Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Indian Culpability in Bison Demise

Thank you SK!

Damn right we do Conrad!!! 🤣

Where do Albanian/Sicilians fit in that Angles and Saxons deal?

Oh, wait, that's right. Those WASPS didn't want us around, or my Celtic Irish ancestors either.

“You say the Indians honored and respected the Buffalo. How’d they do that? They killed them and ate them!!”

Ted Nugent

I rest my case

Now, back to the buffalo jump

Gypos and goombas.

https://www.thewildlifenews.com/2021/06/01/indian-culpability-in-bison-demise/

Looks like the same article

Texas tick fever (bovine babesiosis) had a lot to do with the demise of bison. Records of market-killed bison numbers do not account for even conservative reproduction rates in the herds.

One need only look at a few native communities to get an idea how well they would manage our lands and natural resources.

You mean the cattle had it, spread into bison, then back to the cattle, bad bison. (Note, no question mark used). LOL

Like

One thing to think about is that for Indians back in those days fat was hard to come by as wild animals are very lean and eating just lean meat can lead to protein poisoning or "rabbit starvation". The people who killed bison for their tongues were probably after the fat in them....their bodies were probably craving it. Also the organs were probably prized for the same reason. Sugar and carbs had to be a mostly seasonal thing and what fruit and berries they had were not sweet like our hybridized versions. Fat is the other concentrated source of energy to run a human body and brain.

I think I remember accounts of Lewis and Clark's men struggling to do hard labor on a diet of deer and elk and were glad to get beaver, other rodents, and dogs from the Indians because of the fat.

Absolutely. Humans are just another biological species on this planet. Like any species the human populations have always expanded to the limits their resources could bear.

Thus humans have always "lived in harmony with nature" just like any other apex predator and omnivore. They breed until they experience a cataclysmic population reduction, then they breed again.

The Native American population is estimated to have been around 60,000,000 in 1492 when European pathogens began racing across this hemisphere. It is estimated that number was reduced to 6,000,000 by year 1500. That number is estimated to be further reduced to 600,000 by year 1800.

So yes, the bison was at the height of a population explosion by 1800, as the population of their sole serious predator had been decimated. Much like cottontails or jackrabbits if something eliminates all the foxes, coyotes, and raptors in their environment.

If one wishes to discuss the elimination of the bison herds during the 19'th century, it is well to remember there were not enough Native Americans left on the plains to make any kind of dent in their population.

It is also well to remember that the US Army put a bounty on bison. $1/tongue when $1 was a good day's wages. You did not even have to skin them. Just cut out the tongue and pack it in a barrel with salt.

The skinners were scavengers after the fact during that time. The power distribution belts used in most factories, similar to the familiar tractor to threshing machine belts, were most commonly made from bison leather when it was commonly available.

Somewhere Union Pacific has published a chart of the hundreds of thousands of tons of bison bones transported from the prairies per year. I have seen it in the past, but can not locate it at this time.

All this to say: No the Native American was no noble steward of his environment. He was just a human animal like every other race on the planet.

Fall bear.

Ya, a quick Google stated that brucellosis weren’t ID’d here until 1910, and first found in Yellowstone buffalo and elk in 1917.

But there’s a whole panoply of communicable cattle diseases. I’m pretty sure accounts of mass die-offs of buffalo to disease have been referenced here on the ‘Fire.

I’ve read accounts of livestock along the Santa Fe Trial transmitting diseases to buffalo. It weren’t just buffalo, very few, if any present day dogs in the Lower 48 carry traces of original Indian dogs. The feral Carolina Yellow Dogs of the Southeast turned out to be of Euro dog ancestry. We have photos of the Tahltan Bear Dog of the Pacific NW but the last known examples died from distemper.

Applied to people too of course, the ‘49ers brung cholera with them across the Plains of their way West, wiped out an estimated 10,000 Comanches in the winter of 49/50. Half the tribe as it was at that time.

Look at any reservation today and you will see this is true.

If we ever do get visited by extra terrestrials/aliens we had better kill them on sight.
Remember "To Serve Man"?

Just cut out the tongue, left the rest as carrion.

Crawl back into your igloo and plan a whale hunt!😉😁

So true. We freed them from the frozen north and get no respect.

In IIRC 1745, the Cherokees, and just the Cherokees, brung in 145,000 deer hides to British traders in Savannah.

Go to the old Fort Pitt Museum in Pittsburg PA, where they documented 298,000 bucks (deer hides) brung in by the Indians in 1763. Deer hides was big business, taken in part by mass deer drives at night.

Maybe not so much fur by then, the depletion of furbearers for trade had already sparked the Five Nations of Iroquois to drive out other tribes from the Great Lakes and Upper Ohio Country a whole Century earlier.