Millions Of Bison Once Roamed The Great Plains. So What Happened?

Speaker 1: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Nathan Connolly: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians along with our colleagues, Ed Ayers and Joanne Freeman. Each week, we explore a topic in American history.

Brian Balogh: Last month, youth climate activist, Greta Thunberg, gave an impassioned speech at the United Nations Climate Summit. During the speech, she admonished world leaders for their unwillingness to take meaningful action against climate change.

Greta Thunberg: You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?

Nathan Connolly: But this is hardly the first time the world has faced the prospect of mass extinction. In the beginning of the 20th century, America’s flora and fauna were seriously threatened by urban encroachment and over-hunting. One animal at the center of this struggle was the bison.

Andrew Isenberg: By the end of the 19th century, once various environmental factors and human hunters had done their work there were fewer than a thousand bison left in North America.

Brian Balogh: That’s Andrew Isenberg. He specializes in environmental history and has studied how the bison went from an animal in excess to near extinction in the 19th century. He says at two point in the early 1800s, there were tens of millions of bison roaming America’s Great Plains.

Andrew Isenberg: Some years it may have been above 30 million and then they may have overgrazed the range and then the number would crash. The number of bison is always fluctuating and going up and down, that 30 million or 24, 25 million is probably much closer to the maximum number that the Great Plains could sustain.

Nathan Connolly: So how did an animal which grazed the western grasslands in its millions reach the brink of extinction in under a hundred years? What’s the current state of the bison? Today you can find bison protected on animal preserves in the West and packaged for consumption on the shelves of grocery stores. In 2016, President Obama named the bison America’s first national mammal. So what exactly does the animal represent to people? And how has the bison population changed with the times?

Brian Balogh: In celebration of World Animal Day, we’re going to explore the history of the bison in the United States. We’ll hear more from Andrew Isenberg on what caused the bison’s destruction in the 19th century and why some today see it as a symbol of a bygone American frontier.

Nathan Connolly: You’ll find out how one man is working to restore buffalo for the Eastern Shoshone tribe at Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

Brian Balogh: And you’ll learn about the surprising and troubling connection between bison preservation and Adolf Hitler.

Brian Balogh: Let’s start our story back in the 1800s when millions of bison roamed the Great Plains and as Andrew Isenberg says, “Diverse groups of Native Americans like the Lakota and Cheyenne tribes were hunting them.”

Andrew Isenberg: If you look at the number of Natives and you look at the pressure they’re putting on the bison, in a good year the number of bison that they’re consuming for food and for hides, for their lodges and for robes to keep themselves warm, the robe is the winter skin of the bison with the hair still attached, all of that was well within the capacity of the bison to sustain.

Brian Balogh: But in the 1860s, everything changed with the influx of white hunters in the Great Plains. “In a short amount of time,” Isenberg says, “these hunters delivered a devastating blow to the bison population.”

Andrew Isenberg: What happens in the 1860s, and really after the Civil War, it’s a kind of spasm of industrial expansion on the part of the United States as the US lurches into the Great Plains. So there are very powerful, accurate rifles that had been developed during the Civil War. In the late 1860s, railroads start reaching out into the Great Plains. All of these things kind of conspired to have a few thousand white hide hunters move first into the Southern Great Plains and then they moved farther north.

Andrew Isenberg: They delivered the coup de grace to the bison. The Native hunting had chipped away at the bison population over several decades. Within about 10 or 15 years, these white hide hunters did away with about 12 to 15 million bison. Though we don’t necessarily think about this now, tanning and leather was, I think, the fifth largest industry in the United States in the middle of the 19th century or end of the 19th century. There’s an extraordinary demand for this. So bison leather was simply just incorporated into this expanding demand.

Andrew Isenberg: As it turned out, bison leather is highly elastic, so a lot of it wound up as belting for industrial machinery, which is another sense in which this is a kind of industrial consumption of the bison.

Brian Balogh: Now, there has been speculation that the Federal Government actively supported the destruction of the bison by white hunters. Is that the case?

Andrew Isenberg: Yes. I think we have to phrase this very carefully. Some people have said that the Army went out and shot bison in order to deny their use to Indians, so that Natives would have to submit to the reservation system. In fact, what did happen is that there were too few bison left for Natives to sustain themselves and they had to submit to the reservation system. The Army welcomed this because the Army was not having a lot of success when they were fighting Natives directly. They were beaten rather badly a couple times in 1876 by the Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho.

Andrew Isenberg: But what’s not true is that the Army went out and did this directly. In fact, what happened was is it was private hunters who did the work of killing off the bison. The Army and the Department of the Interior saw what was happening and applauded what was happening, but they didn’t direct it. So the way I put it is that the Federal Government commended the work of these hunters, but it didn’t command them.

Brian Balogh: Right. It probably could have put a stop to it, but-

Andrew Isenberg: It absolutely could have put a stop to it. There were a couple of bills that were introduced into Congress in the 1870s that would have forbade the hunting of bison in federal territories. The people who were sponsoring this legislation were inspired by the SPCA, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was founded right after the Civil War and primarily had as its mission kind treatment of pets and domestic livestock. This was the SPCA’s first and perhaps maybe their only effort to extend their mission to a wild animal.

Andrew Isenberg: The people who were in favor of this legislation in Congress, I remember reading in the debates in Congress, what one of them said is that, “A man who will kill a bison is someone who would shoot down his mother’s cow in the barnyard.” Really sort of adopting that SPCA rhetoric.

Brian Balogh: Yes. There are those who’ve critiqued your interpretation of the decline of bison for placing too much blame on Native Americans. I wanted to get your response to that.

Andrew Isenberg: Well, I don’t think that anyone who’s read the book, Destruction of the Bison, with an open mind would think that I let white hide hunters off the hook. I make it very clear that they were the ones who delivered the coup de grace to the bison. I think it’s one thing to say that Native groups who had kind of improvised a new resource strategy around hunting bison from horseback and over the course of 80 years or so from beginning around the 1770s and 1780s, chipped away at the bison population in concert with environmental factors over which they had no control, like the fact that the weather began to get warmer in the Great Plains starting in the 1850s and that those patchy droughts throughout the Great Plains were kind of chipping away at the bison population as well.

Andrew Isenberg: To me, that kind of use of the bison where they may have been overusing the bison in seasons where there was not enough rainfall to support the bison population is very different from this industrial surge into the Great Plains in the 1860s and 1870s that did away with 12 or 15 million bison very quickly. For instance, we don’t know whether Natives left to themselves might not have reconfigured their use of the bison having realized that in some seasons we may be killing more than can be sustained. We need to pull back on this. We don’t know because they weren’t given the chance to figure that out. So to me, they’re very different things.

Brian Balogh: Often we don’t miss something until it’s gone and disappearing. Was that the case with the precipitous decline of the bison? What I’m getting at here, Andrew, is trying to understand the move to preserve the bison.

Andrew Isenberg: Yeah. There’s a very interesting pivot or slalom on the part of a lot of white Americans about the bison. It was a species that was thought of as wild, as the resource of the Natives, as an animal that would interfere with farming and ranching in the Great Plains. So a lot of people applauded the destruction of the bison in the 1870s.

Brian Balogh: So they were seen as pests?

Andrew Isenberg: Yeah. It was a way of opening up the Great Plains. And then as soon as Natives were on reservations and no longer presented the same threat to white settlement of the West, then there were a number of people who became nostalgic about the bison and sought to preserve it from extinction. These people included Teddy Roosevelt, who was very much about a kind of frontier, masculine notion of the West and how that sort of experience of the West was good for all Americans, William Hornaday who ran the Bronx Zoo, also some pretty prominent people, JP Morgan among them. All of them got together and founded the American Bison Society in 1905.

Andrew Isenberg: The idea was to preserve the bison from extinction. What they did was they rounded up the bison and they collected a few, really fewer than a hundred, and they put them on some very small preserves. They installed these bison on those preserves and then declared that they had done their job because they essentially created them as tourist attractions. People could go see bison, experience the West, and then return to cities or return to the East having tasted for flavor of the frontier.

Brian Balogh: What do you make of turning the bison into a symbol of Western masculinity when clearly that Western masculinity had almost led the bison to become extinct?

Andrew Isenberg: Right. Well, there’s obviously a lot of irony to that. I think one of the things we need to think about is that this kind of preservation happened within the cultural context of the late 19th and early 20th century. Elites such as Teddy Roosevelt had an overweening concern with what they saw as the debilitating and feminizing effects of citified, cosmopolitan easy living. So they really were advocating this kind of move to get back into the outdoors and experience strenuous living in the West, the kind of living that bison hunters had had, they imagined, in the 1870s and 1880s.

Andrew Isenberg: So going to national parks or going to a bison preserve and at least seeing these kinds of animals, even if you weren’t hunting them, although there was continued hunting of bison going on at private ranches. That would give you this kind of taste of the frontier. The bison were preserved in a peculiar kind of way. They no longer had free range throughout the West. They were preserved in very small little herds. Those herds were so small, in fact, that there was not enough genetic diversity. So there were some genetic anomalies that began to occur after a few generations of these small herds on these tourist preserves.

Andrew Isenberg: That’s not something that the American Bison Society necessarily understood. In fact, to the contrary, they thought that these few bison that had survived the slaughter of the 19th century must be the fittest of the species, so it’d be okay to start over with them in these preserves.

Brian Balogh: So how many bison are there today?

Andrew Isenberg: Well, there’s somewhere between half a million and a million bison in the United States. The overwhelming majority of them are on ranches and they are raised for slaughter. There are only about 10 or 15,000 bison on public preserves. That gets to the weird status of bison in the United States, that they are animals you can go see at a zoo or in the public preserve, and you can also go to a supermarket and buy a bison steak. That’s a kind of strange position to be in. What I find interesting about that is that we get upset about the Yellowstone bison being killed because we’ve kind of thought of the bison as, though it wasn’t when this began, our national mammal but it always unofficially was a symbol of something.

Andrew Isenberg: But we don’t get upset at all at the large number of bison that are slaughtered every day in abattoirs in order to provide meat for restaurants and supermarkets. So they’re biologically exactly the same animal, but one of them on a public preserve we’ve decided is special and the other one on a private ranch we don’t think is special.

Brian Balogh: Andrew Isenberg is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American History at the University of Kansas. He’s also the author of the book, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History 1750-1920.