ONEOFMANYFEATHERS'
Spirit of a Nation
The American Bison, scientific name Bison bison. Commonly, although incorrectly, referred to as the buffalo, millions of these brown beasts once inhabited the great plains of the United States. They are the largest terrestrial mammals in North America, reaching three metres in length and two metres in height. They can weigh as much as 900 kilograms, equivalent to the weight of a mid-size car.
The Buffalo was nearly destroyed a century ago by greed and uncontrolled hunting.
Rumbling thunder heard in the distance, not a storm cloud in sight, it is the lords of the prairie. From thundering herds that stretched further than the eye could see, they were reduced to a few thousand animals now living within Montana's Yellowstone National Park.
By the time America's earliest peoples had established villages about 20,000 years ago, the bison dominated the rolling grasslands and forested hillsides that stretched west from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains. Researchers estimate that prairie bison alone numbered between 30 million and 200 million, while a woodland variant existed in smaller numbers.
The buffalo provided tribes with critical supplies of nutritious meat and warm hides that allowed them to survive the region's harsh winters. Uses were found for virtually every part of the animals from their horns to tail hairs.
Indians only slaughtered what they ate, and for thousands of years, the huge bison herds were able to accommodate the loss of the relatively few animals taken by Native Americans.
In the 1800s, arrival of vast waves of white settlers along with trappers and traders, people who made their living selling meat and hides, spelled the end for the buffalo. More than 1.5 million hides were packed aboard trains and wagons to be shipped back east in the winter of 1872-73 alone. Many animals were killed, skinned and their meat left to rot in the sun. Many for their horns. Train companies offered tourists the chance to shoot buffalo from the windows of their coaches. In a buffalo killing contest, a Kansan set a record by killing 120 bison in just 40 minutes. "Buffalo" Bill Cody, hired to slaughter buffalo, killed more than 4,000 in just two years. Once he killed over one hundred bison during a single hunt.
To defeat Native American who were resisting the takeover of their lands by white settlers, some U.S. government officials supported destruction of the bison herds. Soon, military commanders were ordering their troops to kill buffalo - not for food, but to deny Native Americans their own source of food.
By 1880, the slaughter was almost over. Where millions of buffalo had once roamed, only a few thousand animals remained. Soon, their numbers dwindled, with the largest wild herd, just a few hundred animals, sheltered in the isolated valleys of the newly created Yellowstone National Park.
"If I could learn that every buffalo in the northern herd were killed I would be glad. The destruction of this herd would do more to keep the Indians quiet than anything else that could happen."
~General Phil Sheridan, 1881~
Of the 3,700,000 buffalo destroyed from 1872 through 1874, only 150,000 were killed by Indians. When a group of concerned Texans asked General (Philip) Sheridan if something should not be done to stop the white hunters' wholesale slaughter, he replied:"Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance."
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Bison skull pile Species profile: American bison American Bison Buffalo Field Campaign |
American Buffalo American Prairie Foundation American Buffalo (Bison) Gallery 1 Canadian bison |
"We know that on the other side the buffalo will not last long. Why? Because the country there is poisoned with blood...a poison that kills all the buffalo or drives them away. It is strange, that the Americans should complain that the Indians kill buffalo. We kill buffalo, as we kill other animals, for food and clothing and to make our lodges warm. They kill buffalo...for what?
Go through your country. See the thousands of carcasses rotting on the plains. Your young men shoot for pleasure. All they take from a dead buffalo is his tail or his head, or his horns, perhaps, to show they have killed a buffalo.
What is this? Is it robbery? You call us savages. What are they? The buffalo have come north. We have come north to find them and to get away from a place where the people tell lies."
~Chief Sitting Bull~
"The Indian was frugal in the midst of plenty," ~Luther Standing Bear, Lakota ~
"[The buffalo slaughter] was another potent agency in producing the result we enjoy today, in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by substituting for the useless Indians the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle ranches."
~General William Tecumseh Sherman, from his memoirs,1875
"They're the only wild animal that's not afraid of you.
They're not afraid of anything and they've got no reason to be.
They're big enough to take care of themselves and they do."~Jesse Stovall~
" The so-called random shooting at the Montana borders is actually eliminating or depleting entire maternal lineages, therefore this action will cause an irreversible crippling of the gene pool. Continued removal of genetic lineages will change the genetic makeup of the herd, thus it will not represent the animal of 1910 or earlier. It would be a travesty to have people look back and say we were "idiots" for not understanding the gene pool." Bison have developed a natural resistance genetically as long as thay have enough to eat, limited stress and are not consumed by other disease. There is no magic bullet in wildlife disease, Therefore management is important. Vaccines are one management tool and one component, but genetic structure is neccessary for future management. Every animal which is removed from the breeding population can no longer contribute to the genetic variability of the herd."
~Dr. Joe Templeton
Texas A& M University, Dept. of Veterinary Pathobiology,
to the GYIBC on May 21, 1998.
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American Bison Eliminated from the last wild population in the U.S.
2007-2008 Total: 1,604 2007-2008 Slaughter: 1,438 2007-2008 Hunt: 166 2007-2008 Quarantine: 112 Total Since 2000: 3,669* *includes lethal government action, quarantine, hunts |
If we are to truly restore America's grasslands, both ecologically and culturally, then wild, free roaming buffalo must be brought back to public and tribal lands across the Great Plains.
Stop the Slaughter!
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