The Western History Association Killing the Canadian Buffalo, 1821-1881 Author(s): William A. Dobak Source: Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 33-52 Published by: Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of The Western History Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/969920 Accessed: 02-07-2016 11:01 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/969920?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Western History Association, Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University, Oxford University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Western Historical Quarterly This content downloaded from 59.180.142.157 on Sat, 02 Jul 2016 11:01:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms KILLING THE CANADIAN BUFFALO, 1821-1881 WILLIAM A. DOBAK T HE FIGURE OF THE MOUNTED, buffalo-hunting Plains Indian has engaged the imagination of Euroamericans for more than two hun- dred years. Anthony Henday, on a trip west to drum up trade for the Hudson's Bay Company in 1754, found the Native people of eastern Alberta living among "[b]uffalo in great droves," and the HBC's Matthew Cocking used the same words a generation later, when he saw them some two hundred miles to the east, along the North Saskatchewan River. Although horses had arrived in the Northern Plains barely fifty years earlier, by 1794, Native peoples were "so advantageously situated that they could live very happily independent of our assistance," wrote the North West Com- pany trader Duncan McGillivray. They are surrounded with innumerable herds of various kinds of ani- mals, whose flesh affords them excellent nourishment and whose skins defend them from the inclemency of the weather, and they have in- vented so many methods for the destruction of animals, that they stand in no need of ammunition to provide a sufficiency for these purposes. Yet before 80 years had passed, the buffalo were gone from the Canadian Plains, and Native peoples were living on reserves. The trade in tanned buffalo robes was largely responsible-the Canadian historian Robert Beal has called it "the funda- mental factor"-but the decades-long provision trade, in which Native and metis hunters furnished pemmican for the Hudson's Bay Company's boatmen, also played a part, as production statistics suggest. What happened, to the people and to the WILLIAM A. DOBAK received his doctorate in American Studies from the University of Kansas. He now lives in Hyattsville, MD, where he does freelance historical work for hire. A grant from the Friends of Fort Union Trading Post, Williston, North Dakota, made possible much of the research for this article. Material from the Hudson's Bay Company Archives is housed at the Pro- vincial Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba; it is quoted by permission. Western Historical Quarterly 27 (Spring 1996): 33-52. Copyright ? 1996 Western His- tory Association. This content downloaded from 59.180.142.157 on Sat, 02 Jul 2016 11:01:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 34 SPRING 34 1996SPRING 1996 Western Historical Western Historical Quarterly Quarterly buffalo, has been described by Canadian writers, but is not generally familiar to American readers.1 The story of the extermination of the buffalo in the northern United States, on the other hand, is well-known. A few years after the Sioux War of 1876, commercial hide-hunters went to work. Since they were interested in the hides as leather, rather than as robes, they hunted year-round, even in summer when the buffalo's coat was thin and robe-hunters would have let the herds alone. In November 1881, the North- ern Pacific Railroad reached the Yellowstone River at Miles City, and direct shipment of hides became possible. "In 1882 the number of hides and robes bought and shipped was about two hundred thousand," a dealer in Minneapolis recalled, "and in 1883 forty thousand. In 1884 I shipped ... the only car load of robes that went East that year, and it was the last shipment ever made." William Horaday, of the Smithsonian Institution, assessed the damage in 1887: "Many think that the whole great body [of buffalo] went north into British territory, and that there is still a goodly remnant of it left in some remote region ... which will yet return to the United States. Nothing could be more illusory than this belief."2 Whether the destruction of the buffalo in the United States resulted from delib- erate government policy or from market forces alone, commercial hide-hunters did the final damage. More fundamental, though, is the question of whether Native peoples themselves "had established a society in ecological equilibrium, one whose population did not exceed the carrying capacity of its habitat and so maintained a healthy, functioning ecology that could be sustained over the long term." Concentrat- ing on the Southern Plains, Dan Flores has concluded that several factors militated against equilibrium, foremost among them being sheer human population pressure on the Plains, and from outside the region, the expanding capitalist market system and its demand for tanned buffalo robes, which were exchanged for European trade goods. 1 Lawrence J. Burpee, ed., "York Factory to the Blackfeet Country: The Journal of An- thony Hendry [sic], 1754-55," Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 1 (1907): 336; "An Ad- venturer from Hudson Bay: Journal of Matthew Cocking, from York Factory to the Blackfeet Country, 1772-73," in Transactions, ed. Burpee, 3d ser., vol. 2, sec. 2 (1908), 109; John S. Milloy, The Plains Cree: Trade, Diplomacy and War, 1790 to 1870 (Winnipeg, 1988), 29. The standard historical work, The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in its Wild State (Toronto, 1951 and 1970), was written by Canadian Frank G. Roe before the Hudson's Bay Com- pany opened its archives to scholars; the pages cited in this article are the same in both editions, and the author used both editions. A good brief overview of the last days of the buffalo in Canada is John E. Foster, "The Metis and the End of the Plains Buffalo in Alberta," in Buffalo, ed. John E. Foster, Dick Harrison, and I. S. MacLaren (Edmonton, 1992), 61-77. Robert F Beal, "The Buffalo Robe Trade," in "The Metis Hiverement Settlement at Buffalo Lake, 1872-1877," (unpublished report in author's possession) Robert F Beal, John E. Foster, and Louise Zuk, 82. (I use "metis" to refer to persons of mixed-blood, including members of both linquistic groups, and Metis to refer to Francophone mixed-bloods of Canada.) Beal also comments wryly on the way Canadian histori- ans moralize about the slaughter of buffalo in the United States and about American "whiskey traders" in the Canadian Plains. 2 William T. Horaday, "The Extermination of the American Bison," Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1887 (Washington, DC, 1889) pt. 2, 511, 513. This content downloaded from 59.180.142.157 on Sat, 02 Jul 2016 11:01:28 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms William A. Dobak 35 Native beliefs in a supernatural sanction for buffalo-hunting probably played a part as well.3 The Canadian Plains are a good proving ground for these findings. No year-round trade in raw buffalo hides, which depended on breech-loading rifles to kill the animals and railroads to ship the hides, developed there. The animals were gone years before the tracks of the Canadian Pacific arrived. In the absence of catastrophic grass fires or epidemic disease, one must conclude that the buffalo's disappearance was due to hu- man agency. What sort of pressure, exerted by how many people, sufficed to devastate the Canadian herds and to drive the survivors south of the 49th parallel, indeed, south of the Missouri River? How did the international market economy, in the form of the robe trade, affect the number of buffalo killed? What may have been the effect of the Indians' world view on their hunting practices? What, finally, does this suggest about the ecological balance in the North American grassland between human preda- tors and their prey?4 An attempt to explain how and why native groups were able to drive the buffalo out of Canada must begin with an estimate of the number of buffalo, derived from the approximate extent and carrying capacity of the range. Vegetation maps of the North- ern Plains show grassland extending from the aspen parkland along the North Saskatchewan River, southward across the drainage basin of the Yellowstone, with an approximately equal area of grass on either side of the international boundary. The predominant species are grama, needlegrass, and wheatgrass.5 The method Flores used to figure the nineteenth-century bison population of the Southern Plains was to take the number of domestic grazing animals listed in the 1910 U. S. Census and adjust it by means of a "grazing quotient," reflecting the varying range-use efficiency of different species. In 1910, the total number of cattle, horses, and mules in the six large counties of Montana, where the buffalo had ranged in the last third of the nineteenth century, was 527,468.