Historians Revisit Slaughter on the Plains

November 16, 1999
New York Times
Historians Revisit Slaughter on the Plains

By JIM ROBBINS
MISSOULA, Mont. -- The wanton slaughter of millions of bison in the 19th century by white hide hunters, abetted by a military intent on subjugating Indians, is probably the most famous conservation horror story in United States history.
The problem with this tale, a growing number of scholars and historians say, is that it is not true. As portrayed in a number of new books, the real story of the decline of the buffalo involves a significant change in climate, competition for forage and cattle-borne disease. Another major factor, the authors say, were Indian tribes, empowered by the horse and gun and driven to hunt buffaloes for the profits that came from hides and meat.
"What most people don't consider in their 'Dances With Wolves' version of history is that Indians were involved in the market," said Dr. Dan Flores, the A.B. Hammond professor of Western history at the University of Montana. "They were cashing in on buffalo in the 1840s as their principal entree into the market economy, and very few species are able to survive when they become a commodity."
White hunters who killed buffaloes by the millions in the 1870s and 1880s played a major role in the demise, said Flores, but only as the coup de grace. "The hide hunters are not off the hook," he said. "They share the burden of the final mop-up. But without their involvement, the buffalo would probably have only lasted another 30 years." That is because their numbers had been so greatly reduced by the other factors.
The buffalo studies are part of a continuing debate about the role of Indians in Western history. In "The Ecological Indian" (W.W. Norton, 1999), for example, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, argues against the romantic image of the Indian as the first environmentalist. When Indians had had the means and the motive, he says, they abused nature for profit.
Flores, whose work on buffalo has appeared in The Journal of American History and elsewhere, is writing a book on bison under contract with Yale University Press. And Dr. Drew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, has a book called "The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920," which will be published by Cambridge University Press in April.
Not everyone subscribes to the new wave. Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, finds the revisionism preposterous. "It's nonsense," he said. "The Indians did not make any appreciable dent in buffalo numbers in the Northern Plains. It's anti-Indian stuff."
Indians were involved in the buffalo market, scholars generally agree. Their acquisition of horses and guns made buffalo hunting much easier. As steamboats started plying the Missouri River into the heart of buffalo country in the 1840s, hide hunting by the Kiowa, Blackfeet, Sioux and other Plains tribes soared.
For the first time, there was a way to haul the bulky robes back East, where they became popular as a covering during cold weather travel and for leather goods. Indians found they could trade the robes for firearms, lead balls, gunpowder, blankets, textiles, pots and pans and whiskey.
Isenberg estimates that before the 1840s, 60,000 Plains Indians were killing half a million bison a year for sustenance. After the robe trade began in the 1840s, that total went over 600,000 a year, "clearly into unsustainable range," he said.
While white hunters killed more buffaloes (their total throughout the West is estimated at four million), Flores argues that Indians concentrated their killing on buffalo cows, which had more tender meat and were much easier to skin and treat, resulting in severe damage to the herds' reproductive capacity.
Environmental factors play large roles in newer histories of the West. For example, Flores says that the study of tree rings, or dendrochronology, suggests that Indians were so effective in decimating the buffalo because climate had already weakened and diminished the herds.
From the 1500s to the mid-19th century, a period known as the little ice age, tree rings show that the climate in the West was much colder than normal. That favored the grasses buffaloes eat, and they flourished. When a long, widespread drought ended the little ice age in the mid-1800s, the grasses changed and the bison population crashed just as the tribes began market hunting.
At the same time, Flores said, buffaloes began having to compete for forage with horses that were brought by the Spaniards to North America in the 1500s and later went feral. By the 1800s, Flores estimates, two million horses were sharing the range with the buffalo.
Flores and the others also differ from their predecessors in their use of Indian sources. Many bands of Indians, for example, kept a record of events, often symbols painted on bison robes. The Northern Plains tribes kept winter counts of buffaloes on buffalo hides, while the Kiowa, in the south, kept calendars.
"The symbol for 'many buffalo,' a circle with a dot in the middle, appears numerous times from 1800 to 1840 in the Kiowa calendars," Flores said. "But after 1840 it appears only once."
Such counts are crucial to the debate over who or what killed off the bison, but all sides agree that estimates are a tricky business.
In the past, historians estimated bison numbers at 40 million to 60 million, sometimes as many as 75 million. But Flores has tried to calculate how many buffaloes the range could support by analyzing 1910 census data on cattle, and has concluded that in good years the range could hold only 20 million to 24 million.
After the little ice age, at the time of the Civil War, buffalo numbers may have been as low as 10 million to 12 million, he said.
But his calculations have been criticized by Deloria, who says that comparing fenced-in livestock with free-roaming buffaloes is an inappropriate comparison.
Dr. Calvin Luther Martin, who taught history at Rutgers and lived with Eskimos for two years on the Alaskan tundra, also disagrees. Martin, the author of a new book on Indian life, "The Way of the Human Being" (Yale University Press), argues that to judge Indians by contemporary environmental standards "is patent foolishness."
The Indians were caught between two different worlds and two different realities, Martin said. "They don't translate into each other," he said, adding that Indians had no concept of being wasteful.
And the claim that competition with horses would have affected the buffalo has also been criticized by Dr. Valerius Geist, an ecologist who is an emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Geist, author of "Buffalo Nation: The History and Legend of the North American Bison," noted that bison had evolved on the prairie with other large mammals. "Flores is a historian playing ecologist," Geist said.
Finally, the new bison scholarship also casts doubt on another major tenet of buffalo history: that the destruction of the herds was a conspiracy between the United States Army and hide hunters who did the killing.
"I don't think there was a conspiracy by any means," Isenberg said. "The army was happy to see hide hunters, but they were not commanding them to kill bison."
Flores traces the notion of a conspiracy to the memoir of a Texas buffalo hunter named John R. Cook, called "The Border and the Buffalo." According to the book, the Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, the Indian fighter, urged the Texas Legislature not to pass a law that would protect the buffaloes remaining there and instead to create a bronze medal for the hunters "with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other."
Flores said he had found no record of Sheridan's speech to the legislature and believed it was apocryphal. The notion of a conspiracy, he said, has become fact through repetition.
Flores said he had recently discovered letters in which Sheridan wrote that he was concerned about the demise of the buffalo. After hearing in October 1879 about the killing of thousands of buffaloes by hide hunters near Miles City, Mont., Sheridan sent a telegram to Washington, saying, "I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the buffalo should be stopped."
Isenberg denies that the new work on the buffalo is anti-Indian.
"It's romantic to imagine Indians as always living in harmony with nature," he said. "But they are people who did many things right and who also made mistakes. If you want to see them as a real people and not a romantic notion, then you have to look with a clear eye at these kinds of things. None of us have any animus toward Indians."

Email from Valerius Geist

Yes, with my book on bison (Buffalo Nation, Voyageur Press, 1995) I landed in the midst of a dispute by voiciverous eco-historians. They, by the way, are playing ecologists, I - the ecologist - am playing historian. The circumstantial evidence suggests pretty strongly that Generals Phil Sheridan and William Thecumse Sherman did to buffalo what they had done a little earlier to Georgia, demolish same to defeat plains tribes and Lee's army, respectively. General and later President Grant, their protector and mentor watched as it all happened and refused to sign into law the buffalo protection legislation passed by congress. That's disputed by Dan Flores. He points to weather, feral mustangs and the market as the exterminators of bison. About "the market" there is no ultimate doubt; the generals knew just how to take advantage of it. Weather and mustangs as "exterminators" is - well, do not tempt me with appropriate adjectives! That's the short-fall of historians as ecologists. Bison have a very long history of successful colonization and spread dispite all the American Pleistocene horse species, and the Eurasian horses before that. Weather decomates populatioons locally, but such bounce back - unless prevented by human overkill. That native indians were in good part responsinble for the extermination of bison, is beyond question. More importantly: from 10,000 to about 7,000 BP they "shaped" the long-horned, giant bison - slowly - into short-horned dwarfs. Current bison are a "man-made species" - they are the "Cows of Manitou".
Cheers, Val Geist
PS. Buffalo Nation won three book-of-the-year awards.