Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison | The American West

Present on the continent for nearly half-a-million years, the American bison’s numbers and near perfect adaptation to the Great Plains made it one of the evolutionary marvels of Earth. For more than 10,000 years, Native people in the West had intertwined their lives with bison herds to create the longest sustained economies and religious traditions in American history. Then over two centuries of whirlwind change in Native America, the bison was suddenly and mysteriously gone from the wild. Thank you to our sponsor Velvet Buck https://www.instagram.com/velvetbuckwine. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  For more than 100 centuries, native people in Bison had been enjoined in an evolutionary, economic, and religious relationship in the West, only to witness something that appeared timeless collapse completely by the 1880s. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West. Brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at velvetbuckvineyards.com. Enjoy responsibly.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  A Dream of Bison, Part 1.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  In the fall of 1886, William T. Hornaday, taxidermist at the National Museum in Washington, stepped off a train in Miles City, Montana, on a truly historic mission. The American bison, an animal whose charisma and staggering abundance had for three centuries stood as shorthand for North America to the world, somehow was on the brink of extinction. Except in remote parts of Texas, Montana, and Alberta, where rumors held there might be two or three tiny herds of wildly spooky survivors, a creature whose range had once extended from northwestern Canada to Florida, whose herds sometimes took the better part

• 2:46Speaker 02

  of a week for mounted horsemen to pass, was tottering on the precipice of total disappearance. The bison hunt in America was an ancient economy, going back multiple thousands of years. Now, native people like the Blackfeet, who had often taken 20,000 bison a year in 1883, had killed all of six. This was why Hornaday was in Montana. Stunningly, bison were on the verge of becoming little more than a memory, and the National Museum at least wanted a representative collection that might become a museum exhibit, since

• 3:27Speaker 02

  that was all future citizens might ever see of America's most iconic creature. The Hornaday Party's goal was to obtain 20 to 30 specimens, which the scientists understood might represent as many as half of the wild bison left in the United States. He had narrowed his search to west-central Montana, between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, using the L U Bar Ranch as headquarters, to hunt a rumored herd of 35 in the area. The US Army provided support, and two soldiers and two cowboys from the ranch accompanied Hornaday and his assistant, Harvey Brown.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  On Calf Creek, a southern tributary of the Muscle Shell, in October, this party began to find buffalo. The stories about the Survivor animals were true, though. These buffalo were extraordinarily wild, and perceiving themselves pursued fled nearly 15 miles across the Badlands of Montana Territory. Nonetheless, as dusk was falling on October 16, two of Hornaday's hunters managed to down a huge bull. Because of the lateness of the hour, the party left their prize where it fell with a plan to return the following day.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Here is how Harvey Brown described the scene when they arrived the next morning. "Sunday, October 17. To our great dismay, the noble red men had visited the bull which Boyd and McNannon had killed the day before. Astonishment evolved into a general confusion and then anger about what had taken place during the night. All that remained of the bull," he wrote, "was the head painted red on one side, yellow on the other, with a red and yellow rag tied to one horn and 11 notches cut in the other horn. All around were moccasin tracks."

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Hornaday's party went on to take 22 buffalo out of this last remnant of animals, a tiny puddle that was almost all that was left of a once vast, now evaporated ocean of animals. As director of the New York Zoological Park and a founding member of the American Bison Society, Hornaday would spend much of the next four decades of his life trying to save the bison from complete extinction. That fall of 1886, he believed that not more than 30 animals remained alive in Montana, where the last great bison hunts had taken place.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  He would eventually conclude that at the time of this hunt, only 1,073 wild bison were still drawing breath in North America.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  No one ever identified just who those native hunters were, who had located Horneday's downed bull, or exactly what ceremony they had performed around it during the night of October 16, 17, 1886. But from the evidence they left, they too understood that something truly profound was happening. A bison bull, whose head was marked and decorated and painted red and yellow in the night, may have signaled an ending of something large, something that defined the world. The end of bison was a historical change so traumatic that, as the crow leader Plenicu would put it, "After that, nothing happened."

• 7:11Speaker 02

  We now know that one of the long-term consequences of the Pleistocene extinctions 10,000 years ago were a handful of animal survivors that benefited from the loss of competition. In the American West, the primary benefactor was the new, smaller bison, which underwent a massive population explosion when other grass eaters disappeared. Half the size of their Pleistocene ancestors, reaching reproductive maturity far faster, buffalo adapted perfectly to the grasslands of the interior of the continent. Their population was no doubt highly variable, but based on the number of livestock that replaced them, their numbers in their core range

• 7:56Speaker 02

  likely ranged between about 20 and 30 million. Great climate swings like the altathermal redistributed them and shrank or grew their numbers, but never pushed them towards extinction. Buffalo grew so numerous and were such a perfect fit to post-Pleistocene conditions that no amount of predation, either from gray wolves or humans, seemed to diminish them. Biologists now believe modern bison, in fact, are a classic example of anthropogenic selection. Their size and rapid reproduction, a natural increase of about 18%, selected by human and gray wolf predation. That made the modern bison

• 8:41Speaker 02

  one of the most perfectly adapted of all American species.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  The way to imagine these immense herds is by understanding their seasonal rounds, and the proper beginning is in the scorching heat of late summer when bison cows become receptive to sex. Over the next chaotic few weeks, the rumbling bellows of 2,000-pound bulls created a den herd nowhere else on the planet, audible for miles across the boundless plains. The oddly front-weighted males jousted, head-butted, and hooked at one another in dust-shrouded battles for females. Half the size of the bulls, cows didn't always honor the winners of these contests, often

• 9:28Speaker 02

  rejecting both strivers for a higher-ranking bull elsewhere. Over the few weeks of rut, some bulls bred as many as 40 cows, others completely struck out. Once the rut was over, bison would began their general seasonal drift southward, the small grouping herds led by high-ranking cows. Until they were eight years of age, younger cows were subordinate to older females. Whether southward or somewhere more local, the destinations for these migrations were forested river valleys, where bison spent months of snow and cold, protected from the winds that swept open-country snow into drifts.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  As winter wound down in April, pregnant cows dropped their young, and while eagles waddled around among them, picking at afterbirth, the cows urged their bright-red calves to stand, pop their tails over their backs, and run. Gray wolves, knowing well when a bison herd was vulnerable, were certain to be trotting by, yellow eyes fixed, red tongues lolling. Following the spring green up into open country, the herds then sorted themselves into gender groups through spring and early summer. Bachelor bulls worked their way across the upland plains in all-boy posse's, while cow-calf

• 10:52Speaker 02

  herds stayed separate and distant until the pheromones of late summer began to drift through the hot air once again.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  Like many prey animals, bison evolved to be highly social herd creatures. Numbers mean lots of eyes on predators and enhanced chances you're not the target. The herds varied in size and makeup across the seasons. At the macro level, three massive groupings spread across the western landscapes of the continent. In timbered parts of Alberta, the Yukon, and Alaska, there was a distinctive type we now called the wood bison. Out on the grassy sweeps east of the Rockies, a northern herd of plains bison ranged from Alberta to Nebraska.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  From there to the yellow expanses of Texas, another mass worked across the southern plains in search of rains and greening grasses. These big aggregations of animals, groupings really made up of thousands of smaller herds, drifted southward in winter, then reversed direction to shift northward in the summer. While human rituals that charmed and lured bison may have been under the sway of supernatural animal deities, all those bison hunters, over all those thousands of years, understood from observation that the animals' movements were predictable.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  They also understood that bison preferred green grasses from freshly burned country. Humans had been using fire to alter the world to their advantage for a million years. In the eastern woodlands, regular human firing produced patchy ecotones whose rebounding forests created browse for whitetail deer. In the west, fires produced wildlife park savannas for bison, pronghorns, elk, and wolves. These fires actually pushed the aerial extent of the savannas and their animals nearly to the Mississippi River.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Wherever bison herds ranged, archaeologists have mapped out a predatory human pattern that mimicked the prey. In the fall, the hunters set fire to specific upland grasslands they wanted to hunt in the spring, knowing this would draw the herds. In winter, those same hunters moved into the forested river valleys to set up their camps, aware that bison, elk, and deer would congregate there, allowing local hunts to take place throughout the cold months. These hunters were pedestrians, whose only beasts of burden were dogs, and preserving meat by air drying was a huge undertaking.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Nonetheless, in suitable topography like Head Smashed In in Alberta and First Peoples and Madison Buffalo Jumps in Montana, under the supervision of hunt managers, they ran bison off cliffs, a strategy they learned by observing wolves. They also knew buffalo were entirely capable of exchanging cultural information, so at these jumps, they attempted to kill every last animal to prevent buffalo survivors from passing on knowledge about the strategy. The Great Bison Belt of the savannas east of the Rockies was the modern animal's evolutionary home. But bison were not just of the interior.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Archaeologists reconstructing past climates have mapped out a whole sequence of bison presence/absence periods across ancient America. The altothermal, a 3,700-year heat wave thousands of years ago, was one of the absence periods across much of that core Great Plains country. That huge drought, and another one only 1,000 years ago that lasted for six centuries, shriveled western grasslands. Bison numbers likely plunged as the herds sought out better-watered refuges both east and west of the Great Plains, then trickled back in when weather improved.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Then between 1500 and 1600, as old-worlders were settling America, a climate change to wet and cool conditions grew bison into vast numbers, sending teeming herds in the west, eastward beyond the Mississippi River again, convincing Europeans they had found the Eden of the animals in America. For some 10,000 years, a lengthy sequence of different human cultural groups, archaeology has given them fanciful names like Mummy Cave, Ox Bow, McKean, Pelican Lake, Beeset, Avonlea, and Old Women's, lived on bison, drove rivers of bison over cliffs,

• 15:58Speaker 02

  corralled and stalked bison, and built their religions around them. This was the oldest sustained human economy in American history. 2,000 years ago, when Rome was transitioning from a republic to an empire, Beeset and Avonlea hunters were undergoing a transition of their own on America's bison plains. The Beeset people still relied on at-attle technology, invented by Folsom hunters 12,000 years ago. But the Avonlea had the newest hunt technology, the bow, introduced to America by the ancestors of the Inuit.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Even so, the bow hardly dented the enormous bison herds. In the early United States, thinkers and policymakers tended to follow old-world models for imagining human history. The emerging idea was that all humans shared a common origin. And if that was true, then all of us were on the same ladder of progress as it was known. Like Europeans, people who hunted would eventually become herders, then farmers who built cities, wrote constitutions, and founded capitalist republics. It was no doubt comforting to think that everybody else in the world wanted nothing

• 17:21Speaker 02

  so much as to become just like you. Certainly, no one was supposed to retreat back down the ladder. This was the organizing principle behind an Indian policy in America of converting tribes to agriculture, the ownership of private property, and eventually, assimilation. But for many Native people, the America of the 1600s through the 1800s offered a perfect opportunity to descend the ladder, not climb it. In those years, an unusual number of Native people who in fact had long been farmers reverted to full-time hunting. This had been an old fear for Europeans about their own people.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Would colonial Americans survive the enticements of wilderness that lure young men away from farms to hunt and trap? With a continental market economy focused on reducing wild animals to commodities, not just Europeans, but Native people across the country began to abandon their cornfields and village lives and move west to hunt again. What drove this for thousands of Native people wasn't just the market, but an animal revolution. Their acquisition of horses created a grand historical moment, one that has ever since captured the imagination of the world. For roughly 10 human generations, conditions were perfect for fashioning a legendary American

• 18:51Speaker 02

  scene: the horse-mounted Indian as hunter of buffalo and other Western animals. A kind of idyllic opportunity emerged around 1650 and lasted until the early 1880s. Out on the continent's great grasslands, buffalo numbers were soaring to as high as 30 million animals in good years. History, climate, and soon enough, trade and the market would set the stage for a legendary time for Native people to live large.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Missing from Western ecology for thousands of years, horses seemed to appear almost magically from the southern end of the Rocky Mountains. Native people trained to herd Spanish stock in colonial New Mexico were riding off on horses by the 1650s. Then came the revolt of the Pueblo people against Spanish settlers in 1680, the rebels seizing thousands of horses along with goats, sheep, and cattle. The cattle ended up eaten. The Navajos, or Dene, traded for most of the goats and sheep, but the horses attracted customers across the West. Pueblo's and Navajos traded horses to the Utes, who traded them to the Shoshones,

• 20:11Speaker 02

  who dispersed horses throughout the Upper West. Some of those groups were in southern Canada, about as far north as desert-adapted Spanish Barbed horses could survive the winters. By 1730, peoples who had been on foot for 150 centuries were swinging onto horses and riding them into history. Horses carried big implications for buffalo, about to enter a modern world natural selection hadn't prepared them for. Competing with buffalo for grass and water, horses were restoring a measure of the Pleistocene. But for tribal bands, learning from one another how to ride, care for horses, breed them,

• 20:56Speaker 02

  all manner of possibilities opened. Dozens of tribal groups, a common estimate is three dozen, dropped what they were doing and rode off to hunt buffalo. Some of them, the Comanches of the Great Basin, the Sioux and speakers of the Great Lakes woodlands, had never farmed. Propelled now by horses, they switched their focus from jackrabbits, or whitetail deer, to buffalo.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Some groups from outside the plains did very well as buffalo hunters. The Comanches migrated towards the source of horses and established a powerful empire on the southern plains. The Sioux and speakers who rode westward out of Great Lakes forest did the same on the northern plains. Others, the Pueblo's, the Utes, the Salish, Nesspurses west of the buffalo range, and the Caddo's, Wichita's, Pawnees, Osages, Erycaras, and Mandans to the east, remained in their villages but rode off to hunt buffalo several times a year. The Pueblo's were farmers, the Nesspurses deer hunters, but with horses both could now

• 22:05Speaker 02

  make big journeys to haul bison products home from hundreds of miles away.

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  The most surprising of the new buffalo hunters came from villages of farmers, though. Classic buffalo hunters like the Crows, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas, all came out of farming backgrounds. All the eastern Indians who went west to hunt were former farmers, too. There were class distinctions in most of the farming towns, and the evidence is that it was the lower classes who often mounted up to ride away to hunt buffalo. Elite families had political power to lose if they left. So did women, who owned the crop fields in farm towns. So for women, joining a group now counting wealth and status based on the number of

• 24:00Speaker 02

  horses you owned that intended to live by hunting could be a sobering step. For one, it implied the backbreaking work of hide processing. Becoming one of several wives for a buffalo hunting man at least meant some sharing of the work burden. But if the band participated in the market hunt, a woman didn't just become a plural wife, she joined a labor force. For men, traversing the plains, hunting bison, training and accumulating horses, and engaging in trade with the whites was life in a state of perfection. For women?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Well, Sue and speakers had a wry ball story about ever conniving Coyote that helped put this new life in some perspective. It went this way. Coyote had spied a beautiful young chief's daughter he badly wanted to bed, but as beautiful chief's daughters tend to do, she scarcely acknowledged him. But hearing that the whites coming into their country possessed many wonderful things, Coyote used magic to go among them and returned with four objects no Indian had ever seen. Coyote set up a lodge near the girl's teepee and over the next four nights began pounding and banging away as if he were a mad inventor.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  The first morning, he emerged with a choker of brightly colored glass beads. When the chief's daughter saw Coyote idling, holding the choker up to the sunlight, she boldly offered him a kiss if she could have it. The next day, Coyote produced an iron pot, better for cooking than anything else in camp. To possess that, the chief's daughter let Coyote fondle her breasts. The third day, Coyote showed off a red wool blanket with stripes in several colors, and for that, she let Coyote feel her buttocks. Finally, on the fourth day, Coyote produced a beautiful mirror.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  After observing herself in it for several long moments, the chief's daughter let Coyote look between her legs. But Coyote's response to this favor was a frown. "Too bad," he said, "that you've been made upside down. That really should be fixed." The beautiful chief's daughter took her mirror home, but thought long and hard about what Coyote had said. If her sex truly did need remaking, who else to do it but the Coyote, who'd made so many magical new things? "Go and fetch Coyote," she told her girlfriend, "and do it quickly."

• 26:45Speaker 02

  To human observers, bison thronging the plains seemed like the stars in the night sky, a flow of animal life on a scale only the supernatural seemed capable of explaining. The elders of one of the historic bison hunting groups, the Lakotas, perceived a connecting energy flow in the constant air movements of the plains among western creatures. These were connections Linnaean science, Darwinian evolution, or 21st century genetic science would never think to link together.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  What the Lakotas called "Umi" or "Yum" was whirlwind power, the unrestrained residue of the energy of the four winds. Whirlwind power was much sought, in part because possessing it made one difficult to attack and battle. But only a small number of special animals—spiders, moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk, and bison—shared the whirlwind's secret.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Air movement in the form of seasonal winds also seemed part of the bison's special mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon, but the animals could entirely disappear with a north wind. That inclination for bison to vanish led to a widespread belief in Native America that the animals had their origins underground and sometimes returned there. The precise regeneration places tended to move as people relocated. As tribes migrated onto the Great Plains in the 1700s, among the Kiowas, the place

• 28:32Speaker 02

  where bison poured from the earth was the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. For the Comanches, bison regenerated in the canyons of a west Texas plateau, the Yanost Estacado. The Lakotas believed this mysterious renewal happened in caves like Ludlow Cave in and near the Black Hills, which Native peoples surrounded with petroglyphs of buffalo tracks and human vaginas, enjoined symbols of fertility. Most buffalo hunting peoples believed the bison to have been present very early in creation. In this kind of cosmic origin, they were like the other great forces of the universe,

• 29:15Speaker 02

  the sun and moon, the sky overhead, that would always exist. Much as we're all utterly convinced today that there's no force capable of erasing the night sky of its stars, for humans who had been among bison for thousands of years, the animals were similarly beyond all time, all history. In the Plains' Indian creation accounts that undergirded this kind of understanding, the most important animals are there at the beginning, with the creators, before humans joined the world. And it was not just themselves as flesh that bison would offer up as gifts.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Among the Cheyennes, buffalo and thunder gave fire to their culture hero, sweet medicine. For the Mandanadotzas, it was a buffalo bull who gave their culture hero, lone man, tobacco.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Somewhat in the same manner that the Greeks regarded their gods as partly mortal, most Plains tribes thought of buffalo in their worldly form in the same terms as humans. Buffalo had families, and societies, and opinions, and memories. They were people, in other words. In some traditions, buffalo had the ability to renew themselves after death. The Cree's told ethnographer James Mooney that if you left the head, tail, and four feet of a buffalo at a place of its death, the animal would regenerate. Although bison might regenerate, and the earth could disgorged a fresh body of them

• 30:49Speaker 02

  like a hive of bees, the hunting tribes understood that animal masters controlled access to buffalo. That made access, then fraught with taboos designed to convey proper respect for creatures willing to sacrifice themselves for the human good. Among the Cheyennes, their access to buffalo was the legacy of their several culture heroes: Coyote Man and his daughter, Yellow Haired Woman, who had first released the animals of the plains, along with band-specific heroes named Erect Horns and Sweet Medicine. Like most buffalo hunters, the Cheyennes had stories about times when all the buffalo

• 31:34Speaker 02

  disappeared. In one instance, Erect Horns performed a particular ritual that persuaded them to return. Later, in the beginning time of creation and Cheyenne history, the people had forsaken the hero Sweet Medicine, and once again the buffalo and all the animals disappeared. An apology to Sweet Medicine led him to reaffirm that it was a ceremony that would call on the animals to reappear. This ceremony was called among the Cheyennes the Massam. It was a great animal dance at Bear Butte that recreated Coyote Man's

• 32:15Speaker 02

  and Yellow Haired Woman's release of the animals in mythic time. Two of the arrows in their sacred arrow bundle gave Cheyennes the power to kill as many buffalo as they wanted, and that buffalo was open during the Massam. Cheyennes performed the Massam well past 1850.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  Others of their band set up a lone teepee at their summer sundances, representing the mountain from which the Sutai band’s hero, Erectorns, had once released buffalo from hiding and reanimated the earth and the animal life of the plains. The Blackfeet and the Grovants also had stories about what happened when buffalo disappeared. A calamity finally righted by their own cultural heroes, Napi among the Blackfeet and Ni’au in the case of the Grovants, who turned themselves into dogs, found the cave where the gods were holding the animals and drove them out. The Blackfeet called the entity that kept buffalo away “Buffalo Stealer.”

• 33:18Speaker 02

  When he was unhappy, he kept buffalo secreted away in a cave up Cut Bank Canyon. The Mandans, too, had a traditional story about a time when all the buffalo disappeared. In this case, it was because Hoida, a speckled eagle who was the master of all the animals, had quarreled with Lone Man, the first Mandan, and as punishment, decided to withhold all the animals inside Dog Den Butte. After involved negotiations, Lone Man finally convinced Hoida to release the animals to the people. Among the Mandans, the ceremonies that reenacted these negotiations

• 34:01Speaker 02

  were known as Snow Owl and Okepa. The primary animal access ceremony of the Hadassas was known as Red Stick. How did the culture heroes perform these miracles? Generations of living alongside plains animals had fashioned among Indian people a body of cultural stories that credited the buffalo’s willingness to render itself to hunters to the mythic kinship ties between the two species. The common thread was ritually reestablishing the kinship tie between human beings and buffalo through ceremonies that got at the heart of the native explanation of their world.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Thanks to artists George Catlin and Carl Bodmer, we're at least nominally conversant with the outer skins of some of them. What the artists portrayed were animal costume dancers recreating the ancient stories with special lodges and altars that represented the mountains or caves where the animal masters hid buffalo and other creatures when they were displeased. Ceremonies like Snow Owl and Red Stick even featured symbolic sexuality to stimulate bison fertility. In the early 1800s, when descriptions of these parts of the ceremonies by observers like Lewis and Clark appeared in print, they were primly rendered in Latin.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  As bison began appreciably to diminish in numbers and the ancient ceremonies failed to restore them, some native people seemed to adjust their thinking. We can't know what the Indians who danced around and painted William T. Horn today's bull in 1886 thought about why bison had become so few, but in the 1860s, a US Peace Commission had asked tribal representatives why they believed bison were going away. By then, Plains Indians clearly were worried about the trend. The Kiowa calendars, an account Kiowa historians painted on buffalo robes, by the 1840s had

• 36:14Speaker 02

  begun referring to such shortages of buffalo in the southern plains that it was impossible for their bands to assemble to hold sundances anymore. Among the Western Siouxan peoples, their version of tribal histories were called winter counts, and these showed that from 1842 to 1844, the most significant events were the extended buffalo calling ceremonies their shamans performed.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  The tribes the Peace Commission interviewed offered various explanations for what was happening to buffalo, most of which laid blame on either the whites on the overland trails or on Métis hunters from Canada. One western Lakota opined that he thought bison were becoming so few because they simply couldn't abide the smell of white people. By this point, the Indian hunt for bison robes for trade was decades old, and another thought Indians themselves were killing too many for the trade. As the Nez Perce hunter Yellow Wolf later confessed, "I killed yearlings mostly. It was robes we were after more than meat," he said.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  By the time of the Peace Commission, there was growing intertribal competition for every remaining pocket of buffalo in the less hunted zones between tribes. Pockets that got doubled up one by one as expansionist Lakotas and Comanches displaced tribes with prime remaining buffalo pastures. "We stole the hunting grounds of the crows," one Cheyenne later boasted about the war the Lakotas and Cheyennes prosecuted against the crows because they were the best. Then suddenly, it was all over. On the southern plains, the Kiows concluded that the bison had finally returned to the earth.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  For other groups, the ceremonies the culture heroes taught had somehow lost their power. A new pan-tribal ceremony, the Ghost Dance, now swept across the plains with a promise that buffalo would reemerge in the millions and overspread the world again. Even after Lakotas at Wounded Knee were mowed down for dancing the Ghost Dance, a southern Cheyenne priest in western Oklahoma named Buffalo coming out repeatedly performed ceremonies entreating the bison to reemerge from Hiding Mountain in the Wichita Range. But by 1895, even he had given up.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  When the photographer Edward Curtis interviewed Lakota elders at Pine Ridge in 1905, and asked them, "What became of the buffalo?", their answer was simple, confused, and unsatisfying. So far as they could determine, they told Curtis, the explanation was "Wakan", a mystery.

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• 40:29Speaker 05

  When we talk about bison and people in North America, I mean, I've obviously taught a class on people and bison and horses in North America. It's one of those animals where you have to understand its life history to really better understand its relationship with people. And I find that to be a really, that was one of the things that I think blew my mind when I was initially familiarizing myself with like, serious scholarship on this subject. But the biology of the animal is, has this really formative influence on its relationship with people. And you kind of get into that in this, in this chapter.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. I try to, you know, so the bison, I mean, you know, we have to start out by... By conceding that this was for many centuries of American history, the kind of animal that around the world was most closely identified with America. And when people anywhere around the globe thought of America, they imagined vast herds of these animals that had been in place for who knew how long. And of course, those animals being hunted by native people on horseback.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  And what we know from the historical story is that particular image is actually one of a fairly limited range in terms of time. It only occurs for maybe 250 years, at least the horseback part. But people had been engaged with bison in North America for 20,000 years, probably. And long enough, in fact, that large versions of the bison that had existed during the Pleistocene had become extinct. And we think that the animal that survived, the historic and modern bison that we all

• 42:34Speaker 02

  know today, was an animal that biologically was, its evolution was in part anthropogenic. It was shaped by the presence of human and canid predators. And those pressures caused that animal to become smaller than the creatures of the, than its predecessors in the Pleistocene, to have a quicker generational turnover, and probably to adapt almost perfectly to the grasslands of the middle of the continent. And so it's an animal that is kind of, not just in a historic sense, one that the world

• 43:16Speaker 02

  knows about with respect to America, but it's one that has been in place for a very, very long time, and the human engagement with it is very old. I make the point in this particular episode that the oldest economy, sustained economy we have for human beings in North America is the buffalo hunt. I mean, it's gone on for many, many, many thousands of years. And so that made it a particular shock for it to... Only 150 years ago to come to an end. That's part of the, I think, the psychic effect of losing that still.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Maybe a lot of modern Americans don't think about that anymore or experience it, but those of us who pay attention to history certainly do.

• 44:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I, I mean, when we were just working on this most recent Hyde Hunters audiobook, Steve and I were trying to come up with even global analogues to the

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  The duration of that human, I mean, I can't really think of any other example in world history. There's probably fishing villages that have caught some of the same fish for

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:30Speaker 05

  12,000 years, but it doesn't, I mean, there's really nothing else that comes to mind that approximates the relationship between native people and bison in North America.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, not, not even globally. I think you're, you're right about that, you know? I mean, and you can, you can kind of argue in a biological or an ecological sense that, okay, so wildebeests in Africa kind of serve a similar role as a plains animal that migrates in very large herds back and forth across, through East Africa. But the kind of close relationship between bison and native people, it just doesn't really, I mean, the caribou hunters of the far north maybe come as close as we can find.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  And, you know, and those people, I think, as the people I've talked to in Alaska and the Brooks Range country, for example, the Gwich' people kind of think of themselves as caribou hunters that, I mean, and they use this because I think they know that the rest of us in America can relate to the bison story. They call themselves, okay, so we're, we're, that's what we are. We hunt caribou the same way people hunted bison. But it's probably only a shadow really of what this, this bison story was. So, yeah, it's a, it's something, if you can, if, you know, if listeners can wrap their minds around it, it's the sort of thing that has gone on here far.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Multiple times longer than the United States has existed as a country. And you have to stretch your imagination out to comprehend vast reaches of time, rather than doing what most of us do, which is, you know, you just focus on the immediate present of your moment in time. I find it stimulating to stretch my imagination to try to look at a part of the world, like, say, eastern Montana, for example, or west Texas, and say, wow, just 150 years ago, this was a completely different place. And it had been that kind of place for a long time.

• 46:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think stemming from that long relationship, there's, between native people in Buffalo, they have a highly specialized understanding of Buffalo behavior and Buffalo habits. And they have this incredible knowledge of the animal and what it does sort of seasonally, but they explain it in ways that don't align with what the Western science tells us. And I always think this is like an interesting distinction to sort of wrap your mind around, is that they explain these things in terms of obligations and reciprocity. And there's certain moral, there's a moral relationship with the animal.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  And even though it doesn't explain things in the way that we would explain them today, it does explain these things in a way that makes sense and is sort of functionally, you know, useful knowledge, right? Like, just the difference in understanding between Western science and sort of indigenous knowledge of these creatures is sort of fascinating.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Yeah, it's, it is really fascinating. And I think what stories like, particularly the ceremonies that I was describing in this, the script for this episode, what they get us is an opportunity to really look back in time. I think probably farther back than just, say, the 1870s or the 17th or 18th century. I think these are probably really old ways that humans have thought about the animals that are around us. And it's, to be sure, very different from doing ecological studies

• 48:38Speaker 02

  or herd counts of the number of males and the number of females. And so this is the the number that you can take when you're harvesting them. Or even modern genetic science, certainly Darwinian evolutionary science, their take on it was completely different from all of those. And yet, it's somehow, I think, when you, when you read it and understand what they were doing, what these ceremonies were all about, it is truly, to me, understandable. It's something that seems very, very human and probably very, very old. And it also,

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I think, probably had the effect of enabling a kind of a conservation, preservation sentiment about the, the natural world around humanity to, to prevail. And so I, I really was excited about learning about those, those ceremonies in particular. I mean, one of the great lines about them is that whenever they were successfully performed, the animals came dancing. I mean, the idea is that the animals have disappeared and you have to engage in these reciprocal and kinship-based ceremonies to cause them to return. And when you do so, they return

• 50:00Speaker 02

  joyously. The animals come dancing. And it's, yeah, it's, it's something that I think is sort of like, you know, learning about far eastern religions. I think it, it broadens your horizons to understand the human condition as seen by a completely different group of people.

• 50:22Speaker 05

  Again, going back to this sort of long people and bison in North America, there are two huge changes, you know, after the arrival of Europeans that upend this, this, I don't want to call it an equilibrium, but this very long, seemingly sustainable relationship. And one you've already alluded to is the horse, uh, which brings people onto the plains and fundamentally reshapes where people live and how they live. And then two is the market.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  And even though it's this invisible force, like that's probably, in all likelihood, the biggest turning point in this entire story is the beginning of the robe trade.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it is the, a critical part of the story. And, and what you have to recognize is that the global market was able, uh, in a brilliant kind of way, to incorporate indigenous people, uh, producing their own particular local products that were valued by the market all over the globe. And so, native people who participated in the robe trade, who hunted bison for robes that they then traded to, uh, American and European traders, uh, they were not doing something singular or a one-off. It was something that happened all around, uh, all around the world. And one of the reasons it happened is because, uh, as a result of their particular circumstances,

• 51:48Speaker 02

  uh, in Eurasia, connected to the largest landmass of the world, so that you got, uh, old worlders got the benefit of everything everybody invented, from China to India to Africa to Europe. What happened then for a group of people like Native Americans, who were isolated from all that, is that old worlders had gone through a metal revolution that enabled them to arrive in North America with a transformative technology, uh, iron and steel, iron, uh, products in particular, that-

• 52:26Speaker 02

  That basically put indigenous people, put native people into this kind of position. If we don't participate in this trade and someone down the river does, we have disadvantaged ourselves to the point that we're not going to be able to compete or survive. And so, everybody in order to keep up with this new world and to, of course, take on this transformative technology is going to engage in the market. So, native people get caught up in it and the bison robe trade becomes a critical part of it in the West.

• 53:00Speaker 05

  And I think one of the interesting parts of that is that native people had always produced some surplus amount of robes to trade with other native people on the periphery. And so, it's not this, they don't have to do something. It's within the historic sort of economy that they've always operated in. Only now, the market's ability to absorb robes is bottomless.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  It's bottomless. And so, the demand is enormous and the supply steadily dwindles. I mean, that's kind of what, in effect, happens with so many of the animals that become targets of the global market in North America, is that the demand is insatiable and the supply is gradually diminishing over time. To the, to the point where, while you, when you get into the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, native people through their, their own ceremonies, their winter counts, their calendars, their

• 54:09Speaker 02

  yearly calendars that they keep, are already noticing that bison numbers are dwindling. They're going down. I mean, the Kiows are no longer able to have sundances after the middle 1830s because they can't assemble all of their bands in one place since there's not a sufficient number of bison to support them in one spot long enough to do the sundance. The winter counts among the, the Sioux and speaking peoples on the northern plains by the 1840s are all about their shamans doing these ceremonies, trying to call bison. So, what in effect happens is that before the, the hide hunt takes place in the post-civil war years,

• 54:52Speaker 02

  As a result of a number of factors, and I go obviously into as many of them as we understand these days, the role of a changing climate, the role of competition for grass and water from horses, the role probably of accidentally introduced old world bovine diseases like anthrax, for example, as a consequence of all of those, plus the market, you began to get a drawdown of the supply of animals even by the 1840s and 1850s. And of course, during this whole time, as I described in this episode, some three dozen

• 55:34Speaker 02

  native people who are peripheral to the Great Plains are going to mount up on horses and flock to the plains to participate in the hunt. And of course, there are all sorts of other influences taking place as well, the overland trails on the part of whites, and the shrinking of the bison range on all sides as native, the removal policy puts nearly 90,000 eastern and midwestern Indians into Oklahoma, and suddenly the bison are not able to migrate in that direction. And because the growth of the human population in places like Utah and New Mexico is also going up, bison can't go westward. So it's

• 56:16Speaker 02

  just a, it's a perfect storm of causes that by around 1850, 1860 or so, are beginning to bring about a reduction in the number. And then after the Civil War, of course, as we can talk in the next, about the next episode, comes the hide hunt.

• 56:36Speaker 05

  Uh huh. We'll get into that next time. Thanks, Dan.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  You bet.

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