February 6, 2003

Plains Folk: Bison Inquest

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Thanks to the growth of a domestic bison industry, we have more of these sturdy beasts on the plains today than we have had since the early 1880s. Even as the descendants of the monarchs of the plains wax fat, an inquest has convened to determine how the great herds were eradicated from the prairies in the first place. This is a complicated question.

We had this figured out when I studied history in college back in, well, quite a while ago. I remember being assigned to read The Great Buffalo Hunt, a book by Wayne Gard published in 1959. This laid out the story as settled then. It was said the number of bison was between 12 and 60 million--which was to say, who knows? Current writing on the subject, based on calculation of grazing capacity, puts the number at some 30 million.

As for what happened to them, the story went like this. After Plains Indians acquired horses and converted to buffalo culture, they killed buffalo effectively but prudently.  They used what they took and conserved the resource. By the early 19th century Indians were moved by the arrival of white traders to hunt more aggressively for the robe trade carried on at such places as Fort Bent, Fort Union, and the posts of the Hudson Bay Company. The robe trade, though, was limited by the capacity of the Indians for tanning, a labor-intensive enterprise, and so it had little effect on bison populations.

Then in the 1870s tanners in Germany learned to make buffalo hide into useful leather. Leather was needed for industrial use, as engine power was distributed through factories by belting. Thus commercial demand sent white hunters onto the plains to kill the great herds. “Never before had such a slaughter of wild animals by human hands been recorded by a historian,” wrote Gard.

The greedy buffalo hunters and their lousy skinners were wonderful heavies in the tragic story of the bison. Contemporary accounts confirmed they were not nice people. By the early 1900s the cult of the sportsman had arisen in America, so that gentleman hunters condemned the bison hunters, who shot beasts by the score with their Sharps Fifties and sticks. The conservation movement of the same era, too, made Americans view the killing of millions of buffalo merely for their skins, leaving the meat to rot, with disgust.

By the 1960s there were other reasons for Americans to loath the buffalo hunters. The ecology movement, coupled with the anti-capitalist rhetoric of the time, branded them as representatives of the destructive rapaciousness of the American way. Those who despised the military asserted that the Army, too, must have helped, although no one has ever shown just how.

It is only since the 1980s that writers such as Dan Flores and Andrew Isenberg (see The Destruction of the Bison, 2000) have revisited the common knowledge about the killing of the buffalo. They question (and this is quite controversial) whether Plains Indian buffalo culture was sustainable. Native hunters killed too many cows and calves, the historians say, causing gender imbalance. Before 1850, long before white hunters took to the field, bison numbers were crashing as Indians bought into the robe trade again, killing mostly cows as superior robe material.

I think disease played a larger role then most historians credit. They say bovine brucellosis arrived on the plains in the late 19th century. I suspect it was much earlier. There were bison all across North America, and thus no reason why the disease should not have spread methodically from the first European colonies. I think loss of bison calves to brucellosis explains why, as early plains travelers noted, coyotes lurked around the bison herds.        

One of the great things about having so many bison on the plains today is that we can observe them and, perhaps, deduce how they lived on and shaped the land. If we listen, they may tell their own story.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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