The destruction of the bison
Thirty million animals reduced to a few hundred, in fifteen years
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The bison is an ox-like animal of up to a tonne, and the herds on the American plains were probably the largest gathering of big land animals on Earth. The link to military policy is documented in contemporary statements: several officers and politicians explicitly recommended extermination as a means of forcing the Plains nations onto reservations, because it was faster than war. That makes this one of the clearest couplings of ecological destruction and military strategy in modern history. The species was saved by a few private herds and now numbers around half a million, nearly all carrying some cattle DNA.
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Perhaps thirty million bison lived on the Plains. In under twenty years almost all were shot, mostly for their hides, and carried east by rail. By around 1889 fewer than a thousand remained. For the Plains nations, who lived on the bison, it meant the basis of their existence was gone.
Sources
- Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (2000)
- Smithsonian: Hornaday, «The Extermination of the American Bison» (1889)
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