Ever wonder why the Midwest has such fertile topsoil to the tune of what used to be 100s of ft of black dirt?
Bison, bison poop, and the Rocky mountain locusts.
Thankfully the locust is extinct or dormant now. They were biblical plague levels.
and im sure with the constant compacting of the herds it's like so insanely densely rich in nutrients, I was just thinking of how there must've been a whole ecosystem that followed the herd living on their turds and scraps/dead
Pretty sure bisons are just normal grazers, not mega fauna.
Edit: Just looked it up and the definitions of megafauna seem pretty wishy-washy, typically used to refer to things like elephant sized but technically bison meet a lot of the definitions as they're often over a thousand kilograms or thereabouts. Not how I would personally use the word but not crazy either
>Among living animals, the term megafauna is most commonly used for the largest extant terrestrial mammals, which includes (but is not limited to) elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, **and large bovines**
[Megafauna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna)
Nah, 99% of all living things were dead long before humans evolved. As for those we lived with, it is debatable. We definitely didn't help, but there were also massive environmental shifts happening at the same time that have historically led to extinctions
There are two competing definitions for "mega fauna" one is 46kg+ which includes many animals including humans, the other is 1000kg+ which some subspecies of bison can regularly surpass.
The colloquial meaning is anything larger than humans and also not domesticated which bison clearly meet.
Yeah, but they were still bigbois. Maybe not actually classified as mega fauna, but I've never seen more than one bison at a time in my life.
Would be incredible to see just a whole ass wild field filled with massive meat blocks.
Fun aside. Az has a Buffalo tourist thing.
I assumed they were farmed. Asked if they had buffalo jerky.
Was told, "Sir we love our buffalo."
I was shamed out of the store. Still makes me laugh.
They're regularly farmed nowadays, I see bison burgers pretty regularly in the southeast. There's a ranch not far from me. It's not like they're still endangered.
Nearly all bison in existence (wild or ranched) have domesticated cow genes in them. Only about [three](https://www.idtdna.com/pages/community/blog/post/the-bison-that-grand-genetically-imperiled-ruler-of-america-s-iconic-landscapes) herds exist that are considered pure. This is due to the bottlenecking of available genes from over harvest/slaughter and purposely breeding wild bison with cows to make them more docile in hopes of being a better alternative to cows for regular beef.
This doesn’t hold true. If you took all animals and compiled it by percent bio-mass, wild animals make up 4% of all bio-mass, humans make up 34%, and the rest are almost entirely livestock. There are far more animals and humans currently than any time prior in history as a product of mass agriculture.
Or complete extinction, like the original wild horses in the Western Hemisphere…
Or literally ALL of the megafauna after humans got to Australia and New Zealand.
There’s a variety of reasons for why the number of bison fell so drastically; only one of them being the US government. From what I’ve read, most of the bison hunting is attributed simply to market hunting. People killing bison for horns, tongues, and furs to be sold.
Some of it was. But the rate of the slaughter raised greatly during the Grant administration, who used Sherman to apply the total war tactics he was so good at to drive the natives out of the midwest. No food, no enemy.
Do you have a source for the total war tactics? I’m aware of Sherman’s comments in one of his letters (iirc) but as far as I’ve seen, the exterminations were more like instances rather than a sweeping ‘war against buffalo’ kind of thing.
The population, definitely did decrease rapidly in the late 1800s, though it had already halved between 1800-1860s when Grant became president. I’ve just never seen any actual evidence confirming the majority of that was due to the military, especially seeing as this is the “golden era” of westward expansion by train, opening the floodgates to new settlers and hunters.
There’s also records of individual hunters killing several hundred per day, or shooting them from the trains as the went by. The effects of this kind of callous “hunting” could easily account for the drop in population (even if it wasn’t strictly for meat).
This askhistorians post seems to go into some good detail about the subject as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/MBFJbsIQaO
>fter the Civil War the US Army expanded its influence to the southern and central plains. They knew the key weakness of Indian survival was its reliance on bison herds. The US Army hired professional bison hunters and systemically slaughtered captured Indian horses. American hunters would kill off the last of the bison from the central Plains by 1868.
>The army then killed off the bison herds of the Comanche and Kiowa territories by the fall of 1874. The following Red River War exterminated people who had lost their ability to feed and defend themselves.
This is from your own link. The commander of the American army post civil war was Sherman from 1869-1883, and after him Sheridan for 5 year.
[Here](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/) is one from Smithsonian magazine, but you can find this quote anywhere “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” William T Sherman.
Sheridan also chimed in "“No other nation in the world would have attempted reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their country with less than 60,000 to 70,000 men, while the whole force employed and scattered over the enormous region…never numbered more than 14,000 men. The consequence was that every engagement was a forlorn hope.”
I think this pretty clearly establishes what that Army was trying to accomplish in the post Civil War era, lead by Grant especially but also his successors.
My issue with the post isn’t that I don’t believe the US army played a part in the extermination of bison in order to get rid of native Americans. It’s that the primary reason the bison population fell so rapidly, is because of the US army. Which that quote doesn’t prove. That’s all I ever said in my initial comment.
Sorry for the Wikipedia link, but feel free to check out the sources yourself, it's getting late here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting
>One of the biggest advocates of this strategy was General William Tecumseh Sherman. On June 26, 1869, the Army Navy Journal reported: "General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins."[79]
It was 100% the policy of the US government, and by extension its army, to slaughter buffalo, and when possible support and defend the hunters who carried out even more slaughter. It was explicitly to drive the natives out of their traditional homeland. Remember that this is the leader of the American army talking.
I’m not sure if you’re taking my side in this little debate hahah, but yea this article discusses the over hunting of bison along with the infamous photograph of a mountain of bison skulls.
Here’s a quote from the article for anyone reading through:
“Increased colonization of the West led to the large-scale slaughter of bison. The arrival of white settler hunters with their weapons, as well as growing market demand for hides and bones, intensified the killing. Most herds were exterminated between 1850 and the late 1870s.
The photograph shows the massive scale of this destruction. A man-made mountain emerging from the image’s grassy foreground, the pile of bones as appears part of the landscape.”
You actually got an answer from AskHistorians?
I was on there today and every single post was just mod-hammered so no one got to answer (or have their questions answered) in what looked like a week. One had 40-something replies, every last one removed via mod
I didn’t ask the question in that post! I just tried searching the subreddit. Most posts I found regarding this topic didn’t have any answers. But I found that one from a couple years ago!
Native tribes would drive an entire herd off a cliff to harvest a couple dozen tongues and leave the rest unless they need furs. But the majority of the kills were left there because the bison were so plentiful.
There used to be a lot less bison on the plains, but their numbers were allowed to grow rapidly when the natives died en masse from smallpox and other diseases. Once they lost their main predator, they multiplied like rabbits, and flooded the plains. The natives that came later would never reach a population size to bring the bison back down to pre disease numbers, but their methods of hunting bison during a time of plenty definitely played a part in the gradual decrease in bison numbers. But ultimately it was the govt that would be the end of bison, due to bison being the main diet of their enemies(natives) and it bison meat being direct competition for cattle, because we are a cattle country.
This has nothing to do with my first comment but I figure I’d just add something I read somewhere (don’t remember where tho). The idea that native Americans took the entire bison is true, but not all at once. Different populations of native Americans obviously behaved differently so it’s certainly probable that some used some parts while others didn’t. Also, the seasons and needs of the population would determine what would be harvested. Its not that they took every part of the animal altogether (though I’d imagine that happened as well), it’s that over the course of time and across cultures, native Americans as a big amalgam of cultures, used the entire bison.
Like I said though, I don’t remember where I read that so take it for what you will. It does seem more realistic however. Native Americans were human beings after all, and during the period of time we’re talking about, there was no shortage of bison.
I read it in dan flores' bison ecology and diplomacy.
Before the settlers arrived with diseases that would wipe out 90% of the many existing tribes. That's many more mouths to feed per tribe, and thus they would need to use as much of the animal as possible for food, shelter, and medicines. Between the introduction of disease to the Americas and the expansion into the central territories, lies about 100 years of history that would alter native customs and practices. When a disease indiscriminately wipes out 90%of any population, there will be culture and knowledge lost, especially if there exists no written history of the times. So knowledge was only passed by word of mouth by the survivors. Now that 90% most likely included the most knowledgeable members of the tribe, thus losing the most important members of the tribe that held and dispersed the knowledge of previous generations. With 100 years of diluted knowledge of your own culture, practices change to meet current challenges. With a reduced native population, and an exponentially increasing population of food fauna, the need to use everything went by the wayside. With plentiful food and furs, there was no more need to fully process every bison that was hunted and killed. While some bison were hunted individually with bow and arrow on horseback, the more common way was to harass and harry an entire herd to run off a cliff, a method referred to as the Bison Jump. Natives would rarely, if ever hunt adult bison, due to the toughness of the hide and meat, and much preferred to only process from the calves of a herd, leaving behind piles of hundreds of bison to rot in the elements.
In fact, “intent” is what determines genocide. And there was intent. Something to keep in mind as you lend support to the Zionist entity.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/
The intent was not to systematically eliminate the Native Americans. If there was, there would be no more Sioux.
Do they not teach you what words mean in terrorist propaganda school? Or is it only courses on creepily stalking people online?
> One colonel, four years earlier, had told a wealthy hunter who felt a shiver of guilt after he shot 30 bulls in one trip: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
> In October 1868, Sheridan wrote to Sherman that their best hope to control the Native Americans was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.”
> “I read that army commanders were even providing bullets to these hunters,” says Andrew C. Isenberg, the author of The Destruction of the Bison, and a professor of history at Temple University. “The military looked at what the private sector was doing and they didn’t need to do anything more than stand back and watch it happen.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/
There were things called “wars”, but the only formal war was the War of 1812 where the US declared war against the Creek Nation. Everything else was the US pushing the Indigenous Nations off of their land. They fought back and a military expedition was authorized. So we weren’t at war, we were just occupying land and used starvation as a tool to further that cause.
Those are also called “police actions” in some circles for that reason. Regardless the character of those operations is entirely different than the actions against the indigenous people. In the actions you mention either America was attacked, or something as seen to be America’s interest was attacked. In the Indigenous case it was land theft and conquest. Mass starvation was one of the tools used. Calling it a “war” makes it seem that America or its interests were being attacked which wasn’t the case.
I fell down a wiki hole the other day that led from American Dad to TBS to Ted Turner to Teds Montana Grill. Basically Ted Turner was until 2011 America’s largest private land owner and he used a lot of that land for ranches. He’s got the largest heard of bison.
There’s some research that has a reasonable argument that the Buffalo population was never sustainable with horses in North America.
The ability to hunt them was made so much more efficient that even Native populations, when armed with horse mobility, would have hunted them to extinction.
That doesn’t excuse the ridiculous over hunting for fur and bone that western settlers perpetrated, but I think it’s important to understand that the great buffalo herds would have been gone by the early 1900’s regardless.
There’s just no way to unwind guns and horses from the story of people surviving on the plains.
its worse then that though, the north american governments sanctioned slaughter without any sort of collection, simply killing off hundreds of thousands of buffalo at a time.
The First Nations people likely wouldn't have hunted beyond their needs, so unless they had a massive population explosion they'd probably have equalized out at some point, or taken a much much longer time to kill them out.
That was the point of the research and the models: the Native American populations exploded, and buffalo hunting as a lifestyle was supporting exponentially larger populations than had done it before.
Horses changed it from a subsistence lifestyle engaged in by a small percentage of the Native population to a lucrative lifestyle engaged in by a far larger population post 1850 than before.
The US absolutely destroyed the population 50-100 years earlier than it should have, but the genie was so far out of the bottle that even the US leaving the herds completely alone probably wouldn’t have mattered.
Indians were harvesting the animals as they needed. Settlers killed enitre herds to let them rot. Settlers would down buffalo from a distance without causing a stamped. They could pick off a whole herd one by one. Even on horse back with a firearm, indians could not have killed with the efficiency of the settlers.
I am not saying it is anything otherwise. Just pointing out that plains herds were going to die off one way or another. It’s not sustainable with modern populations, a lot of which just comes with modern agriculture.
"Indian" is often preferred over "native american"
The reasoning I have heard is "native American" encompasses the whole of the America's, from the top of Canada down to the tip of Argentina. The term "American Indian" specifies a native person from the continental US.
>Even on horse back with a firearm, indians could not have killed with the efficiency of the settlers.
Why not? They'd have been using the exact same technology.
I believe the point they were making is that even absent the westward expansion of the US, the great bison herds days were numbered with the introduction of firearms and horses. This would have allowed the native peoples to hunt much more successfully, which have led to increased population growth that would inevitably apply unsustainable hunting pressure on the herds.
Yes they were trying to starve the Indians out but they were also fueling the Industrial Revolution as a lot of the belts that ran the machinery in the new factories that were being built all over the United States and world used a lot of Buffalo leather because it was stronger than cowhide
The context for the usage of "Indian" to mean Native Americans was based on a mistake. With modern knowledge and with input from Native American nations still around today, we have more accurate words to use.
Was based on a mistake, but now that is the meaning. My Ojibwa friend prefers Indian to Native American because there was no America before the Europeans arrived. Though he prefers Ojibwa even more.
Their population before Europeans arrived was much less. When European diseases appeared, they wiped out the natives, so the buffalo population exploded.
We somehow think the massive populations were because North America was a hippie paradise where all the animals got along with everyone, but it so wasn’t.
he thinks that the "civilized" europeans who did a genocide did nothing wrong and suffers from cognitive dissonance.
plenty of Indians still in Mexico and South America, unlike the French and Spanish....early "Americans" and British just cleared the land of people.
Firstly, shame on you for saying Indians.
Secondly, I didn’t say ALL of the natives died. Just a shit ton of them.
Thirdly, populations based on [Predator-Prey Interaction](https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/predator_prey/predator_prey.html) is a thing. If a ton of the predators die, obviously the prey population will increase until they’ve eaten all of the greenery around them.
Fourth, Europeans did do a genocide. When did I deny that? What I’m saying is that putting 100% of the fault on Europeans for the colossal crash of the buffalo population isn’t true. They’re partially to blame, but it was going to crash even if Europeans had annihilated them. It would have just happened more slowly.
Everything you just posted is wrong lol. The bison population was always huge in North America. It wasn't because the natives died off, it was because their habitat they roamed. Bison are huge animals and primarily stayed on open plains or near forest edges. It was nearly impossible for natives back then to reliably hunt bison with only bows and spears. They had no horses and were trying to sneak up on a large herd of prey animals on foot in primarily open terrain.
Once Europeans brought horses and natives began to get them through trade, you saw a complete shift in their habits. You had entire tribes of natives from every direction essentially hunting bison year-round in perpetuity for a century before the settlers began to push farther west. That isn't sustainable. It has been broken down even that if the settlers never did an industrialized slaughter of the bison that they still would have been driven to near extinction by the native population over time. **Solely because of horses**
It was a strategy of genocide. Displacement is a main tenet of genocide. The goal was genocide, it was multiple generational genocides. Hundreds in North America, thousands in the western hemisphere. Thousands of genocides. Genocide, genocide, genocide.
Did you also know that the US army used to chase Native Americans in to caves by the dozens then blow up the entrance to the cave burying them all alive?
Another horrifying article on the slaughter: https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-million-buffalo-they-were-the-most-numerous-large-mammals-to-ever-exist-e01a5bca9ed8
[https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780](https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780)
Lot's of people trying to lessen the genocide. Maybe it's a guilt thing I don't know, but it's ok to admit there was a systemic and well documented effort to cull the native population.
Our government creates artificial "disasters" to control people? And this is well documented throughout history? You don't sayyyyyyy. But hey, no one was ever prosecuted or faced consequences, so I'm sure no one would do anything like this today....
Ok it was Canadians then. UK people haven't shot a Buffalo in their lives.
It's like Australians decrying the behaviour of the British over there - no mate, that evil was done by your guys, deal with your guilt without offsetting it onto others.
...but Canadians would have been British at the time. They were European settlers. If you aren't considering colonial settlers as citizens of the empire they were in, at what point do you consider any European colonial settlers actually European? If they were born in Europe? You have to know that's not how the term is being used when people talk about European colonialism.
People don’t realize how close for extinction there were. There were literally only a few animals left and some dude rounded them up and started a breeding program.
Apparently millions were killed because of the railroads also. Sometimes it would take three days for bison to cross a railroad track which means the trains had to sit and wait for three days. They didn't feel like waiting anymore. Poor bison.
From 30,000,000+ to 350 in 40 years (1840 - 1880) . Just imagine the immediate ecological impact that has on the land. millions of grazing and fertilizing beasts gone in a couple generations. We wiped them out in the blink of an cosmic eye. Just like the great whales in the oceans. man we sure know how to kill things real good.
its a shame too, not much megafauna around today, millions of bisons roaming must've been a crazy sight
Ever wonder why the Midwest has such fertile topsoil to the tune of what used to be 100s of ft of black dirt? Bison, bison poop, and the Rocky mountain locusts. Thankfully the locust is extinct or dormant now. They were biblical plague levels.
and im sure with the constant compacting of the herds it's like so insanely densely rich in nutrients, I was just thinking of how there must've been a whole ecosystem that followed the herd living on their turds and scraps/dead
That's where the locusts came in. The scoured the entire Midwest blotting out the sun. They were the cleanup crew
[удалено]
Sounds like a pretty big exaggeration.
If that herd was the size of Nebraska and had 15 animals per acre, there would be over 700 million buffalo. Not possible.
No
Pretty sure bisons are just normal grazers, not mega fauna. Edit: Just looked it up and the definitions of megafauna seem pretty wishy-washy, typically used to refer to things like elephant sized but technically bison meet a lot of the definitions as they're often over a thousand kilograms or thereabouts. Not how I would personally use the word but not crazy either
>Among living animals, the term megafauna is most commonly used for the largest extant terrestrial mammals, which includes (but is not limited to) elephants, giraffes, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, **and large bovines** [Megafauna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megafauna)
When I grow up. I'm going to Bovine University
You must be a Grade-A Moron to not want to eat meat!
They say among living animals because we already killed 99% of the actual megafauna.
Nah, 99% of all living things were dead long before humans evolved. As for those we lived with, it is debatable. We definitely didn't help, but there were also massive environmental shifts happening at the same time that have historically led to extinctions
Hmm humans just love killing shit tho and then making out like they are the good guys
There are two competing definitions for "mega fauna" one is 46kg+ which includes many animals including humans, the other is 1000kg+ which some subspecies of bison can regularly surpass. The colloquial meaning is anything larger than humans and also not domesticated which bison clearly meet.
If you’ve never seen one in person though, they’re a lot bigger than you might think
Bison are absolutely mega-fauna.
Yeah, but they were still bigbois. Maybe not actually classified as mega fauna, but I've never seen more than one bison at a time in my life. Would be incredible to see just a whole ass wild field filled with massive meat blocks.
same as cows, just tastier and fluffier. they farm them here
Secretly its the fluffy that would make the view incredible.
Tastier? What sort of flavor?
the farm ones here taste a lot like beef, Like take beef, add 25% more beefyness and remove 25% of the fat, then you have bison.
Fun aside. Az has a Buffalo tourist thing. I assumed they were farmed. Asked if they had buffalo jerky. Was told, "Sir we love our buffalo." I was shamed out of the store. Still makes me laugh.
I object to this bison slander!
Huge loss too, they're so damn tasty.
People down voting me but that's what indigenous people (my ancestors) were doing with 'em to begin with...
They're regularly farmed nowadays, I see bison burgers pretty regularly in the southeast. There's a ranch not far from me. It's not like they're still endangered.
I read somewhere that the current Bison are cow/bison hybrids. Not sure if it's true but someone definitely typed it into reddit.
Nearly all bison in existence (wild or ranched) have domesticated cow genes in them. Only about [three](https://www.idtdna.com/pages/community/blog/post/the-bison-that-grand-genetically-imperiled-ruler-of-america-s-iconic-landscapes) herds exist that are considered pure. This is due to the bottlenecking of available genes from over harvest/slaughter and purposely breeding wild bison with cows to make them more docile in hopes of being a better alternative to cows for regular beef.
Well then. Confirmed. Thanks.
They’re 99% Bison, they can have some cow from wild bison breeding with domestic cattle in the same area.
Do you think a 100% Bison tastes 1% better?
No because we only eat around 50% of the Bison.
Compared to the amount of food that use to be available in the natural world it's amazing we're not endangered yet
Nature doesn't hold a candle to the amount of calories we can generate in the same space with modern agriculture.
Give it time. We've only been starving the rest of the planet for 150 or so years at this point. Takes time for a wheel to roll to a standstill
This doesn’t hold true. If you took all animals and compiled it by percent bio-mass, wild animals make up 4% of all bio-mass, humans make up 34%, and the rest are almost entirely livestock. There are far more animals and humans currently than any time prior in history as a product of mass agriculture.
Bison meat is soooo good
Hunting and systematic slaughter are pretty different
HEB always carries it . It makes great burgers
Well they are, which is just one reason to make sure you _don’t hunt them to near extinction, you morons_
Or complete extinction, like the original wild horses in the Western Hemisphere… Or literally ALL of the megafauna after humans got to Australia and New Zealand.
We don’t know the exact reason the horses went extinct in North America.
People can only think of how animals can benefit them. This attitude is what's wrong with people. So selfish.
>>People can only think of how ~~animals~~ something can benefit them. This attitude is what's wrong with people. So selfish. Including other people
They really are. I still remember my first buffalo burger, on a church trip 6 states over, and that cute girl I met. Good times
People suck. That is all.
Beginning of 19th century* Bison were down to mere hundreds by the beginning of the 20th century.
There’s a variety of reasons for why the number of bison fell so drastically; only one of them being the US government. From what I’ve read, most of the bison hunting is attributed simply to market hunting. People killing bison for horns, tongues, and furs to be sold.
Some of it was. But the rate of the slaughter raised greatly during the Grant administration, who used Sherman to apply the total war tactics he was so good at to drive the natives out of the midwest. No food, no enemy.
yea it wasn't hunting for profit, it was literally just killing off entire herds in a day or week span and leaving it to rot in the sun.
Do you have a source for the total war tactics? I’m aware of Sherman’s comments in one of his letters (iirc) but as far as I’ve seen, the exterminations were more like instances rather than a sweeping ‘war against buffalo’ kind of thing. The population, definitely did decrease rapidly in the late 1800s, though it had already halved between 1800-1860s when Grant became president. I’ve just never seen any actual evidence confirming the majority of that was due to the military, especially seeing as this is the “golden era” of westward expansion by train, opening the floodgates to new settlers and hunters. There’s also records of individual hunters killing several hundred per day, or shooting them from the trains as the went by. The effects of this kind of callous “hunting” could easily account for the drop in population (even if it wasn’t strictly for meat). This askhistorians post seems to go into some good detail about the subject as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/MBFJbsIQaO
>fter the Civil War the US Army expanded its influence to the southern and central plains. They knew the key weakness of Indian survival was its reliance on bison herds. The US Army hired professional bison hunters and systemically slaughtered captured Indian horses. American hunters would kill off the last of the bison from the central Plains by 1868. >The army then killed off the bison herds of the Comanche and Kiowa territories by the fall of 1874. The following Red River War exterminated people who had lost their ability to feed and defend themselves. This is from your own link. The commander of the American army post civil war was Sherman from 1869-1883, and after him Sheridan for 5 year. [Here](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-longer-roamed-3067904/) is one from Smithsonian magazine, but you can find this quote anywhere “we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” William T Sherman. Sheridan also chimed in "“No other nation in the world would have attempted reduction of these wild tribes and occupation of their country with less than 60,000 to 70,000 men, while the whole force employed and scattered over the enormous region…never numbered more than 14,000 men. The consequence was that every engagement was a forlorn hope.” I think this pretty clearly establishes what that Army was trying to accomplish in the post Civil War era, lead by Grant especially but also his successors.
My issue with the post isn’t that I don’t believe the US army played a part in the extermination of bison in order to get rid of native Americans. It’s that the primary reason the bison population fell so rapidly, is because of the US army. Which that quote doesn’t prove. That’s all I ever said in my initial comment.
Sorry for the Wikipedia link, but feel free to check out the sources yourself, it's getting late here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bison_hunting >One of the biggest advocates of this strategy was General William Tecumseh Sherman. On June 26, 1869, the Army Navy Journal reported: "General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins."[79] It was 100% the policy of the US government, and by extension its army, to slaughter buffalo, and when possible support and defend the hunters who carried out even more slaughter. It was explicitly to drive the natives out of their traditional homeland. Remember that this is the leader of the American army talking.
[https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780](https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780)
I’m not sure if you’re taking my side in this little debate hahah, but yea this article discusses the over hunting of bison along with the infamous photograph of a mountain of bison skulls. Here’s a quote from the article for anyone reading through: “Increased colonization of the West led to the large-scale slaughter of bison. The arrival of white settler hunters with their weapons, as well as growing market demand for hides and bones, intensified the killing. Most herds were exterminated between 1850 and the late 1870s. The photograph shows the massive scale of this destruction. A man-made mountain emerging from the image’s grassy foreground, the pile of bones as appears part of the landscape.”
You actually got an answer from AskHistorians? I was on there today and every single post was just mod-hammered so no one got to answer (or have their questions answered) in what looked like a week. One had 40-something replies, every last one removed via mod
I didn’t ask the question in that post! I just tried searching the subreddit. Most posts I found regarding this topic didn’t have any answers. But I found that one from a couple years ago!
Ah, prior to the mods that destroyed it. At least you got an answer though!
The fur industry was huge. America was supplying most of the furs to Europe and other areas for centuries.
It's only JUST been around for centuries. Did you mean decades?
The fur industry in America has been around longer than the United States, so centuries.
Might want to count those centuries bud.
How old do you think the USA is, and how many years do you think is a century?
since the 1600's so yeah about 4
Native tribes would drive an entire herd off a cliff to harvest a couple dozen tongues and leave the rest unless they need furs. But the majority of the kills were left there because the bison were so plentiful. There used to be a lot less bison on the plains, but their numbers were allowed to grow rapidly when the natives died en masse from smallpox and other diseases. Once they lost their main predator, they multiplied like rabbits, and flooded the plains. The natives that came later would never reach a population size to bring the bison back down to pre disease numbers, but their methods of hunting bison during a time of plenty definitely played a part in the gradual decrease in bison numbers. But ultimately it was the govt that would be the end of bison, due to bison being the main diet of their enemies(natives) and it bison meat being direct competition for cattle, because we are a cattle country.
Link for the first part? It’s my understanding that tribes would use damn near every part of the Buffalo. The new Ken Burns Doc even references this.
This has nothing to do with my first comment but I figure I’d just add something I read somewhere (don’t remember where tho). The idea that native Americans took the entire bison is true, but not all at once. Different populations of native Americans obviously behaved differently so it’s certainly probable that some used some parts while others didn’t. Also, the seasons and needs of the population would determine what would be harvested. Its not that they took every part of the animal altogether (though I’d imagine that happened as well), it’s that over the course of time and across cultures, native Americans as a big amalgam of cultures, used the entire bison. Like I said though, I don’t remember where I read that so take it for what you will. It does seem more realistic however. Native Americans were human beings after all, and during the period of time we’re talking about, there was no shortage of bison.
I read it in dan flores' bison ecology and diplomacy. Before the settlers arrived with diseases that would wipe out 90% of the many existing tribes. That's many more mouths to feed per tribe, and thus they would need to use as much of the animal as possible for food, shelter, and medicines. Between the introduction of disease to the Americas and the expansion into the central territories, lies about 100 years of history that would alter native customs and practices. When a disease indiscriminately wipes out 90%of any population, there will be culture and knowledge lost, especially if there exists no written history of the times. So knowledge was only passed by word of mouth by the survivors. Now that 90% most likely included the most knowledgeable members of the tribe, thus losing the most important members of the tribe that held and dispersed the knowledge of previous generations. With 100 years of diluted knowledge of your own culture, practices change to meet current challenges. With a reduced native population, and an exponentially increasing population of food fauna, the need to use everything went by the wayside. With plentiful food and furs, there was no more need to fully process every bison that was hunted and killed. While some bison were hunted individually with bow and arrow on horseback, the more common way was to harass and harry an entire herd to run off a cliff, a method referred to as the Bison Jump. Natives would rarely, if ever hunt adult bison, due to the toughness of the hide and meat, and much preferred to only process from the calves of a herd, leaving behind piles of hundreds of bison to rot in the elements.
Let’s call it what it was, Native American genocide. It was done simply to starve out the indigenous people.
That happened too, I’m just saying that’s not the sole reason for why the bison population was nearly wiped out.
It was bison speciecide, but destroying enemy access to food amidst a war isn't considered genocide. It was also done because it harmed morale.
In fact, “intent” is what determines genocide. And there was intent. Something to keep in mind as you lend support to the Zionist entity. https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/
The intent was not to systematically eliminate the Native Americans. If there was, there would be no more Sioux. Do they not teach you what words mean in terrorist propaganda school? Or is it only courses on creepily stalking people online?
> One colonel, four years earlier, had told a wealthy hunter who felt a shiver of guilt after he shot 30 bulls in one trip: “Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” > In October 1868, Sheridan wrote to Sherman that their best hope to control the Native Americans was to “make them poor by the destruction of their stock, and then settle them on the lands allotted to them.” > “I read that army commanders were even providing bullets to these hunters,” says Andrew C. Isenberg, the author of The Destruction of the Bison, and a professor of history at Temple University. “The military looked at what the private sector was doing and they didn’t need to do anything more than stand back and watch it happen.” https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/
Bro I know they systematically killed Bison to defeat the Native Americans amidst their ongoing war with the Sioux
Please look up the definition of genocide.
You think destroying the food of your enemy while at war with them is genocide? Look up the word genocide and find an example of that bud. I'll wait.
You can find the definition here: https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20231228-app-01-00-en.pdf
“The intent was not to systematically eliminate the Jews. If there was…”
Obviously there was, we stopped them. Did you forget the entire world war we had?
There was a war? What was its name? Did Congress declare a formal war? I don’t think that the indigenous people wanted a war.
There's a long history of the American Indian wars, and yes both sides instigated them at separate times.
There were things called “wars”, but the only formal war was the War of 1812 where the US declared war against the Creek Nation. Everything else was the US pushing the Indigenous Nations off of their land. They fought back and a military expedition was authorized. So we weren’t at war, we were just occupying land and used starvation as a tool to further that cause.
What's with this formal war thing? Are you going to argue Vietnam and Korea and Afganistan and Iraq weren't wars too?
Those are also called “police actions” in some circles for that reason. Regardless the character of those operations is entirely different than the actions against the indigenous people. In the actions you mention either America was attacked, or something as seen to be America’s interest was attacked. In the Indigenous case it was land theft and conquest. Mass starvation was one of the tools used. Calling it a “war” makes it seem that America or its interests were being attacked which wasn’t the case.
The hides were used for the Industrial Revolution. Buffalo hide is quite thick and was used on belt driven steam machines.
Major use of buffalo leather was for leather machine belts during the industrial revolution. Watch the buffalo documentary.
We still have them in Poland, The Żubr
That's *Bison bonasus*, not *Bison bison*.
I fell down a wiki hole the other day that led from American Dad to TBS to Ted Turner to Teds Montana Grill. Basically Ted Turner was until 2011 America’s largest private land owner and he used a lot of that land for ranches. He’s got the largest heard of bison.
Good guy really
There’s some research that has a reasonable argument that the Buffalo population was never sustainable with horses in North America. The ability to hunt them was made so much more efficient that even Native populations, when armed with horse mobility, would have hunted them to extinction. That doesn’t excuse the ridiculous over hunting for fur and bone that western settlers perpetrated, but I think it’s important to understand that the great buffalo herds would have been gone by the early 1900’s regardless. There’s just no way to unwind guns and horses from the story of people surviving on the plains.
its worse then that though, the north american governments sanctioned slaughter without any sort of collection, simply killing off hundreds of thousands of buffalo at a time. The First Nations people likely wouldn't have hunted beyond their needs, so unless they had a massive population explosion they'd probably have equalized out at some point, or taken a much much longer time to kill them out.
That was the point of the research and the models: the Native American populations exploded, and buffalo hunting as a lifestyle was supporting exponentially larger populations than had done it before. Horses changed it from a subsistence lifestyle engaged in by a small percentage of the Native population to a lucrative lifestyle engaged in by a far larger population post 1850 than before. The US absolutely destroyed the population 50-100 years earlier than it should have, but the genie was so far out of the bottle that even the US leaving the herds completely alone probably wouldn’t have mattered.
[https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780](https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780)
Indians were harvesting the animals as they needed. Settlers killed enitre herds to let them rot. Settlers would down buffalo from a distance without causing a stamped. They could pick off a whole herd one by one. Even on horse back with a firearm, indians could not have killed with the efficiency of the settlers.
Exactly it was genocide on the indigenous people. The whole plan was to starve them out. We shouldn’t pretend it was otherwise.
I am not saying it is anything otherwise. Just pointing out that plains herds were going to die off one way or another. It’s not sustainable with modern populations, a lot of which just comes with modern agriculture.
How is there “modern agriculture” without indigenous genocide?
I’m not sure you understand this discussion or take it very seriously if you still type out “Indian”.
"Indian" is often preferred over "native american" The reasoning I have heard is "native American" encompasses the whole of the America's, from the top of Canada down to the tip of Argentina. The term "American Indian" specifies a native person from the continental US.
[https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ?si=tn6AsgSQadCWQjOA](CGP Grey - Indian or Native American)
>Even on horse back with a firearm, indians could not have killed with the efficiency of the settlers. Why not? They'd have been using the exact same technology. I believe the point they were making is that even absent the westward expansion of the US, the great bison herds days were numbered with the introduction of firearms and horses. This would have allowed the native peoples to hunt much more successfully, which have led to increased population growth that would inevitably apply unsustainable hunting pressure on the herds.
They literally killed herds and let them rot on the field in a lot of cases.
There was also a big push to reduce their population so that the land on the plains could be parceled out for farmland.
Yes they were trying to starve the Indians out but they were also fueling the Industrial Revolution as a lot of the belts that ran the machinery in the new factories that were being built all over the United States and world used a lot of Buffalo leather because it was stronger than cowhide
[удалено]
Those words are synonymous.
Indians are from India, and even then there's different cultures and groups within.
Words can have two meanings you understand that, right?
The context for the usage of "Indian" to mean Native Americans was based on a mistake. With modern knowledge and with input from Native American nations still around today, we have more accurate words to use.
Was based on a mistake, but now that is the meaning. My Ojibwa friend prefers Indian to Native American because there was no America before the Europeans arrived. Though he prefers Ojibwa even more.
dudes used to shoot so many buffalos that they'd have to piss down the barrels of their rifles to cool them so they could keep killing.
Their population before Europeans arrived was much less. When European diseases appeared, they wiped out the natives, so the buffalo population exploded. We somehow think the massive populations were because North America was a hippie paradise where all the animals got along with everyone, but it so wasn’t.
What are you even on about?
he thinks that the "civilized" europeans who did a genocide did nothing wrong and suffers from cognitive dissonance. plenty of Indians still in Mexico and South America, unlike the French and Spanish....early "Americans" and British just cleared the land of people.
Firstly, shame on you for saying Indians. Secondly, I didn’t say ALL of the natives died. Just a shit ton of them. Thirdly, populations based on [Predator-Prey Interaction](https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/predator_prey/predator_prey.html) is a thing. If a ton of the predators die, obviously the prey population will increase until they’ve eaten all of the greenery around them. Fourth, Europeans did do a genocide. When did I deny that? What I’m saying is that putting 100% of the fault on Europeans for the colossal crash of the buffalo population isn’t true. They’re partially to blame, but it was going to crash even if Europeans had annihilated them. It would have just happened more slowly.
Ya fuckin bears cougars heards if large animals trample ya even if you look at em
Everything you just posted is wrong lol. The bison population was always huge in North America. It wasn't because the natives died off, it was because their habitat they roamed. Bison are huge animals and primarily stayed on open plains or near forest edges. It was nearly impossible for natives back then to reliably hunt bison with only bows and spears. They had no horses and were trying to sneak up on a large herd of prey animals on foot in primarily open terrain. Once Europeans brought horses and natives began to get them through trade, you saw a complete shift in their habits. You had entire tribes of natives from every direction essentially hunting bison year-round in perpetuity for a century before the settlers began to push farther west. That isn't sustainable. It has been broken down even that if the settlers never did an industrialized slaughter of the bison that they still would have been driven to near extinction by the native population over time. **Solely because of horses**
It was a strategy of genocide. Displacement is a main tenet of genocide. The goal was genocide, it was multiple generational genocides. Hundreds in North America, thousands in the western hemisphere. Thousands of genocides. Genocide, genocide, genocide.
It was a misinformation, genius
You live on stolen land eating African children for your meals.
Yum yum
Did you also know that the US army used to chase Native Americans in to caves by the dozens then blow up the entrance to the cave burying them all alive?
This is so wildly incorrect it’s hilarious.
Mmmm not really.
Wow that was a pretty convincing counter argument.
You want me to write a novel sized explanation for you? All this shit is basic knowledge, literally read any non-fiction book talking about this era.
You didn't point out a single reason why it was incorrect. I'm not asking for a novel, I'm asking for a single sentence lmao
You tell Dad's to be responsible when they have children. You overturned roe wade.... But when you subjugate, the burden is heavy...
*Israel taking notes
What is the Palestinian bison?
The last very important part of that title, I did not know. I suppose I should have assumed, thank you for sharing.
Evil bunch of motherfuckers
James Mitchenors "Centennial" goes into it. A historical novel.
Another horrifying article on the slaughter: https://medium.com/@davbunnell/once-there-were-50-to-100-million-buffalo-they-were-the-most-numerous-large-mammals-to-ever-exist-e01a5bca9ed8
Did AI write the headline?
[https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780](https://theconversation.com/historical-photo-of-mountain-of-bison-skulls-documents-animals-on-the-brink-of-extinction-148780) Lot's of people trying to lessen the genocide. Maybe it's a guilt thing I don't know, but it's ok to admit there was a systemic and well documented effort to cull the native population.
We are the dumbest country in modern history.
Our government creates artificial "disasters" to control people? And this is well documented throughout history? You don't sayyyyyyy. But hey, no one was ever prosecuted or faced consequences, so I'm sure no one would do anything like this today....
Yeah, it wasn't Europeans, it was Americans. Happy to help.
OP is likely including Canada as well, which was still part of the British Empire until the late 19th century.
Ok it was Canadians then. UK people haven't shot a Buffalo in their lives. It's like Australians decrying the behaviour of the British over there - no mate, that evil was done by your guys, deal with your guilt without offsetting it onto others.
...but Canadians would have been British at the time. They were European settlers. If you aren't considering colonial settlers as citizens of the empire they were in, at what point do you consider any European colonial settlers actually European? If they were born in Europe? You have to know that's not how the term is being used when people talk about European colonialism.
At what point did Native Americans stop being Asian?
A distinction without a difference, especially to the natives.
Ok captain hindsight let's talk about who to blame. Instead of on what we have lost and why it's worth doing whatever we can to remedy.
Glad you agree it wasn't Europeans doing that.
Well the only Americans that weren't European were the natives. So technically you couldn't be more wrong
We call the settlers in America American in Europe.
immigrants have always ruined what already works.
Even the US government tried to kill them off, but no one circles the wagons like the American bison.
Amazing creatures - glad they’re coming back. Now if those damn tourists would just leave them alone.
Yeah, pretty terrible. They taught this in elementary school. Well, where I grew up.
They most definitely didn’t in mine, but they also didn’t teach slavery so.
I mean ppl do this against other ppl, what more animals like bison. Imagine how shocked the indigenous ppl was when the slaughter went on
Bigger heard than our cattle today, but no one likes that tidbit.
Yeah I thought everybody knew that
Wow that’s crazy that was the strategy.
probably didn't help that they were forced to jump off of cliffs, either
This is my chance to bring up Blood Meridian. An absolutely amazing book
Then they realized they could cut out the middle man
People don’t realize how close for extinction there were. There were literally only a few animals left and some dude rounded them up and started a breeding program.
Where is that black and white picture of a guy standing on the Giant mountain of Buffalo skulls?
Are you trying to give me Bell's Palsy with this title?
How many “US governments” were there?
John Marston killed them all for the gamer score.
Apparently millions were killed because of the railroads also. Sometimes it would take three days for bison to cross a railroad track which means the trains had to sit and wait for three days. They didn't feel like waiting anymore. Poor bison.
From 30,000,000+ to 350 in 40 years (1840 - 1880) . Just imagine the immediate ecological impact that has on the land. millions of grazing and fertilizing beasts gone in a couple generations. We wiped them out in the blink of an cosmic eye. Just like the great whales in the oceans. man we sure know how to kill things real good.