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The Destruction of the Bison an Environmental History, –

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The Destruction of the Bison an Environmental History, – front.qxd 1/28/00 10:59 AM Page v The Destruction of the Bison An Environmental History, 1750–1920 ANDREW C. ISENBERG Princeton University front.qxd 1/28/00 10:59 AM Page vi published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, uk http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, usa http://www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain © Andrew C. Isenberg 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 Printed in the United States of America Typeface Ehrhardt 10/12 pt. System QuarkXPress [tw] A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Isenberg, Andrew C. (Andrew Christian) The destruction of the bison : an environmental history, 1750–1920 / Andrew C. Isenberg. p. cm. – (Studies in environment and history) Includes index. isbn 0-521-77172-2 1. American bison. 2. American bison hunting – History. 3. Nature – Effect of human beings on – North America. I. Title. ql737.u53i834 2000 333.95´9643´0978 – dc21 99-37543 cip isbn 0 521 77172 2 hardback front.qxd 1/28/00 10:59 AM Page ix Contents Acknowledgments page xi Introduction 1 1 The Grassland Environment 13 2 The Genesis of the Nomads 31 3 The Nomadic Experiment 63 4 The Ascendancy of the Market 93 5 The Wild and the Tamed 123 6 The Returns of the Bison 164 Conclusion 193 Index 199 ix intro.qxd 1/28/00 11:00 AM Page 1 Introduction Before Europeans brought the horse to the New World, Native Americans in the Great Plains hunted bison from foot. Their technique was ingenious: by making a Wre or creating a ruckus near a herd of bison, they stampeded the skit- tish animals toward a bluV. The Indians lined the route to the bison “jump” with fallen trees or thicket and waved robes to shoo the beasts toward their destina- tion. If the hunters dared to risk a general conXagration, they set more Wres to direct the herd. Once they had stampeded the bison over the precipice, they pep- pered the crippled animals with arrows. For the bison, the stampede to the bluV was probably a disorienting experience. As they hurried toward their deaths, the more perceptive among them might have wondered, “Where is all this commo- tion leading me?” As readers of this book consider – among other things – grass- land ecology, horses, smallpox, the fur trade, and gender roles in Indian and Euroamerican societies, they may Wnd themselves pondering the same question. Nonetheless, just as pedestrian hunters herded their prey to their deaths, this book eventually leads to the destruction of the bison. Why consider so many seemingly disparate subjects? Because, a host of economic, cultural, and ecological factors herded the bison toward their near- extinction. That diverse assembly of factors Wrst emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century from ongoing encounters among Indians, Euroamericans, and the Great Plains environment. Those encounters were both a process of intercultural and ecological exchange and an interaction between people and a place, the nonhuman natural environment.1 1 For the American West as a place, see Donald Worster, “New West, True West,” Western Histori- cal Quarterly, 18 (April 1987), 141–156; for process, see William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanish- ing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Ibid., 157–176. For the interaction of ecology, economy, and culture, see Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries, 1850–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–16; McEvoy, “Toward an Interactive Theory of Nature and Culture: Ecology, Production, and Cognition in the California Fishing Industry,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives in Modern Environmental History, ed. Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 211–229. Also see Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1–26. My understanding of environ- mental history has been profoundly inXuenced by the work of Richard White, particularly The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). 1 intro.qxd 1/28/00 11:00 AM Page 2 2 Introduction On its surface, the encounter between the Old and New Worlds that led to the destruction of the bison appears to be a simple matter: Indian and Euroamerican hunters pushed the species to the brink of extinction for commercial proWt. In the nineteenth century, they slaughtered millions of bison and brought to market the animals’ hides, meat, tongues, and bones. Like other environmental catastrophes in the American West – the depletion of the California Wsheries, the deforesta- tion of the Great Lakes region and PaciWc Northwest, and the “dust bowl” of the southern plains in the 1930s – the destruction of the bison was, in part, the result of the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources.2 Yet, as in the California Wsheries, the wheat Welds of the dust bowl, and elsewhere, more than a capitalist economy’s demand for natural resources caused the near-extinction of the bison. The volatile grassland environment itself was a factor; drought, cold, predators, and the competition of other grazing animals accounted for much of the decline. The Great Plains environment inXuenced the fate of not only the bison but the human inhabitants of the region, particularly mounted, bison-hunting Indian societies. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the hunters adjusted their social structures and resource strategies to the ecology of the grasslands. Just as important, the Indians adapted to the ecological and economic changes that resulted from the arrival of Euroamericans in the West. Largely in reaction to the Europeans’ introduction of the horse (which facilitated bison hunting), Old World diseases (which discouraged a sedentary life), and the fur trade (which encouraged specialization as hunters), some Indian groups rein- vented themselves as equestrian nomads in the high plains.3 These adaptations 2 For the California Wsheries, see McEvoy, Fisherman’s Problem; for deforestation, see Richard White, “The Altered Landscape: Social Change and the Land in the PaciWc Northwest,” in William G. Robbins, Robert J. Frank, and Richard E. Ross, eds., Regionalism and the PaciWc Northwest (Cor- vallis: Oregon State University Press, 1983), 109–127; for a masterful treatment of the transfor- mation of the Western environment in the nineteenth century, see William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991); for an equally insightful history of environmental change in the twentieth-century West, see Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). The degradation of the environment is an important theme of recent works in Western history. See Wilbur Jacobs, “The Great Despoliation: Environmental Themes in American Frontier History,” PaciWc Historical Review, 47 (February 1978), 1–26; Worster, “Beyond the Agrarian Myth,” and White, “Trashing the Trails,” in Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin, eds., Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 18–21, 26–39. 3 The Wrst important study of the impact of imported biota on a previously isolated community was Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Plants and Animals (London: Chapman and Hall, 1958). The historian Alfred W. Crosby has integrated the science of ecological invasions with the history of European exploration and colonialism in several major books and essays. See Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1986); Crosby, Germs, Seeds, & Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972). Indian history has been revitalized in recent years by studies that have analyzed Indian societies that reinvented themselves in response to European colonialism. According to this perspective, the changes attendant on the arrival of Europeans were so extensive that not just the colonists, but Indians as well, found themselves in a “new intro.qxd 1/28/00 11:00 AM Page 3 Introduction 3 left the newly nomadic societies dependent on the bison, a species vulnerable to depletion by overhunting and drought. In the mid-nineteenth century, the com- bination of Indian predation and environmental change decimated the bison. Cultural and ecological encounters also shaped the Euroamerican destruction and, later, preservation of the bison. Beginning in the 1840s, the presence of increasing numbers of Euroamericans in the plains displaced the bison from their customary habitats. Livestock belonging to Euroamerican emigrants on the Oregon-California and Santa Fe trails degraded the valleys of the Platte and Arkansas rivers.4 More important, between 1870 and 1883, Euroamerican hunters slaughtered millions of bison. Federal authorities supported the hunt because they saw the extermination of the bison as a means to force Indians to submit to the reservation system.5 The hunters, aided by drought, blizzards, and other environmental factors, nearly destroyed the Indians’ primary resource. Although Eastern preservationists at the turn of the century decried the waste- fulness of the hide hunters, they nonetheless yearned for the bygone era that the hide hunters had epitomized. Their desire to preserve the bison as a living memorial to a romanticized frontier of Euroamerican conquest animated their mission to save the species from extinction.
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