Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What killed the buffalo?

Stephen Ambrose in his book “CrazyHorse and Custer” makes the case to f how prolific the Indian pony was at that same time. Those pony herds adapted well to the plains, and Ambrose says that left unchecked the ponies might have eventually pushed out the buffalo.
In “Son Of The Morning Star”, Connell tells of Crow Indians killing thousands of Buff taking only the tongue and leaving the rest for the buzzards.
Indians living in harmony with nature is white man’s hogwash. Most Indians believed that the buff would never run out, no matter how many they killed, at least up until the mid 1870’s when the herds started to dwindle. He also tells of them chopping down grove of trees to get the nuts they produced. The Indians thought it was “the fishes and the loaves” and it would never end. If the whites hadn’t taken over, maybe the Indian population would’ve kept the balance!
I have often seen the plain’s stretch for miles and wondered what would go through the mind pat seeing the buffalo in numbers only God could count! How I’d have loved to see it!
Reon

They died from lacking wings.

Market hunters using large caliber muzzle loading rifles did have an impact, but widespread drought conditions in the west during the 1850's killed most of them.

It wasn't the 45-70 though. For one thing the 45-70 loads of the 1870's weren't powerful enough to be effective. I'm sure some the 45-70 accounted for a few, but the 22 Hornet has accounted for a few deer too. 45-70 was introduced in 1873, most of the bison were dead by then and laws banning bison hunting were passed in 1874 to protect the handful left.

Jmr a 405 gr 45-70 at 1200 fps will go thru a buffalo side to side and damn near thru them lengthwise.. the math on all the posts is bullcrap. Buffalo cows calve every other year. I've hunted buffalo / bison twice they are a unique animal with a distinct social order. When you shoot one and it finally goes down others will try to get it back up. While they are doing that you could put a pile of them on the ground. You shoot the lead cow and they will mill quite awhile that's how the hunters back then got a "stand". Wanton waste by native and white hunters played major cause in the quick demise of the herds. Disease from cattle.and environmental factors took there toll. Every year during spring runoff the Missouri River floated dead buffalo for weeks just from the ones that fell thru the the ice and drown. A lot of things contributed to the demise of the buffalo. The buffalo hunt ushered in the "industrial age". It was a Jew named Lowenstein who sent a couple hundred buffalo hides to Germany to see if they could be processed into good usable leather for belting . The kind of belts used to transfer power from the steam engine to rotating shafts to do lathe and mill work . Yeah a Jew doing the Jewish thing of making money just like the rest of the people working for a living back then . Damned few got rich from the hunt. The people who made the money were the end users just like today..mb

Reading into history will lead one to distrust much popular conceptions, for example the old saw that White hunters wiped out the buffalo.

Catastrophic drought in Texas in the 1850’s drove some bands of Comanches to accept reservation life for a period of time. Before and after that event those skinny long-horned North African feral cattle originally brung in by the Spanish were increasing rapidly and spreading Texas fever, anthrax and brucellosis.

Feral cattle became common enough in Texas that when Kit Carson went against the Comanches and Kiowas in the1863 First Battle of Adobe Walls he found the Indian Camps accompanied by droves of cattle. Another thing forbidden in pop history.

Different things...

I thought it was global warming.

Those extremely high bison population estimates were also likely an exception rather than the rule. Disease thinning the numbers of Native Americans could have led to an population explosion with the bison. Charles Kay's Aboriginal Overkill hypothesis spells this out.

Hunting did kill off the pigeons but the methods were far different that with the buffalo. Pigeons would roost and nest in vast 'swarms' of millions at favored nesting sites. Hunters learned that the birds would return to those roosts at dusk so they started hanging out around them to shoot birds as they returned from the day's feeding. The birds quickly abandoned the nesting sites for new ones and hunters just as quickly found and haunted the new sites. The birds were never given a chance to nest. An entire generation of chicks was lost, and the next and the next. The pigeons had a fairly long life span but only laid 1 egg at a time. The bird population crashed almost overnight. Within a very short time, the population dropped from billions to only a handful and on to extinction.

A few years ago, some researchers were looking at ways to collect viable DNA from dried pigeon skins to try to resurrect the species by using band-tailed pigeons, the passengers' closest living relative. I haven't heard anything about it in a long time and don't know if the work's still going on or not. Maybe they have a colony of man-eating pigeons on an island off Costa Rica.

Nobody knows how many bison there were, anymore than they know the age of the earth.

Simply guesses with lots of opinion and agenda added.

A question that concerns me is the amount of methane contributing to global warming caused by all the buffalo. How can cattle numbers now, which certainly number fewer than the buffalo numbers be a cause for increasing methane? Wouldn’t the methane numbers be less now than then due to fewer cows when compared to buffalo numbers? I know there are other causes of methane. I am just talking about the so- called negative effect upon our environment caused by raising cattle.

Fouck Off

Pos

Happy Camper can come console your feelings.

Your math is worse than ringman's.

Estimates of the population of plains Indians say that there were less than 100k people across the entire plains region of the US and Canada. Some estimates are far lower than that. There weren't enough of them to make much of a dent in buffalo numbers.

If any of you watched the recent PBS special on the American Buffalo you would have a better understanding of why they almost became extinct.

Yeah, PBS has no agenda. Right?

IMO, not when it came to reporting on the demise of the Buffalo. Watch the series then come back and tell us your opinion.

Once the disease was introduced it ran past its introduction area just the same as did smallpox in the native American Indian population, Lewis and Clark found Indian populations decimated by smallpox. Populations that had not yet had contact with the white man but had been exposed by Indians that had.

Disease can easily outrun its point of origin.

"If we give each buffalo ten (10) feet on each side and ten feet in front and behind"
While that is a lot of words to describe "a ten foot radius" the math is essentially correct - 314...square feet is "about 300 square feet" for discussion purposes.
This answer is neither pro nor con to the OPs hypothesis, just a defense of a statement being incorrectly contested.

Now y'all enjoy your arguments.
Rex

Are you mathman's sock puppet?