Historians Revisit
Slaughter on the Plains
By Jim Robbins
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context from November 16, 1999, Section F, Pg 3
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The wanton slaughter of millions of bison in the 19th century by white
hide hunters, abetted by a military intent on subjugating Indians, is probably
the most famous conservation horror story in United States history.
The problem with this tale, a growing number of scholars and historians
say, is that it is not true. As portrayed in a number of controversial new
books, the real story of the decline of the buffalo involves a significant
change in climate, competition for forage and cattle-borne disease. Another
major factor, the authors say, were Indian tribes, empowered by the horse and
gun and driven to hunt buffaloes for the profits that came from hides and meat.
''What most people don't consider in their 'Dances With Wolves' version
of history is that Indians were involved in the market,'' said Dr. Dan Flores,
the A. B. Hammond professor of Western history at the University of Montana.
''They were cashing in on buffalo in the 1840's as their principal entree into
the market economy, and very few species are able to survive when they become a
commodity.''
White
hunters who killed buffaloes by the millions in the 1870's and 1880's played a
major role in the demise, said Dr. Flores, but only as the coup de grace. ''The
hide hunters are not off the hook,'' he said. ''They share the burden of the
final mop-up. But without their involvement, the buffalo would probably have
only lasted another 30 years.'' That is because their numbers had been so
greatly reduced by the other factors.
The buffalo studies are part of a continuing debate about the role of
Indians in Western history. In ''The Ecological Indian'' (W. W. Norton, 1999),
for example, Shepard Krech III, an anthropologist at Brown University, argues
against the romantic image of the Indian as the first environmentalist. When
Indians had had the means and the motive, he says, they abused nature for
profit.
Dr. Flores, whose work on buffalo has appeared in The Journal of
American History and elsewhere, is writing a book on bison under contract with
Yale University Press. And Dr. Drew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history
at Princeton, has a book called ''The Destruction of the Bison: An
Environmental History, 1750-1920,'' which will be published by Cambridge
University Press in April.
Not everyone subscribes to the new wave. Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., a
professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of
the Standing Rock Sioux, finds the revisionism preposterous. ''It's nonsense,''
he said. ''The Indians did not make any appreciable dent in buffalo numbers in
the Northern Plains. It's anti-Indian stuff.''
Indians were involved in the buffalo market, scholars generally agree.
Their acquisition of horses and guns made buffalo hunting much easier. As
steamboats started plying the Missouri River into the heart of buffalo country
in the 1840's, hide hunting by the Kiowa, Blackfeet, Sioux and other Plains
tribes soared.
For the
first time, there was a way to haul the bulky robes back East, where they
became popular as a covering during cold weather travel and for leather goods.
Indians found they could trade the robes for firearms, lead balls, gunpowder,
blankets, textiles, pots and pans and whiskey.
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Dr. Isenberg
estimates that before the 1840's, 60,000 Plains Indians were killing half a
million bison a year for sustenance. After the robe trade began in the 1840's,
that total went over 600,000 a year, ''clearly into unsustainable range,'' he
said.
While white hunters killed more buffaloes (their total throughout the
West is estimated at four million), Dr. Flores argues that Indians concentrated
their killing on buffalo cows, which had more tender meat and were much easier
to skin and treat, resulting in severe damage to the herds' reproductive
capacity.
Environmental factors play large roles in newer histories of the West.
For example, Dr. Flores says that the study of tree rings, or dendrochronology,
suggests that Indians were so effective in decimating the buffalo because
climate had already weakened and diminished the herds.
From the 1500's to the mid-19th century, a period known as the little
ice age, tree rings show that the climate in the West was much colder than
normal. That favored the grasses buffaloes eat, and they flourished. When a
long, widespread drought ended the little ice age in the mid-1800's, the
grasses changed and the bison population crashed just as the tribes began
market hunting.
At the same time, Dr. Flores said, buffaloes began having to compete for
forage with horses that were brought by the Spaniards to North America in the
1500's and later went feral. By the 1800's, Dr. Flores estimates, two million
horses were sharing the range with the buffalo.
Dr. Flores and the others also differ from their predecessors in their
use of Indian sources. Many bands of Indians, for example, kept a record of
events, often symbols painted on bison robes. The Northern Plains tribes kept
winter counts of buffaloes on buffalo hides, while the Kiowa, in the south,
kept calendars. ''The symbol for 'many buffalo,' a circle with a dot in the
middle, appears numerous times from 1800 to 1840 in the Kiowa calendars,'' Dr.
Flores said. ''But after 1840 it appears only once.''
Such counts
are crucial to the debate over who or what killed off the bison, but all sides
agree that estimates are a tricky business.
In the past, historians estimated bison numbers at 40 million to 60
million, sometimes as many as 75 million. But Dr. Flores has tried to calculate
how many buffaloes the range could support by analyzing 1910 census data on
cattle, and has concluded that in good years the range could hold only 20
million to 24 million. After the little ice age, at the time of the Civil War,
buffalo numbers may have been as low as 10 million to 12 million, he said.
But his calculations have been criticized by Dr. Deloria, who says that
comparing fenced-in livestock with free-roaming buffaloes is an inappropriate
comparison.
Dr. Calvin Luther Martin, who taught history at Rutgers and lived with
Eskimos for two years on the Alaskan tundra, also disagrees. Dr. Martin, the
author of a new book on Indian life, ''The Way of the Human Being'' (Yale
University Press), argues that to judge Indians by contemporary environmental
standards ''is patent foolishness.''
The Indians were caught between two worlds and two realities, Dr. Martin
said. ''They don't translate into each other,'' he said, adding that Indians
had no concept of being wasteful.
And the claim that competition with horses would have affected the buffalo
has also been criticized by Dr. Valerius Geist, an ecologist who is an emeritus
professor of environmental science at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Dr.
Geist, author of ''Buffalo Nation: The History and Legend of the North American
Bison,'' (Voyageur Press) noted that bison had evolved on the prairie with
other large mammals. ''Flores is a historian playing ecologist,'' Dr. Geist
said.
Finally, the new bison scholarship also casts doubt on another major
tenet of buffalo history: that the destruction of the herds was a conspiracy
between the United States Army and hide hunters who did the killing.
''I don't
think there was a conspiracy by any means,'' Dr. Isenberg said. ''The army was
happy to see hide hunters, but they were not commanding them to kill bison.''
Dr. Flores traces the notion of a conspiracy to the memoir of a Texas
buffalo hunter named John R. Cook, called ''The Border and the Buffalo.''
According to the book, the Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, the Indian fighter, urged
the Texas Legislature not to pass a law that would protect the buffaloes
remaining there and instead to create a bronze medal for the hunters ''with a
dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other.''
Dr. Flores said he had found no record of General Sheridan's speech to
the Legislature and believed it was apocryphal. The notion of a conspiracy, he
said, has become fact through repetition.
Dr. Flores said he had recently discovered letters in which General
Sheridan wrote that he was concerned about the demise of the buffalo. After
hearing in October 1879 about the killing of thousands of buffaloes by hide
hunters near Miles City, Mont., General Sheridan sent a telegram to Washington,
saying, ''I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the buffalo
should be stopped.''
Dr. Isenberg denies that the new work on the buffalo is anti-Indian.
''It's
romantic to imagine Indians as always living in harmony with nature,'' he said.
''But they are people who did many things right and who also made mistakes. If
you want to see them as a real people and not a romantic notion, then you have
to look with a clear eye at these kinds of things. None of us have any animus
toward Indians.''
