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The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains

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The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains Department Discussion Paper DDP1701 ISSN 1914-2838 THE SLAUGHTER OF THE BISON AND REVERSAL OF FORTUNES ON THE GREAT PLAINS Donna Feir & Rob Gillezeau Department of Economics, University of Victoria Victoria, B.C., Canada V8W 2Y2 & Maggie Jones Department of Economics, Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6 July 31, 2017 Abstract In the late-19th century, the North American bison was slaughtered in a dramatic near- extinction episode that occurred in a period of just over ten years. We argue that the rapidity of this slaughter led to a “reversal of fortunes” for the Native American societies that relied on the bison. We exploit regional variation in the speed at which the bison were slaughtered and tribal variation in bison-dependence to show that bison-dependent Native American tribes suffered a significant change in living standards immediately after the bison's near-extinction, as measured by changes in height. Once the tallest people in the world, the generations of bison-dependent people born after the slaughter were amongst the shortest. We show that these effects persist into the present: formerly bison-dependent societies have between 20-40% less income per capita in 2000 than the average Native American nation, and this effect is strongest among the least historically diverse economies. Our results are robust to the inclusion of cultural, colonial, contemporary, and geographic factors and hold in both Canada and the United States. Although the living conditions of historically bison-dependent nations improved modestly between 1910 and 2010, as measured by standardized occupational rank, outcomes remain lower than non-bison-dependent nations, particularly for those living on Native American reservations. We suggest that the restrictions on mobility and economic diversification that were placed on Native Americans by federal Indian policy during the 19th and 20th centuries likely hampered the ability of these economies to adjust in the long-run. Keywords: North American Bison, Buffalo, Extinction, Economic History, Development, Displacement, Native Americans, Indigenous, Income Shock, Intergenerational Mobility JEL Classifications: I15, J15, J24, N31, N32 Author Contact: Donna Feir, Dept. of Economics, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700, STN CSC, Victoria, B.C., Canada V8W 2Y2; E-mail: [email protected]; Voice: (250) 721-8533; FAX: (250) 721-6214 The Slaughter of the Bison and Reversal of Fortunes on the Great Plains University of Victoria Economics Department Discussion Paper DDP1701 ISSN 1914-2838 Donna Feir Rob Gillezeau Department of Economics Department of Economics University of Victoria University of Victoria [email protected] [email protected] Maggie E.C. Jones Department of Economics Queen's University [email protected] July 31st, 2017 Abstract In the late 19th century, the North American bison was slaughtered in a dramatic near-extinction episode that occurred in a period of just over ten years. We argue that the rapidity of this slaughter led to a \reversal of fortunes" for the Native American societies that relied on the bison. We exploit regional variation in the speed at which the bison were slaughtered and tribal variation in bison- dependence to show that bison-dependent Native American tribes suffered a significant change in living standards immediately after the bison's near-extinction, as measured by changes in height. Once the tallest people in the world, the generations of bison-dependent people born after the slaughter were amongst the shortest. We show that these effects persist into the present: formerly bison-dependent societies have between 20-40% less income per capita in 2000 than the average Native American nation, and this effect is strongest among the least historically diverse economies. Our results are robust to the inclusion of cultural, colonial, contemporary, and geographic factors and hold in both Canada and the United States. Although the living conditions of historically bison-dependent nations improved modestly between 1910 and 2010, as measured by standardized occupational rank, outcomes remain lower than non-bison-dependent nations, particularly for those living on Native American reservations. We suggest that the restrictions on mobility and economic diversification that were placed on Native Americans by federal Indian policy during the 19th and 20th centuries likely hampered the ability of these economies to adjust in the long-run. Keywords: North American Bison, Buffalo, Extinction, Economic History, Development, Displacement, Native Americans, Indigenous, Income Shock, Intergenerational Mobility JEL classification: I15, J15, J24, N31, N32 Acknowledgments. We would like to thank Christian Dippel, Nathan Nunn, and Rick Steckel for their will- ingness to share data. We would also like to thank Terry Anderson, Mauricio Drelichman, David Green, Price Fishback, Nicole Fortin, Joe Kalt, Bryan Leonard, Frank Lewis, Ian Keay, Taylor Jaworski, Ian McKay, Nathan Nunn, Kevin Milligan, Dominic Parker, Krishna Pendakur, and all seminar participants who contributed their comments to this work. Any errors or omissions are ours alone. 1 Introduction \But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again." (Crow Plenty-Coups quoted in Lindermann (1930, p. 169)) The changes of the late 19th century brought with them the near-extinction of the North American bison and, consequently, the elimination of a way of life for the Native Americans of the Great Plains, the Northwest, and the Rocky Mountains. Although Native Americans' dependence on the bison was not static or uniform across tribes, the bison had been a primary source of livelihood for over 10,000 years prior to its near-extinction (Frison, 1991; Gilmore, Tate, Tenant, Clark, McBride, and Wood, 1999; O'Shea and Meadows, 2009; Zede~no,Ballenger, and Murray, 2014). For many tribes, the bison was used in almost every facet of life, not only as a source of food, but also for clothing, blankets, lodging, and tools. This array of uses for the bison was facilitated by generations of specialized human capital, which was accumulated partly in response to the plentiful and reliable nature of the animal (Daschuk, Hackett, and MacNeil, 2006). Historical and anthropometric evidence suggests that these bison-dependent societies were once the richest in North America, with living standards comparable or better than their average European contemporaries (Carlos and Lewis, 2010; Prince and Steckel, 2003; Steckel, 2010; Steckel and Prince, 2001). When the bison were eliminated, however, the resource that underpinned these societies vanished in a historical blink of the eye. We argue that the destruction of the North American bison had substantial, persistent negative effects on the Native Americans who depended on them. These effects are visible both immediately after the bison's decline and up to 130 years later. In some regions, the bison was principally eliminated through a mass slaughter that occurred within a period of just over ten years. The slaughter was, at least in part, spurred by a drastic improvement in European tanning technology that allowed bison hides to be transformed into commercially viable leather, thereby increasing the demand for bison hides internationally (Taylor, 2011). However, in many regions of North America, the decline of the bison was a gradual process, beginning with the introduction of the horse and the arrival of European settlers. Our empirical strategy exploits regional variation in the speed at which the bison 1 disappeared as well as tribal variation in bison-dependence to determine the impact of the loss of the bison on the Native American societies that depended on them. We argue that the timing of the technological change and the speed at which it affected Native American tribes are exogenous to pre-existing differences in Indigenous populations and the timing and types of policies applied to them at the federal- and state-level. We establish the point-in-time impact of the elimination of the bison on Native American well-being using a number of historical sources. We generate measures of bison-dependence which we merge with data on the height, gender, and age of over 15,000 Native American peoples collected between 1889 and 1919 by physical anthropologist Franz Boas (Jantz, 1995).1 The structure of Boas' data allows us to employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to show that the height of men born in bison-dependent nations declined by 3cm after the bison were eliminated relative to men born in non-bison-dependent nations. By restricting the sample to include only those nations which depended on the bison, we find that nations which lost the bison most quickly suffered a 5cm decline in height relative to those that lost the bison slowly. This is the first empirical evidence for the hypothesis put forth by Steckel and Prince (2001) and Prince and Steckel (2003) that the people of the Great Plains derived their height advantage, at least in part, due to their access to the bison.2 While it is well established that income shocks have persistence at the individual or commu- nity level, we would expect these shocks to dissipate over time as individuals and communities adjust. However, the unique legal structures of reservations and the institutional restrictions placed on Native Americans during the 19th century may have limited Native Americans' ability to adjust to economic shocks in the long-run. In the case of another large, exogenous resource shock, the American Dust Bowl, Hornbeck (2012) suggests one major path of adjustment for those affected by the Dust Bowl was out-migration from the affected areas. For most Native Americans, this channel of adjustment was not available, as they did not have the right to 1Our primary measures of bison-dependence is constructed from overlaying maps of the historic bison range with traditional tribal territory maps to calculate the proportion of a nation's ancestral territory covered by the historic bison range.
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