.........We all heard there were millions of buffalos on the cotenant of North America when the
Settlers arrived. They ranged from the Appellation Mountains in the east to the Rocky Mountains
in the west. Many estimate there were between thirty million (30,000,000) to one hundred
million (100,000,000) buffalo when Columbus arrived. Some railroad travelers reported when
out on the plains seeing one herd 125 miles long and as far as the eye could see. If we give each
buffalo ten (10) feet on each side and ten feet in front and behind, it possesses about 300 square
feet. There is a simple formula on how far one can see on flat ground due to the curvature of the
earth. One measures from the height of one’s eyes in feet and uses the square root of that
number in miles to determine the approximate distance one is seeing. For simplicity let’s put
their eyes at nine feet above the plane. Using this formula and the 300 square feet per animal, we
divide the square feet in 375 miles by the 300 square feet per buffalo and arrive at about thirty
million (30,000,000) in that particular herd.
.........As early as two years old buffalo cow can produce a calf. Normally she will bare a single calf.
The hunters would kill any wolves they encountered because they were competing predators.
Therefore, more calves reached maturity than when the wolves were preying on the buffalo.
Modern herd managers report there is about one (1) bull for every fifteen (15) cows. Even if only
half the cows produced a calf and only half of them lived, we are talking six to twelve million (6 –
12,000,000) new bison added to the herd each year.
..........We’ve also heard how the buffalo herd was wantonly decimated by money hungry white men
and their guns. Originally only subsistence hunting threaten the buffalo. Subsistence hunting
included the Indians. Once Indian got horses they acted like most anyone else. They killed more
than they could use. Even prior to this a tribe would drive several hundred over a cliff to kill them.
These hunters may have balanced the lack of wolves so that the herd size remained stable until
about 1820. About this time buffalo hunting started for skins and meat for the railroad.
..........Making inroads into the population using only the lowest estimate of 30,000,000 to get to the
end of the hunting about sixty years later, how many would have to be killed every year? The
hunters would have to kill equivalent to all calves born and then more. Let’s take a middle of the
road number of nine million (9,000,000) new calves the first year plus some adults to get to the
few hundred that were left going into 1880. Long about half way there would about 15,000,000.
With the ratio of one bull to every fifteen cows we are still looking at 4,500,000 calves plus a lots
of adults to keep the number of buffalo going down.
...........How much lead and powder is necessary to kill the at least seventy million (70,000,000) bison?
Let’s say the hunters used about 400 grain bullets and used only one bullet per buffalo. Let’s also
conjecture they used no more than 70 grains of powder per shot. We multiply 70,000,000 times
400 and come up with approximately 280,000,000 grains. This is about 4,000,000 pounds of
lead. Seventy grains of powder times 70,000,000 equals 700,000 pounds of powder. Of course
in the early days the vast majority of the material would be necessary and tapering off during the
sixty years of hunting. My contention is the majority died from disease rather than being killed by
gun shot.

Sweet mother of pearl..

#cutnpaste



Steve Reniella says cliffs killed the buffs…

BigDave39355,

What an assertion. I spent several hours looking up info and writing that.

I will accept your apology.

Anthrax?

They were killed for their wings.

Ringman, very interesting information sir, TY for sharing

Your math is wrong.

So is your appellation of the eastern mountain range

No way that hunters red or white wiped out the bison. The introduction of Texas cattle into an already over populated and weakened herd of bison did it. It is called Texas Tick Fever and Anthrax. The bison herd would have naturally been about 50/50 male and female and at least half the females would have each produced a surviving calf thus supplementing the population by millions every year. Of course hunters did deliver the coup de grace to the survivors but it is not possible that bison were shot into near extinction.

By the way, European diseases are the main cause of mortality in the Native American Indians. Not U.S. Army bullets.

Sounds about right to me.

L.W.

I read a paper written by a female researcher who alleged that it was mathematically impossible for the bison herds to be decimated by hunting/shooting alone. Her thesis was that there was a biological agent that raced through the herds. I don't recall exactly what her best guess was.

It sounds plausible, Pfizer wasn't around with a vaccine to save the bison from theIr pandemic.

I should have saved that paper.

This is the most logical reason, I've ever read.

#oh-snap

I thought it would be off. But like the first responder, you didn't help. In fact, while I wrote it I was hoping mathman might arrive and help.

It's not math, it's simple arithmetic.

The best estimates of how many were killed by market hunters was the number of hides delivered to the railroads for shipment east. Research has been done collecting the data of the hides shipped and it was found that hide hunters couldn't even come close to killing enough to even offset the calves born. That 30 million number is probably the northern herd. There was also the southern herd. I've seen estimates of 60 million total.
I read that market hunters killed an average of 200,000 per year. If half the 60 mill were cows and half of those produced a calf each year, that's 15 million new calves. Hunting couldn't even come close to killing them off.

Alot can be learned from the migration and killing of Buffalo, and the similarity to any game animal that migrates for whatever reason. If you kill all the females unfettered, what did anyone expect to happen?

Generally, Buffalo north of 49th were hunted by Indians and Metis hunters, my grandfathers killed thousands of them, and were plains hunters who either were employed by or sold robes and meat to the Northwest Company and or the Hudson Bay Company.

Especially the Metis hunters were by far the largest hunting group on the plains north of the 49th. A hunter who hunts for his entire career, lets say 20-30 years kills several hundred a year, mostly the Cows because of the favored meat, as well the robes were better making them worth more.

In my view, because of the migratory nature of a Buffalo, hunters on both sides of the 49th played massive roles in killing, especially the females.

Lots of information in the Fur traders journals about Indians killing a pregnant Cow and only eating the unborn Calf, why lie lol.

The original estimates of how many Buffalo there were was likely way to high. I have never read anything pertaining to some sort of disease in any of the Fur trade journals I have read and have in my possession, so I doubt it, not saying it couldn't/didn't happen, I dont see any evidence from a primary source.

Also, the hunting I am referring to included N Dakota, Montana, and part of Minnesota IIRC, as well as Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba.

Well now, if there were only 20 million they would still produce at least 5 million calves a year. If the white and red hunters killed as many as they could handle how would they exterminate the bison on such a large range as the American mid-west and west. The pictures of piles of bones and skulls at rail yards were collected for years and the causes of death could have easily been disease.

The demise of the bison coincides with the introduction of the wild Texas cattle being driven north in the last half of the 1800s. The Texas cattle were almost surely what is known as immune carriers of tick fever.

You're still not helping.

Interesting thread.

I’ve always read that the US government waged a war on bison in order to starve out the Indian’s. Rather they did that after the herds were severely reduced due to disease from domestic cattle, overgrazing by cattle, ranchers shooting them on site, Native Americans and whites having access to horses, barbed wire fencing, more modern weapons, a rapidly growing and westward population, or railways.

I have no idea what was the main factor or factors. I’m sure that it all played a part.

Given the need for wide open spaces to graze and inability to retreat to cover in the way that elk can along with western expansion and technology it’s no surprise that there days were numbered.

I dont know what happened in texas, I said the geograpic area I'm talking about, but wouldn't this disease come north?
I am just saying I have never read anything, whatsoever about it from any primary sources, there is alot written about the disease in humans.
I and others think the estmates were to high to begin with.
Have bones been studied for disease?

I didn't check your math but I don't see why the buffalo could not have been killed off by hunters. Many other large animals have been killed nearly to extinction by unregulated hunting. Examples include the grizzly bear in North America, tigers in India, and elephants and lions in Africa. Elk and buffalo were killed to extinction east of the Mississippi.

Then there is this^^^ this was a thing, the slaughter was real. There were no cattle grazing north of the 49th during the dwindling of the herds.

How did this thread even start? By assuming that humans couldn't destroy something? Say that out loud. Oh no, humans could never destroy that! Humans can destroy anything and they totally killed all the buffalo. Only reason we haven't killed ourselves is because God doesn't want us to, yet.

Sure I am. You just went through an arithmetic problem. I checked your numbers for you.

They're off.

Happy camper?

So, what got the Passenger Pigeon? Likely even greater numbers.

Yeah.
This is what I meant in my first post when I said alot can be learned about the near extinction of the Buffalo herds and other game animals. It isn't any stretch when I say I and others in my part of the world have seen populations of Elk and Moose dwindle 75% in 20 years, and this is a so-called "managed resource" people are mistified as to what it could be lol. We know who and what the reasons are, its ridiculous.

Jesus

Exactly.

Population expansion and the environmental changes that came with it. For some animals clearing out massive old growth pine forest was a huge benefit whitetail deer in MI for instance. For most critters it was a negative. Especially for the ones that require a specific niche environment or large tracts of land.

And the Rocky Mountain Locust?

99.9% of species that have lived on this planet have gone extinct. Maybe a better question is why NOT the bison?

WTF are you on???

If you’ve ever seen a buffalo on the prairie, they stick out enough to ensure their demise. Not hard to figure out.

Indians and settlers alike probably committing a good amount of wanton waste with no refrigeration and sub par tools.

Most probably just had the back straps cut out if that.

Then throw in the market hunters.

What’d he have against the buffs?

One example.

Much to the chagrin of the anti-hunters, it was disease that was the main cause of the demise of the buffalo.

Brucellosis was probably a partial factor

TRex.

Once the Indians figured out how to saddle them, it was all over.

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?

This guy knows nothing about the 45-70. Guys are still using a lead 405 in front of a case full of blackpowder and they're still shooting through Bison. The Buffalo were everywhere after the Civil War when guys headed West. They wrote about it. Custer wrote about it too. There were no laws protecting Buffalo passed. The Grant administration's policy was to wipe out the Bison in order to starve out the Plains Indians. Little Phil Sheridan came up with that plan.
JMR40 is one of the biggest idiots and largest disseminators of misinformation on the entire Campfire

I found this a number of years ago, some of you may find it interesting.

If there was disease in Buffalo herds..........then it would have been far south, and then the herds would of been wiped out before the disease made its way north, and that would explain why it wasn't documented north of the 49th.

In my family there were 3 generations of plains hunters, that is all they did and it was/is documented, records were kept. So then if a hunter lasted 20 years which I think realistic, they went on 2 annual hunts with on average 200 hunters, sometimes more/less.......I think it probable they killed several thousand Buffalo each in their lifetime, mostly Cows. Instead of thinking about how many Calves are being born, one should be wondering how many are not born. Near the end of the vast herds people starved to death on the plains and they were all color of people.

The notion that Native hunters never wasted the resource is ridiculous, they still do the same today, I see it on a daily basis. I dont understand why guys cant fathom that when you kill females of any species unfettered, bad things are going to happen. I have just witnessed with my own eyes a 75% decrease in the Elk pops over 20 years, disease??

Buffalo Bill was reputed to have killed at least 5,000 by his own hand, he is just one guy.

I have also just witnessed about a 75% decrease in the Whitetail pops in 10 years because of a regulated female harvest, is that disease too?? Sure there are people who will disagree about that too, but I notice they enjoy shooting a doe, then go back to their home in the City and think everything is the same.

WTF do people think a female harvest is all about? up here at this time it is a 2 week season and it is to decrease the pops and that is all.

All species of people participated willingly in the demise of the Buffalo, and some of them were never able to recover from the economic, societal, and cultural impacts of that.

Did Canada have a policy of exterminating Bison?

No^^^

673: No doubt the hunters played a part but the simple arithmetic doesn't allow for near extinction to have been caused by hunting alone. The herds were too large and the range too vast.

As I said the disease outran its point of origin and devastated the herd. Hunters finished the job.

The near extinction of the bison and the prior devastation by disease of the native Indians did play a huge part in the ability of the U.S. government to control the mid-west and west. Otherwise farming and settlement would have been impossible.

Neither the bison or the Indian were going to be domesticated.

Notice Idaho. There were no buffalo there in 1870. Idaho at that time was mainly mining and trapping. Extensive farming didn't come along until later when irrigation was established as most of Idaho is too dry for dry farming. The 1st town established in Idaho was in 1860 and the buffalo were largely gone by then. They weren't hunted out because there weren't enough people to do that. Something else got rid of them.

It was after the war, people had no future, and there was a great financial panic. The fancy folks back east wanted robes and meat....yes there was a lot of meat recovered but no refrigerator railcars or the the waste would have been much less. People needed cash money and here was a commodity to be had to gain a stake or feed their family. Right or wrong I would been there doing the same or busting longhorns out of the South Texas Brush.

About the guns. The 50-70 likely figured more in the kill of more buffalo than other calibers. Remember the Indians were killing hell out of them too with lances, muzzleloaders, and 50-70 needle guns. Early on it, the 44-77,50-90, and 44-90 were very popular. The 45-110 arrived on the range in 76 and it became the preferred caliber of the big outfits. Although the 45-70 was around evidently it didn't gain a following till most of the herds were gone....mainly when Mecham began mass marketing converted and re-barrelled Sharps to 45-70. Fact is, I can't, nor can friends who also study this thing come up with a professional hunter that used the 45-70. If you know of one I'd sure like to know.

Some here might enjoy this set of books: Encyclopedia of Buffalo Hunters & Skinners Vol 1&2. And if yall will buy enough maybe they just publish Vol 3

Was the Buffalo Era prior to the Atomic Bomb?

Didn't think so.

Does anybody no for sure?

I always respect your thoughts on any subject you dialogue on here, this is no different.
Why is there nothing recorded in the fur traders journals of massive dead and diseased Buffalo?
The arithmetic doesn't add up because the numbers are skewed from the start, the estimates are too high.

By the time disease was among the Native pops the Buffalo was already in decline, which only made things worse, as an example, my ggrandfather was born in 1860, one of 12 children, 7 died on the plains, 5 survived.

I would also say the number of Metis hunters alone were up to 5,000-7,000 in 1850, I am looking at a page of the Pembina census 1850 right now, the page has 10-12 names on it and they are all hunters, just 1 page, and almost always their children were listed as hunters as well.

Then we have indian hunters, we have no known number of hunters, its safe to say alot. We then have non-native hunters, that is an unknown, safe to say it was alot.

Watch the PSB series:) It was very enlightening. It was mostly due to the market hunters killing them for their hides and tongues. Plus plenty of indiscriminate killing by a lot of different groups.

A lot of natural causes were involved.

Osky

And climate change of course.

Like what?

No bone to pick with anyone here. Didn’t opine that it was germane. Ringman asked for help.

But to your statement, if you start using radiuses, it is more complicated. Using the radius will add an additional error to the existing 4% by overestimating the occupied square footage - cuboidal vs circular packing.

Drought, famine, fire, etc. if not why only 30 million or whatever before whites? Should have been never ending trillions.

Osky

Diseases killed off most everything in the new world including trees like the Chestnut.

No doubt there were some factors you mention, fire may have killed alot, but then the plains were enriched a couple months later and it was good times again. I guess even a fertile land can only support so much grazing.

Evidently, alot of Buffalo drowned, the last time I and the family were back (home) in Saskatchewan my boys came back to our camp with a partial skull they had found sticking out of the bank of the Saskatchewan river, another fellow had an almost complete skull from that day alone.

There is more evidence in the massive piles of bones that were all over the plains from massive hunting excursions. From around 1900-1930 many people made a living picking the bones and selling them for fertilizer, my family did or they starved.

By 1860-1870 hunters were already traveling from the red river settlement (Winnipeg) to the Rocky mtns looking for dwindling herds. Going south across the 49th to hunt meant dealing with unfriendlies, which they did anyways, but then there was no point after the pops were slaughtered.

A song about the demise of the buffalo, sung by a squaw.

No. I've heard of no professional Bison hunter who employed the 45-70 as a primary arm. The 45-70 actually appears to have run a distant fourth to the 50-70, 44-77, and 50-90 from what I can tell through studying the matter. But it was there by the mid 70's and it was killing Bison contrary to JMR40's misinformation

As to what caused the extinction I cannot say but I do think it was a culmination of a lot of things. I have read that it took at least 25 Buffalos for one indian family each year not counting what they killed for food. They made a lot of stuff including their housing and clothing from the hides. Other than drying the meat for jerky there wasn't any way of preserving it much. Drought, fencing off the prarie, market hunting, disease and other weather conditions like winter storms and such must have played hob with them.

Actually there are written accounts, three are referred to here, there are others….

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190052818300087

Also, Charles Goodnight’s comments included referring to the decimation of his by then Hereford and other improved breeds of cattle by the mere passing of herds of driven longhorn cattle are illuminating.

The Comanche and Kiowa first got into the cattle driving/stealing business in a big way in the 1860’s, refer to my previous comment about Kit Carson finding herds of Texas cattle in association with Comanche and Kiowa camps in the 1860’s. Those cattle also woulda carried diseases.

Another thing about epidemics both human and animal was if they happened to occur unseen and written about by literate people, they often went unrecorded. Many of our human hunters could and did write down what they had done, microbes didn’t.

673;
Good morning my friend, I hope this middle Sunday in the last month of a bit of a turbulent year finds you all well. '

Thanks for your contributions to the thread, I know you're a serious student of our western history from our conversations on that topic.

Regarding the population estimates of the bison herd, I've read some theories that as the overall plains FN tribes numbers went down from disease starting with their initial contact with Europeans that the bison herd numbers increased to a point where the habitat wouldn't support that number in the long term.

While I can't recall what evidence they backed it up with, it might have some merit.

On the subject of your ancestors and how many buffalo they took out, when we read of how many tons of pemmican they'd sell to the HBC and Northwest Company annually, it sort of staggers the imagination as to how many would be needed.

You mentioned the bone picking and of course that's the original name for Regina - Cree for "Where bones are piled" if I got the translation kinda/sorta understood.

Lastly in the "for whatever it's worth" file, both my late Father who was born in 1920 and my late Father in Law who was born in 1912 talked about having buffalo robes in the house and for sure in the horse drawn sleighs they'd use in prairie winters.

As well, the RCMP used to issue buffalo coats for winter use into the 1960's.

Those hides had to come from someplace and I can't find anywhere which indicates there were buffalo/bison ranching operations growing enough animals to supply the robes and hides for the prairie folks and RCMP Constable's coats in the '30's.

So then the question I have is where'd those hides and robes come from?

Were there warehouses full of them back east from the hunting days of the 1880's?

Lastly your skull and bone story rings true with stories that I've heard from many of the older prairie generation farmers including my late Father and Father in Law who talked about finding them into the '50's.

All the best to you all this Sunday and Merry Christmas.

Dwayne

I never said it didn't happen, I said I never read or saw any documented in the Fur traders journals, a primary source, not some guys musings.

I also said if it did happen, then it was perhaps in the south as Hastings was eluding too, but the diseased Buffalo were killed before any disease was evident on the Northern plains, killed either by said disease, or more likely hunters.

Fur traders were more literate than many people today, and their job was to document everything, which they did. Are there any documented reports of Indians that saw many Buffalo dead and dying from disease?

Injuns and the horse.

Indian Culpability in Bison Demise

https://www.thewildlifenews.com/202...20had%20a,bison%20in%20a%20single%20day.

An interesting link mentioning Comanches running off more than 4,000 head of Texas cattle in a single week and one cattleman’s counter strike in 1873.

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2002&context=nmhr

That same year a demonstration corral of then new-fangled barbed wire would be set up in downtown San Antonio, said wire heralding the end of an era.

I’m looking for a reference that mentioned Comanches trading 30,000 head of Texas cattle in New Mexico that same year.

This expertise in cattle perhaps explaining why Quanah Parker and the last of the radical traditionalist fringe group could transform so easily into ranching after the shooting stopped.

Are you saying Jesus killed them off?

I believe buffalo bones are generally absent from Indian sites in the East prior to that massive epidemics of the 1600’s, indicating the Indians themselves had previously hunted then out of those areas, buffalos then extending their range east in the absence of humans.

This thread is good.

Possibly waaay back into millennium for parts of Tenn and Kentucky notwithstanding small pocket populations clinging on.
I have long hypothesized this with the abrupt cut off of Archaic blades, darts and tools for dismantling big kills. These types of tools grow absent about the cut off of 6000 years. Sites were I hunted hold almost nothing from Woodland and Mississippian Cultures.
All ‘big hunter’ type sites with large order springs, and small upland rivers.
One place we hunt has what appears to me be an ancient eastern buffalo fording. The only pocket in to high river banks. Astounding amounts of artifacts and debitage here. As if an ambush point.
Elk in the equation too but these sites are in what is considered The Barrens. Flat, areas, Kentucky prairie type biomes with karst areas and dolines that would make suitable wallows and additional ambush spots.

Would really like to get maybe Cûntz or VomitGuy to lend something to this conversation.

Ringman: I am not sure of the correct reason so many millions of them perished, but I am happy "some" American Bison are left.
100,000,000 "Buffalo" would be tough to "get along with" in todays America - what with them blocking freeways, wrecking wheat fields and trampling children in schoolyards etc etc etc.
I like Buffalo's and have eaten a fair amount of Buffalo meat - can't seem to get drawn for my own Buffalo tag here in Montana though.
Long live the Buffalo.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

I saw a documentary that said they were reliant on chestnut trees, and some disease killed off the trees.

Absolutely not. The issue was done before Brucellosis came to the US.

In far northern central and even east central Minnesota when digging deeper to improve the road system they are finding extremely large bison skulls down deep in the boggish ground. How long ago was that?

In southeastern Montana along the little Missouri, powder, tongue, rosebud, big and little horn rivers and many tributary creeks buffalo skulls and bones are a common find, not really noted anymore.
Many I’m sure did succomb to flooding events. Maybe like blue tongue there diseases that clobbered certain areas periodically the way mother nature does.

I have a complete spine I found coming out of a bank deep down in a cut. Skull is probably in there somewhere yet. U of M did an analysis for age and told me 17,000 years give or take a few hundred.
Neat stuff.

Osky

Very interesting reading, thank you

10Glocks: Thanks for that VERY interesting and informative articles link.
Thanks again.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

This is an exellent thesis, and speaks to and of some of the Fur traders I was/am referring to. There are Communities up here that were founded by Buffalo hunting families and the people are still there today, like where I am from in the Qu'appelle valley in Saskatchewan. Virtually all of the people there are remnants of historic Buffalo hunting families, unless they came there recently.

However, I don't know anything about hunting south of Montana and N.Dakota, and am surprised Buffalo were that far east and South, according to the map provided some posts back. There are historic Buffalo hunting Communities in the two states I mentioned.

On the Pemmican... people who received land grants etc , while clearing land for farming, lots of people were finding Pemmican caches hidden that were there for 60-80 years.

Prime beef tastes better.

673;
Good afternoon, I trust the day goes well up there for you all.

In the early '80's I worked in a small 3 man cabinet shop owned by a Metis chap with the last name Barrett.

He'd grown up just east of your people in Qu'Appelle, I want to say maybe Wapella area?

Anyways he was maybe 15 years older than me but perhaps a bit less and told of finding a pemmican cache in a tree stump as a kid.

When I asked him what it tasted like, he replied, "Pretty much like all other pemmican I tried, which was terrible!"

I believe it was from him that I was told that the Metis didn't add berries to the pemmican they made for themselves as it didn't last as long with berries added, but the stuff sold to the fur trading companies could go either way.

That might be my remembering something mixed up too however, it was a long, long time ago that that conversation took place.

All the best.

Dwayne

I just read a thread on page one here...and it is fairly obvious to the dullest intellect that the buffalo were killed by canola and olive oil.

LOL
You made me remember the Pemmican caches, funny, then your buddy found one.

We can learn alot from the demise of Buffalo, which is why we need to have an honest look at what we are doing to our game in this Province, because it is similar. Either way, the killing of female ungulates needs to be addressed, one way or another.

Bill !!!!

Where did barb wire fit in?

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.

It sure ain't the Cowboys tonight!

Years ago I found one.

Very cool Sam! A good friend dug one out of a creek bed several years ago not far from here.
All I ever find is arrowheads. 😬

You may very well have me on the mesquite coals part....

Well good folks, eat what you like, I do.

In more recent times we could ask the same questions about the Quebec caribou herd. I hunted NW Quebec in 2002 and 2003. Herd was estimated at 1.2 million head. We saw thousands. By 2017 the estimated herd was 200,000 or less and sport hunting stopped. Sport hunting had been taking less than 10,000 a year, native winter hunting somewhat more. I saw a place on Lac Minto where hundreds had drown and washed ashore so nature had an impact too. I believe it is never one thing but an overwhelming combination of factors. Migrating herds do so to avoid over grazing a single area. Snow geese eat the same lichen as caribou in their nesting area and their populations were expanding at the same time as the caribou. The lichen grows very slowly. I think available food became a problem and led to fewer calves and diseases.
Similar to the buffalo? Maybe. Easier to just blame climate change or hunters.

So, in 15 years the herd lost 1 million?
Who came up with the estimates for the Native hunting harvest?

You beat me to it,

Jim

Not to mention the US Army buying salted tongues for $1 each. Literature seems to be well scrubbed of such, but 60 years ago bounties on Bison were mentioned all over the place.

I agree 100%. Bison and free range beef are just about identical to my taste and not near as good. But if a person likes grass fed, go for it but I cannot see that as a selling point.

Until Columbus discovered the western continents, the Native American population was limited to what their environment could sustain. That population had reached the maximum carrying capacity of the land and animal populations there-on.

European diseases swept across the N American continent subsequent to 1500. Some estimates are the Indian populations were reduced by 80% or more by 1800. Which is to explain why Bison populations had reached an all time high by the 1800's.

Population numbers swell and ebb. Unsustainable high numbers are going to crash. It is natures way. With a little artificial help, local and global extinctions easily happen.

Is anyone going to mention the million upon million of antelope that disappeared?
There were plagues of Rocky Mountain Locust in the 1800's swarms estimated to be hundreds of miles long and many miles wide they just never returned no one knows why,
Jack rabbits in the NW have become scarce it is even rare to see one where 40 years ago there were millions
I use to shoot lots of pheasant's around this area now it's rare to see a nice cock,
When I was a kid there were bullfrogs everywhere I have not heard one in over a year
there were lots of leopard frogs too now if you ask someone that grew up here 40 or less they don't know what a leopard frog is.
ten years ago we would shoot hundreds of whistle pigs a day, two years ago I spent about a hour in the same locals and shot at two, and didn't bother to even go last year.
On and on and so forth, the bottom line is,
Critters come and go for multitude of reasons many of which we don't really know why.

I think this version is very plausible. High bison populations strained the system, most of the Indians were wiped out by European disease, prairie fires were used in warfare against the remaining Indians which drastically reduced the bison food supply weakening an over grazing herd further. Then the immune carrier Texas wild cattle were driven north into bison country devastating the herd. Then the hunters finished up killing the rest.

So, bio-weapons (unintentionally used) took care of the Indian and bison impediments to settling and farming the mid-west and west.

Pivot sprinklers. Before pivots, every field had ditches lined with weeds. There were high spots in fields that weren't farmed because they were too rocky and brushy. There were fence rows with lots of weeds. All those were bird cover. When the pivots arrived, all of those patches of cover disappeared and the pheasants went with them.
We used to hunt them in the Rupert, ID area. It was a pheasant Mecca. Now days, in the winter you can drive for miles and see not a single patch of weeds or a ditch bank. It's all bare plowed fields.

I've preached it for years.
Whitey gets blamed for everything.

Embrace it. We are good at everything, even the bad stuff.

It sure wasn't the Cowboys!

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.

Trump was the reason the bison almost were extinct.
yet if they had listened and taken the covid shots it would have all been fine.

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?

I guess you guys didn't read the link provided by 10glocks, don't bother filling up your heads with historical facts.

Fire didn't destroy anything, it enriched the earth enabling the Buffalo to flourish with the higher nutrient food provided.
In the largest populations of Buffalo hunters, there isn't any evidence of massive die off from disease, at least not in any of the northern herds from the northern US states-North.

There are so many theories and postulates on what happened to the buffalo. Numbers are thrown around with wild abandon and all sources cited are only as reliable as the source that those writers used to determine their ideas.

The facts are simply that buffalo lived on the North American continent for thousands of years and numbered in the 10’s of millions. There weren’t that many Indians roaming around to impact the buffalo herds to any measurable degree.

Market hunting was certainly an issue and how many buffalo were killed during that time, seems to be the least recorded contribution to the demise of those vast herds of buffalo.

There is one undeniable fact in all of this; buffalo that numbered in the millions were decimated to hundreds by the end of the 19th century and I don’t believe that hunting them is the sole reason for that ratio..

...message deflave for a pic...

The historical sources cited are primary sources, otherwise known as evidence. In many cases it was their job to record the fauna&flora were skilled at that.
Anything other than primary source of information is speculation and hearsay, or...secondary sources.

If hunting accounted for 95% of the herds demise, and 2% to drowning, and 3% to choking on twigs, hunting them into extinction wasn't the cause of their demise.

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…

We saw something like what you describe in northern South Dakota. I pheasant hunted on private land there for years, with my cousins and we always got our limit and saw many birds. There were still plenty of fence rows and potholes that held water with cattails all around them. In about 3 years those fence rows were gone and the farmers filled in those low areas and are now farming them. You rarely see a pheasant now. It won't come back in my lifetime either. Without habitat wild game can't make it.

Lol, for some reason I just don't think you're going to get one.

I can account for a few…

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.

Been waiting for these.

Thanks for posting.

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...

I've been gone...

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.

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.

3 species of buffalo went extinct after the native Americans arrived.




Go to 17:55 for the buffalo species native americans wiped out

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?

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

People and modernization!!!

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.

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.

Them Hinckley guys!!! They were dynamite !!!

interesting read. Good thread guys.

There were probably never as many buffalo as they said.

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.

Yes it does.

A grain is 1/7,000 of a pound.

70/7,000 lbs x 70,000,000 = 700,000 pounds = 350 tons.

Late to the party.

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.

I haven't read the whole thing but was wondering if BigDave bought Ringman an apology dinner?

The 270win made most game endangered

What killed the buffalo?.. everyone knows ,it was the 6.5 Creedmore that done in the Buffalo herds

I did not see this back in December.

Something I was just thinking about this last week is if the herds were miles long, would there be any grass for the bison at the back of the herds?

One thing that I had heard before from a rancher out west and not from an official source is that when the diseases spread and killed off Indians that there were less bisons killed and the herd was allowed to grow. Some had already mentioned this theory already.

I've preached this stuff for so many years.

It's hard to find good info on Indian populations. I did find that the US Census Bureau did show numbers taxed and untaxed. By their figures, at no time did the total US Indian population exceed 340k.

Census Taxed Indians (enumerated) Not taxed Indians Total Indians Percent enumerated
1860 44,021 295,400 339,421 13
1870 25,731 287,981 313,712 8
1880 66,407 240,136 306,543 22

These numbers include a lot more than the plains Indians who lived on buffalo. Those would have numbered maybe 100k?

I never thought about it that way. But I still have some doubts after reading Evan Connell’s “Son Of The Morning Star”. He tells of Crow Indians killing around 1000 Buff, taking only the tongues, sold to the Whites for whiskey! The rest went to the buzzards. Also of Comanche cutting down whole groves of Pecan Trees to get the nuts!
I was shocked to read that.
Growing up in the’70s, I was always under the impression that the Indian lived in tune with nature, never taking more than was needed.
There’s quite a few things about history that don’t really fit the mold very well. Most folks don’t realize that what they learned in school is based on myths and fictional stories.
Please don’t accuse me of being a revisionist. I hate the fact that kids are now taught the Civil War was fought over slaves.
I’m not a revisionist, but I’m damn sure a realist!
Reon