Commonly taught in classrooms is the lesson that market hunters slaughtered the buffalo for their tongues and hides and more importantly, to rid the native Americans of their food source to force them onto the reservations.

Big problem with that commonly accepted theory is the numbers don’t add up. Market hunters never killed more than 2 or so million in most years. So even on the low end you would have 30 million animals still reproducing.

Here is a good read that offers more plausible scenarios of what really happened to the American Buffalo

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

Another photo commonly used as propaganda showing the slaughter of the buffalo.

While the commonly circulated photo is real, what is not commonly circulated is that it’s from 1892, over 15 years AFTER the peak of the market hunting days, not the results of a single years hunt as commonly purported.




Bones were commonly picked up off the plains to be ground and used for fertilizer among other things.

From the accounts I read, the overwhelming numbers of bison were killed by the US Army led by Sherman as a scorched earth tactic to deprive Indians from the food and other benefits they derived from bison as well as outright sadistic punishment. Market hunting and sport killing, which also occurred, were minor in comparison.

The Yankee terrorist Sherman did it to the civilians in the South. Then the sadist Yankee terrorist mass murderer Sherman turned his demonic soul toward the Indians and unleashed unforgivable evil.

Sherman's place in history is along side other mass murderers of history, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Hitler burning in hell.

That article does not even mention Sherman one single time. "Unexplained population crash...." I put that rewrite of history well into the full blown propaganda bin.

We cannot and should not let that dark and evil history of our government be erased from memory through sugar coated rewrites omitting the bitter truth.

Sherman did not kill 15 million buffalo, which is what it would have taken, at a minimum, in a years time to cause a population crash.

Something happened that affected a large number of animals very quickly.

Ok, ok, now I understand what we are supposed to think, the Indians and bison died of Covid and climate change, not lead poisoning from the government.

Fencing led to the demise of bison.

Hmmm. . . ., from Google - "In Audubon's time there was an estimated 3 billion passenger pigeons. By 1914 the last remaining pigeon would die... The extinction of the Passenger Pigeon had two major causes: commercial exploitation of pigeon meat on a massive scale and loss of habitat."

Avian flu took a huge chunk. But loss of habitat is a major one as it disrupts their ability to reproduce.





Google will tell you whatever you want to hear

I’m offering a more plausible explanation that uses common sense rather than the usual “white man killed everything” rhetoric.


I’m not saying they didn’t kill alot of buffalo. I’m saying they didn’t kill enough with bullets to cause them to go extinct in a 15 year time span.

Two things happened; either they died of something on a large scale, like bovine tuberculosis, anthrax or the like, or they grossly underestimated the original number of buffalo.

On the low end, they estimated there were 30 million buffalo. On the high end 60 million. They were killing between 2-4 million a year, with the 4 million mark hit only once or twice. So you remove say 4 million buffalo off the landscape in one year, do you think the other 26 million didn’t reproduce?


It’s not hard to see that the numbers don’t add up

I don’t know much about bison but I assume like cattle they are not “grown” reproducing members of the population in 1 year. Would seem to compound on the population fall because you not automatically adding back every year as much as some may assume.

Cow buffalo can calve at 2 years old. At 30 million head you would have about 7 million new calves being born each year give or take.

Looked up the stats there are currently approx. 30 million whitetail deer in the US currently.

Hunters kill approx. 6 million every year plus what gets hit by cars, etc.

So how many bison are we assuming we started with if there are only 30 million wt?

30-60 million buffalo

Wt deer wasn’t that populous a species in the 1800’s. Much more of them now than any time in recorded history.

I only threw that reference in to show the current deer population and how many we kill yearly in comparison to the buffalo numbers.

The paper presents an interesting hypothesis. Thanks for sharing.

Sherman was definitely pro wiping out the bison to take care of the Indian problem. He was already familiar with wiping out a people’s resources. That’s documented and easy to find.

Probably multiple reasons why the bison population declined.

I don’t care one way or the other, but if there are only 30 million WT now and there are more than there has ever been, I do not believe that 1800’s population estimates of 30-60 million bison were accurate. It’s apparent in the population estimate with a variation of 100%.

First off no way they knew how many bison were actually around back then, just a guess.
Yes disease may have been a larger component of their demise but white man brought those diseases so yes white man was responsible for their demise.

When you see piles of skulls like that pic, and there are tons of them out, now way you can say we did mot have a huge impact on the bison.
As stated fencing, settling the land they roamed and market hunting were their demise, along with the military. Diseases may have contributed but not in a large scale way.

I tend to agree. Sherman was very adept at hitting the enemy where it hurt and he viewed the destruction of the buffalo as a military expediency. The possibility that something more than hunters contributed to the buffalo demise is logical.

The Columbus era estimates is there were around 500,000 whitetail in the continental US in the 1500’s. As a species they were not as numerous as we would think looking at todays numbers and the general way of thinking is that there were more way back when. Habitat was completely different today than buck then. 100 years ago there was estimated to only be 250,000 whitetail here in Texas. We are now over 5 million. Wild to think there were large areas of Texas that had zero deer.

I will agree there was no way to tell how many buffalo there actually were, it’s possible there was only 10 million instead of 30 million. It’s highly possible and likely they were way, way off on this number. That would make the extinction by bullet theory much more plausible.

Interesting to note that the authorities on buffalo don’t dispute the 30million head number. How they came up with thet census I do not know

TT,

where are you finding all of these "facts"? WT's probably hit a low population point of 200-500,000 during the Great Depression due to subsistence hunting.

Pre-Columbian WT population estimates are well into in the tens of millions.

Here is an easy graphic:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...6-estimated-from-combined_fig3_344865578

Here is a more detailed peer reviewed scientific paper that puts the population at 24 million to double or more that number:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/rm/pubs_journals/2020/rmrs_2020_hanberry_b009.pdf


I'm skipping your Passenger Pigeon comments for later discussion.

Didn't read the whole article .
D- in grammer,
Mass killing of the Buffalo ta put Indians
on reservation, could been part of it.
They could have gotten designed like with deer.
Over grazing playe..d a part.

Wasn't their, just few of my thoughts.
who's the one that counted 60 million ?

Jeff bird,

You are correct, the number I quoted was the 1900 estimate not the 1500 estimate. That was an error on my part.

I’m not claiming anything as fact, I’m just opening the discussion of the possibility that things did not happen the way we commonly believe. If a liberal historian is telling it then I 100% will question it. The same historian who will tell the story of how evil and greed almost wiped the buffalo off the map will cheerfully tell a story a few chapters later about Mt. Rushmore and what a grand engineering feat it is that we should all be proud of. Which if you look on how the U.S “acquired” the land it is nothing more than pure theft. But again, history doesn’t want to tell that story. I am interested in factual history, good, bad or indifferent, not polished or glossed over tales or ones manipulated to push an agenda.


The story of the buffalo is one that has always been at the forefront of modern history and still garnering interest today. The restoration of the species is one of great significance.

As previously mentioned, it’s possible there were far, far less buffalo at their peak than previously believed. Thus the recorded numbers killed by market hunters and the army would somewhat jive with an extreme population reduction.

But if the numbers were close to that 30 million mark then it’s not feasible (in my opinion)to believe that people were the sole contributor to the decimation of the buffalo in the number of years it took to wipe them out. That would point to a disease outbreak at some point.

There have been numerous cases where unregulated hunting was the cause of an animals demise. I just don’t believe that was the case with the American buffalo.

Too many bison for the range to support?
Maybe. The bison couldn’t understand rotational grazing.

Every fisheries manager knows that you need a balanced pond ecosystem. That means that the predator/prey relationship is symbiotic (they need each other). Without bluegills, the bass don’t make it. And, without bass(predators), the bluegills(forage) over spawn, foul the water and have a ‘die off’.

The same is true with wildlife everywhere. Rabbits and coyotes come to mind. My concern here is that there are a whole lot more piglets than rabbits. Do coyotes also prey on fawns? You bet. But, in the drought I’m having now, I’m questioning just how many rabbits, fawns and piglets will make it with dry range conditions.

Don’t think there were any Bison-proof fences in the late 1800’s. A fence is but a bead curtain to a Buffalo.

If you read "Empire of the Summer Moon", there are decades of quotes, from multiple Comanche leaders that recognized the white man killing off game in many parts of Texas. Much of which was bison. The bison grazed from the Rio Grande to the northern plains. I prefaced that book with the Biography of Charles Goodnight. Through his travels, he believed there were actually two herds. A northern and a southern. Neither would cross the Canadian or the Arkansas River. Can't remember exactly which one. But he did drive feral cattle from Weatherford to Pecos, to Eastern Colorado. His cattle may have contributed to disease in Bison.

In all, I have no doubt the bison were in fact mostly shot to death, more than any other way. The bison killing spanned over many decades. Cynthia Anne Parker was abducted in 1836. Quanna Parker, her son, finally cried uncle and surrendered into Oklahoma 40 years later. More than those four decades bison were shot and Comanche were shot. All in the name of the white man conquering, and holding land. Land today that is everything west of current I-35. That was about the eastern line of "Comancheria" as that author called it. The Kingdom of the Comanche. Private hunters and the U.S. Army shot the hell out of Comanches and their one of their main sources of making a living. The other source was the mustangs. The second battle of Adobe Walls was Buffalo Hunters against Comanche. And the Buffalo Hunters won it, by a wide margin.

And I can accept the herds size may not have been the original estimated size that we've been told.

Something else I was told, by a man looking into raising them, but I never researched further. A Bison calf does not grow near as fast as a beef calf. I think he said they put on weight at half the rate of a beef calf.

Agreed.

Goodnight also killed the Bison in Palo Duro Canyon like we shoot feral hogs. So that he could make room for his cattle. He built fence, in the panhandle. But a small percentage of the mass of land the Bison grazed.