The Near Extinction Of The American Bison: Do The Math (Rev. 11/9/2015)
The Herd That Once Numbered Perhaps 50 Million Had But 325 Individuals Remaining by 1884.
Originally Posted at “Old Ones Dream” February 9, 2015 and updated here.
What Really Caused the Near Extinction of the American Bison
In “Hay Camp” at Shade Ranch in the Little Missouri Grasslands near Medora, North Dakota, in 2013 we spoke of “Texas Tick Fever”. It had been mentioned in a program, perhaps on the History Channel, which described the devastation brought by the disease to the domestic cattle herds in the northern plains in the 1800s. Kim Shade commented that some say that this disease is what accomplished the virtual extinction of the American Bison. There is evidence to support that theory. In 1983, a pathologist, Dr. Rudolph W. Koucky *(1), published a paper concluding that the last 4 million American Bison (the remainder of the northern herd), succumbed in 1882 to disease, not bullets.
The Timeline
The American Bison ranged from Northern Mexico to Southern Canada and is variously estimated to have numbered from 30 million to more than 100 million animals. Calculations based on the “carrying capacity” of the land area set the total herd size at around 30 to 60 million. Many who actually saw the great herds from Texas to the Great Plains believe 30 million to be too conservative. The “Timeline of the American Bison”*(2) as recorded by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (no more credible than other sources) is a source of the following benchmarks:
In the 1500s an estimated 30 to 60 million Bison were living in North America
From 1700 to 1820, European Americans settled the country, moving westward from the east coast. They brought changes to native habitat through plowing and farming, and the introduction of cattle diseases and grazing competition. Native Americans tribes, forced off of their lands to the east, brought horses and guns to the Great Plains which increased pressure on the bison.
1830: organized hunting of the great herds began.
1840: buffalo had disappeared east of the Mississippi and west of the Rocky Mountains
In the 1860s, railroads built across the Great Plains divided the bison into two main herds - the southern and the northern. Many bison were killed to feed the railway crews and Army posts. During this time, Buffalo Bill Cody gained fame as a wholesale buffalo killer.
By 1877 the southern herd had been exterminated.
By 1880, slaughter of the northern herd had begun.
By 1884 there were approximately 325 wild American Bison in the United States, including 25 in Yellowstone National Park.
Today there are over 250,000 bison in the United States; of which, reportedly less than 10,000 individuals are genetically pure, including around 4,500 in Yellowstone National Park.
Pure Bison Herd, Wind Cave National Park, Custer, SD June 2010 - Photo by Tom T Traywick
The larger environmental context for the decline of the buffalo was set by climate, drought, disease, fire, horses, cattle, barbed wire, ranchers, railroads, market hunters, and so on. It was driven for the most part by the commodification of the buffalo — tongues, hides, and other parts as highly desired commodities in a greatly expanding marketplace. - Shepard Krech III, “Buffalo Tales: The Near-Extermination of the American Bison,” Brown University National Humanities Center
The Math
The Horse.
Until the early 1500s when the Spanish horses arrived in the West, the American Bison was the only large herbivore competing for food, and had no serious predator accept hunter gatherer native americans on foot, and wolves that primarily served to remove the sick and injured from the herd. The horse changed that dynamic. Horses reproduce rapidly and consume huge quantities of grass and water. Horses became the Native American currency and so huge herds were accumulated by them as wealth, which required large areas of rangeland (for food and water) - all at the expense of the American Bison.
The Native Americans
The buffalo was revered by the Native Americans. That Tatanka was conserved by them is the conventional wisdom but in reality they slaughtered the buffalo in great numbers by driving them over cliffs, and by the use of prairie fire. This slaughter may have expanded once the Native Americans became horsed.
Nature
One of the Bison’s enemies was his own small sharp hoofs which could cause them to become immobilized in mud or snow, which made them easy game for hunters, and which occasionally resulted in starvation of large numbers.
It was the nature of the bison herds to graze into the wind.
One of the Sioux who fled to Canada with Sitting Bull told the author the story of a great herd lost because unseasonably soft northern winds had drawn them far into the frozen lands of upper Canada one fall, into the face of the arctic winter. The entire herd starved and froze there, leaving their bones to bleach … until the whole region was white as with the snows in which the buffaloes had died. How many were lost? “Ahh-h, it was long ago, and the dead ones were very many,” the old Indian replied. “Enough to feed all the women and children a long, long time, Perhaps this many —“ touching his two finger-spread hands at the thumbs, moving them from the right shoulder left and downward for the sign of a hundred. Then instead of counting the number of hundreds on the backs of the fingers he made the sign again, one hundred hundred, and then once more. One hundred times one hundred hundred — a million. “Very, very many,” he said softly, as to himself. - Mari Sandoz, “The Buffalo Hunters,” (Hastings House, NY, 1954), page 45-46.
Bison Female Harvest
Both the Native Americans and the European Americans selectively killed Bison cows because of the superiority of the female hides both for domestic use and for the market. In the rare cases when the meat was actually used, the meat of the cow, particularly that of the fetus, was considered to be superior. It is obvious that the selective killing of females would exert extra pressure on population by artificially decreasing the number of reproducing animals. Do the math.
Organized Hunting
The organized hunting for hides and tongues that began before 1850 resulted in the killing of many millions of bison each year. Mari Sandoz grew up on the Niobrara River in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and listened to the stories of the Old Ones who came to her fathers store from the Rose Bud and Pine Ridge reservations. Her books are good records of interviews with the Sioux. She states that by the 1850s, the Native Americans probably killed around 3.5 million bison each year for the needs of their own population of around 250,000 and the robes they traded. That number seems high. Native Americans have been known to exaggerate when describing their own activities.
U. S. War Department Policy
There is the matter of the U. S. Government policy of trying to force the Native Americans onto the reservations by destroying their food supply, similiar to the tactic used so successfully by General William Tecumseh Sherman just a few years earlier against the Confederate States of America. Although there was never a documented U. S. War Department policy of extermination of the bison, that goal was broadly spoken of among government officials and endorsed by General Phillip H. Sheridan*(3).
Fire
The Native Americans used fire as a management tool which benefitted the land and the wildlife and they used it to enhance the harvest of bison. The U. S. Department of War used fire as well. According to Mari Sandoz, in January 1865, fires were set, on the orders of Brigadier General Robert B. Mitchell, “… at close intervals all along the line of the Platte and the South Fork, from Kearney in middle Nebraska to the foothills of the Rockies near Denver — better than four hundred and thirty miles.” Sandoz further relates that the fire burned southward for three days, destroying millions of creatures, “… all the game dead or driven from an area half again as large as all of New England.” No Native Americans were killed. They backfired around their camps and horse herds. Many European American settlers along the east were wiped out, their lives saved by their dugout homes, but their livestock killed by the fire. A few greenhorn buffalo hunters perished. I have not seen an estimate of how many bison were killed. Do the math for the geographic area consumed— there must have been millions of bison exterminated?
The Railroads
The bison was the enemy of the railroads because the great herds could derail the relatively lightweight engines and cars of the day, and because the seemingly endless masses of bison moving across the tracks would delay the scheduled arrivals and departures of the trains. The railroad owners organized hunting trips for “sportsmen” who would shoot bison from the comfort of the catered railroad cars. The railroad also hired buffalo hunters to kill bison to feed the huge crews of railroad construction workers during the time of the great railroad building push that occurred in the 1860s over multiple routes from the Mississippi River to the West Coast.
Disease
Sandoz states “… there was apparently no disease on all the continent that threatened the buffalo in any number.” That is debatable but certainly was no longer true once the European Americans arrived with their domestic cattle.
In 1825, a “murrain” wiped out all of the hoofed animals in eastern Nebraska resulting in the starvation of some Native Americans in the area, and again in 1858 all of the hoofed animals along the trails between Fort Laramie and Bridger died. Sierra Stoneberg-Holt, Phd., a rancher and scientist in Montana says “…the die-offs in Nebraska seem to match anthrax, and there is a strain of anthrax that was native to that area since about the Pleistocene.”
Yellowstone Kelly, a trapper, wrote this account circa 1867:
Our course led over rolling prairie when we crossed a high and level plain which extended for many miles. The plain was covered with a thin coating of ice, and on all sides as far as the eye could reach was dotted with bodies of dead buffaloes. These animals were in good condition and bore no mark of bullet or arrow wounds. The cause of their death was a mystery to us. As we marched over the plain toward the valley of the Cheyenne, the appearance of so many carcasses scattered around made a strong impression on my mind, perhaps because they were the first buffaloes I had ever seen.
Division of the Herd
The railroads and wagon trains, and the disease epidemics that wiped out the herds along the Platte River, divided the Bison and segregated the Northern and Southern Herds. By 1880, all that remained was the Northern Herd which ranged Montana and Canada and small parts of the Dakotas and Wyoming. Estimates were that the Northern Herd numbered four million animals. By 1884, the buffalo were finished, they were gone.
Cattle Drives and Tick Fever
After the Civil War, ranches were created in Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming, largely with Texas cattle - cattle no doubt carrying “tick fever”. There were reported instances of wagon trains of settlers headed west having their oxen become ill and die while traveling through this country.
E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott in his 1939 memoir, “We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher,” tells of driving the first Texas cattle to Montana in 1880. He later describes the evidence he saw of slaughter of the Buffalo and deplored how the range was covered with carcasses on which the hide remained. He may not have fully realized what he was seeing.
Forty years later, while hunting on the former northern buffalo range, the pathologist Rudolph W. Koucky, M.D., saw buffalo skeletons “… arranged much like a herd of cattle lying on a meadow.” As a pathologist, he took the same scene that “Teddy Blue” had seen and interpreted it in the light of math and science. He could find no suggestion that the animals had been killed and wrote “They had simply laid down and died. … That scene has had considerable influence on my interpretation of the disappearance of the buffalo. It is, in fact, my firm belief that the several million buffalo died from disease.”*(1) page 28
"In 1881 and 1882 disaster struck the northern herd. The four million animals, together with their anticipated 500,000 annual offspring, disappeared in those two years”. *(1) page 25
= (Stress)
Because all of the hunters involved, Native and European, preferred the hides and the meat of younger female bison; there was the counter productive pressure of gender imbalance in the great herds. Sandoz says that: “… by 1867 there were approximately 9 or 10 bulls to every cow.” That is a strong statement. If we are to believe that, and if that trend continued, and there is no reason to think otherwise, then the last four million American Bison may have been almost all bulls. Imagine the level of stress in that herd. Do the reproductive math. That would have been just about the end of line for the last four million in the northern herd.
1882: The End of the Line
There is data and there is data and there is math and there is math and much of it is in conflict in the many tellings of the story of the American Bison. There is exaggeration, contradiction, and rearrangement of mostly incomplete data. There is much to read about and many people to trust or not. There is, however, a strong case to be made that the last 4 million bison and their “anticipated 500,000 annual offspring” were not killed by hunters with horses, wagons, knives, single shot hunting rifles, and black powder ammunition in a land with no roads, all in a period of two years. Do the math, but by all means read the Koucky article.
“The primary cause of the buffalo's extermination, and the one which embraced all others was the descent of civilization, with all its elements of destructiveness, upon the whole of the country inhabited by that animal." — William Temple Hornaday, "The Extermination of the American Bison" (1889)
*(1) Rudolph W. Koucky, M.D. “The Buffalo Disaster of 1882,” published in 1983 by North Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains
*(2) The requested URL “”https://www.fws.gov/bisonrange/timeline.htm”“ was not found. FWS.gov was recently redeveloped. As a result, some content has been removed or relocated. Please search the site for the information you are looking for. FWS.gov home page
*(3) Sheridan to Adjunct General, October 13, 1881, Box 29, Sheridan Papers, Library of Congress
Acknowledgement
The inspiration for this article is entirely the result of remarks made by Sierra Dawn Stoneberg-Holt, Phd., a rancher and scientist living near Saco, Montana; and Kim Shade, a rancher at Medora, North Dakota.
Bibliography
Many books and periodicals were read. The following were very helpful.
(1) Rudolph W. Koucky, M.D. “The Buffalo Disaster of 1882,” published in 1983 by North Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains Koucky’s article is a serious scholarly work. His research is exhaustive, his conclusions logical, and his math is impeccable.
Dr. Sam Fadala, “Was the Buffalo Hunted to Near Extinction,” Petersen’s Hunting; September 4, 2012: Fadala, writing in a hunting magazine, relies largely on Koucky’s information.
Mari Sandoz, “The Buffalo Hunters”, Hastings House, NY, 1954. Mari Sandoz grew up on the Niobrara River in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and listened to the stories of the Old Ones who came to her fathers store from the Rose Bud and Pine Ridge reservations. Her books are beautifully written records of interviews with the Sioux. Her Crazy Horse biography was the first that I know of and is a favorite of mine.
Shepard Krech III, “Buffalo Tales: The Near-Extermination of the American Bison,” Brown University National Humanities Center
COMMENTS
Reply 02/12/2015 at 12:31 AM
Sierra said…
I like your point about the large horse herds. I think that is a valid point.
One interesting thing to consider is that buffalo and horses reproduce at a fairly similar rate, one, which you point out is "rapid".
Our European view of ecology tends to be of 1+1=2 and 2-1=1. The synergies of ecology can sometimes lead to 1+1=3 and 2-1=4. The Original Americans _did_ slaughter bison in great numbers, and may very well have in this way preserved them. A serious dip in Original American numbers preceded the dip in buffalo numbers.
I'm not certain they killed more once they had horses. Until then, you had to kill an entire small herd, from 50 to 200 animals at once. Horses allowed more selectivity and less waste.
A prey animal, especially a prey animal with a predator with whom it has evolved for thousands of years (like the buffalo and Original Americans) can be seriously endangered by the loss of its predator. You can make a case for this kind of timeline: Original Americans have serious smallpox die-offs, buffalo numbers explode, Europeans enter the region, driving
tribes before them, buffalo that are unhealthy because of the quick population explosion that damaged their environment and health are suddenly exposed to lots of disease, competition, and hunting. The first major smallpox epidemic in the range of the Northern Herd was 20 years before Lewis and Clark.
2 million cows in an unmanaged herd will produce close to a million increase per year (this is new calves minus all the animals that would die of age, accident, etc.) If the herd is at carrying capacity, and if that 1 million increase is not killed, then the herd will begin to endanger itself, threaten its own survival, by overpopulation, a terrible thing in grazing animals. So if there were 30 million bison and only 3 million of them were cows... you'd have to kill a million and a half to keep the herd healthy and in balance. Sandoz thought the tribes were killing 3.5, so I guess you could claim overkill, but 9 to 1 bulls does seem a tad extreme. Note that Koucky estimated 3 to 1 bulls when making
his estimates of the northern herd.
Without predation, the herd will double about every five years. So thirty million bison can be sixty million in five years, 120 million in ten. This makes the facts you cite above, that some people estimate more than 100 million bison at one time and that the environment could probably not sustain more than 60 million at the most, extremely interesting. What happens when you keep 100 million animals in a pasture/continent that will support 60 million? It isn't pretty. The vegetation, the water cycle, the soils all suffer. Soon, with this kind of abuse, the land will support far fewer than the original 60 million. Particularly interesting is the fact that Lewis and Clark's journals detail exactly the kind of vegetation, soil, and water cycle damage you would expect from this kind of situation in the range of the northern herd.
The description of the big herd lost in Canada is interesting. I can't help but wonder if disease didn't play a role. It reminds me of Goodnight talking about how bison wouldn't move if they were hungry, would just stand and starve, but he was describing animals dying of tick fever.
I definitely find some of the FWS points suspect, but they are their points. That's simple fact. Specifically, I'm not convinced they have good information about populations in the 1500s. A large population in the late 1700s, early 1800s (entirely probable) does not guarantee that they had been at that level for 200 years. The FWS claims that organized hunting began in 1830, but according to both Dary (1974, The Buffalo Book) and Haines (1976, The Buffalo), there was no serious market for bison hides before 1870, and no professional white hide hunters. Haines states, "There is no indication that the traders at that time made any special effort to buy skins, but seemed to buy from the various tribes only to keep the Indians happy and to ensure that the Indians would sell them their better furs. (p. 188)" Breech-loading rifles were not invented before 1860. This seems supported by what I've seen from early trader/trapper journals from the range of the northern herd. Since my Ph.D. work was on genetics (admittedly of grass), I find the FWS claims that only a few bison are actually bison to be groundless in my opinion.
Reply 02/12/2015 at 01:39 PM
Tom T Traywick said in reply to Sierra...
Thank you, Sierra, for your comments. Coming from a high plains ranching academic, your views are not what main street America has read before, and my readers have learned from you. I admire your knowledge and the care you take with it.
Reply 02/13/2015 at 10:26 AM
Deaver Traywick said...
Wonderful exchange by two researchers (one professional, one self-taught) on the nuances of a story I had only heard told in very simplistic terms. And a good reminder that much of the natural world still eludes our full understanding. I'll keep in mind Sierra's "2-1=4" example for some time.
Reply 02/15/2015 at 05:52 PM
Nolly said...
I am still pondering the #s. Thanks
Reply 02/18/2015 at 11:10 PM
Robert Dennis said...
Hi, nice blog. Kim is a friend of mine.. as to the increase at calving, in modern day times, those who run buffalo as they would have been back then, i.e., no hay in winters and just allowed tot their own resources, a cow would only calve about every other year.. so half the cows would calve per year… 100 cows would have 50 and there would be some loss in the calves to natural resources.. in the end, it doesn't matter, they almost became extinct...
Reply 02/19/2015 at 07:23 AM
Tom T Traywick said in reply to Robert Dennis...
Thanks Robert,
We haven't met but I have heard your CD in Kim's pickup, and I did a blog post about horse teams feeding hay that refers to you and Buck Buckles and Kim.
And I enjoy following your blog.
Reply 02/04/2017 at 10:59 AM
Tom T Traywick said...
I noticed last night that there was a flurry of activity on this blog and backtracked it to Shiloh Rifle Forums: “Identifying the cause of the catastrophic bison die-off 1870-1882?”
http://www.shilohrifle.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=24904
There are a several dozen thoughtful posts to the discussion.
I recommend it.
Reply 05/10/2017 at 09:44 PM
Steven R. Evans said...
Enjoyed reading the Bison bit. I have done extensive research on the Nez Perce Indians and live on the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho. I wrote one history book, The Voice of the Old Wolf, and co-wrote, with Allen Pinkham, former tribal Chairman, Lewis and Clark Among the Nez Perces. I taught tribal history for twenty years at Lewis-Clark State College. One thing I found is that the Nez Perces complained that game was on the decline in the mid 1850's and complained about that at the proceedings of the 1855 Walla-Walla treaty negotiations. The Indian women, as you noted, preferred summer killed cow buffalo. The meat was better and the hides easier to handle. I have examined closely two different old-time buffalo hide tipis and there is not a whole hide in the cover. It is instead a mosaic of half and quarter hides sewn together. My wife is tribal and we have made perhaps a thousand tipis in the last thirty-five years and all were made of canvas. A sixteen footer weighs about thirty five lbs. and I weighed the buffalo hide tipis and they both weighed in at around seventy pounds each. We thought they would be heavier but the summer-killed cow hides kept the weight down. - Steven R. Evans, Lapwai, Idaho