Following the example of the first. Americans, early European visitors utilized the buffalo as a source of steaks, stews, and marrow. Throughout the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers, such as Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and Vincente de Zaldivar, wrote of consuming buffalo flesh during their adventures. The British, however, who settled east of the buffalo grounds, did not encounter the animal until they began to move inland at the beginning of the seventeenth century. By the end of the colonial era, the buffalo had virtually disappeared from the landscape east of the Appalachians.
The reasons for this disappearance are varied. Although settlers often hunted bison for food, it is doubtful that the human population of the time was numerous enough to eliminate great numbers of the animals. Rather, it seems more likely that as the whites transformed the landscape to meet their needs, the buffalo simply migrated westward away from people. In addition, as farmers began to raise more cattle, their grazing would have reduced the available food supply. Finally, it should be noted that the eastern herd was by no means as large as that of the west.
When European settlement expanded into the area between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, buffalo were once again on hand as a food source. In detailing his travels through Kentucky, Daniel Boone mentioned meals of fresh buffalo, and as other early frontiersmen penetrated the region, they often followed “buffalo roads” - narrow paths formed by herds in search of salt (Rorabacher 1970).
As had happened east of the Appalachians, however, as human settlement continued, buffalo east of the Mississippi became displaced by a changing economy. Initially, settlers relied heavily on bison for food; yet, once farms were established, the animals became nuisances, grazing on land more profitably used to raise cattle or crops. By 1830, the buffalo had disappeared from the East, and the American bison population was compressed into the Great Plains.
The Bison West of the Mississippi
Crowding into the plains created a variety of natural hazards for the buffalo. Food shortages were more common, and fatal diseases (particularly anthrax and bovine tuberculosis) could spread quickly and kill greater numbers as the herds grew more closely together (McHugh 1972).
Such consequences of the bison’s westward migration, however, seem insignificant when compared with the destruction wrought by humans during the final third of the nineteenth century. It was then that the forces of economics and politics, as well as human greed, carelessness, and malice, came together in such a manner as almost to remove the American bison from the North American ecosystem. Between 1870 and 1873, the large buffalo herds of Kansas were destroyed. Next to go were the southern herds, and by 1878, the animals were absent from Texas to the edge of the prairie. The vast northern herds of the Dakotas and Montana survived a few years longer, perhaps into 1883. But by 1900, the herds of the Canadian plains were gone, and only about 300 of the animals remained in the United States.
Commercial hunting seems to have been the factor most significant in the buffalo’s destruction. The earliest professional hunters in the West sought beavers, not bison, and required the latter only for food. By the early 1820s, however, commercial buffalo hunting had begun in southern Canada, with the primary aim of securing buffalo tongues (a popular delicacy) and hides for shipment to the East and abroad. Often, entrepreneurs recruited Native Americans to do such hunting in exchange for whiskey.
At least at this point, however, the bison’s habit of shedding offered a degree of protection against excessive hunting. Because the sale of furry hides (for use as robes) produced the greatest revenue, and because the animals lost their furriness during the summer, hunting them was strictly seasonal. Nevertheless, the desire to trade for the white man’s goods resulted in a Native American slaughter of buffalo that has been estimated as 30 percent greater annually than their personal needs required (Dobak 1996).
During the two decades prior to the Civil War, the Great Plains experienced a series of ecological changes that also hastened the disappearance of the bison. Foremost was the proliferation of open-range cattle ranching. Indeed, by 1850, the prairie had become home to more than 50 million cattle that were major competitors for the region’s food supply. Moreover, ranchers were unhappy with the seasonal wanderings of the bison, arguing that their grazing rendered the land unfit for beef cattle for as long as two years afterward (Vestal 1952).
At the same time, as human settlement increased and transportation on the prairie improved, the slaughter of the buffalo for industrial purposes escalated. The trade in buffalo robes accelerated as more forts and trading posts dotted the western landscape: In 1850, around 100,000 robes reached the markets of St. Louis, a record total at that time. The increase in civilian and military populations on the plains also meant that still more of the animals were slaughtered for food (Dary 1974).
After 1865, the future of the bison became ever more precarious. With the conclusion of the American Civil War, both the U. S. Army and the railroad corporations sought to consolidate their positions on the plains. Troops were stationed in the West to pacify the Native Americans, and thousands of men migrated to the prairie to lay tracks for the Union Pacific and the Topeka & Santa Fe railroads. Fresh buffalo meat served as the primary fare for both the soldiers and the laborers. Moreover, once the railroads began service through the West, the buffalo again (as they had in the East) became nuisances, routinely wandering onto or across the tracks, blocking trains, and causing long delays. George Bird Grinnell recalled two such delays while traveling on the Kansas Pacific, one of which lasted for around three hours (Grinnell 1892).
In 1870, a refinement in tanning techniques became still another factor in the decrease of the American bison. The animal’s summer hide had long been dismissed as economically worthless because there was no known method for transforming the skin into commercial leather. However, once Philadelphia tanners devised such a method, the bison became a year-round target, and the promise of easy money encouraged more and more men to become buffalo hunters (Cronon 1991).
This was especially the case following the financial panic of 1873, when the nation entered a five-year period of severe economic depression. As banks closed and millions of easterners were suddenly unemployed, the seemingly inexhaustible bison herds of the plains offered a chance to earn a living, and perhaps even to acquire wealth. Buffalo hides brought from 2 to 3 dollars each during the 1870s, and a successful hunter might kill more than 250 animals in a single day. In the 1950s, Frank H. Mayer, once a “buffalo runner” himself, recalled:
The whole Western country went buffalo-wild.
It was like a gold rush or a uranium rush. Men
Left jobs, businesses, wives, and children and
Future prospects to get into buffalo running. There were uncounted millions of the beasts - hundreds of millions, we forced ourselves to believe. And all we had to do was take these hides from their wearers. It was a harvest. We were the harvesters (Mayer and Roth 1958: 21).
Much of the time, hunters worked in gangs, with individuals specifically assigned to shoot or skin the animals. Larger parties would utilize horses to remove the hides quickly: After the buffalo’s skin was loosened by making a series of cuts, it was tied to a horse which pulled the hide off the carcass (Wheeler 1923). The skins were awkward and bulky, often weighing more than 100 pounds each. Still, an experienced skinner could have the hide off an animal in about five minutes. Although the financial rewards encouraged efficiency, the animals’ abundance more often produced carelessness and waste, and bison slain by commercial hunters were not really “harvested” at all but merely left to rot in the sun.
In general, the bison was easy prey. Seasoned hunters understood its habits and instincts and developed techniques to attack it when confused and vulnerable. Recalling the hunts of the 1870s, one participant stated that “[t]he stupidity of the buffalo was remarkable” (Wheeler 1923: 81). Although there was a modicum of risk in buffalo hunting, accidents were more often the result of human error than of aggressiveness on the part of the hunted. Many retired hunters later wrote about injuries caused by falling off horses or by rifles exploding. Occasionally, too, poor judgment during winter months resulted in death from exposure (Dodge 1959).
In addition to destruction by commercial hunters, the buffalo population was further decimated by increasingly numerous “sport-hunters.’’As early as the 1830s, such traveling gentlemen as Washington Irving began to test their marksmanship on the buffalo, and during the 1850s, an Irish nobleman, Sir George Goe, indulged in a highly publicized “safari” with 21 wagons and a staff of 40 servants. In a three-year period, his party killed 2,000 bison.
Such “sporting” expeditions became increasingly widespread as the century progressed, especially during the depression that ensued after the “Panic of 1873,” when the railroads were determined to increase revenue by increasing the number of passengers going west. Rail executives hit upon the notion of catering to the sportsmen (who seemed to have money and time when most people did not) and advertised special “buffalo trains” that would transport easterners into areas populated by the animals. Upon arrival, the passengers could shoot bison from the comfort (and safety) of the railroad cars. More intrepid hunters might track them on horseback, although in general the procedure was to hire an experienced “scout” to minimize the danger.
The most renowned of such guides was William F Cody, or “Buffalo Bill,” a clever entrepreneur who later prospered as the creator of the traveling “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” show, on the road from 1883 to 1916. Much of Cody’s initial fame had resulted from escorting prominent personalities, such as Gordon Bennett II (publisher of the New York Herald) and the son of Russian Tsar. Alexander II (Aleksandre Nikolayevich), on hunts.
Such expeditions were bloody slaughters. Many hunters recalled ruining expensive rifles because of lengthy periods of continuous and rapid firing that caused them to overheat. If the hunters were successful in making a “stand” - a technique of tricking the buffalo into immobility - the potential for killing was limited only by their ammunition. Numerous parties recorded killing up to 200 animals per hunter per day.
World History
