Some yerars ago I read a paper by a UND or NDSU researcher who correlated the arrival of Texas cattle in MT with the sudden (year or two) demise of maybe a million bison (northern herd) and noted that there was NO increase in shipments of hides on the NP out of Miles City. There followed some years of bone picking, which were sent, I believe, to Chicago for fertilizer and sugar processing. Much of this was based on first-hand reports by both NA, settlers/ranchers and NP shipping records.
It sounded rock solid to me that tick fever was the primary cause, though not necessarily were there not contributories.
Probably much the same thing happened in the southern ranges, without documentation.
Teddy R. probably shot the last lone buff left in ND - I don't know the year.
Get 'em while you can!
Passenger pigeons went away through multiple related causes it appears, between wanton waste, market hunting, and the destruction of the big hardwood forests necessary for food, roosting, and nesting, IIRC.
Does anyone know what is stopping the Whitetail, Mule deer, Elk, Moose pops from being wiped off the face of the Earth?
At the start of the 20th century, whitetails were in real trouble and uncontrolled market hunting was a major part of it. Strict game management saved them. Sometimes the subject of SHTF and living off of game meat comes up here on the Fire. There simply aren't enough game animals in this country to support an uncontrolled bunch of survivalists living off of them. They'd all be wiped out in short order.
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ― George Orwell
It's not over when you lose. It's over when you quit.
3 species of buffalo went extinct after the native Americans arrived.
Go to 17:55 for the buffalo species native americans wiped out
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self. -Ernest Hemingway The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.-- Edward John Phelps
Does anyone know what is stopping the Whitetail, Mule deer, Elk, Moose pops from being wiped off the face of the Earth?
Management. Check the population of those animals around the turn of the 20th century and they were far less than what we have now…
Management yes, but the turn of the Century was also a bad time for pops, and one may have to go back to the short window of post contact and the recorded information we have.
I am going to say........people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that their is only a short period of time where unbiased evidence is available, that is in the journals of Fur traders, explorers etc....it was their job to collect info, good and bad.
Provided is primary evidence it wasn't whiteman who was solely responsible for the demise of the Buffalo, Native hunting was perhaps equally to blame, the ratio of who done more/less has nothing to do with it, there is no way to break that down, but here it is........no one species of people can point to the other as to sole blame.
The truth of the matter is that there weren't milions of people involved with hunting, trapping and explorers. Keeping track by those people was limited at best, few cared about the limitless resource they were killing. Conservation wasn't on the radar until the late 19th century and people like TR saw what was happening and realized that something had to be done.
Management is what saved the big game in America and the inability to manage buffalo made 2 dynamics that we are left with to day. We have big game in sustainable numbers and buffalo are only a few animals to let us look to the past and wish things were different...
100% agree, with you, with one exception..........The Fur traders and Buffalo hunters kept impeccable records on their activity, marrages, baptisms, whereabouts by the HBC and the NWC, they are all available for viewing.
Previously they were only available if you went into the archives with white gloves and physically handled the documents, not anymore, they are available online for free, I think there may be a small fee to access some of them, but I am not sure.
I have a lifetime of study on the issue's at hand and have offered assistance to anyone who reaches out for guidence as to where it can be found. I have also qualified as an expert witness on issue's integrated to the subject at hand.
The questionable part of record keeping is made of of 2 essential components. How many were engaged in this activity and then what % actually kept those kind of records. I will bet both those numbers are quite low. I would guess in the 100's, maybe thousands, but not 10's of thousands...
Hundreds for sure, but that should be enough to reference and cross reference multiple times, shouldn't it?
I think for the discussion at hand the issue may be not one of too much information, but one of omission of fact with what we have available. I'm not saying you are trying to do that, you are better than that, and I also know you have extensive knowledge on certain issue's as well.
What hasn't really been touched on here is Mike Venturino says in his "Buffalo Rifles" book that the Buffalo hunters recorded that they averaged 3 shots per Bison. So, we're talking 300 million bullets, powder charges, and primers. Were the materials even available for this kind of shooting?
What hasn't really been touched on here is Mike Venturino says in his "Buffalo Rifles" book that the Buffalo hunters recorded that they averaged 3 shots per Bison. So, we're talking 300 million bullets, powder charges, and primers. Were the materials even available for this kind of shooting?
This is the biggest problem I have with speculative numbers. I don't know how many people really know how much a million really is.
A friend of mine put it into perspective on elk. If someone said they saw a million elk, which is really unrealistic, but is in terms of measuring, at least a yard stick. Ron said that a million elk was realistcally 20 and a billion was 40.
1 million buffalo is a bunch, and 30-60 million seem to be the numbers that are close to documented, so at reasonable reproduction rates among the buffalo herds, I find it hard to believe that market hunting eliminated that many buffalo from the plains...
No it doesn't. When I'm at a restaurant that offers Bison I get Bison
YMMV. Bison burgers are OK. The steaks have a sweet “whang” to it that I don’t particularly care for. I’ve heard others compare it to horse meat. 😬
As far as prime US Beef, I’m betting you’ve never had a Certified Black Angus fillet that’s cooked medium rare over mesquite coals.
I've had almost all beef. I still prefer wild game like moose or dall sheep or bison by far. it may be an acclimated taste but its there. beef has a weird taste to me. And wagyu may be my least favorite so far of beef.
that said any wild game or likely beef, can taste bad depending on factors.
You poor man. You have my sympathy. I don't think I could go on if I thought wild game was the best tasting meat. What would be the point of living?
Be glad you live these days. You wouldn't survive years ago. But I am sorry you have not sampled moose or bison or dall sheep. It should be mandatory for everyone to try the best there is out there.
We can keep Larry Root and all his idiotic blabber and user names on here, but we can't get Ralph back..... Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over....
More on the Passenger Pigeon, just finished reading the book A Feathered River Across the Sky, a detailed and depressing account of the demise of this bird.
The last “darken out the sky for hours” flock containing an estimated 3,700,000,000 (3.7 billion) pigeons was recorded in Ontario in 1860, which was likely almost all the passenger pigeons in existence at that time.
Passenger pigeons could breed in such enormous flocks because they were pigeons, and as such fed their young high fat and protein “milk” secreted in their crop. Unlike songbirds which deliver actual food items, passenger pigeons could be gone for hours, forage as far as 100 miles from the nest and return the same day while the other parent fed the single young milk as it was produced. It is estimated that from hatching it only took the young about two weeks to weigh as much as the parents.
Even given the as many as 10 million birds shipped to market from a single mass nesting in Michigan in 1878 with at least another 10 million adults and young dead as a result, like the buffalo it is difficult to reconcile the numbers lost to market hunting with the sudden population crash.
What made extinction possible was the railroad and the telegraph, enabling as many as 1,200 professional “Pigeoners” outfits to descend upon a single nesting alongside thousands of amateurs with shotguns. The same railways and telegraphs enabling shipping to the big cities where, for a while, passenger pigeons were a common and inexpensive food item.
The primary extinction mechanism though appears to have been colony abandonment by the harassed parent birds, many more young starving in the nest than were taken for market. Absent successful reproduction, the population rapidly crashing as the adults perished from various natural causes.
The first recorded instance of complete colony abandonment was in 1860 and continued all the way through to the last large nesting colony (mere hundreds of thousands) in 1886, pigeon numbers declining the whole time.
A sad part is the dwindling numbers of pigeons continued to try to breed in smaller and smaller flocks and even single pairs but their reproductive strategy was to swamp any predators with numbers (breeding success has been estimated at 90% in an untouched super colony). The nests were conspicuous and in smaller groups losses of eggs and young to predators were high.
IIRC last known wild young of the year bird was a single individual shot while feeding with a flock of mourning doves in 1890. The last known adult shot in the wild was an adult male in 1902.
Another sad fact is that passenger pigeons, although like all other birds kept in such conditions subject to disease, were not that difficult to breed in captivity even in the cramped and crowded aviaries normal at the time, one guy even bred hybrids (which proved sterile). Martha, the famed last example of the species that died of old age in 1914 was actually hatched in captivity.
It is an example of the informal small scale and poorly documented nature of any captive breeding at the time that no one knows for sure how old Martha was when she died, anywhere between 17 and 29 years old.
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
What hasn't really been touched on here is Mike Venturino says in his "Buffalo Rifles" book that the Buffalo hunters recorded that they averaged 3 shots per Bison. So, we're talking 300 million bullets, powder charges, and primers. Were the materials even available for this kind of shooting?
This is the biggest problem I have with speculative numbers. I don't know how many people really know how much a million really is.
A friend of mine put it into perspective on elk. If someone said they saw a million elk, which is really unrealistic, but is in terms of measuring, at least a yard stick. Ron said that a million elk was realistcally 20 and a billion was 40.
1 million buffalo is a bunch, and 30-60 million seem to be the numbers that are close to documented, so at reasonable reproduction rates among the buffalo herds, I find it hard to believe that market hunting eliminated that many buffalo from the plains...
I also think it points out something else Shrap… if you had a population of 30-60 million and had a reproduction rate of a decent percentage it would not be many years before the Buffalo would have been shoulder to shoulder across the land. They weren’t so I believe there were probably a host of different ailments and natural disasters that periodically checked Buffalo populations severely. Whites offered another one.
Osky
A woman's heart is the hardest rock the Almighty has put on this earth and I can find no sign on it.
Does anyone know what is stopping the Whitetail, Mule deer, Elk, Moose pops from being wiped off the face of the Earth?
At the start of the 20th century, whitetails were in real trouble and uncontrolled market hunting was a major part of it. Strict game management saved them. Sometimes the subject of SHTF and living off of game meat comes up here on the Fire. There simply aren't enough game animals in this country to support an uncontrolled bunch of survivalists living off of them. They'd all be wiped out in short order.
You are correct about the whitetails being wiped out by uncontrolled hunting but that was quite a bit different than the situation on the expansive and lightly populated plains although some livestock diseases may have impacted deer also. In my part of Louisiana the timber was cut by the big Northern lumber outfits, hogs and cattle ran at large, and the cutover land was burned every year. My old great uncle born in 1903 told me he remembers the last deer killed in Winn Parish. He said they hunted at night, trapped, ran deer with dogs, and got down stream of the woods fires and shot them as they came out. All this was done without regard to time of year or seasons. They were poor hill farmers and needed the meat. The only deer left in the state were the Mississippi River brakes and the coastal marshes which is where the 1950s restocking deer came from.
Patriotism (and religion) is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Jesus: "Take heed that no man deceive you." Hebrew Roots Judaizer
More on the Passenger Pigeon, just finished reading the book A Feathered River Across the Sky, a detailed and depressing account of the demise of this bird.
The last “darken out the sky for hours” flock containing an estimated 3,700,000,000 (3.7 billion) pigeons was recorded in Ontario in 1860, which was likely almost all the passenger pigeons in existence at that time.
Passenger pigeons could breed in such enormous flocks because they were pigeons, and as such fed their young high fat and protein “milk” secreted in their crop. Unlike songbirds which deliver actual food items, passenger pigeons could be gone for hours, forage as far as 100 miles from the nest, while the other parent fed the single young milk as it was produced. It is estimated that from hatching it only took the young about two weeks to weigh as much as the parents.
Even given the as many as 10 million birds shipped to market from a single mass nesting in Michigan in 1878 with at least another 10 million adults and young dead as a result, like the buffalo it is difficult to reconcile the numbers lost to market hunting with the sudden population crash.
What made extinction possible was the railroad and the telegraph, enabling as many as 1,200 professional “Pigeoners” outfits to descend upon a single nesting alongside thousands of amateurs with shotguns. The same railways and telegraphs enabling shipping to the big cities where, for a while, passenger pigeons were a common and inexpensive food item.
The actual extinction mechanism though appears to have been colony abandonment by the harassed parent birds, many more young starving in the nest than were taken for market. Absent successful reproduction, the population rapidly crashing as the adults aged out.
The first recorded instance of complete colony abandonment was in 1860 and continued all the way through to the last large nesting colony (mere hundreds of thousands) in 1886, pigeon numbers declining the whole time.
A sad part is the dwindling numbers of pigeons continued to try to breed in smaller and smaller flocks and even single pairs but their reproductive strategy was to swamp any predators with numbers (breeding success has been estimated at 90% in an untouched super colony). The nests were conspicuous and in smaller groups losses of eggs and young to predators were high.
IIRC last known wild young of the year bird was a single individual shot while feeding with a flock of mourning doves in 1890. The last known adult shot in the wild was an adult male in 1902.
Another sad fact is that passenger pigeons, although like all other birds kept in such conditions subject to disease, were not that difficult to breed in captivity even in the cramped and crowded aviaries normal at the time, one guy even bred hybrids (which proved sterile). Martha, the famed last example of the species that died of old age in 1914 was actually hatched in captivity.
It is an example of the informal small scale and poorly documented nature of any captive breeding at the time that no one knows for sure how old Martha was when she died, anywhere between 17 and 29 years old.
Passengers only laid 1 egg at a time, unlike other species of pigeons/doves. So, it took 2 nesting seasons just to replace the parents. I don't know how many times they'd nest in a year.
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ― George Orwell
It's not over when you lose. It's over when you quit.
... Seventy grains of powder times 70,000,000 equals 700,000 pounds of powder.
No, it doesnt.
Otherwise, interesting article you have prepared here. I havent heard of this angle. Being from East of the Appelation Mountains, we dont get all the real learnin stuff like those out west.
Originally Posted by Archerhunter
Quit giving in inch by inch then looking back to lament the mile behind ya and wonder how to preserve those few feet left in front of ya. They'll never stop until they're stopped. That's a fact.
"Come, shall we go and kill us venison? And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools, Being native burghers of this desert city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored."
Quit giving in inch by inch then looking back to lament the mile behind ya and wonder how to preserve those few feet left in front of ya. They'll never stop until they're stopped. That's a fact.
Passengers only laid 1 egg at a time, unlike other species of pigeons/doves. So, it took 2 nesting seasons just to replace the parents. I don't know how many times they'd nest in a year.
The related band-tailed pigeon of the American west likewise lays one egg each time, but breeds up to three times per year, there appears to be no evidence in the latter half of the 19th Century of two consecutive super colonies in the same year, so it is suspected only once per year.
No one knows what criteria led pigeons to nest in any given area, how they determined there was enough nuts and acorns to make it possible. One cool fact is they could disarticulate their jaws to swallow large acorns whole and a bird shot with a full crop of acorns (about a as big as a baseball) would rattle like a bag of marbles when they hit the ground.
Breeding sites originally occurred as far north as the souther end of Hudson’s Bay ( a surprise) as far east as Upstate NY and New England and as far west as the Eastern Great Plains.
Highly mobile, super abundant at a given colony one year, absent the next. Given the staggering densities at its breeding colonies it’s easy to see how people couldn’t imagine it going extinct, they would just assume they moved elsewhere.
Band-tail pigeons have about a 70% annual survival rate. If we take those 3 billion adults observed in 1860 and in the absence of successful breeding assume a highly optimistic 30% annual decline in passenger pigeon numbers, a quick calculation gives only about 40,000 pigeons left in 1885.
The last know commercial shipment was maybe as many as 10,000 to St Louis from a winter roost in present day Oklahoma in 1893.
Given the specialized breeding habits, I dunno that we could keep them around in the wild even today.
"...if the gentlemen of Virginia shall send us a dozen of their sons, we would take great care in their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of them." Canasatego 1744
1) Disease ( as mentioned reduced the southern herds and increased graze area for cattle which in turn brought more diease.)
2) Locusts- There were large numbers of locusts within swarms that would decimate vegetation. The swarms of locust by themselves wouldn't cause huge decline but coupled with some very hard winters they become a game changer.
3) Market hunters- It wasn't long after the spread of railroads that the huge herds weakened by the first two conditions were cut down by the advent of large caliber rifles.
General Sheridan did like the policy of cutting the bison off of the plains as that was a way to eliminate Plains Indian resistance.
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