Great article, thanks.
I don’t recall if it was mentioned but buffalo bones were largely absent from pre-contact middens east of the Mississippi, suggesting they were not found in those areas, presumably hunted out.
Subsequent to the 16th Century DeSoto expedition and the first rounds of massive epidemics depopulating the Southeast, by the 18th Century and the arrival of the Colonial Frontier buffalo were present as Far East as Virginia, after 200 years the Indian population being still a fraction of what it had been in DeSoto’s visit.
Here in Texas drought absolutely did hammer buffalo numbers in the 1850’s, a thing which still happens about every half-century. The 1850’s drought causing starving Comanches to try settling on Reserves where they were encouraged to take up farming.
Also not mentioned is disease, the African-ancestry long-horned cattle introduced by the Spanish carried both brucellosis and the tick-borne Texas fever, both lethal to buffalo. At the time of the Alamo you already had to go 100 miles north and west of San Antonio reliably to find buffalo.
By the 1860’s there were famously 6 million feral Longhorns in Texas and few buffalo. So much so that in the 1860’s the Kiowa and Comanches began the process of transforming into a cattle-based agrarian economy. Large numbers of Texas cattle were run off, when Kit Carson went up on the Panhandle at First Adobe Walls (1964?) he found theKiowa and Comanche camps kept large herds of cattle.
