What was the impact of the destruction of the buffalo upon the Native Americans?

The change in the Nebraska landscape was dramatic. In just a few short years, cattle replaced the American bison as the leading, cloven-hoofed, grass-eating mammal on the Great Plains. In 1850, millions of bison ranged the grasslands and were the main natural resource for the region’s American Indians.

In 1868, the steel rails of the transcontinental railroad created a barrier that bison did not like to cross. That divided the great herd into northern and southern herds.

When the great trail drives began, bison interacted with the cattle being driven from Texas.

"Buffaloes travel in a straight line. When they were moving and encountered a herd of Texas cattle they invariably bored right through the herd, turning neither to right nor left. It was just the same if but one or a dozen buffaloes were on the move — they walked straight through." –James H. Cook as told to Eli S. Ricker, May 23, 1907

The cattle infected the bison with new diseases: the dangerous brucellosis as well as Texas tick fever, which dramatically weakened the bison herds.

Then in 1870, a process was developed that so bison hides could be commercially tanned into soft, flexible leather. This happened at the same time there was a high demand for leather to make the belts that powered machines in the Industrial Revolution. There were huge markets in England, France, and Germany. Bison hunters poured onto the Great Plains. By 1880, the combination of disease, environmental stress, and hunting left the bison near extinction.

The destruction of the bison had two important consequences:

• It left the vast grasslands open to the herds of cattle moving north from Texas. Now cattle ranches appeared in the north.
• More importantly, though, it robbed the Plains Tribes of the one resource that allowed them to move across the plains.

Find out more about the devastating effects on bison, and thus on Native Americans, when Cattle Replace Bison. From the 2008 NET Television production Beef State

journal article

The Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Vol. 33, No. 1 (Jul., 1929)

, pp. 34-49 (16 pages)

Published By: Texas State Historical Association

https://www.jstor.org/stable/30237207

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Journal Information

The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, continuously published since 1897, is the leading scholarly journal for Texas history and also features content relating to the history of the Greater Southwest. It is offered as a benefit of membership in the Texas State Historical Association.

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Founded as a private, nonprofit educational organization on March 2, 1897 – the 61st anniversary of the Texas Declaration of Independence – the Texas State Historical Association has long been regarded as one of the nation's most dynamic regional history organizations. Reinforced by more than one hundred years of scholarship and educational programs, its mission is to further the appreciation, understanding, and teaching of the rich history of Texas through research, writing, and publication of related historical material.

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(part 3 of 4)

George Catlin Prairie Meadows Burning 1861/1869 National Gallery of Art

The decline of the buffalo is largely a nineteenth-century story. The size of the herds was affected by predation (by humans and wolves), disease, fires, climate, competition from horses, the market, and other factors. Fires often swept the grasslands, sometimes maiming and killing buffaloes. Millions of horses in Indian herds competed for grasses. Drought was perhaps most significant; severe prior to the fifteenth century, and episodic in the eighteenth, it might have been worst at the very moment when other pressures converged in the early years of the decades from 1840 to 1880.

Yet no matter the impact from drought, horses, or fires, what doomed the buffalo most were (1) the commodities markets for buffalo tongues, skins, meat, and robes; and (2) the railroads, which provided the means of transportation to rapidly expanding European-American populations.

1872 enlarge image National Archives "the fury of the slaughter for hides and other products"

Again largely a nineteenth-century tale, the final stage from 1867 to 1884 was notable for the fury of the slaughter for hides and other products. In 1867 the first of five railroads split the herd in the heart of buffalo range, a process repeated again and again. Provisioners like Buffalo Bill Cody, sportsmen, farmers, and ranchers who craved the prairies for crops and cattle—all placed new pressure on bison. The railroads made transportation of buffalo hides easy and cheap, so market hunters flooded in, wasting three to five times the numbers they killed. The carnage from herds already depleted by other factors defied description: 4-5 million killed in three years alone. The commercial hunt was finished by the fall of 1883.

	National Archives Hide yard with 40,000 buffalo hides Dodge City, Kansas, 1878 enlarge image

Indians, confined to reservations and distressed from hunger, took part until the bitter end—the Piegan until "the tail of the last buffalo" disappeared. The final shipment of hides took place in 1884. With very few exceptions, the buffalo was gone and bone collectors scooped up all the remains they could find for shipment east where they were processed into phosphate fertilizer.

1870 National Archives

Thirty years ago millions of the great unwieldy animals existed on this continent. Innumerable droves roamed, comparatively undisturbed and unmolested, . . . Many thousands have been ruthlessly and shamefully slain every season for past twenty years or more by white hunters and tourists merely for their robes, and in sheer wanton sport, and their huge carcasses left to fester and rot, and their bleached skeletons to strew the deserts and lonely plains. "In the Prime of the Buffalo," J. F. Baltimore The Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine November 1889 full text

Today, one hundred years later, the buffalo has returned from the brink of extinction to roam the grasslands again in Yellowstone and beyond. Feared by farmers for diseases like brucellosis that they might carry to cattle herds, their fate beyond Yellowstone is uncertain, although Indian people have joined forces in a cooperative effort to save animals wandering from Yellowstone from the rifle, and to raise viable herds of this formerly vital, and currently deeply symbolic, animal. Yet it is no coincidence that in today's changing economy, when many Indians talk of the return of the buffalo, they mean not the animal but casinos.

Carsi/CAS