- Bison skulls piled up on the southern Plains in 1870s. This photo epitimizes the wasteful slaughter of bison by commercial hunters. However, we don’t know how large an area this represents–within a mile or maybe a hundred miles. We don’t know over how many years these skulls were laying around on the ground. Do they represent dead bison from a year or several decades? We don’t know how they died. Did some die from disease, harsh winters, or wolves? And even if humans killed all these bison, how do we know who did the killing? Could many of these skulls represent bison killed by Indians? We just don’t know. [Is there a small dirt mound under that helping shape the hill of skulls? – RPT addition] All we know is that many bison died. (WILDLIFE NEWS)
The above well known picture and the comment under it is from one of the two articles I will reproduce below. Great stuff Maynard! Here is how kids in elementary school are taught about the matter:
Indian Culpability in Bison Demise
…The idea that somehow either through cultural values or even “genetics” Indigenous people are more likely to protect and enhance biodiversity and other conservation values is widespread. But the other possibility that I think provides more explanation is that across the globe, wherever there was a low human population and limited technology, people “appeared” to live in “balance” more or less with natural landscapes. This is just as true of Celtic people in the British Isles, Mongols in the Asian Steppes, Bedouin people in the Middle East, or Africans in the Congo.
What is common in all these instances is low population and low technology. Change these factors, and humans everywhere, no matter their religion, race, or cultural identity, frequently overexploit the land. With modern technology, medicine, food availability and other factors, including dependency on the global economy, almost all indigenous people are freed from these prior constraints. Indeed, have been freed for several centuries in most places.
Such ideas are frequently guilty of the False Cause Fallacy. Correlation is not Causation. The False Cause Fallacy occurs when we wrongly assume that one thing leads to something else because we’ve noticed what appears to be a relationship between them.
The fallacy is saying in times past because there were more wolves or more bison or whatever when Indigenous people occupied a specific location, it was due to the people’s cultural values.
[….]
The idea that Indians “used” all parts of the bison and didn’t “waste” wildlife is another myth. There are plenty of documented instances of tribes killing bison merely for their tongues and leaving behind hundreds and sometimes thousands of dead animals. How many bison were killed annually in this manner is unknown; however, it was common to take only the best parts of a bison if one anticipated encountering more bison in a few days.
It is a lot of work to cut up a bison and transport it in its entirely, and unless you were starving or anticipated a shortage, it was just easier to kill a fresh animal when you needed it. And that was a common practice among Indians as it was among the few whites that roamed the plains in those days to take the best and leave the rest.
It is easy for people today to condemn such wasteful or, in many cases, try to make up excuses for it, but one cannot use today’s cultural values when viewing the past. If bison were abundant, and you believed that the herds were infinite, there was no reason to “conserve” them.
Francis Antonie Larocque, a French-Canadian trader, traveled to the Upper Missouri River in 1805 to initiate a trade with tribes located there. This was the same year that Lewis and Clark traveled up the Missouri and spent the winter of 1805 at the Mandan villages in North Dakota. Larocque noted in his journal that: “They (the tribes) live upon buffalo and deer, very few of them eat bears or beavers flesh, but when compelled by hunger: they eat no fish. They are most improvident with regards of provisions. It is amazing what number of buffalos or other quadrupeds they destroy—yet 2-3 days after a very successful hunt, the beef is gone. When hunting they take but the fattest part of an animal and leave the remainder.”
Alexander Ross, a fur trader who accompanied a bison hunt by Metis in Manitoba, reported they killed twenty-five hundred buffaloes to produce three hundred and seventy-five bags of pemmican and two hundred and forty bales of dried meat. According to Ross, seven hundred and fifty bison would have been sufficient to produce this amount of food. Still, he goes on to say, “the great characteristic of all western hunts of buffalo, elk or antelope, was waste.”
In his book The Ecological Indian, Shepard Krech quotes Trader Charles McKenzie, who lived among the plains Indians in 1804 who noted that Gros Ventre Indians he traveled with killed “whole herds” only for their tongues.
Similarly, Alexander Henry in 1809 noted that the Blackfeet left most of the bulls they had killed intact and reported that they took “only the best parts” of meat.”
And Paul Kane, another visitor to the Great Plains, remarked that the Indians “destroy innumerable buffaloes,” and he speculated that only “one in twenty is used in any way by the Indians” while “thousands are left to rot where they fall.”
(Of course, white trappers and other travelers in bison territory often did the same practices like killing a bison and only taking the prime cuts).
As early as 1800, traders along the Missouri River reported that local bison herds were depleted by native hunting. And here is where you must pay attention to dates—sometimes, most people ignore or simply don’t appreciate the significance.
While a few fur traders had penetrated the Great Plains before the 1800s, the Lewis and Clark explorations between 1804-06 provided a glimpse of the bison hunting culture and the abundance of beaver.
Their journals spurred on the era of the mountain man fur trapper who concentrated on beaver trapping. The mountain man was in his heyday between 1820 and 1840s. Estimates suggest that at their height, no more than 1000 white trappers were spread across the entire plains and the Rocky Mountains from what is now Mexico to Canada. And the mining era only began in the 1850s-60s, and most mining camps were concentrated in the mountains away from the large bison concentrations on the plains.
All of this suggests that hunting of plains bison by white people was insignificant before the 1870s, yet bison herds were already disappearing from many of their former haunts….
Bison Ecology, Ecological Influence, Behavior, And Decline
….Shepard Krech (1999) quotes Trader Charles McKenzie who lived among the plains Indians in 1804 who noted that Gros Ventre Indians he traveled with killed “whole herds” only for their tongues.
Similarly, Alexander Henry in 1809 noted that the Blackfeet left most of the bulls they had killed intact and reported that took “only the best parts” of meat.” And Paul Kane, another visitor to the Great Plains, remarked that the Indians “destroy innumerable buffaloes” and he speculated that only “one in twenty is used in any way by the Indians” while “thousands are left to rot where they fall.”
Bailey (2016) described Native Americans bison killings: “Stuart (Spaulding 1953:116 117) found immense numbers of bison bones in every direction of the upper Green River Valley, Wyoming, in 1812 and Bonneville observed similar conditions in the same place in 1833 (Irving 1837:95). Clyman (1984:25) observed Crows killing “upwards of a thousand” bison in a day of 1824. Russell (Haines 1965:36) describes one village of Shoshones killing, without using guns, “upwards of a thousand cows” in one day of 1835. On the Great Plains, 500 or more Sioux killed 1400 bison in less than a day of1832 (Catlin in Roe 1951:631) and 100 or more Minatarees and Mandans killed several hundred bison in 15 minutes (Catlin in Hornaday 1889:482). Native Americans often attempted to kill whole herds of bison. In the cited Minataree/Mandan slaughter, every Intermountain Journal of Sciences, Vol. X, No. X, 201X animal of the herd was slain. Using the same hunting technique, the “surround” or “running hunt”, Flatheads (Salish) “usually carried a hunt to the point of extermination.” (Point, nd:141). Literature cited here contains descriptions of pre-hunt ceremonies of Native Americans. Many appear to have believed that providence, more than prudence, determined the continued availability of bison.”
Given the natural mobility of bison herds, it was impossible for tribes to know that they might be slaughtering the bison. However, herds on the fringes on the edge of the bison natural distribution were the first to go.
For instance, Osborn Russell (1955) observed the slaughter of several thousand bison by the Bannock Indians in Idaho. Russell described the scene: “I walked out with the chief to a small hillock to watch the view of slaughter the cloud of dust had passed away in the prairie was covered with the slain several thousand cows were killed without burning a single grain of gunpowder.”
A few years later along the Portneuf River near present-day Pocatello, Idaho Russell noted: “In the year 1836 large herds of buffalo could be seen in almost every little valley on the small branches of this stream: at this time the only traces which could be seen of them were the scattered bones of former years, deeply indented in the earth, were overgrown with grass and weeds.”
Trader Edwin Denig who spent 23 years on the Upper Missouri remarked in 1855 in describing the territory of the Sioux tribe that area east of the Missouri River “used to be the great range for the buffalo, but of late years they are found in greater numbers west of the Missouri” (Ewers 1961).
In the late 1800s, bison had been nearly extirpated from the West (in part by Indian hide hunting). For instance, by 1830 a decline of bison numbers was already noted at Fort Union on the North Dakota and Montana borders. In 1834 Lucien Fontenelle told a visitor that the “diminution of the buffalo was very considerable. A survey of the Upper Missouri in 1849 noted a lack of bison and by the 1850s bison were becoming scarce in Kansas and Nebraska (Isenberg 2000).
This is where paying attention to dates is critical. In the 1830s the only whites in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain region were the fur trappers, whose numbers even at the height of the fur trade never exceeded 1000 across the entire West. Though they shot bison for food, their focus was on beaver.
The hunting of bison by whites did not become a significant factor until after the mid-1800s and intensified in the 1870s and 1880s when bison numbers were already in steep decline across the West (Flores 1991).
One of the factors that may have contributed to bison extirpation is that cow bison were the only hides traders wanted, hence Indians focused their hunting upon female bison, which may have led to over-harvest.
In a sense, the bison slaughter by whites was the coup de grace, and final nail in the coffin, not the original source of decline (Bailey 2013)…..
Choctaws, Chicasaws, Cherokee, Creeks, Mohawks, Iroquois, and Seminoles to name just a few that were in states of war with each-other in some fashion before-and-after the white-man every step foot on the continent.
Here for instance are the killing, scalping, putting into slavery those captured ~ FIGHT over the Black Hills (via: America: Imagine the World Without Her)
Now, however, as the Beaver Wars exemplified… there was a larger “monetary” benefit to these raids, land grabs, and the like.
To wit, *JUST LIKE* with the buffalo.
While there was a concerted effort to get American Indians to become less nomadic (and thus less liable to be: “fierce raiders,” “crafty foemen” [an enemy in war], and “‘not’ meek”), the Indians THEMSELVES played a large roll in this “de-nomaditisation”! American Indians THEMSELVES sought to make a buck off of these new techniques of leather making (see especially the second large quote below):
Until 1871 the fur buffalo robe was the main marketable item, the leather being a far more limited commodity. Leather was used by the British Army in the Crimean War (1854-1856), but only after 1871 did an English firm provide a mass market for the buffalo hides. Previously, when the robes were the main item of value, commercial hunting was confined mainly to the winter when the fur was thick, but with leather as the mass product, the buffalo hunter could kill with profit all year round (Vestal, 1952, 40). The railroads, too, were glad to have the business. Their progress westward had been stopped by the long depression of the 1870s; with almost no traffic, carrying buffalo meat, hides, and bones to eastern markets was a valued business opportunity. Merchants and freighters welcomed the business that came from buffalo hunting (Vestal, 1952, 38).
Hardly had the market for buffalo hides become widely known than the panic of 1873 began which lasted for five years. During those years most of the buffalo on the southern plains were destroyed [Vestal, 1952, 451]. In 1871 the buffalo were estimated in the millions. Many of the hunters entered the profession expecting it to prove a life work and despaired of killing off more than the annual increase of the herd. Hunters encamped by water holes and rivers where the animals came to drink, built watch fires at night so that the slaughter could go on for twenty-four hours a day [Vestal, 1952, 46].
For maximum efficiency some hunters used the Big Fifty, a gun produced by Sharps to the hunter’s specifications, made to load and fire eight times a minute (Sandoz, 1954, 97; Vestal, 1952, 41). “In a brief two years (1873-1875), where there had been myriads of buffalo, there were only myriads of rotting carcasses. The air was filled with the sickening stench of death. . . .” [Vestal, 1952, 46].
The meat rotted, the bones remained, and then they, too, became a source of commercial profit. They were used in making fertilizer or in making bone china. They brought good prices. A man driving to town to trade would fill his wagon bed with bones and sell them on Front Street, Dodge City (Kansas). There were bones piled up as high as a man’s head, extending all along the track for many yards awaiting shipment. Many of the settlers managed to keep going by selling bones when drought and depression again struck the plains and destroyed their corn crop (Vestal, 1952, 50), before wheat had become a major crop of the area. One bone-buying firm estimated that over seven years (1884-1891) they bought the bones of approximately 5,950,000 buffalo skeletons. This firm was only one of many (Sandoz, 1954, 358).
Eleanor Burke Leacock and Nancy Oestreich Lurie, North American Indians In Historical Perspective (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1971), 219-220.
Supply-and-demand. This doesn’t make the near extinction an ideal goal… but it opened up the Plains for a large movement of settlers. AS WELL AS pointing out that the real push for Buffalo hides was profit during a slow times after the Civil War; not “genocide. Nor was the goal “death” of N-A’s, directly. Indirectly, anything subsidized writ-large is known to cause death in greater numbers. In similar fashion, authors Hine and Faracher make the same historical statement:
Plains Indians had long hunted the buffalo, and the level of their hunting greatly increased with the development of the equestrian Indian tradition in the eighteenth century. From a peak of perhaps thirty million, the number of buffalo had declined to perhaps ten million by the mid-nineteenth century, partly as a result of commercial over-hunting by Indians, but also because of environmental competition from growing herds of wild horses and the spread of bovine diseases introduced by cattle crossing with settlers on the Overland Trail. By overgrazing, cutting timber, and fouling water sources, overland migrants also contributed significantly to the degeneration of habitats crucial for the health and survival of the buffalo. The confluence of these factors created a crisis for buffalo-hunting Indians by the 1860s. Tribal spokesmen protested the practice of hunters who killed for robes, leaving the meat to rot on the plains. “Has the white man become a child,” the Comanche chief Santana complained to an army officer in 1867, “that he should recklessly kill and not eat?” But it was less a case of childish whim than cynical guile. “Kill every buffalo you can!” Colonel Richard Dodge urged a sport hunter in 1867. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
The extension of railroad lines onto the Great Plains and the development in 1870 of a technique for converting buffalo hide into commercial leather sealed the buffalo’s fate. Lured by the profits to be made in hides, swarms of hunters invaded western Kansas. Using a high-powered rifle, a skilled hunter could kill dozens of animals in an afternoon. And unlike the hunter of buffalo robes, who was limited to taking his catch in the winter when the coat was thick, hide hunting was a year-round business. General Philip Sheridan applauded their work. “They are destroying the Indians’ commissary,” he declared. “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are ex terminated.” As the buffalo hunters did their work, Indians also accelerated their kills, attempting to capture their share of the market. At the Santa Fe depot in Dodge City mountainous stacks of buffalo hides awaited shipment to eastern tanneries. Historians estimate that in the five years between 1870 and 1875 five or six million buffalo died on the southern plains, wiping out the southern herds. The war on the animals then shifted to the northern plains, following the advancing tracks of the Northern Pacific. “If I could learn that every Buffalo in the northern herd were killed I would be glad,” Sheridan declared in 1881. “Since the destruction of the southern herd . . . the Indians in that section have given us no trouble.” His hopes were soon fulfilled. “It was in the summer of my twentieth year (1883),” the Sioux holy man Black Elk later testified, that “the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wa-sichus,” the Lakota term for white men. With the exception of a small wild herd in northern Alberta and a few remnant individuals preserved by sentimental ranch-men like Charlie Goodnight, the North American buffalo had been destroyed. “The Wasichus did not kill them to eat,” said Black Elk incredulously. “They killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. . . . And when there was nothing left but heaps of bones, the Wasichus came and gathered up even the bones and sold them.” This shameful campaign of extinction remains unmatched in the American annals of nature’s conquest.
Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faracher, The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven, CT, 2000), 317-318.
One needs to also keep in historical perspective that yes, these buffalo killed were done so primarily for their skin. And a lot of waste was involved. But even the Plains Indians are no angels in “waste.”
For instance, I wrote a response to an in-class assignment to my sons elementary class lesson about HOW the Settlers treated the New World versus how the Indians treated it. Here is a quote from that post:
From James Fenimore Cooper to Dances with Wolves and Disney’s Pocahontas, American Indians have been mythologized as noble beings with a “spiritual, sacred attitude towards land and animals, not a practical utilitarian one.”[16] Small children are taught that the Plains Indians never wasted any part of the buffalo. They grow up certain that the Indians lived as one with nature, and that white European settlers were the rapists who destroyed it.
In The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, strips away the myth to show that American Indians behaved pretty much like everyone else. When times were bad they used the whole buffalo. When times were good, “whole herds” of buffalo might be killed only for their tongues or their fetuses.[17] Although American Indians adapted to their environment and were intimately familiar with it, they had no qualms about shaping it to their needs.
Indians set fires to promote the growth of grasses and make land more productive for the game and plants that they preferred. Sometimes fire was used carefully. Sometimes it was not. Along with the evidence that Indians used fire to improve habitat are abundant descriptions of carelessly started fires that destroyed all plant life and entire buffalo herds.[18]
Nor were American Indians particularly interested in conserving resources for the future. In the East, they practiced slash and burn agriculture. When soils became infertile, wood for fuel was exhausted, and game depleted, whole villages moved.[19] The Cherokee, along with the other Indians who participated in the Southern deerskin trade, helped decimate white-tailed deer populations.[20] Cherokee mythology believed that deer that were killed in a hunt were reanimated.
In all, contemporary accounts suggest that many Indians treated game as an inexhaustible resource. Despite vague hints in the historical records that some Crees may have tried to conserve beaver populations by allocating hunting territories and sparing young animals, Krech concludes that it was “market forces in combination with the Hudchild’s Bay Company policies [which actively promoted conservation]” that “led to the eventual recovery of beaver populations.”[21]
Those who blame European settlers for genocide because they introduced microbes that ravaged native populations might as well call the Mongols genocidal for creating the plague reservoirs that led to the Black Death in Europe.[22] Microbes travel with their hosts. Trade, desired by Indians as well as whites, created the pathways for disease.
[16] Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, W.W. Norton & Company; New York: NY (1999), p. 22.
[17] Ibid., p. 135.
[18] Ibid., p. 119.
[19] Ibid., p. 76.
[20] Ibid., p. 171.
[21] Ibid., p. 188.
[22] For a discussion of the effect of the Mongol invasions and their effect on European epidemiology see, William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, Doubleday; New York, NY (1977)
You see… when history is looked at in total and not in isolation, a theme comes out. Man is fallen. All men. Indians, Aborigines, Africans, Native-Americans, etc, etc. For history to be twisted, it needs to be viewed in isolation from other parts. History is not pretty, and the good things that come from it should be lauded… because they are rare. And this is not a polemic saying these United States were in the right in all their dealings with N-As. Reading through pages 176-184 in The American West book is heartbreaking. Moving whole groups of people by force has awful consequences, period. In this graphic from page 179 of the aforementioned book shows the undertaking started in this respect ~ even keeping in mind most fought against us in the Revolution. It doesn’t mean innocent men, women, and children were affected:
Alternatively, it is tough to argue that genocide or racism was involved as well. For instance, Colonel Dodge could be said to hate the Buffalo more than Indians. An insightful quote is this one, and, can be argued to be “speciesism” more strongly if Indian genocide is argued from his earlier solitary quote, via the official Journal of the Western History Association:
Lieutenant Colonel Dodge, who fancied himself a bona fide sportsman, regarded buffalo as “the most unwieldy, sluggish, and stupid of all plains animals.” To the hunter on foot, buffalo were by no means difficult to kill in large numbers. “If not alarmed at sight or smell of a foe,” wrote Dodge, “he will stand stupidly gazing at his companions in their death throes until the whole herd is shot down.” To be sure, Dodge regarded buffalo hunting on horseback as exciting and dangerous. But though chasing buffalo was thrilling to the novice, Dodge thought that “frequent repetition is like eating quail on toast every day for a month–monotonous.”
The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883 Author(s): David D. Smits Source: The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 325-326; Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of the The Western History Association.
As
This is related in some way to many of my Native-American posts:
- Native American History In Public School (Howard Zinn Refuted)
- Did the United States Practice Genocide Against Native-Americans?
- Johnny Depp/Disney vs. History (h/t ~ Brad Thor)
- What’s the Truth About the First Thanksgiving?
- Some Turkey Sized Myths About Thanksgiving and America
- Smallpox Blanket Myths and Truths
- Mayan and Aztec “Terrorism”
- The New Trail of Tears
- Did We Eviscerate the Native Americans? (Whittle, D’Souza, MachoSauce)
- A Rebuttal Of The Lefts View of Columbus and the New World
- Native-Americans Proud of Washington Redskins Mascot