Pod Insights Gunfighters Ep. 17: What Really Happened to America’s National Mammal? | The American West About this episode America’s national mammal possesses a troubling story in western history. For a century writers have presented the fate of the buffalo as brought down by a federal conspiracy that plotted the animal’s demise to undermine Native cultures. With an animal this important to American and western history, understanding the more realistic and accurate version of its 19th and 20th century story seems a critical step as we figure out how to go forward in returning America’s most iconic mammal to the modern West.
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1:05 Speaker 02 With its tragic endgame, why is the buffalo America's national mammal? If history is instructive, then we should understand the real story of what befell the enormous herds that once spread across the western interior and defined North America to the world. 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.
1:57 Speaker 02 What Really Happened to America's National Mammal? Part 2
2:04 Speaker 02 So, why on earth does an animal like the buffalo matter? Yes, in 2016, at least a century too late, President Barack Obama made it America's official national mammal. Yet stuck in yellow zone traffic behind an obstinate bull standing in the road in the Lamar Valley, the buffalo strikes many of us as an ungainly holdover from a past world. If it butts a car in the traffic jam it caused, that could go viral on social media, but mostly as Exhibit A of how out of place and time a real buffalo is, as opposed, say, to the sports bar version shilling wings on TV.
2:49 Speaker 02 The truth, though, and there is a bigger truth, is that this animal's history, and especially its endgame, stands in for the whole of the American nature story over the past 500 years. Once the buffalo was the quintessence of adaptation to North America, perfectly suited to its interior grassland habitat, which is why the animals were here for half a million years. It was the wildebeest of our American Serengeti, yet because the Pleistocene extinctions left it with so few competitors, it attained a thriving biomass wildebeest never achieved. Bison survived the grand extinction that took out our elephants and saber-toothed
3:33 Speaker 02 cats, and then 10,000 years of sacred death at human hands. Yet after all that, in the space of less than a century, we Americans very nearly erased it from existence. Except for the equally disturbing fate of the passenger pigeon, no other nature story in American history hits with that kind of impact, or has been used so frequently by economists to point out the danger unregulated capitalism can pose to the natural world.
4:03 Speaker 02 Looking back on it now, the bison's end seems like some tremendous sustained crashing sound that cut off dead silent just at the moment we've turned to listen. There were uncounted millions in one instant, and in another, there were none. If you have any interest in continental history, you ought to realize that the collapse of the bison as a species was a truly signal event, a watershed moment in the history of the United States. At the time, it seemed a grand finale to three centuries of conquest across North America,
4:44 Speaker 02 an irreversible step of replacing some ancient Eden we'd found with a wholly new thing, a civilized stage modeled on the old world of Europe from whence all we newcomers had started. If the things I've just said seem true, then maybe we should try to wrap our minds around what it was that happened to bison so quickly and finally. What really transpired with an ancient American animal that had weathered drastic climate change and witnessed scores of other species die out around it, but somehow couldn't survive us? How did we get to a silent and empty Great Plains, from what a New York journalist described
5:26 Speaker 02 in 1877 as he and companions watched from the top of a butte for a full five hours, a sea of black, shaggy life, rolling like billows at our feet, an ocean of buffaloes, surging and swaying like the waves? I think for most of us, the cocktail party version, if such a topic ever comes up at all, devolves pretty quickly into inevitability. Or as someone actually said to me once, gesturing towards history with his Grey Goose martini, "What happened to the buffalo is just what happened globally when civilization met wilderness."
6:10 Speaker 02 If the wild past did have to yield inevitably to modern needs, then maybe a trope like John Gass's famous 19th-century painting, "The Goddess of Liberty," summarizes all we really need to know. In Gass's art, the goddess is a blond, giant, and flowing, angelic white garb, striding across the West, stringing telegraph wires and leading settler wagon trains. Slinking away to the margins of his canvas are the resident of Americans of the prior 20,000 years: native people, wolves, and buffalo.
6:53 Speaker 02 "What killed the buffalo," my cocktail-party companion insisted, "was simply the march of progress, technology, and modern civilization." In America, modernity could brook neither traditional people nor the great animals that had evolved here. For the buffalo specifically, Western history used to tell how the inevitability of this story was plotted out to make it happen. That story went something like this: "In the 20 years after the Civil War, 60, or 75, or even 100 million buffalo ended up as stinking corpses and bones
7:37 Speaker 02 in a killing maelstrom involving railroads and more deadly firearms, all of it driven by a conspiracy of the federal government, the American military, and a few thousand private buffalo hunters secretly cooperating with one another against Western Indians, all with the goal of making way for the modern world." While some of these actors, not all, are the same, the version I'm about to describe of how we destroyed the continent's most iconic animal is a different one. In its largest context, it doesn't really give the country much credit for planning an inevitable outcome.
8:20 Speaker 02 Big historical forces are definitely involved in my story, but they were of a kind neither people nor governments were very much in control of.
8:34 Speaker 02 Our historical myth about the buffalo story has an interesting origin that rested on a very effective misdirection of blame. In the first decade of the 20th century, Americans were still grappling with the shocking demise of the most numerous mammal on the continent. At a time when the term "conservation" was a new notion in the national consciousness, many were outraged by the stories of orgiastic slaughter by men who had destroyed millions of American animals in the previous three decades. Descendants of some of these hunters, in fact, went so far as to destroy family papers and records to hide their shame.
9:18 Speaker 02 There were no ticker-tape parades for buffalo hunters in the early 1900s. Then, in 1907, one of those former buffalo hunters named John Cook published a memoir called "The Border and the Buffalo." Appearing at the very moment conservationists were desperately trying to save the last few bison left, Cook's memoir told Americans disgusted by the slaughter that they had it all wrong. Amidst his tales of frontier adventure, Cook made a startling claim. "Destroying America's bison," he wrote, "had been the goal of a secret conspiracy by the
10:00 Speaker 02 federal government and the US military to force native people onto reservations and to speed their assimilation." In Cook's telling, he and buffalo hunters like him had never been villains at all. They were unappreciated national heroes, the executioners of a secret plan of social engineering. Cook insisted that the military had not only encouraged the hunters to exterminate bison, it had handed out free ammunition to that end. Instead of being vilified, market hunters like Cook deserved the thanks of the nation and medals of honor for what they had done.
10:41 Speaker 02 Cook's book included what he advanced as "a smoking gun", an actual public speech delivered by a high-ranking military official, one who by 1907 had unfortunately passed away. Over time, that speech became one of the best-known documents in America's bison story, endlessly quoted in books and articles, and even available today on T-shirts. The speech, Cook said, was delivered in Texas in 1875, when that state was on the verge of passing a law to protect buffalo. "To prevent that," Cook wrote, "no less than Civil War hero General Philip Sheridan
11:24 Speaker 02 had journeyed to Austin to bring Texas in line with the government's policy of deliberately destroying buffalo." Here are the words Cook put in Sheridan's mouth: "These buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years and will do more in the next year to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary, and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will. For the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.
12:09 Speaker 02 Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization." The key phrase, "let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated." There's just one problem here. The speech Cook included was, in fact, a complete fabrication. There was a hint of invention in the story all along. Cook dodged and flinched by introducing this Sheridan story with the telling passive-voice line, "It is said that..."
12:52 Speaker 02 Of course, all manner of claims have escaped interrogation via the passive voice. Cook's book never identified any source for his Sheridan story, nor is there now any evidence for it at all. There's no record that Texas ever introduced or debated a bill to outlaw killing bison. There's no evidence that Philip Sheridan ever appeared before the Texas Legislature. During those very years, the US Congress was considering various laws to protect big mammals in the western territories, all of which met with derision from the Texas delegation, which called them misplaced sentimentalism.
13:32 Speaker 02 In the Gilded Age, sentimentality was a code word for something only women felt. Men accused of it understood. Standing accused of being sentimental meant your manliness had just been insulted. Sheridan's actual history with respect to buffalo was very different, too. In 1879, while in command of the Missouri District of the West, in fact, he enlisted the Departments of War, Interior, and Indian Affairs in an effort to drive thousands of market hunters off Indian lands.
14:15 Speaker 02 "I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the buffalo should be stopped", he told the secretaries of those departments. And in the 1890s, Sheridan oversaw troops who were the only wildlife protectors the federal government could muster for Yellowstone National Park. But Cook's made-up story cast buffalo history in a way that worked for the next century. After all, an intimate linkage between buffalo and Indians was obvious, and hadn't the Union victory in the Civil War featured a Burnt Earth campaign, in that case against the South's stock and resources?
14:56 Speaker 02 A bison story that blamed the animal's demise on "the government" conveniently made heroes of men who said they'd shot down buffalo for the sake of civilization. It also papered over the role that hallowed free-market capitalism played in destroying a world-famous animal. Much like the 20th century rewriting of the cause of the Civil War, that a war that had nearly torn the country apart had not been about the enslavement of black Americans, but was actually about states' rights and preserving the so-called "southern way of life",
15:36 Speaker 02 Cook's version of the buffalo's fate made ordinary Americans feel better about their history.
15:46 Speaker 02 The inconvenient truth of the buffalo story is that, while there were other contributing causes, the buffalo's demise was part of a horrific history of wildlife slaughter for money in America, a destruction of many different creatures across little more than a century of time. And no, it was not inevitable. We could have stopped it. But because of how we thought about animals, how we privileged economics, how we viewed government, we failed to do it. The way Americans saw the animal life around us was a significant part of this story. Against the ancient and poetic worldview informed by kinship and reciprocity
16:30 Speaker 02 that characterized native ideas about animals, Europeans introduced from the Old World views of animals that were also old, but very different. Christianity, seconded even by science prior to Darwin, taught that humans were exceptional, the only beings made in the image of a deity, the only ones with souls, and that the rest of Earth's life existed solely for our benefit. As Europeans became Americans, our views towards animals were increasingly influenced by capitalism, which saw economic action as freedom and animals and their body parts as commodities in the emerging global market.
17:14 Speaker 02 Powered by human self-interest, all this proved an irresistible force.
17:21 Speaker 02 So if we posed the question, why did the buffalo, an animal that has survived the Pleistocene extinctions that humans had hunted for at least 13,000 years, come within the barest whisper of disappearing a century ago, a different and complex answer now seems more realistic. American free-market capitalism was without question the overwhelming force that had bison almost joining passenger pigeons in a ratio. But these days, we also understand that there were other causes of varying intensity that broke apart in ecology that had functioned on the Great Plains for thousands of years, a perfect storm of causes.
18:06 Speaker 02 By now, we've learned something about the influence of climate on bison. Since the 1970s, paleontology and archaeology have shown that bison populations over time were highly variable, and that variability was keyed to a fluctuating Great Plains climate. During warm, dry periods, the carrying capacity of the grasslands dropped, and so did bison numbers. There were also times of wet, cool weather that grew bumper crops of grasses and swell the bison herds so that they sometimes spilled out of the Great Plains, both eastward and westward. Dry conditions had prevailed on the Great Plains over the three centuries immediately
18:47 Speaker 02 prior to the time Europeans were first becoming a presence in the Americas. But at the very moment when Coronado's party was pushing out onto disconcertingly vast prairies in search of Quivera in the 1530s, another major climatic change set in across the entire northern hemisphere, the one we call the Little Ice Age. Between 1500 and 1700, the much cooler moisture weather of the Little Ice Age was devastating agriculture in Europe and advancing glaciers in the Alps and the Rockies. But for buffalo hunters on the Great Plains of America, the Elysian Fields were at hand.
19:30 Speaker 02 That moment was grand, but it was brief. It did produce mind-bending numbers of bison for a time, although no modern method we can devise for determining their carrying capacity on the Great Plains indicates there ever could have been 60 or 75 million of them. Under optimum conditions, somewhere in the range of 30 million seems the best estimate. But the Little Ice Age's optimum grass-happy conditions began to dissipate during the first half of the 1800s. Western tree ring studies show wet conditions continuing from 1800 to about 1821. After that, 19th-century plains weather gradually began to cycle towards drier, warmer
20:14 Speaker 02 conditions that were increasingly less favorable for grass, and hence for buffalo. By 1840, spotty droughts had begun to crop up all over the plains, settling finally into a major dry period from 1858 to 1866 that climate historians consider the end of the Little Ice Age. That end came in a form that made it much worse on grazing animals than any regional drought, for it seems to have occurred simultaneously across almost all of the Great Plains. Climate change, then, we are now certain, was one of the causes of bison collapse in the 19th century.
20:56 Speaker 02 The practical effect of the end of the Little Ice Age on buffalo was even more profound than it would seem. By 1850, the bison's former drought refuges east and west of the Great Plains had now filled in with people. Now a part of the United States, New Mexico had a population of 50,000, and Mormon Utah was rapidly climbing towards that same figure. American settlers were already in western Oregon, and mining strikes were about to draw large human populations to Colorado and Montana. German and Czech immigrants had settled on the edge of the southern plains in Texas, and America's Indian removal policies had filled Oklahoma and Kansas with more than
21:40 Speaker 02 87,000 eastern and midwestern Indians, many of whom hoped to hunt bison themselves. There was no direction now for bison to flee the growing dry and over-cropped plains grasses.
21:55 Speaker 02 The end of the Little Ice Age then may have reduced the Great Plains' carrying capacity for buffalo by as much as forty to sixty percent. At the Civil War's conclusion, in 1865, there almost certainly weren't twenty or thirty million buffalo, but more likely maybe ten or twelve million, which helps to explain the comparatively slight railroad shipping figures for buffalo hides we have from the subsequent hunt. The backdrop of drought enabled a perfect storm of causation to form around bison well before the Civil War. The 1840s and 1850s was the heyday of white homesteader caravans along the overland trails
22:36 Speaker 02 to Oregon and California, manned by travelers armed to the teeth who shot at everything that moved on their way west. Another clear causation in the decline of the bison herds was the growing population of horses in the West, not only sometimes very large Indian pony herds, but especially the rapidly proliferating wild horse bands. Horses had a significant dietary overlap with bison, and they competed for water sources as well. For the first time since the late Pleistocene, horses were once again grazing competition for bison on the wild plains, drawing down the carrying capacity for bison every year that the horse herds grew.
23:19 Speaker 02 The overland caravans with their oxen and cattle were likely also the sources for another effect, with consequences whose extent is unanswerable but may have been significant. Old-world livestock introduced exotic new animal diseases, like the rinder pest that decimated wild herds during droughts in Africa in the 19th century. In the West, the exotic diseases anthrax and bovine tuberculosis were both present in the remnant bison that survived into the 1880s.
23:54 Speaker 02 But in addition to a backdrop of climate change, disruption from overland travelers, competition from expanding horse populations, railroads, and likely the effects of exotic diseases, first and last, there was the market. As I described in the last episode, the market was not just an influence on the hide hunters who shot down bison to sell tongues and hides after the Civil War. Responding to a transformative trade of firearms, metalware, and eventually even luxury items that functioned to enhance status and set some people apart from others, Indian peoples who had flocked to the plains from all over North America became ensnared by a market
24:37 Speaker 02 economy almost no one could resist. This was a phenomenon for indigenous peoples across the globe.
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26:57 Speaker 02 In a final cruel twist, the Civil War unloaded thousands of young men into the West who were familiar with firearms, but had few post-war prospects beyond employing their new skills against wildlife. These were the hide hunters, gearing up wagons and Sharps rifles and skinny knives to impose a gruesome future for the West's remaining animals. Most were veterans of the war, knew guns and killing, and were armed with firearms technology the Civil War's frontal assaults had refined. Others were construction workers the railroads had let go. For tongues cut from the animals' mouths, but mostly for what they called hides, the
27:41 Speaker 02 skins of the animals ripped from their bodies and staked out to dry, the hide hunters turned the plains into an open-air, industrial, factory slaughterhouse. Just as steamboats had facilitated the demise of beavers, railroads hauled the harvested parts of once-living animals away in boxcars. The commodity parts of the animals went to nearby cities or to the East Coast, where a new chemical process converted buffalo hides into a tough leather used as industrial belting and wagon suspensions. One hunter related that as far as their dead stripped victims went, from any eminence,
28:25 Speaker 02 their bodies glistened in the sun like so many glass pane windows stretching to the limits of sight.
28:34 Speaker 02 Some of the hide hunters may have believed the old saw that extinction was impossible and bison were inexhaustible. But most of them seemed to have understood what they were doing. Jay Wright Moore, a 20-something Vermonter who with his brother hunted in Kansas and Texas, claimed the $1,000 he realized in a month of buffalo hunting was more than he could make in a year in the east. After five years, he'd saved enough to buy a ranch and gave up hide hunting two years later. Most of the hunters realized that the money was temporary, since the majestic creatures they were killing were fast disappearing.
29:14 Speaker 02 But the Moores, Billy Dixons, Frank Mayers, and John Cooks of the world justified their self-interest in the classic manner. What was good for them was good for America. Moore, who ended up in Texas, didn't go quite so far as Cook and suggest he deserved the national medal, but he did scoff at conservation and sentiment for the animals. "Any one of the many families killed and homes destroyed by the Indians would have been worth more to Texas and civilization than all the millions of buffalo that ever roamed from the Pecos River to the platte," he said. Another hunter, Frank Mayer, saw things differently, though.
29:58 Speaker 02 "Maybe we were just a greedy lot who wanted to get ours and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, and anyone else. I think maybe that is the way it was." There are two perfect words for this kind of callous disregard for life, for an attitude that regarded two or three years of returns worth reducing millions of ancient animals to a putrid desert of rotting carcasses, blowflies, and generations of us who would never see America's Serengeti again. Fucking pathetic.
30:40 Speaker 02 That putrid desert did feed legions of ravens, magpies, eagles, coyotes, and wolves. But that feast lasted only a few months before only skulls and bones were left, which poor settlers gathered up and sold as fertilizers for a few pennies. Birds then made off with the remnant fur still snagged on the sagebrush as silence set in over the plains. The wallows where buffalo rolled and dusted themselves once speckled their country with craters that in low light made it look like the surface of the moon. Now they filled in with sand and the spade-shaped leaves of plants known ever since as buffalo gourds.
31:22 Speaker 02 The trails over which bison had navigated the west single file for half a million years eroded into topography. No one could believe it. As the conservationist William Temple Hornaday put the matter in his 1889 book, Extermination of the American Bison, "America was committing a crime against both present and future by allowing its wild fauna to be destroyed like this. Buffalo were almost extinct because of man's reckless greed," Hornaday wrote, "his wanton destructiveness and improvidence." All played out in a nation where, as he said, "there was not even one restraining or preserving
32:05 Speaker 02 influence." Why was there not a single restraining influence to halt such profound losses to nature? Where was the federal government while all this was happening? Simply, it was frozen in inaction. Having revolted against a British crown that tried on several occasions to restrict the profligate killing of American wildlife, Americans from their origins had been unwilling to suffer any regulation of the free market for wild animals. States had tried to stop or slow citizens from killing certain valuable species like deer, but always ineffectually.
32:48 Speaker 02 The country's embrace of Adam Smith seemed to demand it look the other way as its citizens pushed one species after another to extinction, near extinction, or regional extirpation.
33:00 Speaker 02 Beavers, sea otters, gray ox, and scores of even common animals had been the initial targets. Following the Civil War, the focus shifted to bison, then pronghorns, elk, mule deer, passenger pigeons, bighorn sheep, and wolves. Obviously, the federal government wasn't secretly targeting all these animals on behalf of the social engineering of native people. It was standing aside for a larger principle. That larger principle was what Gilded Age America called laissez-faire, a sacred belief
33:39 Speaker 02 that governments should never interfere in the higher laws of economic supply and demand. With Reconstruction ending in the South, with Black Southerners losing their rights to vote as a result, in the late 19th century, the Republican Party was especially interested in the support of the new American corporations, a brothers-in-arm bond it has never relinquished. Democrats floundered trying to decide what they stood for, but they too regarded the free market in near-religious ecstasy. Confronting a wholesale destruction of wildlife then, the country's history and beliefs
34:21 Speaker 02 froze the national government into standing aside and letting economics take its course. There were Americans who were outraged. One was the journalist-author George Bird Grenell, whose magazine articles about the cruelties and excesses of the wildlife slaughter in the West eventually drew the attention of Congress. The killing sprees were taking place on reservation lands and on unappropriated lands still administered by the Fed's General Land Office, and not every member of Congress was willing to let the market have complete sway. In 1872, Californian Cornelius Cole had introduced in the US Senate the first-ever federal bill
35:04 Speaker 02 that attempted to halt the indiscriminate slaughter of the buffalo, elk, antelope, and other useful animals, as the law read. This was the same Congress that was actually banning killing animals in brand-new Yellowstone National Park. But Cole's bill died in committee.
35:25 Speaker 02 In 1874, as reports had come in of a frenzy of buffalo destruction in western Kansas, a Republican representative from Illinois named Greenberg Fort introduced a new bill in the House to make it unlawful for any non-Indian to kill any female buffalo of any age in the western territories. Forced bill obviously was not a plan to deprive Indians of wildlife. It was aimed at market hunting and the preservation of the buffalo species. After considerable debate, both the House and the Senate passed this bill.
36:05 Speaker 02 But this first federal legislation ever drawn up to protect a single American animal did not become law. President Ulysses Grant failed to sign it in time. In Congress, the explanation was that the president was a supporter but had been distracted by other issues. So Fort reintroduced the same bill in the 1876 session. Again, it passed in the House. But as the Senate committee was meeting, turmoil over the Little Big Horn Battle and the death of George Armstrong Custer deflected Congress's attention.
36:44 Speaker 02 That was followed by a disputed presidential election with reconstruction of the former Confederate states at stake. No federal bill to curtail the buffalo slaughter ever came up again. In the United States, market hunting of all wild animals would remain entirely unregulated by the United States government for another quarter of a century. That was long enough for the mayhem to extend far beyond buffalo.
37:19 Speaker 02 The former hidehunter, Charles Buffalo Jones, the Texas ranching couple, Charles and Mary Goodnight, conservationist writer William Hornaday, along with numerous native people, were the handful of bison advocates who saved the animal from extinction. A Montana Salish named Latati coaxed six bison calves from eastern Montana to follow him across the Rockies to the Flathead Reservation, where they became the nucleus of the famous Pablo Allard herd. Michel Pablo himself was part Salish. A mixed-blood Lakota named Fred Dupries caught five calves on the Yellowstone River
38:04 Speaker 02 and sold his animals in Canada, where James McKay, who was a Métis, became another buffalo savior. A few animals somehow managed to survive market poachers even in Yellowstone National Park. Hornaday might have been a racist who once contrived to place an African pygmy in a viewing cage in the Bronx Zoo. But he fought to save America's wild animals like no one else of the age. In 1907, with President Roosevelt's blessing, Hornaday launched the American Bison Society to create a series of national bison ranges to save the animals. A frighteningly small group of only 88 buffalo
38:49 Speaker 02 became the nucleus released into these ranges. Disbanded in 1936, when it believed its project was finished, the society unquestionably performed heroic work. But without a single Indian on its board, it never intended that buffalo be restored to the West as wild animals. Hornaday even invoked Darwin and argued astonishingly that natural selection favored cattle in the former American Serengeti.
39:22 Speaker 02 Over dinner several years ago with Fred Dubre, one of the original founders of the Intertribal Bison Council, I heard Fred's stories from the beginning days of the ITBC. When he and other Native people had the idea in the 1980s of bringing buffalo back to Indian reservations in the West, an elderly Lakota woman had taken them aside and said, in effect, "Best you ask the buffalo if they want to come back." I was intrigued. I was a captive audience. "And?" I asked. Fred took a couple of bites,
40:01 Speaker 02 swilled his drink, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin. The guy had a great sense of timing. "Well, we did a ceremony and asked them," he said. "And what did they say?" Another pause. "They said they wanted to come back," Fred replied, "but they said they didn't want to come back and be cows. They said they wanted to come back and be buffalo. They said they wanted to be wild again."
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42:50 Speaker 06 Dan, I'm almost not sure where to start with this one because the question of what really happened to the bison might be probably the most significant question in your professional career in terms of shaping your, shaping your life in academia.
43:09 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:09 Speaker 06 And it's also, you know, no doubt caused a lot of headaches for you, arguing with people who have refused to let go of sort of the traditional narratives. And so I wonder just where we even begin with this question of like, what are the stakes of this in terms of explaining what happened to the bison and why is this such a thorny question?
43:36 Speaker 02 Well, I think the stakes, aside from just getting things about the past right, probably are unusually big for this one because of the way the buffalo story sort of stands as a set piece of the whole North American nature story, you know, and for a lot of people, the extent of what they know is that, okay, one time, obviously, there were just millions and millions and millions of these animals, and then suddenly, almost overnight, there were none of them. And clearly, something produced that effect.
44:18 Speaker 02 And the question is, exactly what? And yes, Randall, you're correct. I mean, I published a kind of a career-defining piece in a fancy journal, a Journal of American History, in fact, in the early 1990s, reinterpreting what had happened to the buffalo. But I will say that that particular piece only went a certain distance in sort of assembling a new batch of causes that contributed to the demise of the animals. And what I've
45:02 Speaker 02 done more recently, and what this particular script lays out too, is to take on a kind of a, an accepted historical explanation that's been out there for a long time, and try to show, you know, that its feet were in the sand all along. It was based on a made-up story, and cast a particular figure from American history who happened to not be alive at the time the story was created about him, as a particular villain. So, I
45:42 Speaker 02 mean, you can right now buy T-shirts online with Philip Sheridan's face on one side, and quotes from this made-up speech he supposedly delivered in Austin, Texas, in the 1870s, on the other side. And so it's certainly a way to try to provide an accurate assessment of what really happened. And I think the what, what makes it critical is that by buying into the original story that so many of us have, so many people, even in the history profession have sort of bought into that buffalo were eliminated by a conspiracy between the federal government,
46:27 Speaker 02 the American military, and these guys who went out and shot them down. You're obfuscating and ignoring the role that market capitalism played in wiping out these animals and how the federal government in the 19th century was so anxious about interfering with economics that it basically, in truth, just stood back and let this happen. Just as we let it happen to a whole host of other species, passenger pigeons being probably the other prime example,
47:09 Speaker 02 where the federal government never steps in and tries to do anything. And this speaks to our current moment in terms of, of how we want to view our history as well, because of course, we're at a moment in, in time right now where the idea is we don't want to cast the past of the United States in a bad light. We want, we're supposed to be, the Smithsonian is supposed to be talking about all the great things we did and not about any of the critical problematic things that happened in American history. And this in fact, was one of those stories that put the reality of the world on a shelf and came
47:53 Speaker 02 up with a kind of a fake narrative that blamed the government for what happened to, to buffalo. And I think the proper way to look at it is through the lens of here's the truth about American history and we need to look it in the face and accept it for what it was.
48:13 Speaker 06 Right. Yeah. And I think.
48:17 Speaker 06 You know, when you read the sources from the 1870s, there's a recognition that the Hyde hunt has implications for native people, and ultimately for their ability to resist the US Army. But that recognition of an unintended side effect does not equal intention or premeditation, right? And so I think it's easy, if you come into the source material with that idea in mind, to read more into what is there. But I think like the John Cook story is just so powerful in terms of his fabrication of this quote.
49:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, and it's, you know, so it's basically John Cook is this former buffalo hunter who, like many of the buffalo hunters who are still surviving into the progressive age of conservation, are being castigated for the role that they played. And what Cook devises is a story that basically turns himself and other buffalo hunters into national heroes. "We're just secret national heroes. You don't know about it because it was, you know, kept on the down low, but we were told to do this by the federal government because this was how economic policy and how social engineering
49:47 Speaker 02 was going to play out for native people." And as I said, it reminds me, because I grew up in the South with this kind of story, it reminds me very much of the story that I heard many times as a kid. "The Civil War was not about slavery. It had nothing to do with the enslavement of black people in America. The Civil War was about preserving the Southern way of life and the principle of states' rights." Well, if you're a Southerner, that idea makes you feel a lot better about the history of your region. The problem with it, of course, is that it's another one of these kind of made up... Kind of historical explanations. And I think the buffalo one, the John Cook
50:32 Speaker 02 version that so many people accepted is one of those made up ones that makes us feel pretty good. We don't have to say, oh, man, we were just a bunch of greedy capitalists who went out there and shot these animals down for money. In fact, it was a secret conspiracy by the federal government.
50:47 Speaker 06 Yeah, when you read the sources, the, you're often reading somebody saying, I needed some money, so I went out there and did this, or I agreed to skin buffalo until I could get back to town and get a new set of clothes. So I did this, right? There's no, but in, in the Cook, in the Cook manuscript, he talks about sitting around a campfire and a guy telling him how many settlers are between this river and that river.
51:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:10 Speaker 06 And he goes, good, I guess we did our jobs. But it's just, it's so strange. And I think part of that, as you point out, is that these guys live through perhaps like the most wholesale transformation in our thinking about wildlife and natural resources in this country. From, you know, Boone and Crockett Club, some of them survive into the twenties and thirties. And one of them famously lives, I believe, till 1954.
51:37 Speaker 02 Oh, is that right?
51:37 Speaker 06 Yeah.
51:37 Speaker 02 I didn't know that.
51:38 Speaker 06 Yeah. So, you know, they're living in this world where Teddy Roosevelt is carved on the Mount Rushmore. And Teddy Roosevelt's famous crusade is just these market hunters need to go away. Right? And so how do you make sense of your own past in that context?
51:57 Speaker 02 Well, you know, John Cook sort of did it for them. We're, we deserve medals as American heroes, you know, we're, we're sort of the secret heroes of the coming of civilization to America in the 20th, 20th century. So, yeah, it's a, it's a kind of a crazy sort of historical story. And, you know, in some respects, I think a lot of serious Western historians who are Interested in talking about, you know, the role of women in the West, the role of various ethnic groups and so forth, gradually sort of moved away
52:38 Speaker 02 from stories like this, the same way that, you know, maybe Richard White accepted, a lot of modern historians moved away from telling the account of the railroads in the 19th century, or the mining strikes. These became sort of old fashioned stories in Western history. But I think taking a fresh look, especially with a kind of an environmental lens, and also being a more critical reader of the sources, has enabled some of us to come up with a valuable explanation for a story that I think we really need to come to terms with in reality.
53:19 Speaker 06 Yeah, and just to get into the toolkit that you're talking about, you know, you have all these stories from the 1860s or 1870s about it took us days to ride past the buffalo herd.
53:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
53:32 Speaker 06 But when you sat down to tackle this question, you're using insights from biology and conservation biology, and even range management. I mean, what are some of the big, I guess, new angles that you took to begin to pull the threads apart on this?
53:53 Speaker 02 Well, I began working initially with, so how many of these animals were out there? And the way I tackled that one was to look at the census records for livestock in the 1890s, 1900, 1910, 1920, to actually see how many grazing animals, units, animal units, of course, is the term that the Department of Agriculture uses, which, you know, regards a sheep and a yearling to be equivalent to a grown cow, that sort of thing. How many animal units was it actually possible for the buffalo range to support? And what you quickly come to terms with is that there couldn't have been 75 million buffalo, or 100 million buffalo, or 40 million buffalo.
54:38 Speaker 06 Right.
54:38 Speaker 02 And so the first step is to try to, to scale back to an actual believable figure. And one of the things you realize very quickly is because the natural world doesn't stand still, it's changing all the time, is that those figures are variable depending on climate. So the fact that there were climate historians beginning to work allowed me to bring in the climate story. And then, of course, we had the whole idea at the time of, well, what about disease epidemics? And what about the effect of reintroducing horses to the West, which begins to produce, obviously, a drawdown in terms of grass and water that bison are
55:18 Speaker 02 also relying on. And so it was just a combination of looking at a variety of things, at archaeology, at paleontology, at evolution, evolutionary theories, at range management, at census data, and attacking the problem with an open mind. And I want to start over on this and not have my mind be colonized by what other people have already written about.
55:50 Speaker 06 Well, Dan, thanks. Always, always fun to talk bison with you.
55:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, no kidding, Randall. Thank you.
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