Denver, Colorado maintains two bison herds descended from the last wild North American bison. There were as few as 18 bison left in Colorado at the beginning of the 1900s. Thankfully, the conservation project has been a success and Denver has been transferring bison to Native American tribes to start additional herds. The herds are just about 30 minutes from downtown if you ever visit.
They really are majestic creatures. (albeit a bit grumpy)
If anyone in the US hasn't seen one in person, I'd recommend making the effort. Much different experience than simply seeing a picture, especially if it's on open range like Yellowstone National Park.
They're huge (~10' long, 6' tall). They're heavy (~1700 lbs). They're fast (~40mph, in the locomotive, once-they-get-1700lbs-going sense).
And they fit perfectly in scale with the plains.
(Disclaimer: Don't approach them, as they generally don't like that. And you don't want one angry at you)
They have this spring thing, where you see them wind up for half a second and then they do something far more agile (accelerate, jump, etc.) than you'd expect... for something that weighs that much.
Will never forget meeting a group on a trail, stepping off behind a (SUV-sized) boulder, then feeling them spook a bit and in 2 seconds go from a leisurely walking to thundering trot. Earth shaking with them just in a mild hurry! Not even full speed!
But they're built to outfight anything smaller than them and outrun anything bigger than them, so I guess they're as strong/fast as they need to be.
It doesn't mean they lift their entire body up 6 ft. They just have to be high enough to clear the belly while lifting their legs up. Just like steeplechase runners do. High jumpers never have their center of gravity above the bar, they just kinda fold themselves over it.
I read this and thought surely the center of gravity still has to pass over the bar. But right you are, the center of gravity can pass below the bar since it's just the average point of the mass. Cool!
Fermilab has had a herd on the grounds since the beginning. Used to be that visitors could get pretty close (but still behind the fence), but I haven't visited in many years.
While of course the bison there are fine, this reminds me of the National Lampoon's joke newspaper from Dacron, Ohio. One running joke there was an effort by environmentalists to protect the Dacron Nine-eyed Trout, which was only found near Dacron's nuclear power plant.
My uncle worked at Fermilab. The joke there was that the bison were the ultimate problem detectors. "If we look out at the ring and the bison are all dead, then we really have a problem".
John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossing is an incredible story about buffalo hunters. If half of it is true it’s tragic. The sheer numbers; the depth of destruction for the profit of a hide. It boggles the mind that we did this.
A general rule, when you find a "beautiful work", it usually is trying to sell you a story that seriously lacks in historical detail. There are exceptions, but they are rare.
Regarding bison, it's likely that the final blow was not from overhunting, but from habitat encroachment that constrained their migratory patterns. This in turn started an epidemic of tick-borne disease, that resulted in a total collapse of their population within just 2 years (1881-1883).
Fiction requires a suspension of disbelief- that a certain person is real, or that certain things have happened, etc.
Good fiction asks its audience to accept things that don't require special knowledge. Bad (historical) fiction presents false things in such a way that the audience accepts them without realizing that is is part of the fictional narrative, because they lack the specialized knowledge to understand when artistic liberties have been taken.
Since the audience is already in a state of suspended disbelief, they aren't prepared to be skeptical of what is presented as real but is not.
I have a similar quibble with American Gods. Several times I've seen people parrot ideas from the story that sounded like one of many historical facts but were actually very wrong, such as the background of Easter.
Edit: I may have been overly harsh with the use of the word "Bad". They're good stories in their own rights, but this particular bone has been stuck in my craw for a long time.
The situation with bison in the US was deeply unnatural when you think about it. Bison are large herbivores, that can reproduce fairly quickly, and that don't have any consistent predators.
Nothing in the US can hunt them successfully and consistently. A wolf pack can take down a grown bison, but it's risky for them, and the wolf population was nowhere large enough to control the bison population numbers. Cougars and coyotes can prey on calves, but not on healthy grown bison.
Unnatural? Not sure I understand the use of the term here. They were here for several hundred thousand years so there were only natural forces at work. There must have been some kind of balance if they thrived for that long. At the very least food availability would have limited their numbers in some way. It isn't dissimilar to the situation with bears.
Just guessing, but I would think there would have been a lot of cougars eating a lot of calves. That would also have some restraining impact on the population.
> They were here for several hundred thousand years so there were only natural forces at work.
Only if you include Native Americans in the "natural" forces. They were responsible for the disappearance of the local megafauna.
> At the very least food availability would have limited their numbers in some way.
Or maybe periodic population collapses due to disease.
> It isn't dissimilar to the situation with bears.
Grizzly bears have one of the slowest reproduction rates, though. They simply won't have cubs if there isn't enough food. In Africa, it's a similar story with elephants, nothing can hunt them consistently, but they reproduce so slowly that they can't really overpopulate the area.
I think you're missing the fact that Native Americans were here in number for thousands of year before Europeans. The herds were a result of North America before the Columbian exchange. Not a result of a pristine wilderness with only "natural forces at work"
When it comes to buffalo, in Canada at least, the term “mismanagement” is the most appropriate of all three.
For Plains indigenous people, the buffalo were a massive part of their culture, spirituality and history. Hundreds of generations had lived alongside the buffalo herds and become a part of their life cycle. Their hunts, while truly massive, participated in the life cycle and ensured stable herds.
When european settlers came, they had absolutely no understanding of that life cycle so their hunts were in opposition. Then as they started importing european land ownership and putting up fences, the ecosystem collapsed. They hadn’t followed the herds for generations so really didn’t know how much land a herd actually needed to sustain itself.
It was really the wrong hunting even more so than over hunting. Early communities had names like “Pile of Bones” that were indicative of the scale of earlier hunts.
From my understanding, it was more intentional than mindless.
The article suggests that the extermination of the bison went hand in hand with the destruction of aboriginal societies. The nomadic bison were also problematic for expansion, affecting both agriculture and the railway. This was not a case of, "oh, there's money to be made off of their hides. Whoops! Where did all of the bison go."
The reason why so many people take a stance against certain types of development goes well beyond unintentional consequences. It is because many of those consequences were intended to serve a particular agenda.
> This was not a case of, "oh, there's money to be made off of their hides. Whoops! Where did all of the bison go."
This actually was exactly the case. The bison population collapsed within just _two_ years (1881-1883). In 1883 hunters were waiting for the bison that never came.
As for railroads, the first trans-continental railroad was finished in 1869, and smaller railroads existed before that.
It has always been my understanding that the near extermination of the American buffalo never had to do with over hunting.
Every bit of industry during that era was centered around westward expansion. The biggest deterrent to expansion was the presence of American Indians (literally in the form of attack or sabotage of the transcontinental railroad construction, or psychological discouragement of settlers).
There’s no delicate way to put it: exterminating buffalo was the safest, most cost-effective way to mitigate the American Indian threat against westward expansion.
Since American Indian tribes weren’t agriculturally equipped to sustain themselves, especially through winters, reduction of buffalo along the overland expansion routes practically guaranteed the reduction of attacks against settlers and railroad workers.
Hiring people to shoot buffalo was orders of magnitude easier and cheaper (and safer) than hiring and maintaining an army to fight Indians.
Plus a Buffalo heards natural response to threat is either to run, or form a tight circle (you could say _that_ adaptation never counted on the invention of gunpowder).
All that is to say, extinction of the buffalo was not the consequence of insatiable bloodlust for killing animals, as much as it was an objective in order to achieve unencumbered expansion and sustain the economic machine that was fueling it.
Also recommend Francis Parkman's, "Oregon Trail", such a life of adventure combined with the ability to turn out sublime prose. A better record of the time than any video footage could ever have achieved.
It was a deliberate act of genocide not just for profit. Read Empire of the Summer Moon to learn about why the Middle of North America was largely unsettled by Europeans for 350 years.
I mean sure. Or you can look up a really interesting feature of American history that is not widely known. The Comanche Empire commanded an incredible amount of space with only 10s of thousands of people.
The numbers don't seem large at all compared to how many animals we slaughter per year for meat. Just like the buffalo hide, we don't need that meat to survive, it's a luxury.
Ted Turner (of CNN/Turner Broadcasting/blood feud with George Steinbrenner fame) has also been doing this for decades[1], with bringing back bison as a primary focus. He’s one of the largest private landowners in America with a couple of million acres and tens of thousands of bison.
Something about "we need your money to keep northeast Montana empty" seems fishy. I've seen a fair amount of the northern great plains, and they seem to be empty already.
Context: I grew up in this area and have hunted there my whole life. The land is very much so not "empty" -- sure, there aren't condos, but it is owned by people and those people get economic gain from it predominantly through grazing cattle and somewhat agriculture. You could not just release Bison anywhere in this country without extreme uproar from the people who see them as in direct competition with their livelihood. And that's not even mentioning the other complex components of the prairie ecosystem that are being undermined (and in this case, restored).
That's why they are buying ranches that are currently utilizing the land for the purpose of cattle grazing and turning them back into wild prairie (and reintroducing bison).
My personal opinion is that it's incredibly cool that they're taking a very small piece of the great plains and letting it just be empty in the way that it used to be.
Based on the language used, it was obvious to me that the part in quotes was a rhetorical paraphrase. It may not be correct use of quotation marks according to a style guide, but such use of double quotes to highlight a rhetorical paraphrase is in common vernacular use.
I’m curious why you feel “I’ve driven through there” qualifies you to dismiss the efforts of people working in the open, for very little money, to restore certain classes of ecosystems.
“Blind man doesn’t want to pay for printed newspaper.” So don’t. But you could educate yourself and then you could see.
If there's a fence between empty land and empty land that disrupts migration patterns, money is needed to buy a tiny corridor of land so that wildlife can migrate. Unlike programmers, wild animals don't live a sedentary lifestyle.
What a long article to explain what could have been summarized in one phrase:
"Kill every buffalo you can. Every dead buffalo is a dead Indian"
That was the de-facto policy of the US on the American bison.
An explicit policy of animal extermination to achieve human extermination. A policy that would later inspire the most horrible events of the 20th century.
The reason you don't know many Native Americans today, and most people you know either come from Europe, Africa or Asia but not here.
Everything else is revisionism, obfuscation, dillution of important events in oceans of irrelevant text, and waste of time.
Bisons were killed and their bones were processed into fertilizer.
I’m surprised more people don’t know about this - the US government promoted great hunting expeditions for this very goal. That said, 90% of native people died from diseases before any of this happened.
This view is extremely well-documented, by literally every historical record, although the poster got the quote slightly wrong - it's "every buffalo dead is an Indian gone".
A lot lot lot more.
It’s sad you think you can reduce complex history to two sentences and sad you don’t think correlations should be inspected for validity.
You don’t think disease, land stealing, or war should be part of the picture?
You're not talking about it. You're using a classic deflection / distraction tactic.
You also don't seem to be aware that history is not absolute. In this case, there are *at least* three lens: the genociders, the genocidees, and the buffalo / bison.
You seem to be stuck on defending the genociders by demanding justification or some sort of analysis. But we know exactly what happened. We know why.
I'm afraid your reading comprehension needs work.
My whole point is you seems to be reducing the genocide to a single event "buffalo killing". Whereas I'm trying to say there are MANY different genocidal impacts on the Native Americans.
By the time the Americans had a program to slaughter the bison to get rid of the natives, many estimate the Native Americans had already lost 90% of their numbers.
I'm not saying there was no genocide, I'm saying it was going on long before buffalo killing was used as a tool for it.
And when someone asks for documentation (where this dispute started), it's unreasonable to claim "two things don't exist, therefor one caused the other". By the same logic I could say "the Tasmanian devil doesn't exist and Indians don't exist, therefore killing the Tasmanian devil was used to kill the Indians." what an absurd form of logic. Just because something is true, doesn't mean your logic or justification for it are valid or educating for others.
Have you ever wondered why the European North American settlers didn’t have a unified indigenous empire to contend with, such as could be found in Central and South America? (Ie Incan or Aztec).
I would posit that it was because the Hunter/raider/gatherer societies could not sustain growth beyond a certain point. For whatever reason, the North American indigenous tribes would not cross a threshold of government and infrastructure that is required to eliminate their reliance on raiding (the perpetual changing hands of limited refined resources), and game hunting (ie lack of livestock domestication and food storage that allow for permanent settlements, growth).
What the Europeans did to the Indians was as horrendous in execution as it was consequential to the decisions those tribes made during the hundreds of years leading up to the arrival of the Europeans.
Who knows what may had been if Columbus had been confronted with a unified indigenous empire with permanent settlements and defensive emplacements? Instead he found desperate tribes of marauding Indians, reliant on a singular food source and very willing to accept short term alliances for short term infighting advantages.
Its hardly a thing, IMO, for a descendant many generations removed to feel guilty over…let alone pay penance for.
That is correct, and I feel like it supports my point..in both of those examples the incumbent empire was weakened by infighting—-a non unified front.
I’m not as steeped on the Aztecs as I am the Incas, but Pizarro and Diego de Amargo arrived as conquerors in a company whose singular purpose was conquest. They were encircled and outnumbered 500 to 1 in what was effectively a kill box. Technology and horses gave them the upper hand, but the domino which instituted the downfall of the Incan empire is that the emperor himself was present _inside_ the killbox. Pride goeth before the fall. Which allowed Pizarro to charge through his soldiers and literally seize him from his royal litter…I don’t think this exception disproves that a unified front with defensive emplacements could have withstood a few hundred horse borne conquerors.
I’m Canadian and Canada is part of the continent you’re talking about. I can’t go anywhere without running into indigenous people I know personally. Canada’s program of ethnic cleansing was several levels deeper than the United States but indigenous people are all over. Demographics suggest they will be the majority in my province before I die.
The US experience does not speak for the entire continent.
You seem to be... bragging about? or at least seeking recognition for? your country's policy of forced assimilation vs. another country's policy of forced removal.
Aside from being a deeply weird thing to say, there's no buffalo left in either case.
This is not true as Native American can mean many things, and the fossil record for the Americas is richer in South America than it is North America, some of which may be in part due to the Smithsonian coverup.
The Paiute tribes, and others, have stories about the long war they fought against the Si-Te-Cah which were giant red-headed cannibals, and there are samples from that war that still exist. The Choctaw similarly have stories of their wars against the Nahullo (white giants), similarly, that were cannibals, as do many other tribes.
There have been many Smithsonian coverups of the well-reported giant findings https://grahamhancock.com/dewhurstr1/ and some of the skeletons are both the more ancient Giant Native American mound peoples (non-caucasian), and the described caucasian skulls.
South America is replete with giant skulls and skeletons, some of which have characteristics fundamentally different from normal human skulls and are not merely headboarded infants. Many of these skulls have some similarities to the Mound people's giant skulls found in North America.
Many of the skulls and DNA they've found are not simply North Asian, Eastern Asian and Southern Asian, but also show other groups history in the Americas too, such as the Australo-Melanesian findings
A plug for Steve Rinella's excellent book, "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon".[0]
He recounts his grueling trip in the Copper River Basin in Alaska on a hunt for a bison, and every other chapter continues a parallel telling of the history of the species in North America, particularly the archaeological evidence of prehistoric hunting of the animal, from large kill sites to fascinating sites like the Mesa site in northern Alaska[1] linking arctic cultures to Paleoindians in midcontinent.
It's a really enjoyable book, and he narrates the audio book.
If you’re interested in the history of the conservation, check out this entry on how Hornaday became a conservationist [1] and his subsequent conservation efforts. [2] Stumbled on it about a month back and thought it was pretty cool.
For some reason a lot of documentaries or books on bison neglect to mention that these herd animals had a presence in ever US state except Hawaii. Have not seen this new film, maybe this is mentioned there.
Apparently beavers aren't as good a Ken Burns story. Mostly killed to make beaver hats for Europeans rather than just wasted, it's not a purely American story, plus you can't easily see them from your car.
More info, pictures, and video here: https://www.denvergov.org/Government/Agencies-Departments-Of...