America’s War on Bison (and Itself)

“I assended to the high Country and from an eminance, I had a view of the plains for a great distance. from this eminance I had a view of a greater number of buffalow than I had ever Seen before at one time. I must have Seen near 20,000 of those animals feeding on this plain.”

So wrote Meriwether Lewis in his journal entry for August 29, 1806. In an earlier entry, dated July 11, 1806, Lewis wrote that “the bulls keep a tremendious roaring we could hear them for many miles and there are such numbers of them that there is one continual roar.”

Throughout their record of their famous journey across the American West, Lewis and Clark referred to “buffalow” (or “buffaloe”) numerous times, and no wonder. These enormous animals were prominent on the Great Plains in the early nineteenth century. At one time, there may have been 45 million or even more of them grazing on this vast grassland.

In 1889, William Hornaday, working for the Smithsonian Institution, counted 541.

What happened to the buffalo, and why should we care?

Some Impressive Stats

As a wordsmith, I feel compelled to point out that what we sometimes call a buffalo is actually a bison. It belongs to the same biological family as the water buffalo of Asia and the Cape buffalo of Africa, but is a different species. In taxonomy, the technical term for the North American species, in fact, is “Bison bison,” which sounds like the name we would give to a group of bovid background singers if Marky Mark and Lisa Lisa ever did a duet. (My future wife, Lisa, and I started dating when Lisa Lisa and Marky Mark were pop stars—an obvious sign that we were meant to be together, even though neither one of us has ever been formally associated with a Funky Bunch or a Cult Jam, whatever those are.)

The distant ancestors of the bison that Lewis and Clark spotted probably crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America about 100,000 years ago. If you have seen one in person—or, rather, in bison—you may think of them as big, lumbering creatures, but they are more athletic than they look (which is why they got together and formed an NFL team, apparently). Bison can run a whole lot faster than you or I or Usain Bolt, for that matter—40 miles per hour, according to one measurement—and some can jump four feet or higher. Did I mention that female bison can weigh 700 pounds and males can weigh close to a ton?

If these stats aren’t enough to make you want to plaster your dorm room with bison posters, I should add that they also have an impressive tolerance for both heat and cold—a valuable trait for an animal living on the Great Plains. They can sustain lows of 40 below zero and highs over 110, and their heads are equipped, no joke, to plow as much as 4 feet of snow (also useful on the plains).

It’s hard not to like a bison.

A Keystone Species

Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains valued, even revered bison, which provided not only food, but also tools, clothing, and, thanks to their hides, even shelter.

"The buffalo was iconic and sacred, and became so deeply ingrained in the life of the tribe,” Kiowa writer M. Scott Momaday said, “that they could not imagine existence without the buffalo. They were indivisible.”

Bison served more than humans, though; they were also a crucial part of the ecosystem of the Great Plains. Here’s an insight from the exhibit I saw at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History:

Bison aerate soils with their hooves, allowing water to penetrate. They create wallows, or shallow indentations, where they roll on the ground. Wallows collect rainwater and provide habitat for birds, small mammals, amphibians, invertebrates, and insects.

Because they loosen the soil with their hooves, bison also make it easier for prairie dogs to dig burrows—and who doesn’t love a prairie dog? (By the way, when he encountered these funny little rodents on his journey with Clark, Lewis coined the term barking squirrel, which strikes me as a more accurate, if less endearing, term.). Prairie dogs, in turn, provide food for ferrets. In short, bison, just by being bison, served a host of other creatures. “No other wildlife species,” the National Park Services says, “has had as much impact on humans and the ecosystems that they occupied than bison.” In fact, as Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan note in their book Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo, bison are considered the “keystone species” of the Great Plains.

Then they started to disappear.

Epic Devastation

Although we associate bison with the Great Plains, their habitat once stretched over most of the continental United States, even down to Florida. They were gone from the area east of the Mississippi by the early part of the 1800s, but they continued to be fairly common on the Plains until the 1860s.

If you know American history, you know that two related events took place around the middle of the nineteenth century. Western migration more than doubled the population of non-native peoples west of the Mississippi River, from fewer than 5 million in 1850 to more than 10 million by 1870, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869 facilitated transportation of goods across the continent.

The destruction of the bison accelerated in ways that are difficult to comprehend, but this photograph of bison skulls from the 1870s provides some idea of the sheer quantity of bison that were killed.

A number of factors combined to create this devastation. For one thing, railroad workers needed to eat, and bison were plentiful sources of food in a vast expanse of land without huge crops or herds of domesticated animals. William Cody literally made his name by killing buffalo—4,280 to be exact—to feed railroad workers in 1867 and 1868.

While “Buffalo Bill” achieved something notable (and notorious) with this feat, killing a single buffalo was not all that difficult in this era, thanks to the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company, which created rifles designed specifically for this purpose. A placard at the Smithsonian exhibit explains:

These new rifles fired larger slugs with more power than traditional hunting rifles. A hunter could hit targets accurately 400 to 1,000 yards away . . . . Taking down a buffalo was no longer dependent on the hunter’s skill on horseback at close range. Shooters could even take aim directly from train cars as they crossed the plains.

Trains contributed to the demise of the bison in another respect. Because they could transport hides back to eastern markets, where they fetched high prices, killing bison seemed to make economic sense, at least for individual hunters in the short run.

There was another problem for the bison, one expressed eloquently by George Horse Capture, Jr., alluding to westward expansion:

Everything had to get out of the way.  When Europeans came, everything that's natural has got to get out of the way.  It's just a matter of fact.

The larger story, which Burns and Duncan do a wonderful job of telling in their book, involves a number of destructive factors, including habitat destruction and disease, as well as ripple effects—more like tidal-wave effects—on indigenous peoples. It was, in short, one of the darkest chapters in American history: an epic and atrociously wasteful devastation of an invaluable species coupled with incalculable harm affecting countless human beings.

What Can We Learn?

This discussion of the destruction of the bison could devolve into a diatribe against expansion, industrialization, or even people of European ancestry, and the result would be a hot debate of what may appear to be a two-sided issue.

That’s not where I’m going.

Westward expansion clearly came with a cost, but it also has served this country and the world in positive ways. To come down on one side or the other is to oversimplify the subject. (I will have more to say on oversimplifying the complexities of the world in next week’s issue.)

What I hope all of us can agree on is that it pays to plan. You may have heard the old expression “Look before you leap.” I prefer a phrase that I picked up from one of my bosses years ago. He liked to “play it out.” In other words, before taking any action, we can try to predict the downstream impact and then act thoughtfully to maximize the positive effects while minimizing the negative effects.

In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey encourages us to “Begin with the End in Mind.” ** That’s a good start, but we need to consider everything else that might occur along the way. A transcontinental railroad (or a new housing development or a new medication or whatever) may promise some appealing outcomes, but will there be environmental and social costs, harmful side effects, or other unintended and unforeseen consequences?

In hindsight, the Americans driving westward expansion in the nineteenth century seem to have been so fixated on the end, particularly financial gain, that they did not sufficiently consider the impacts of the means they were taking to that end. The results were devastating, but they didn’t have to be.

Over the past century and a half, thoughtful work has helped restore the bison population, which now stands at about a half-million, including bison raised as livestock. (Burns and Duncan also tell this part of the story very well.) The animals are classified as “Near Threatened,” but, thanks to the thoughtful efforts of some, they are not in immediate danger of becoming extinct.

In short, humans—some of them anyway—were responsible for the near extinction of bison, along with all of the attending negative consequences for people and land and wildlife, but humans also have helped restore the bison.

We can do things thoughtlessly or thoughtfully. Either way, we live with the consequences.