Neander97 / Historical Trivia: How many buffalo (bison) once roamed the prairies, plains, and woodlands of North America? That there were once millions is an undisputed fact, but how many millions? Some sources estimate as many as seventy million, some make a more conservative guess and say only twenty million.
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ANCESTORS
It was in southern and eastern Asia at the end of the Pliocene epoch that the first known ancestors of the buffalo* appeared. Although smaller and slighter in stature than its present day progeny, this ancestral buffalo bore all the characteristics found in the modern genus Bison. During the next million or so years-- in the period known as the Pleistocene epoch or the Ice Age--bison grew in size, migrating from central Asia east to Siberia and west into Europe. Later in the Pleistocene a new form of bison, the steppe wisent, made its appearance. Although it spread forth to occupy traditional bison habitat in the Old World, the steppe wisent also crossed Beringia, the Bering Strait land bridge, moving from Siberia into the New World--the buffalo had arrived in North America.
Once in America, the steppe wisent evolved into new forms to exploit its new environment. One offspring of the steppe wisent, Bison latifrons, became the largest of all New World bison. Latifrons, from the Latin meaning wide forehead, bore horns measuring some nine feet from tip to tip, fully three times the horn-span of modern day buffalo. Bison evolution over the next 20,000 or so years, from the middle period of the Pleistocene epoch to the present, involved downsizing. Giant-horned latifrons was replaced by a smaller buffalo, Bison antiquus, who was in turn succeeded by a yet even more compact model, Bison occidentalis. Occidentalis originated in Asia where it evolved from the steppe wisent, and like its progenitors spread across northern Asia, Europe, Siberia, and North America.
*We will through out these essays interchangeably use the terms bison and buffalo. The only criteria being the whim of the author.
KITH AND KIN
As the Ice Age drew to a close, bison populations in both hemispheres evolved to meet the demands of their new environment. Both the modern Old and New World bison evolved out of common parent stock--Bison bison occidentalis, which inhabited Siberia during the latter phases of the Pleistocene epoch. This evolutionary process resulted in present day Old and New World bison that are remarkably similar in skeletal structure, general appearance, and even in shared genetic materials--in fact; European-American bison hybrids yield fertile male and female offspring. Despite this physical or taxonomical similarity, the European bison, known as the wisent, was once considered a separate species from the American bison (plains bison/buffalo). Today, however, both are considered members of the same species--the wisent is now classified as Bison bison bonasus and the plains buffalo as Bison bison bison.
In the present system of natural classification, both the buffalo and wisent belong to the order of mammals known as ruminants. Among ruminants, bison belong to the family Bovidae, and within that, into an even more defined category, Bovini. In addition to bison, Bovini include the African Cape buffalo, the wild Indian buffalo, the domesticated water buffalo, the dwarf water buffalo (also know as the anoa or Celebes ox), the tamarau of the Philippines, and all true cattle. Cattle, belong to the genus Bos, which includes two extant and one extinct species of what we commonly call cows, as well as five other species, most of whom are found in Asia: the yak, guar, gayal, banteng, and Kouprey. The existing species of the genus Bos, those we know as domestic cattle, cows, and/or kine, are: Bos taurus, which includes most types of domestic cattle found in Europe and the U.S and Bos indicus, the humped cattle of India and Africa. The Bos indicus species includes the Indian zebu and the brahma stock often seen in rodeos. The third cattle species Bos primigenius, the auroch or long-horned wild ox of Europe which reached extinction in 1627, is believed to have been the ancestor of Bos taurus.
IT'S A BIG `UN
It is the stoic majesty of buffalo, complemented by its sheer size that leads one to suspect that the wild buffalo was the true Monarch of the Plains. A full-grown male plains bison tips the scales at between fourteen hundred and twenty-two hundred pounds, stands between five and half and six and half feet tall at the shoulders, and measures from nine and half to eleven and half feet in total length from nose to tail. A male bison in its prime is the largest land mammal in the Western Hemisphere, a mature bull can weigh up to a half ton more than the largest moose or Kodiak bear. When all North American mammals are considered, only whales and the occasional bull walrus outweighs the buffalo.
WILD WISENTS
Both the European wisent and the American buffalo have fared poorly at the hands of humankind. The growth of agriculture and other anthropomorphic activities in Europe hastened the wisent along the path to possible extinction at a far earlier date than did such developments threaten its American cousin. By the end of the Middle Ages the wisent's continued survival was in doubt. As early as 1400 the European bison no longer survived in France, it was driven to extinction in Austria and Hungary during the 1500s, and vanished from the Germanys in the 1700s. By the beginning of the twentieth century the largest remaining group of wild wisent, a herd of some seven hundred or so, were confined to the Bialowieza Forest in what is now northern Poland.
Due to uncontrolled poaching during World War I, the herd was completely exterminated by the war's end. Following the war it was estimated than only sixty purebred wisents existed in the entire world. In 1939, in the hopes of returning the European bison to its natural surroundings, sixteen wisent were returned to the Bialowieza Forest--only to be caught in the cross-fire of World War II. Due to the often-heroic efforts of Polish gamekeepers and the care given them by concerned Nazi and Stalinist officials, this small herd survived the war. Today, world-wide, over a thousand European bison still exist, over half of which live in the Bialowieza Forest--where Polish naturalists are attempting to transform these semi-domesticated animals into a herd of free-ranging wild wisent.
NUMBERS TOO MANY TO COUNT
HOW MANY BUFFALO ONCE ROAMED THE PRAIRIES, PLAINS, AND WOODLANDS OF NORTH AMERICA? That there were once millions is an undisputed fact, but how many millions? Some sources estimate as many as seventy million, some make a more conservative guess and say only twenty million. Thomas Farnham while traveling along the Santa Fe Trail in 1839 encountered a single herd of buffalo so immense in numbers as to stagger the imagination. For three days Farnham blazed a trail through this vast herd: "We traveled at a rate of fifteen miles a day. The length of sight on either side of the trail, 15 miles; on both sides 30 miles: 15 x 3 = 45 x 30 = 1350 square miles of country. . . [a landscape] so thickly covered with these noble animals, that when viewed from a height, [one could scarcely] sight . . . its surface." Farnham, it seems, encountered a mass of buffalo somewhat larger in area than the State of Rhode Island.
In Eastern Montana during the 1881-1882 season, the last sizable buffalo herd in North America met with extinction before the guns of the hide-hunters. A single merchant in Glendive purchased over 250,000 hides, perhaps as many 300,000 hides were ferried down the Missouri on the steamers, while the Northern Pacific Railroad hauled some 200,000 hides eastward in its box cars. The 1881-1882 season marked the end of the commercial buffalo hunts, in 1883 the hunters returned empty-handed--there were simply no buffalo left to "harvest."
In 1492 there were some 1.25 million square miles of bison habitat in North America. Range management specialists--after calculating grazing conditions found in the tall-grass Eastern Prairies, the mixed-grass Central Plains, and the short-grass High Plains--estimate that these grass-lands supported some twenty-six animals per square mile, or about 32 million buffalo. Subtract a couple million head--recognizing that other animals such as elk, deer, and pronghorns also grazed these lands--and it seems quite reasonable to believe that 30 million buffalo once roamed North America.
WOOD BUFFALO
The North American wood buffalo, Bison bison athabascae, commonly exceeded its plains cousin in size, with bulls exceeding twenty-five hundred pounds and cows weighing in at sixteen hundred pounds. Formerly, the wood buffalo inhabited much of the montane regions of North America. The wood buffalo's traditional habitat ran from the Great Slave Lake in Canada south along the spine of the Rockies into northern Mexico. From East to West, the wood buffalo roamed the foothills of the Front Range, spilling over into the great river valleys of the Rockies, across the Continental Divide, and into the varied habitats of the Great Plateau, the Southwest, the Great Basin, and the Pacific Rim states. In 1872 the territorial legislature enacted legislation to regulate the hunting of mountain bison (i.e. wood buffalo), however, the animal was, by that time, all but extinct in Montana. Today, many authorities argue that the wood buffalo as a unique sub-species is extinct, as the last pure-bred population, the herd at Canada's Wood Buffalo National Parks, was cross-bred with plains bison in the 1920s.
The mountain men knew the wood buffalo as the mountain bison, with, it seems, good reason. The wood buffalo often wintered in the open ranges and river bottoms along the foothills, moving up into the meadows and high valleys of Rockies during the spring and summer months. There are documented cases of mountain bison negotiating a twelve-thousand-foot pass near Pikes Peak, Colorado, during their migrations to and from summer pastures. Skeletal remains of mountain bison, in context demonstrating that the animals were alive at the time the remains were deposited, have been found in Wyoming's Medicine Bow Range at altitudes in excess of 11,500 feet.
GRANNY'S TALE
In the spring of 1880, Granville Stuart traveled the middle reaches of the Yellowstone Valley of Montana, scouting out the range for the DHS cattle outfit. On April 7, as he rode the stage from modern day Forsyth to Miles City, Stuart described the sight he witnessed along the trail on that, otherwise, beautiful spring morning: "From the Porcupine clear to Miles City [a distance of some thirty or so miles] the bottoms are liberally sprinkled with the carcasses of dead buffalo. In many places they lie thick on the ground, fat and meat not yet spoiled, all murdered for their hides which are piled like cordwood all along the way. `Tis an awful sight. Such a waste of the finest meat in the world! Probably ten thousand buffalo have been killed in this vicinity this winter. Slaughtering the buffalo is a government measure to subjugate the Indians."
THE STAFF OF LIFE
The peoples of the Blackfoot Nation, the Siksikah, referred to the bison as "real meat," meaning that all other meat and animals paled in significance when compared to importance of the buffalo to their survival and way of life. Prior to the acquisition of horses, the Blackfoot "far-back fathers" hunted buffalo with great difficulty and often with little success. One day, however, a deity known as Sun showed a Blackfoot hunter a new way of hunting real meat, the piskan or pishkun (buffalo surround or jump). In the words of Many Tail Feathers, a Pikunni elder, the piskan changed his ancestor's lives and made them into a new People. "Ha! How happy the men and women were as they sprang into the piskan and with their flint knives and stone-axes and hammers began butchering the animals--a whole herd . . . enough meat for the whole tribe . . . . It is no wonder that the hunters sang and sang and gave praise to Sun for his helpfulness. . . . With ever-plentiful supplies of meat and hides obtained with their piskans, our far-back people had easy living; in time they became so many that for various reasons they had to separate. So it was that they became three tribes: the Siksikas, Kainahs, and Pikunnis. . . . From North Big (Saskatchewan) River south to Elk (Yellowstone) River and from the Backbone (Rocky Mountains) far out eastward on the plains, they traveled and camped, fought off enemy tribes, made of that land their own vast country."
The Assiniboin believed that a dispute over a buffalo carcass was responsible for their splitting away from the main branch of Lakota/Sioux Peoples and founding a separate Nation. The Assiniboin say that the wives of two Sioux Chiefs quarreled over a buffalo carcass, soon the Chiefs became involved in the argument, and great hostilities were engendered by the disagreement. One Chief with his supporters left the tribe, never to return. These dissidents then became the Assiniboin Nation.
The Sarcee/Sarsi of the Northern Rockies, members of the Athapaskan language group are related to the Navaho of the Southwest. Traditionally, the Sarcee called themselves the "Tsu T'inna," meaning Earth People or Many People. The Navaho, also Athapaskan-speakers, call themselves the "Dineh." Linguists believe that T'inna and Dineh are, in fact, one in the same. The Sarcee believe that they indirectly owe their creation as a People or Nation to the buffalo. According to Sarcee history one winter, long ago as the entire Earth People band crossed a large frozen lake, an old woman tried to pry loose a buffalo horn frozen in the ice. The ice cracked and divided the lake in two, leaving part of the Earth People on the lake's northern shore, and part on the southern shore. The latter group, ancestral Navaho, continued on their way until they reached the warm lands of the south, where they settled and live to this day. The group stranded on the opposite shore remained in the forestlands of the north, where they became the Sarcee or Tsu T'inna and gained great fame as hunters of the "xaniti" (buffalo).
BUFFALOE SAUSAGE, ala CHARBONNEAU
Meriwether Lewis, in his own inimitable style, described a delicacy prepared by the expedition's cook, Toussaint Charbonneau in the summer of 1805, "About six feet of the lower extremity of the large gut of the Buffaloe is the first morsel that the cook makes love to . . . he gently compresses it, and discharges what he says is not good to eat, but of which in the sequel we get a moderate portion; the mustle lying underneath the shoulder blade next to the back, and fillets are next saught, these are needed up very fine with a good portion of kidney suet; to this . . . is then added a just proportion of pepper and salt and small quantity of flour . . . our skillful operator Charbonneau seizes his recepticle, which has never once touched the water, for that would intirely distroy the regular order of the whole procedure."
Lewis then described the process by which Charbonneau stuffed the buffalo intestine and then described the terminal stages of this process, "It is then baptised in the missouri with two dips and a flirt, and bobbed into the kettle; from whence, after it be well boiled its is taken and fryed with bears oil until it becomes brown, when it is ready to esswage the pangs of a keen appetite." Life on the frontier perhaps hardened one to more than just mere adversity, for Lewis noted, "This . . . we all esteem one of the greatest delicacies."
BIG MEDICINE
In May 1933 a white buffalo was born at the National Bison Range at Moiese, Montana. This was the first documented birth of a white buffalo in the twentieth century. Biologists and rangers at the Bison Range, evincing a bureaucrat's keen imagination, named the calf "Whitey." Members of the Blackfoot Nation who came to Moiese to commemorate the birth of this special buffalo named the calf "Big Medicine." The white calf was, except for a brown patch about his crown, an off-white color, as he matured Big Medicine's coat turned pure white. His eyes, lacking normal pigmentation, were bluish-gray. At age four, Big Medicine was mated to his dam, who gave birth to a pure albino calf, subsequently named "Little Medicine." Little Medicine--a true albino with a pure white coat, white hooves, and pink eyes--was born partially blind, and was abandoned by his mother soon after birth. Although the albino calf was transported to the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. where he received special care, Little Medicine died before the year was out. Big Medicine, however, lived to the ripe old age of twenty-six. Big Medicine's remains were subjected to the taxidermist's art and can be viewed at the museum at the Montana Historical Society in Helena, Montana.
BISON STANDARD TIME
The buffalo played a vital role in convincing skeptical Euro-American scholars of the true extent of humanity's ancient presence in North America. Prior to the 1920s, conventional wisdom held that humankind reached the New World only some three to four thousand years prior to the arrival of Columbus. In 1924 J.D. Figgins of the Denver Museum of Natural History led a party of paleontologists to a site along the Cimarron River, in northeastern New Mexico, where the party uncovered a substantial number of fossilized bison remains. Figgins estimated that the bison remains had been deposited at the site some ten thousand years ago. Relying upon conventional wisdom Figgins et al. first interpreted the site as bog or water hole, where they believed the buffalo had became mired in the mud and perished. As the crew proceeded with its excavation this interpretation, and, thus, conventional wisdom, fell to the side in the face of the physical record.
In the clay matrix surrounding a bison rib bone, the paleontologists discovered a flint projectile point. This leaf-shaped point was characterized by its distinctive fluting or hollow-ground flaking, a style never before seen in the New World. This flint knapping technique, and the culture subsequently found in association with points of this style, is known as Folsom, named after the town nearest to the Cimarron River bison-kill site.
Finding one point, however, was not enough to dispel the tenets of conventional wisdom. Many scholars maintained that the Folsom point was manufactured at a more recent date and that its presence in the bison rib matrix was a mere fluke. The next year Figgins returned to the Cimarron site and, yes, a second Folsom point was found associated with bison remains. Figgins halted work, and invited his skeptics in the scientific community to come to the site and view the point in its undisturbed, unexcavated bone-point-clay matrix. The tide began to turn, and an increasing number of scholars began to accept that humans had reached the New World far earlier than had previously been estimated. It was not, however, until the third season's dig with the discovery of yet more Folsom artifacts, that the true scale time involved in human history in the Americas began to gain widespread acceptance. Today, we know that the Folsom culture flourished in North America some 10,000 years ago.
BISON ART
Humankind made its first record of the bison some twenty-five thousand, or more, years ago; deep within the earth in caves in what are now Spain and France. Here, Cro-Magnon artists made paintings and molded bias-reliefs of the big game animals that furnished their Peoples with the raw materials of their life and culture. Cro-Magnon artists depicted the bison with skilled hands and eyes. By employing stylized lines, shading the contours of the bison's body with natural pigments, and using the texture of cave walls and daubed-on clay they created near life-like representations of the giant humpback steppe wisent (Bison priscus).
We assume that these murals held spiritual significance for their creators, they surely were not mere decorations, for they were generally hidden in the most remote recesses of caves and caverns. To view Cro-Magnon art in the cave at Niaux, France, one must traverse a three thousand foot long twisting, torturous, stalactite-strewn passage to reach this underground gallery. Among the bison depicted at Niaux several are portrayed as prey--pierced with spears and spewing great gouts of blood. Perhaps, then, the art was an appeal to forces outside the control of the hunter for aid in the hunt--or perhaps the art was a way of paying homage to the very animals who surrendered their spirit, their life, that the hunter and his people might live.
THE BUFFALO TODAY
Today there are an estimated thirty to forty thousand bison in North America, a pitifully small remnant of the once immense herds that roamed this continent in centuries past. Small though these current numbers may be, they represent a staggering increase over the scant handful of buffalo that survived at the dawn of the 20th century. A census conducted in 1889 revealed the grim fact that little more than one thousand buffalo survived in all of North America. In Canada a herd estimated to number about 550 head clung to existence in the vicinity of the Great Slave Lake. Some 200 bison still survived in Yellowstone Park. Only a scant 256 buffalo lived in zoos and private pastures throughout all of the U.S. and Canada. Sadly, by 1889 perhaps as few as 90 free-ranging bison still existed in the U.S. The crisis confronting the buffalo only grew worse, by 1901 only twenty-five or so bison, those fortunate enough to have avoided poachers, still survived in Yellowstone Park.
On December 8, 1904, a group of conservationist convened in the Lion House of the New York Zoological Society and organized the American Bison Society. The society's goal was nothing less than the preservation and, indeed, the restoration of the buffalo to portions of its historic range. The American Bison Society launched an extensive campaign to meet this seemingly unobtainable goal. Through a combination of fund raising, education, promotion of restoration activities in the private sector, and lobbying of state and federal governments, the society and its many supporters rescued the buffalo from its teetering foothold on the brink of extinction. At the society's urging, Senator Joseph M. Dixon of Montana introduced legislation to establish national bison reserves. On May 23, 1908, President Roosevelt signed into law the bill that led to the creation of the National Bison Range in Montana. Throughout the opening decades of this century governments and private citizens alike worked to establish new bison preserves and increase the size of bison herds. Although there were many obstacles yet to be surmounted, the buffalo was on the road to recovery. In 1930 the American Bison Society, feeling that it mission had been accomplished, disbanded. For the most part, the American and Canadian people have continued to support bison preservation activities and the future of the buffalo's existence in North America seems as secure as that of any of the continent's threatened mammillae.
I suppose it only fair to ask why should we care whether or not the buffalo survives? Why should we care whether or not any single plant or animal species survives? The planet earth teems with life, there are so many species of life that we have yet to even identify and classify them all. What does it matter if one, or even a hundred, species of animals ceases to exist? After all, extinction is a natural process that has occurred throughout the entire history of life on this planet. Perhaps this is all true. But has extinction ever occurred at the rate we have witnessed in the past 200 years? Perhaps, perhaps not. Is the present wave of worldwide extinction of plant and animal species is occurring outside of the "normal" pattern of the past? Perhaps, perhaps not. Has humankind interfered in the process by preventing the evolution of new species to replace those that die off? Perhaps, perhaps not. The rate of extinction among mammals has increased some fifty-five fold in the past 150 years. If this pattern continues unchecked, by the year 2030 nearly all of the remaining 4,000 species of mammals alive today will be no more. This would be an unimaginable tragedy--all scientific criteria aside, a world with no animals would be a sad world upon which to live. From a more selfish perspective we should, perhaps, consider that we, humankind, are included among those remaining 4,000 species of mammals alive today who face extinction. If we cannot, or choose not to, endeavor to save the buffalo or other threatened species, can we then expect to "save" ourselves?
A BISON BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Mark H. THE PLAINSMEN OF THE YELLOWSTONE: A HISTORY OF THE YELLOWSTONE BASIN (1961).
Ewers, John C. INDIAN LIFE ON THE UPPER MISSOURI (1968).
Fagan, Brian M. ANCIENT NORTH AMERICA: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF A CONTINENT (1991).
Gard, Wayne. THE GREAT BUFFALO HUNT (1968).
Grinnell, George Bird. THE CHEYENNE INDIANS, 2 vols. (1962).
Holder, Preston. THE HOE AND THE HORSE ON THE PLAINS (1974).
Hungry Wolf, Adolf. Teachings of Nature (1989).
Jablow, Joseph. THE CHEYENNE IN PLAINS INDIAN TRADE RELATIONS, 1795-1840 (1950).
Lowie, Robert. INDIANS OF THE PLAINS (1954).
Matthews, Anne. WHERE THE BUFFALO ROAM (1992).
McHugh, Tom. THE TIME OF THE BUFFALO (1972).
Pfeiffer, John E. THE EMERGENCE OF MAN (1969).
Schultz, James Willard. BLACKFEET AND BUFFALO: MEMORIES OF LIFE AMONG THE INDIANS (1962).
Stuart, Granville. FORTY YEARS ON THE FRONTIER AS SEEN IN THE JOURNALS AND REMINISCENCES OF GRANVILLE STUART, GOLD-MINER, TRADER, MERCHANT, RANCHER, AND POLITICIAN, 2 vols. (1925).
Walker, James R. LAKOTA SOCIETY (1982).
Silverberg, Robert. THE MORNING OF MANKIND: PREHISTORIC MAN IN EUROPE (1967).
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