Theodore Roosevelt and Sitting Bull both thought the great American buffalo were extinct. Roosevelt called it “a veritable tragedy of the animal world,” and Sitting Bull said, “a cold wind blew on the prairie the day the last buffalo fell.” They didn’t know there were still about 100 remaining, but they were almost right.
In 1800 there were probably 25 million buffalo in North America, 15 million on the Great Plains. By 1885 they were gone. The great herds were virtually exterminated in less than a decade – almost every single one. Today it is difficult to comprehend such a massive change in the landscape.
I have copies of the journals of Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, and Stephen Long. They are fascinating. All three expeditions crossed the Great Plains exploring, mapping, and documenting the new Louisiana Purchase for the government at the beginning of the 19th century. All three described seemingly infinite herds of buffalo. Pike and Long both said the prairie was black with so many buffalo they couldn’t be counted, herds that stretched further than the eye could see.
The species was eventually saved, partly through hunter activism. Hunters are generally considered conservation-minded, but in the 19th Century hunting as a tool of conservation was a new concept. From the beginning of time, hunting was primarily a means of eating, with little thought about the possibility – or imprudence – of hunting any species to extinction. But the plight of the buffalo awoke people to that stark possibility. Numerous writers worried that the buffalo would soon vanish forever, especially the Smithsonian zoologist, William Temple Hornaday, America’s first endangered species crusader.
The other saviors of the buffalo were ranchers. The growing market that fed the slaughter also turned buffalo into a valuable resource, leading a few ranchers in the 1880s to begin capturing and breeding. That literally saved the buffalo from extinction until federal legislation finally protected them in the mid-1890s.
It is a popular success story of the early conservation movement, but perhaps even more interesting is what led to the slaughter in the first place. It was studiously documented a few years ago by Scott Taylor’s noted article, “International Trade and the Virtual Extinction of the North American Bison.”
He proves that subsistence, and even sport hunting, both of which had persisted for centuries, could scarcely make a dent in those massive herds. It was politics, and economics. He used a complex but accepted formula called the “intrinsic growth rate” of species. An oversimplified version is: zero buffalo produce zero offspring, then there is a growth line as the herd increases, up to the carrying capacity of the land, after which net growth will return to zero. Based on that biologists’ curve, and a “maximum sustainable yield population” of 7.5 million buffalo, he shows that an annual kill of 750,000 buffalo was sustainable forever.
Hunting, even in the western expansion period after the Civil War, never came close to that. Teenage Pony Express rider “Buffalo Bill” Cody got that nickname when he won the contract to supply Union Pacific workers with buffalo meat. He won several challenges for harvesting the most buffalo, yet even he never killed more than 5,000 or so a year. Hornaday claimed that whites and natives combined had killed almost 500,000 annually before 1870, a number biologists now know was sustainable. The railroads later provided transportation for buffalo products to eastern and foreign markets, but in the 1860s before refrigeration, buffalo meat was only sold salted, cured, or smoked. There was no market for hides, so the railroad contract was the primary market.
Everything changed after 1872, when German and British tanners finally developed a method for tanning buffalo hides, previously much too thick, tough, and furry to compete with cowhides. Tanning technology suddenly reversed the economics, and the hides became far more valuable than the perishable meat, their thickness now an advantage for making shoe soles and industrial belts. And the growing railroads made worldwide shipping easy. With no American patents, the new tanning process was soon duplicated, giving hunters a ready market, predictable prices, and free access. The meat was left rotting on the Plains while hunters got rich selling hides.
The government was content to stand aside and ignore the slaughter, because of politics. Generals like Sheridan, Sherman, and Custer thought it might help control buffalo-dependent tribes.
The vast growth in international trade, combined with irresponsible government policies, proved almost fatal for the great American buffalo herds. It’s a history lesson worth remembering.
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