We’ve been buffaloed!

I’ve heard it over and over, and I’m sure you have too.  Those who repeat it most often use it to support their contention that Native Americans were natural people who purposely lived with the environment, doing no harm and living as one with nature.

Somewhere in the argument comes the statement that Europeans came along and ruined that perfect balance in the new world, unbalancing the environment and driving buffalo to the brink of extinction.

The problem is, like a herd of buffalo, that reasoning contains a generous amount of bull.

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We can argue about whether white hunters were solely responsible for the vast reductions in animal numbers in the U.S. or not, but the answer is much more complicated than it might appear if one buys popular “knowledge”. 

The argument is that the Native Americans lived a vastly superior way of life and that white people were basically evil.

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So let’s talk about the bison, known by most of us as the American buffalo or just buffalo.  Even accepting that there was way too much waste by the predominantly white “civilized” invaders, a lot of those animals were killed to feed and clothe people. 

Anyone who has ever eaten the flesh of a bison knows how lean and delicious it is.  I wish it was more commonly available around here.  I like it better than beef, and I LOVE beef.

But there were other uses the bison was put to…and killed for.

During the early stages of the industrial age there developed a need.  Much of the machinery was belt-driven.  Guess what was found to make strong, flexible belts: bull bison skins.

Also, in those days when many people traveled in horse-drawn wagons, you can imagine how cold it could get with virtually no way to heat the thing.  Buffalo robes, with their thick wooly hair, were ideal for throwing over the lap and/or pulling around the shoulders to keep passengers from freezing various important body parts.

Of course some of the reasons were more nefarious than just killing them because they tasted good and their skins were warmer than those of cattle.

There were other financial reasons.  Railroads were needed to help move goods and supplies west, and for transporting things produced by the settlers to markets in the east.  Even the biggest train stood a risk of being derailed if it ran into a herd of bison weighing a ton or more apiece.  Can you imagine the time and expense involved in lifting an engine and several cars back onto the track?  And don’t forget the expense of repairing them either.

So, the owners and investors in the railroads encouraged the shooting of bison.  They quickly found that they could charge “sportsmen” a fee to ride the train and shoot from the safety of the railroad cars.  Think of it as something similar to a video game, only with permanent results.

After the killing, the skeletons of the many bison that were left to bleach on the plains were found to be easily made into great fertilizer.  There was soon an industry which did just that.  You may have seen pictures of the huge piles of bison bones when you studied history in school.  Why do you think someone went to all the trouble to pile all those heavy things up?  Yep, they were shipped off to a factory where they would be ground into fertilizer, to aid in the production of food for people and livestock.

Bison were also killed off to make room for cattle. 

Wild buffalo were just that, wild.  Bulls were not afraid to attack humans, even when the people were riding horses or wagons. They were even known to attack trains!  They were tough to herd as they would run off en mass or attack rather than walking quietly like domestic cattle.

Although some ranchers have since found ways to raise bison for meat, at that time cattle had been domesticated for a long time and were much easier to raise profitably than bison were, and with less risk to the rancher.

Even worse, from today’s perspective, the huge herds of bison were killed because they were the basis of life for the plains Indian.  The less buffalo there were, the harder it was for the Native Americans to survive, and the easier it was to “tame” them.  Tame sounds nicer than conquer doesn’t it?

No, not to me either.

Anyway, even though some of the reasons are more justifiable than others, white invaders were certainly responsible for the final push toward the extinction of the great herds of the big woolies.

Native Americans historically did a much better job of sustainably utilizing bison populations, right?

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So, OK, I just listed a few of the reasons the bison herds were reduced nearly to extinction.  Native Americans didn’t do that, right?  I mean, they only killed them to eat, and then they used every part of every animal.  Also, they only killed what they actually needed.

I’ve seen that argument taken as far as even listing the uses Native American put their bison prey to.

Of course, they ate all the meat, fat, and organs, even the bone marrow.  What couldn’t be cooked and eaten immediately was dried and made into jerky or mixed with dried berries and seeds and pounded into pemmican, which could then be stored and eaten later.  Bones were made into tools, such as arrowheads or spear points or hoes for digging/gardening, or needles for sewing or pipes for smoking.  The stomach, intestines, and bladder were used for bags and other containers.  Skins made clothing and material for tents, heads for drums, bindings, boats, etc.  Tendons were used for bowstrings, to tie arrowheads to shafts, and similar things.

Those are established facts, but there’s a problem with that.  Let’s talk about sustainable harvest.

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In movies like, “Dances with Wolves,” we see the Indians riding their horses alongside stampeding bison, shooting them down with arrows or guns, and stopping when they have the number they actually need.

While that did happen, it wasn’t the only way bison were harvested.  It wasn’t even the first choice if certain other options were available.  Think about it.  Have you ever ridden a horse at full run?  It’s a lot of fun, right?  Now imagine that your flying steed is suddenly hit in the side by an animal twice its size, and that animal has horns fully capable of disemboweling it and you.

The rider had to maintain control of his horse as it dodged for safety, while hanging on to his bow and arrows or rifle, and holding on to keep from being thrown to the ground in the middle of that stampeding herd.

I’ll bet a lot of Native Americans were killed or permanently injured during horseback buffalo hunts.

But the Indians knew a safer way for them to earn their bison meat.  They ran them off a cliff…the whole herd, bulls, cows, and even little, bitty, calves.  The native hunters would find a cliff high enough to be reasonably expected to incapacitate buffalo that ran off it, then they would chase the bison with fire, on horseback, or even on foot, toward that precipice.

I’m not positive what natives historically called them, but modern researchers call them buffalo jumps.

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The Vore Buffalo Jump in Crook County, Wyoming is a sinkhole that, according to archeologists, was used for only about 300 years.  Those scientists have thus far excavated about five percent of the site and removed approximately ten tons of bison bones.  They estimate the site contains the remains of 20,000 buffalo.

It’s hard to come up with an average weight for buffaloes but, after research and admittedly imprecise mathematical reasoning, 1300 pounds gives a usable number for each one.  20,000 buffalo would be 26,000,000 pounds live weight, yielding about 8,580,000 pounds of meat, along with the accompanying bones, organs, etc.  That gives about 28,000 pounds per year for each and every one of those 300 years.

Now, while modern Americans average about half-a-pound of meat per day, natives probably ate less, but let’s go with the half-pound figure since we have it.  28,000 divided by 365 equals about 77 pounds per day, enough to feed 154 people every day.  OK, not too bad. 

As usual, there’s more to the equation.  For one thing, the hunters and their tribe had to butcher the animals killed and preserve them for use throughout the year.  It could easily take a full day for several people to butcher one animal, then it still had to be preserved.  Preservation meant basically drying or smoking.  Given changes in the weather, that could take a lot of time, plus the meat had to stay fresh until the processors could get around to it.  We’re talking thousands of pounds of meat all needing to be preserved all at the same time.

Many animals were decayed beyond use before the natives could even get around to them.

Needless to say, there was a LOT of waste.

Speaking of waste, many, if not most of the bison that ran off the cliff would not be instantly killed.  If the cliff was high enough to ensure a quick kill, it was high enough to do serious destruction of meat, so a balance had to be made between high enough to incapacitate and low enough to minimize damage to the food.  Also, after the first few animals hit bottom, others falling would land on them, giving a bit softer (less destructive) landing than on rocks.  Accounts tell of many injured bison bellowing in pain as they tried to get away.  Many did escape, only to wander off and die.

Think I’m exaggerating?

On Wednesday, May 29, 1805, Meriwether Lewis, in his journal of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, said, “Today we passed on the (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcases of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immence pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcases they created a most horrid stench.  In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke…”

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I’ve said all this, not to justify what the white man did to the vast herds of bison that still roamed the plains when they arrived.  Nope, it’s indefensible from a biological point of view.  Nor am I trying to denigrate the Native Americans’ way of life.  Nope, I would have loved to live wild and free like the American Indians, except for the high incidence of infant death, starvation, intertribal wars, and the fact that their way of life was doomed by the arrival of Europeans.  I’ve pointed these things out to illustrate that there really are two sides to every discussion.

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The number of bison living in North America was about 60 million in the late 18th century and reached a low of about 541 animals by 1889.  There are now about 500,000.  Roughly 15,000 are considered wild, free-range, bison, not confined by fencing.

By the way, I’m really glad big wooly is still around.

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