West, horses are able to go feral in the American West extraordinarily easily, probably because they are returning to a former . . . an ecology that they had evolved to.

And so, not only are Indians beginning to acquire horses in large numbers after the Pueblo revolt against the Spaniards in New Mexico in 1680—the Pueblo Indians captured the Spanish horse herds and began trading them to other groups, so that within fifty years after that revolt, most of the Indians in the West had horses. But horses also began going feral in the West about that time, so that by 1800 it’s been estimated that south of the Arkansas River alone there were probably two million wild horses.

In other words, by the time of Lewis and Clark, there may have been as many as three million wild horses in the West, and by that time perhaps a quarter to a half million Indian-owned horses. The reason this is significant is because horses have, in some ecologies, a dietary overlap with buffalo that runs as high as 80 percent. So buffalo suddenly, by the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, are beginning to compete with one of their old grazing competitors from 10,000 years before—with horses. And horses, then, simply by their very presence, began to reduce the available forage for buffalo.

So that’s yet another factor that most traditional histories have not tried to figure into the mix.

Diseases

There are at least three others that I think are probably pretty important.

One is the fact that the United States government in the 1830s is busy removing Indians from the eastern United States. They relocate during the 1830s almost 90,000 eastern Indians into what is now Oklahoma and southern Kansas. Many of those groups were located right on the edge of the Great Plains. They want to hunt buffalo, and they do. And I think the intrusion of almost 90,000 Indian hunters, hunting families, onto the edge of the Great Plains in the 1830s, very clearly introduced a level of human stress on the buffalo populations that had a considerable impact.

Still another impact—although we don’t know very much about this one, except that there is all kinds of interesting evidence about it—is the arrival of exotic diseases of cattle-like animals, from Europe and Asia. Those diseases include diseases that many of the herds of buffalo today still have.

Brucellosis, of course, is the one that we all know about. Brucellosis might not have arrived early enough in the 19th century to have affected buffalo populations on the Great Plains during the time of the great hunt. Some scholars—Mary Meagher of Yellowstone National Park, for example—think that brucellosis didn’t arrive, probably, in North America until the early 1890s. The first evidence, she says, of buffalo with brucellosis, is in Yellowstone in 1916. So brucellosis may not have played a role in the 19th century.

But bovine tuberculosis, and anthrax, almost certainly did. Anthrax, we know, was present in the southwest as early as 1800. Now, anthrax, of course, can lie undisturbed in the soil, in the form of spores, sometimes for decades. And one of the interesting things about anthrax in Africa is that it’s usually released into ungulate populations in times of drought, at which point it has usually a fairly dramatic effect on wildlife populations.

I’ve suspected for a while now that anthrax probably was in the soil on the Great Plains, introduced by immigrant oxen and cattle, across the immigrant trails in the 1830s and 40s, and that when the Little Ice Age ended in the series of droughts beginning in the 1840s, 50s and 60s, that anthrax probably was released into the buffalo herds, and may account for some rather strange accounts we have of inexplicable buffalo die-ups in the 1860s.

Charles Goodnight, for instance, the famed Texas ranger and cattle rancher, in Palovero Canyon, observed a die-up of buffalo in the Concho River valley, in 1867. He said buffalo lay dead in the Concho River valley in an area that was approximately 10 miles wide by 25 miles long. He said there were, he thought, probably more than a million animals dead. He had no idea why they had died, and his speculation was that they had eaten out all the grass in the Concho Valley and for some reason had refused to migrate where there was more grass, and therefore starved to death.

But I’ve thought for a long time that this may be evidence of buffalo contracting some kind of disease—if not anthrax, perhaps bovine tuberculosis, or something.

Marketplace Victims

And, of course, the last factor—and it’s the one that I think is perhaps the one that breaks the back of buffalo by the middle of the 19th century—is the global market economy, and the gradual luring of Plains Indians into the global market. (We’ve long known that Indian hunters played a role in the beaver hunt in the Rocky Mountains in the 1820s and 1830s.) Scholars of the fur trade have known that Indian hunters were involved in providing buffalo robes. Robes were usually taken from buffalo cows, which produced the softest pelts. They were finished by Indian women, which in effect made the labor of Indian women a premium on the Plains in the 19th century. It took an Indian woman usually a week to ten days to finish out a buffalo robe. It’s an enormous amount of work to do it. They were finished very soft, with the hair on one side.

They became an item in the global market economy as early as the 1820s, and we know that by the 1820s as many as 100,000 buffalo robes were arriving in New Orleans each year, in 1827, 1828, 1829. By the 1840s the market has shifted to the northern plains, the Missouri River especially, made possible by steamboat navigation on the Missouri River—the Yellowstone made it up the Missouri River in 1832—and suddenly buffalo robes began pouring down the Missouri River at a level that’s been estimated at probably a hundred to a hundred and fifteen thousand robes a year during much of the late 1830s and 1840s.

At the same time, in Canada, realized that they’re going to have to trade for buffalo robes, or most of the Indian trade is going to go to the Americans, and so they start buying buffalo robes in the same period. And in the middle of the 1840s something like 75,000 buffalo robes—I believe 1844 was the peak year for the Hudson’s Bay Company, when 75,000 robes were traded to their posts in Canada.

What this meant was that Indian hunters, lured by the market, and what they were getting in exchange for these buffalo robes were metal wares, also guns, powder and ball to prosecute their wars. Their wars were usually with other tribes, and their wars were often over access to buffalo country. They were trading for the items of the Industrial Revolution. And the, if you happened to saturate a tribe with the items of the Industrial Revolution, the traders always had alcohol to fall back on, for which there basically was an unlimited demand. And lots of tribes were lured into alcoholic consumption because of the trade during this time.

And so, in exchange for alcohol and the goods of the Industrial Revolution, Indian hunters began hunting buffalo for the market at a rate that probably was becoming unsustainable for buffalo by about 1840 or so. The reason it was unsustainable is because Indian hunters were killing, basically—for some tribes that we have evidence for, the Southern Cheyennes, for example—roughly three times the number of animals they needed for subsistence alone, in order to provide robes to the traders.

What the traders wanted were prime robes, stripped from buffalo cows, and so Indian market hunters concentrated on cows. And of course what that meant is that you’re concentrating on the gender that’s capable of replicating the population. So this focus on cows for the market from the 1820s to the 1840s, I think, is really beginning to produce a serious drawdown of buffalo.

Conspiracy

One of the great questions about what happened to the buffalo after the Civil War has long been whether or not the federal government was involved deliberately in attempting to eliminate buffalo in order to make the Plains Indians easier to deal with. That’s one, in fact, that is literally another set piece argument in lots of histories. In fact, my experience has been, in talking to people about buffalo—particularly lots of Indian people today . . . . They’ve basically absorbed that story completely, that there was a government conspiracy involving the American military and the buffalo hunters, the hide hunters, to eradicate the buffalo in order to make it possible to put the Indians on reservations.

I don’t know that that story isn’t accurate. It well may be accurate. In fact, in a very recent book, one published in 1997, a scholar has argued that it is true—that this is what happened.

On the other hand, I guess I feel constrained to say that there is a lot of doubt about that story. And the doubt has to do with the following bits of historical evidence

First of all, the major evidence we’ve had for this so-called government conspiracy to wipe out the buffalo, has consistently come from the buffalo hunters themselves. In almost every instance—in fact I can’t think of an exception to this—when you look at the accounts from which this story is drawn, they are basically in the form of memoirs written 20 to 30 years after the fact; usually written in the early 20th century, at a time when conservation, especially of wildlife, was a major American crusade; at a time when many people were not pleased about what the buffalo hunters had done. And so those memoirs tend to take on the tone of being more or less apologias.

One of the ones that really stands out, and that is cited in almost every book about the buffalo, is that Phillip Sheridan—the great Civil War commander who was in charge of the reconstruction province that included Texas after the Civil War—when he heard that the Texas legislature was debating a bill to outlaw the hunting of buffalo in West Texas, visited that legislative session in Austin, and got up and made an impassioned plea with the Texas legislature not to pass this bill, based on the argument that the buffalo hunters in fact were doing the government’s work for them, and that—as the story goes, almost every time you see it—Phillip Sheridan is supposed to have said, “Rather than outlawing the buffalo hunt, what you actually ought to do is give those buffalo hunters a medal, showing a dead buffalo on one side, and a discouraged Plains Indian on the other side.”

Now, that’s a great story. I’ve been guilty of repeating that story myself, as the truth. And the reason I say guilty is because, just a few years ago a couple of historians interested in this problem began to look at the possible speech that Phillip Sheridan is supposed to have made, and they discovered something rather remarkable. First of all, the only account we really have of it is in George Crook’s book, On the Border with the Buffalo—he’s a former buffalo hunter—written in 1905 as a memoir. There’s no other account of it.

Not only is there no other account of it, but when they examined the records of the Texas legislature they found no evidence that Phillip Sheridan either made the speech, or had ever visited the Texas legislature to make any speech on behalf of any bill. The story seems to be purely apocryphal, and it sounds suspiciously as if a buffalo hunter in his old age is attempting to defend himself against charges that he helped wipe out one of America’s emblematic western animals by saying that the government wanted us to do it.

One of the other accounts that the buffalo hunters tell is that “The government suppliers at the military posts handed out free ammunition to us if we would go out and kill buffalo.” Well, once again, historians have examined that one too, and they’ve discovered, to their astonishment, they even made troopers pay for ammunition when they went out on their own hunts, in their off-time.

And so we have almost certain evidence that stories like that are invented later by buffalo hunters to sort of buttress and support their own reputations in a conservation age.

The Evidence

Now, we do know that Grant did veto a hide hunting bill that was passed in Congress. Congress passed a bill to outlaw hide-hunting in the territories, and Ulysses S. Grant killed it with a pocket veto. We don’t know exactly why he did that, although, since Grant was a strong advocate of the economic policy of laissez faire, which most of the members of the Republican party advocated in the 19th century, there are good grounds to assume that he vetoed that bill because he thought it would be undue interference with a western economy. But we don’t know. That one bears some closer investigation.

We also know that the Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, made a statement at one point. As he put it, he “should not be disappointed if the outcome of the buffalo hunt eventually was that it made the Plains Indians willing to go onto reservations.” But as I, and other historians have pointed out, saying that you wouldn’t be disappointed in the outcome of something is not, by any stretch, the same thing as saying that we have a policy that this is what we want to happen.

And I guess that probably the final bit of interesting evidence that we have about this one is that the hide-hunters in the United States were able to kill off the buffalo almost entirely, but it took them almost five years longer than it took hunters—mostly Metis and Indian hunters—in Canada, to wipe out the Canadian herds, and no one has ever argued that Canada had an unofficial policy to wipe out the buffalo. The buffalo disappeared in Canada because of the market, because of drought, because of competition from horses, because of all those factors that I mentioned.

And I think the herds disappeared in the United States for the same reason. I don’t think it was necessary for there to have been a secret policy.

Further Reading

Dan Flores, “The Great Contraction: Indians and Bison in Northern Plains Environmental History,” Charles Rankin, ed., The Little Bighorn Legacy (Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1996): 3-22.

David A. Dary, The Buffalo Book: The Full Saga of the American Animal (n.p.: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1989).