The impact of such slaughter was not unnoticed at the time. In 1871 and 1872, the territorial legislatures of Wyoming and Montana passed laws intended to reduce buffalo hunting. In the U. S. Senate (also during 1872), Cornelius Cole of California and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts attempted on separate occasions to enact federal protection for the bison. Both, however, were unsuccessful.
Two years later, U. S. Representative Greenburg L. Fort of Illinois sponsored national legislation prohibiting the killing of female bison by anyone not a Native American (Dary 1974).This bill triggered much debate that clearly indicated that its opponents saw in the extermination of the bison the most effective way of subduing the Plains Indians. Indeed, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano had endorsed such a position (in his annual report for 1873) by predicting that the disappearance of the bison would eliminate future Native American uprisings by reducing the Native Americans. One of the opponents of Fort’s legislation, Samuel S. Cox, bluntly argued that the bill “favored Indians at the expense of white men,” whereas only the reverse was desirable (Dary 1974:127).
Despite strong opposition, the bill passed the House and Senate during the spring of 1874, only to have President Ulysses S. Grant employ a pocket veto that quietly killed it the following year. There seems little doubt that this was a political tactic inspired by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and by General Philip Sheridan.
In fact, Sheridan had clearly laid out a scheme whereby “the extermination of the buffalo herds by meat hunters for the construction gangs of the railroad, by hide-hunters, and finally by tourists shooting from palace-car windows” could hasten the submission of the Native Americans (Slotkin 1992: 426). In a frequently quoted 1875 speech to the Texas Legislature, Sheridan denounced efforts to save the buffalo, explaining that “the hide hunters were doing more to settle the Indian question than the entire Army had done in thirty years, by destroying the Indians’ commissary” (Garretson 1938:128).
If the. American bison were not already doomed to near extinction by 1875, the failure of Fort’s bill certainly brought it one step closer. Although within a decade a number of western states enacted laws to halt the slaughter, such regulations were rarely enforced, and even had they been, the laws probably appeared too late to reverse the decline of the species. In 1880, the Northern Pacific Railroad extended its lines through North Dakota, thus offering hide hunters ready access to the still-flourishing northern herds. Within three years, almost all of this population was destroyed.
By the end of the century, free-roaming buffalo had disappeared from the Great Plains and could be found only in a few protected situations: national parks, game reserves, and captivity. By 1913, when the “buffalo nickel” 5-cent coin (designed by James Earle Fraser) entered circulation, wild American bison had vanished from the landscape.
The Struggle for Conservation
The capability of the bison to breed in captivity was a critical factor in its escape from extinction. Following the demise of the wild herds at the end of the nineteenth century, a series of conservation measures were undertaken to preserve the species by controlled management of the few survivors. The initial attempt at government-sponsored protection dates from the beginning of the twentieth century and occurred at Yellowstone National Park, which contained the scant remnants of the northern herd. Although Congress had outlawed all buffalo hunting within the park, poaching was widespread and carried no serious penalty before 1894.
Far greater attention was accorded the buffalo following the 1902 appointment of Charles J. Jones as the warden of Yellowstone. Jones increased the size of the bison population by purchasing privately held animals from throughout the United States. Moreover, he segregated the animals into a “wild herd,” which functioned with minimal supervision, and a “tame herd,” which was closely monitored and given food and protection from deep snow during the winter. Newborn calves were frequently transferred from the wild to the tame herd to ensure their survival.
The publicity given to Jones’s efforts subsequently resulted in the formation, in December 1905, of the American Bison Society (ABS). With Theodore Roosevelt serving as honorary president, and its membership composed of both naturalists and sportsmen, the society proved an effective association for the preservation of the buffalo. Working in conjunction with the New York Zoological Society, the. ABS advocated the formation of additional federal herds to augment those in Yellowstone. Between 1907 and 1918, the societies assisted in the creation of buffalo reserves in Oklahoma, Montana, Nebraska, and North Dakota (U. S. Department of the Interior 1977).
In addition to such conservation agencies, many Native Americans have made efforts to reestablish the bison in North. America. As early as 1873,Walking Coyote, of the Pend d’Oreille, noted the animals’ decreasing numbers and attempted to raise a herd of his own from four calves captured in Montana. During the 1930s, both the Crow and Sioux established herds on reservation lands. More recently, in 1990, the InterTribal Bison Cooperative (ITBC) was organized to assist bison-restoration projects undertaken by 31 tribes in 13 states. In viewing the bison as a natural part of the plains ecosystem, the ITBC argued that a return of the animal to its former home would improve the lives of the area’s human inhabitants (Garretson 1938;Callenbach 1996).
The conservation strategies of the twentieth century have been remarkably successful. No longer endangered, the bison population has prospered to such a degree that the animal has entered commercial markets as a food item. During the 1970s, breeders created the “beefalo,” an animal comprising three-eighths bison and five-eighths bovine parentage. Overall, this hybrid offered little beyond novelty; nutritionally, the meat was inferior to that of the buffalo, and the animal appeared susceptible to an array of diseases. The failure of this experiment suggests that, at least in the near future, the American bison is safe from any further genetic tinkering (National Buffalo Association 1990).
Bison as Food
As livestock, the bison provides a high yield of marketable meat, as well as a nutritious final product in the oven or on the stove. A major disadvantage in raising buffalo, however, is the high start-up cost: Prices of bison calves start at around $1,000, and because buffalo are classified as “exotic animals” by the U. S. Department of Agriculture, aspiring ranchers have less access than cattlemen to government assistance. One considerable advantage is that bison require less food, and far less water, than cattle. Although similar to other bovines in being ruminants capable of digesting other fodder, bison do not depend on succulent grasses. Instead, they prefer short, dry grass, which usually contains a higher percentage of protein. When grazing, bison will consume about 180 pounds less grass per month than cattle of comparable size.
The biggest advantage of the buffalo, however, is its high yield of nutritional meat. With lighter hides, heads, hooves, and tails than Hereford cattle, the buffalo provides a larger percentage of salable meat when dressed (Rorabacher 1970). In addition, when compared to domestic cattle, it is surprisingly disease free (although respiratory ailments, anthrax, and brucellosis appear as occasional illnesses), and as a result, the meat lacks most of the antibiotics and medications contained in commercial beef and is nonallergenic (National Buffalo Association 1990).
Unlike almost all the meat of other types of domesticated livestock, buffalo meat is low in fat (5 grams per half pound of raw bison, compared to more than 18 grams of fat in the same amount of beef). Clearly, in light of concerns for nutritional health, the bison has great potential as a healthful alternative to most other meats. In areas where butchered bison is readily available (primarily in, but not limited to, the American West), the meat is sold in cuts similar to those of beef: steaks, ribs, roasts, and ground meat. Although the per-pound cost of bison for consumers is often 50 percent greater than, or even double, that of beef, the lower ratio of fat means less shrinkage, and consequently, a pound of bison yields substantially more protein than an equal measure of beef or pork.
The nutritional argument notwithstanding, however, there are an assortment of economic and biological factors that will interact in any determination of whether the bison will again become a significant source of food. Currently, the species is raised on small - to medium-sized ranches in herds of 100 to 250 animals for large-scale production. But the buffalo would doubtless have to be fitted into the beef industry model.
Yet feeding, grazing, meat storage, and refrigeration are only a few of the practices within the cattle industry that would probably require modification to accommodate the buffalo. For example, bison are ill suited to feedlots - facilities used by cattlemen for the rapid increase in the size of their animals immediately preceding slaughter. The confinement created by such ranching tends both to increase fighting and to accelerate the spread of disease among bison. Buffalo, then, cannot be harvested with the same efficiency as cattle. Moreover, although proponents of bison exalt the animals’ “natural” meat, free of the vitamins and antibiotics common in other foods, it seems possible, at least, that such additives in buffalo meat would be an eventual result of large-scale commercial production.
It is ironic that economic and cultural change, the same forces that nearly destroyed the bison during the nineteenth century, may hasten the ascendancy of the species in the future. For Native. Americans, the buffalo was a sacred resource to be utilized according to human need. However, as the original inhabitants of North America were displaced by white settlers, the hunting of bison became an industry that rapidly diminished the animals’ numbers.
At present, North Americans are involved in a cultural shift of sorts: Past understandings of what constitutes good nutrition are being rejected, and many people are reluctant to continue to consume the high-fat foods that have traditionally composed their diets. Low-fat red meat from the buffalo appears to be a viable replacement for much of the beef presently produced in America. Consequently, once again, harvesting the animals may offer vast financial rewards to humans. However, it is not difficult to envision large-scale bison ranching resulting in a noticeably different meat product from that presently provided by moderate-sized facilities, perhaps even in an unrecognizable buffalo.
J. Allen Barksdale
World History
