Ken Burns chronicles the sad fate of the American buffalo
economist.com
economist.com
More info, pictures, and video here: https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...
If anyone in the US hasn't seen one in person, I'd recommend making the effort. Much different experience than simply seeing a picture, especially if it's on open range like Yellowstone National Park.
They're huge (~10' long, 6' tall). They're heavy (~1700 lbs). They're fast (~40mph, in the locomotive, once-they-get-1700lbs-going sense).
And they fit perfectly in scale with the plains.
(Disclaimer: Don't approach them, as they generally don't like that. And you don't want one angry at you)
Stay in your car of course.
Wyoming 296 (Chief Joseph Highway) gets closed at the west end of Sunlight Basin.
Will never forget meeting a group on a trail, stepping off behind a (SUV-sized) boulder, then feeling them spook a bit and in 2 seconds go from a leisurely walking to thundering trot. Earth shaking with them just in a mild hurry! Not even full speed!
But they're built to outfight anything smaller than them and outrun anything bigger than them, so I guess they're as strong/fast as they need to be.
They are fascinating creatures.
https://bisonrange.org/bison-range-information-hours-of-oper...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher's_Crossing
(Off-topic, but Williams is best known for Stoner, a truly beautiful work that you should read immediately if you haven’t already.)
Regarding bison, it's likely that the final blow was not from overhunting, but from habitat encroachment that constrained their migratory patterns. This in turn started an epidemic of tick-borne disease, that resulted in a total collapse of their population within just 2 years (1881-1883).
There's a really nice overview article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019005281...
Good fiction asks its audience to accept things that don't require special knowledge. Bad (historical) fiction presents false things in such a way that the audience accepts them without realizing that is is part of the fictional narrative, because they lack the specialized knowledge to understand when artistic liberties have been taken.
Since the audience is already in a state of suspended disbelief, they aren't prepared to be skeptical of what is presented as real but is not.
I have a similar quibble with American Gods. Several times I've seen people parrot ideas from the story that sounded like one of many historical facts but were actually very wrong, such as the background of Easter.
Edit: I may have been overly harsh with the use of the word "Bad". They're good stories in their own rights, but this particular bone has been stuck in my craw for a long time.
The situation with bison in the US was deeply unnatural when you think about it. Bison are large herbivores, that can reproduce fairly quickly, and that don't have any consistent predators.
Nothing in the US can hunt them successfully and consistently. A wolf pack can take down a grown bison, but it's risky for them, and the wolf population was nowhere large enough to control the bison population numbers. Cougars and coyotes can prey on calves, but not on healthy grown bison.
Just guessing, but I would think there would have been a lot of cougars eating a lot of calves. That would also have some restraining impact on the population.
Only if you include Native Americans in the "natural" forces. They were responsible for the disappearance of the local megafauna.
> At the very least food availability would have limited their numbers in some way.
Or maybe periodic population collapses due to disease.
> It isn't dissimilar to the situation with bears.
Grizzly bears have one of the slowest reproduction rates, though. They simply won't have cubs if there isn't enough food. In Africa, it's a similar story with elephants, nothing can hunt them consistently, but they reproduce so slowly that they can't really overpopulate the area.
For Plains indigenous people, the buffalo were a massive part of their culture, spirituality and history. Hundreds of generations had lived alongside the buffalo herds and become a part of their life cycle. Their hunts, while truly massive, participated in the life cycle and ensured stable herds.
When european settlers came, they had absolutely no understanding of that life cycle so their hunts were in opposition. Then as they started importing european land ownership and putting up fences, the ecosystem collapsed. They hadn’t followed the herds for generations so really didn’t know how much land a herd actually needed to sustain itself.
It was really the wrong hunting even more so than over hunting. Early communities had names like “Pile of Bones” that were indicative of the scale of earlier hunts.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Bison_sk...
The article suggests that the extermination of the bison went hand in hand with the destruction of aboriginal societies. The nomadic bison were also problematic for expansion, affecting both agriculture and the railway. This was not a case of, "oh, there's money to be made off of their hides. Whoops! Where did all of the bison go."
The reason why so many people take a stance against certain types of development goes well beyond unintentional consequences. It is because many of those consequences were intended to serve a particular agenda.
This actually was exactly the case. The bison population collapsed within just _two_ years (1881-1883). In 1883 hunters were waiting for the bison that never came.
As for railroads, the first trans-continental railroad was finished in 1869, and smaller railroads existed before that.
Here's a nice overview article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019005281...
There’s no delicate way to put it: exterminating buffalo was the safest, most cost-effective way to mitigate the American Indian threat against westward expansion. Since American Indian tribes weren’t agriculturally equipped to sustain themselves, especially through winters, reduction of buffalo along the overland expansion routes practically guaranteed the reduction of attacks against settlers and railroad workers.
Hiring people to shoot buffalo was orders of magnitude easier and cheaper (and safer) than hiring and maintaining an army to fight Indians.
Plus a Buffalo heards natural response to threat is either to run, or form a tight circle (you could say _that_ adaptation never counted on the invention of gunpowder).
All that is to say, extinction of the buffalo was not the consequence of insatiable bloodlust for killing animals, as much as it was an objective in order to achieve unencumbered expansion and sustain the economic machine that was fueling it.
Easy. Why would you settle there when a much better Eastern coast is available? The US non-Native population in 1800 was less than 6 million.
For comparison, the UK was 10 million according to the 1801 census.
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000090583-...
And a direct link to American Buffalo:
As a result, they have no incentive or negative incentive to advertise that other stations carry their content.
Or did I misinterpret your point?
That's why they are buying ranches that are currently utilizing the land for the purpose of cattle grazing and turning them back into wild prairie (and reintroducing bison).
My personal opinion is that it's incredibly cool that they're taking a very small piece of the great plains and letting it just be empty in the way that it used to be.
Empty and "hospitable to/available to bison" are two different things.
“Blind man doesn’t want to pay for printed newspaper.” So don’t. But you could educate yourself and then you could see.
"Kill every buffalo you can. Every dead buffalo is a dead Indian"
That was the de-facto policy of the US on the American bison.
An explicit policy of animal extermination to achieve human extermination. A policy that would later inspire the most horrible events of the 20th century.
The reason you don't know many Native Americans today, and most people you know either come from Europe, Africa or Asia but not here.
Everything else is revisionism, obfuscation, dillution of important events in oceans of irrelevant text, and waste of time.
Bisons were killed and their bones were processed into fertilizer.
And where bisons were so numerous that roamed the land lifting so much dust that the sky turned dark.
There were a lot of natives.
The European outsiders all but eliminated both. No guilt. No respirations.
What more do we need to know?
You don’t think disease, land stealing, or war should be part of the picture?
Reducing? Beats ignoring
You also don't seem to be aware that history is not absolute. In this case, there are *at least* three lens: the genociders, the genocidees, and the buffalo / bison.
You seem to be stuck on defending the genociders by demanding justification or some sort of analysis. But we know exactly what happened. We know why.
By the time the Americans had a program to slaughter the bison to get rid of the natives, many estimate the Native Americans had already lost 90% of their numbers.
I'm not saying there was no genocide, I'm saying it was going on long before buffalo killing was used as a tool for it.
And when someone asks for documentation (where this dispute started), it's unreasonable to claim "two things don't exist, therefor one caused the other". By the same logic I could say "the Tasmanian devil doesn't exist and Indians don't exist, therefore killing the Tasmanian devil was used to kill the Indians." what an absurd form of logic. Just because something is true, doesn't mean your logic or justification for it are valid or educating for others.
Have you ever wondered why the European North American settlers didn’t have a unified indigenous empire to contend with, such as could be found in Central and South America? (Ie Incan or Aztec).
I would posit that it was because the Hunter/raider/gatherer societies could not sustain growth beyond a certain point. For whatever reason, the North American indigenous tribes would not cross a threshold of government and infrastructure that is required to eliminate their reliance on raiding (the perpetual changing hands of limited refined resources), and game hunting (ie lack of livestock domestication and food storage that allow for permanent settlements, growth).
What the Europeans did to the Indians was as horrendous in execution as it was consequential to the decisions those tribes made during the hundreds of years leading up to the arrival of the Europeans.
Who knows what may had been if Columbus had been confronted with a unified indigenous empire with permanent settlements and defensive emplacements? Instead he found desperate tribes of marauding Indians, reliant on a singular food source and very willing to accept short term alliances for short term infighting advantages.
Its hardly a thing, IMO, for a descendant many generations removed to feel guilty over…let alone pay penance for.
The Tahuantinsuyu (Inca) had a civil war of succession followed by a purge of the nobility after the monarch died Huayna Capac of smallpox.
So not even in those cases they faced a unified front.
And the innovations you mention are not enough. On one side you have no navigation technology (map making, compass, etc), no animal traction.
The US experience does not speak for the entire continent.
Why so many of them have paternal haplogroup R (European)? (in some areas, with a frequency of up to 88% of males)
What really means is that the natives you are running into are... you.
What happened to the rest?
Aside from being a deeply weird thing to say, there's no buffalo left in either case.
The Paiute tribes, and others, have stories about the long war they fought against the Si-Te-Cah which were giant red-headed cannibals, and there are samples from that war that still exist. The Choctaw similarly have stories of their wars against the Nahullo (white giants), similarly, that were cannibals, as do many other tribes.
There have been many Smithsonian coverups of the well-reported giant findings https://grahamhancock.com/dewhurstr1/ and some of the skeletons are both the more ancient Giant Native American mound peoples (non-caucasian), and the described caucasian skulls.
South America is replete with giant skulls and skeletons, some of which have characteristics fundamentally different from normal human skulls and are not merely headboarded infants. Many of these skulls have some similarities to the Mound people's giant skulls found in North America.
Many of the skulls and DNA they've found are not simply North Asian, Eastern Asian and Southern Asian, but also show other groups history in the Americas too, such as the Australo-Melanesian findings
https://sciencenordic.com/anthropology-archaeology-denmark/d...
https://www.science.org/content/article/mysterious-link-emer...
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-dna-fossils-sout...
https://www.livescience.com/61319-dna-first-americans-lineag...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/polynesian-ancest...
He recounts his grueling trip in the Copper River Basin in Alaska on a hunt for a bison, and every other chapter continues a parallel telling of the history of the species in North America, particularly the archaeological evidence of prehistoric hunting of the animal, from large kill sites to fascinating sites like the Mesa site in northern Alaska[1] linking arctic cultures to Paleoindians in midcontinent.
It's a really enjoyable book, and he narrates the audio book.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/American-Buffalo-Search-Lost-Icon/dp/...
[1] https://www.blm.gov/programs/cultural-heritage-and-paleontol...
If you're in the SF area, Golden Gate Park has a buffalo herd in a fenced area.
https://youtu.be/i8wrAkixfHc (First part is on the Serengeti; Bison starts at 13:55)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Temple_Hornaday#Biog...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Temple_Hornaday#Wild...
—Some investment banker, probably.
"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a brief moment in time we created a lot of share-holder value."
—New Yorker (cartoon)
https://www.beaverinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Q...
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/wildlife_damage/downloads/beaver/...
Then I needed the exposition of that sad fate. The mistake is probably in using an NFL reference.
It is indeed a pun but I make no claims that it is a good pun!