TEN BILLION TO ONE or BISON³ REDUX

3 days ago
40 min read

Updated: 3 hours ago

Back in 2019, while still in grad school, I wrote about bison. I noticed that the numbers and circumstances commonly offered relating to the historic abundance and eventual disappearance of this species, who at one time thrived across nearly the whole continent but were rapidly reduced to almost zero, made little sense.

If you’ve never come across it, the usual version of events deviates little from what is found on the US National Park Service website:

Bison herds in the western United States were so massive, they shook the ground and sounded like thunder in the distance. The American bison roamed most of North America and in the early 19th century, population estimates were between 30 million to 60 million. … By the late 1880s, the endless herds of bison were wiped out and just a few hundred individuals remained.

The cause of the population decline is commonly spelled out by authoritative sources who, just as you would hope and expect, have evaluated all the available historical evidence and the modern research based on that. As the story goes, just as found in this IUCN report from their American Bison Specialist Group, with dozens of expert contributors from across the continent, the cause of the bison decline is said to be multivariate, but:

Commercial hunting by Euroamericans and some Native North Americans for meat and hides was a primary cause (Hornaday 1889; Isenberg 2000). The American military quietly approved illicit market hunting on federally protected tribal lands in the northern and southern plains. Other factors included indiscriminate slaughter for sport and recreation. Sport hunting was exacerbated by the westward push of colonization from the east and across the prairies with the implicit and explicit approval of politicians and military leaders anxious to resolve the food supply side of the so-called “Indian problem.” (Danz 1997; Dary 1989; Hewitt 1919; Isenberg 2000; McHugh 1972.)

I had seen and heard this sort of thing a million times and had no reason to disagree with any part of the story. But also I had never really thought about the situation, the species we’re talking about, the logistics for such a massive project, and the circumstances on the ground. So I did that. This was just a thought experiment one afternoon while sitting in my dorm room and just using the numbers folks like offering.

I could think up all kinds of scenarios to get this terrible deed done or even to see it happen without human intervention but certainly not with the variables most commonly presented. It seemed to me that tens of millions of bison could not be killed in a few years as described or that, as most tellings report, only their skins were taken (or even that this was true most of the time, in tens of millions of instances.)

The most basic problem was that people appear desperate, for some reason, to frame this as an even bigger catastrophe than it so clearly was. To do so they favour very high numbers, like 60 million or more without considering any of what that entails. And if you have conversations about this or seek out YouTube videos or podcasts from experts or merely sources informed on the matter you’ll discover it is not hard for someone to offer a population estimate for bison twice that or more of what could ever be justified and presented for peer-review. And there is no shortage of publications and institutions glad to share these offerings as fact to the wider world.

For example, celebrated scholar Wade Davis recently had published in The Narwal and in The Tyee, really anywhere that would take him, an essay he penned as a contribution to a new book (offered by UBC’s Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies) telling readers that “over 100 million bison were slaughtered.” A recent art installation for Toronto’s Luminato Festival by Anishinaabe artist Jay Soule, titled “Built on Genocide”, presented a pile of bison skulls and explained to visitors, reproduced for the press, that “They say at the time of European contact, there was anywhere from 60 to 100 million bison that roamed North America...” Texas Parks and Wildlife tells us “By the late 1800s, vast herds of 100 million bison and 40 million pronghorn antelope pounding across the American plains had vanished.” This inflated idea can be found everywhere and in every form, not arriving a century ago as rumours in overseas tabloids but at present from leading sources on the continent.

And if they pair their peak historic population numbers with any other information, which is rare, they will suggest that the terrible slaughter that took place in the early 1870s saw annual kills of up to one or perhaps as many as two million. There are no higher figures based on any evidence. Noticing this, I reasoned that, at the very least, those largest numbers for annual hunts (which seemed like weak guesses based on an absence of information) probably would not have come close to the number of new calves born each year by such a huge population of just 60 million, or even half that number. And I proposed that any annual cull taking a single or low double digit percentage (especially with a diverse scattering of many herds spread across the whole continent) very much would not in itself threaten the species with endangerment, never mind bringing bison to near-extinction. That made the whole narrative messy and feel like the common version of events was pretty unlikely. But that was just the start.

Historic bison range

Beyond the basic population and harvest/extermination numbers, I also didn’t like the obvious problem of there being so many millions of animals spread across the bulk of North America, from Alaska to Florida and most places in between, and so few humans with no way to easily penetrate remote areas (which was most of the continent back in the mid and late 1800s). Accompanying that, and critical here, is what this maximal bison population disbursal tells us about these organisms. Any animal known to thrive in the dry scrubland and rugged mountains of Northern Mexico and Southern Texas (think Big Bend National Park) and in the humid Gulf states, but also in the continent’s grasslands through to the transition zones between northern Boreal wetlands and Arctic tundra of Northern Canada and Alaska (check out Wood Bison National Park or the Innoko or Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuges) is not a fragile animal clinging to a narrow and easily disrupted niche common of so many threatened or endangered species. As modern recovery efforts have shown, bison can make a go of it almost anywhere they find themselves and almost anywhere you try to stick ‘em — from Catalina Island to the Grand Canyon to Banff National Park and the floodplains of Western Alaska.

Similarly, no one wished to explain how, once tracked down, folks were getting at those millions of bison renowned for their keen sense of hearing and smell (while being swift and agile, able to hit 35mph and leap high fences, while also being capable swimmers.) The bulk of the continent remained open terrain during this time, not crisscrossed by train tracks or highways, or impeded by massive culverts or dams, or vast stretches of fencing. In fact, barbed wire was not invented, mass produced, or deployed before the bison hunt was effectively over. Major ranching areas, such as the Texas Panhandle, didn’t see large enclosures until the mid 1880s — which actually caused tremendous push-back from open-range herders, hunters, and lovers of wildlife and resulted in the "Fence-Cutting Wars"…

Given that bison were free to roam and flee across an unbroken land of many millions of square kilometres, how was an army or just an individual riding up to a million skittish bison on horseback and blasting away at them with extraordinarily loud, highly visual rounds (not with modern smokeless ammunition but with a flash and plume of smoke billowing with every shot), and slow-firing rifles without causing a stampede? How would someone pull off shooting dozens, hundreds, or thousands of bison from hiding even from the maximum range of a historic rifle (whose rounds had to be lobbed in a rainbow arch at any distance)? And all this had to happen without sending up a fury alarm of all the fauna for miles around (bobcats and coyotes, deer and pronghorn, grouse, turkeys, and hawks, squirrels, jackrabbits, prairie-dogs, porcupines, and more). It didn’t seem to me like you could. But I’m no hunter.

Of course, no one volunteered where the, what, three, five, or twenty-five million rounds of .50 caliber rifle ammunition came from for just one hunting season, who paid for that, or how it was moved and stored. (I found accounts from the 19th century talking about one or two shots per kill being possible but also folks having to put almost ten or even twenty rifle rounds into a large bison before it was dead.) Even if all of these bullets were just surplus from the war and the federal government was covering the cost, all of it still had to get from the factories and arsenals out East to the remotest parts of the Old West. And those would have been packaged and moved in bulky wooden crates (and likely disbursed for safety.) As far as I could tell, all of that was not a few boxes of bullets but something like hundreds of metric tons-worth, maybe 400 tons or more, making this event closer to the scale of a war than a large hunting trip. Again this is one hunting season. There were at least three such seasons and some smaller ones, too. Now you’re at 1,200-1,500 tons or something. At minimum that tonnage had to be moved and stored somewhere (last time I checked lead and black powder doesn’t grow in the grasslands of Kansas or South Dakota) and you can expect good accounting of that not a total mystery. This, and we’re still not yet talking about each hunter needing a team of men, horses, a wagon or two, camping gear, and supplies for the season… All of that seemed like a real problem and yet that was just what I thought of as the input side of things, just the hunting bit, but all of it was still being treated like irrelevant externalities.

I also wanted to know how all of these valuable resources, the meat and bones, were just left behind, as the story so commonly insists, when so much of the US population, and certainly those in remote parts west of the Mississippi River and doing this work, was living a subsistence lifestyle or in abject poverty. The idea is absurd on its face, especially when you acknowledge those folks were already committing the time, labour, and resources to finding and killing these animals and then also sitting down for forty minutes or more with a knife to strip a hide.

For a real sense of who and where we’re talking about go check out the amazing photos from Solomon Butcher. He was working throughout bison territory, in places like rural Nebraska (though his images are from the late 1880s onward, long after the bison hunt). These are the people who we’re (not) told just left mountains of valuable resources behind.

Images from Solomon gallery found at Nebraska State Historical Society

Consider it for only a moment. Pretend just a fraction of the suggested total bison were shot and killed, just ten million bison, say; and then imagine you’re only talking about a thousand pounds of resources per adult bison (males can reach twice that weight). If you could hardly fetch any price for any of that you’re still talking on the order of ten billion (with a ‘B’) pounds of meat and bone. Even if you spread most of that killing over five to ten years you’re talking at least a billion pounds of bison a year. But people will tell you the kill was five or even ten times that size, conducted in half the time, AND that all those resources were not worth anyone’s time and just left to rot. Go look at Butcher’s photos. Look those people in the eyes and tell me they were uninterested in a billion pounds or maybe fifty billion pounds of raw goods (that they, like Native Americans, could make into everything from soap and cosmetics to lubricants, needles and awls to pouches and containers, straps, belts, shoes and other clothing, to cups, ladles, jewelry, and more… or just collect to feed their dogs and pigs…)

Much weirder still, folks talking about the extermination also like to help visualize the horror by showing images of tremendous piles of bison bones, not scattered as they fell on the open range but gathered in a pile along the train tracks or in a factory lot… make it make sense!

"...taking only their hides."

That none of this was addressed only made all of it seem more like a steaming pile of nonsense. Just to attempt to consider the task of putting bullets in all, most, or merely many of America’s 30 or 60 million bison, I contrasted the bison cull with the US Civil War. That seemed fair as both took place in a similar period with similar timing, locations, resources, technology, and people. But it was the differences that were so critical.

The Civil War lasted from the Spring of 1861 to the Spring of 1865. The war involved millions of men, perhaps 3.5 million, a number that would have amounted to about 10% of the total US population at that time. The most commonly agreed number of deaths is said to be around 620,000. To get there it is estimated troops on both sides fired a combined 1.5 million artillery rounds and something on the order of a billion small arms rounds at one another. They employed revolvers, rifles and muskets, early machine guns, grenades, dynamite, land and sea mines, other improvised explosives and booby traps, cannons, artillery, bayonets, swords, and knives, gunships, and every other tool you can think of.

The peak of the bison hunt, with by far the bulk of the kills, took place in the three years from 1872 through ‘74. Really the only weapon used to kill bison were high-caliber, slow-firing rifles. And it is said that the “total railroad shipments to the East between 1872 and 1874 were estimated at 1,378,359 hides.” This figure was less than the total estimate for bison killed in these years. A real total would include the commercial pursuit of hides and subsistence harvesting by locals, making up the “primary cause” of the decline, but also sport hunting and wanton killing, too, which were significant. All of this activity together has been estimated again and again and the highest numbers proposed bring the total number of dead bison up to ~3.7 million over the peak of the hunt, or in the vicinity of 1.2 million per year for three years.

It seemed to me like the commitment of people and resources as well as the urgency of the war vastly exceeded that of the bison hunt. It had to have. And yet the argument appears to be that the death visited upon the bison was many times that of the whole-nation Civil War effort — but against animals who were not armed with rifles or squared up against and charging at those hunting them and without the hunters deploying any of the men, weapons, or munitions. Even just one hunting season in Montana and Kansas alone is said to have produced more than two times as many kills as the whole four-year-long Civil War! Needless to say, I was skeptical.

BUT THAT WAS THEN

I’ve done a lot more reading about bison and this period since 2019. The most interesting has been delving into all the historical texts commonly cited in this research as well as a pile of newspaper clippings from the time. I also listened to some podcasts and read more about North America’s fur trade, the realities of actual bison hunting, as well as what it takes to process a bison hide. All of it, with many more apparent contradictions, only makes the popular story surrounding the disappearance of the bison even more confounding.

ORIGINAL POPULATION ESTIMATES

Perhaps the most important written record of the bison comes from 1889, in The Extermination of the American Bison by Dr William Hornaday. This author, hunter, zoologist, and primary researcher of bison for the Smithsonian Institute, tells us early on in his book that “Of all the quadrupeds that have lived upon the earth, probably no other species has ever marshaled such innumerable hosts as those of the American bison. It would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes living at any given time during the history of the species previous to 1870.” He also explains of their numbers and range how, though the early pioneers thought buffalo were abundant in the Atlantic and midwestern states “the herds which lived east of the Mississippi were comparatively only mere stragglers from the innumerable mass which covered the great western pasture region from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Rio Grande to Great Slave Lake.” Exactly!

Hornaday collected stories offering specific details about bison encounters. One such story comes from a Colonel Dodge, found in his own work The Plains of the Great West. There we are told of an unbroken mass of animals stretching twenty-five miles wide and fifty miles deep, as well as their predisposition toward freight and stampeding. Dodge writes:

In May, 1871, I drove in a light wagon from Old Fort Zara to Fort Larned, on the Arkansas [along the Santa Fe Trail in central Kansas], 34 miles. At least 25 miles of this distance was through one immense herd, composed of countless smaller herds of buffalo then on their journey north. The road ran along the broad level ‘bottom,’ or valley, of the river.

The whole country appeared one great mass of buffalo, moving slowly to the northward; and it was only when actually among them that it could be ascertained that the apparently solid mass was an agglomeration of innumerable small herds, of from fifty to two hundred animals, separated from the surrounding herds by greater or less space, but still separated. The herds in the valley sullenly got out of my way, and, turning, stared stupidly at me, sometimes at only a few yards’ distance. When I had reached a point where the hills were no longer more than a mile from the road, the buffalo on the hills, seeing an unusual object in their rear, turned, stared an instant, then started at full speed directly towards me, stampeding and bringing with them the numberless herds through which they passed, and pouring down upon me all the herds, no longer separated, but one immense compact mass of plunging animals, mad with fright, and as irresistible as an avalanche.

The situation was by no means pleasant. Reining up my horse (which was fortunately a quiet old beast that had been in at the death of many a buffalo, so that their wildest, maddest rush only caused him to cock his ears in wonder at their unnecessary excitement), I waited until the front of the mass was within 50 yards, when a few well-directed shots from my rifle split the herd, and sent it pouring off in two streams to my right and left. When all had passed me they stopped, apparently perfectly satisfied, though thousands were yet within reach of my rifle and many within less than 100 yards. Disdaining to fire again, I sent my servant to cut out the tongues of the fallen. This occurred so frequently within the next 10 miles, that when I arrived at Fort Larned I had twenty-six tongues in my wagon, representing the greatest number of buffalo that my conscience can reproach me for having murdered on any single day. I was not hunting, wanted no meat, and would not voluntarily have fired at these herds. I killed only in self-preservation and fired almost every shot from the wagon.

Hornaday also tells of Dodge’s guess for the number of animals he witnessed. The estimate came in a private correspondence almost two decades after the events described, in 1887, where Dodge felt somewhere in the range of at least five hundred thousand was a reasonable guess. Hornaday tells us he rejected the figure, however, preferring his own estimates. He explains that if they were actually as described this single group would have numbered more than four million. Hornaday proposes, too, that he would guess his assessment is “more likely to be below the truth than above it.”

Other population estimates come from accounts telling of a General Sheridan who “was under the impression that the western army could significantly reduce the buffalo herds, thereby demoralizing the plains tribes.” To evaluate the feasibility of that terrible task, it is said that in March of 1869 Sheridan had the men under him go away and return with a reliable estimate just for the animals in one southern herd between Fort Supply, Oklahoma and Fort Dodge, Kansas — a known herd said to stretch more than 100 miles wide. Their first serious estimate came back at 10 billion bison. (Yes, you read that right.) Apparently the general scoffed at the astronomical figure at its face and demanded a revision. They returned with an estimate of just one billion, a number later revised down to something slightly more plausible but still truly astronomical “more than one hundred million.” In David Smits’ The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865-1883, we’re told that it was due to Sheridan’s belief in this figure, at least one hundred million bison in this one herd alone, that “Sheridan was forced to abandon all hope of using his tiny army to wipe out the animals.” How does this account fit with any part of anyone’s version of events? Half the US bison population alone was 100 million animals and from the outset the military deemed the task of killing them unachievable?...

BETTER POPULATION AND HUNT ESTIMATES

To put together a more sophisticated evaluation, the zoologist, Hornaday, investigated the numbers of bison hides shipped by railways, known to keep pretty good records and also understood to be the primary mode of transport of these goods from the interior. From the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad (which only stretched across Kansas and into Colorado at this time), he noted precise figures from the height of the commercial bison hide hunt and extermination period, 1872-74. The company reported moving hides numbering:

165,721 in 1872
251,443 in 1873
42,289 in 1874

But this was just one railroad. With no records for the Union Pacific Railroad (the first US transcontinental railroad, at this time stretching just from Nebraska to Wyoming and into Utah) or the Kansas Pacific Railroad (a more southern route to the Santa Fe, going from Kansas to Colorado), Hornaday just tripled the number to arrive at a total of 1.378 million hides. He also considered there was likely a significant difference between the hides shipped and the actual numbers of animals killed. As such he presumed the total kills were closer to 3.1 million for the period between ‘72 and ‘74. Hornaday also made the effort to estimate how many bison were killed annually by locals, both Indigenous and new settlers moving out West, for subsistence as well as for the sale of their hides. His total for all the animals killed over three years on the southern plains came in at around 3.7 million.

Elsewhere Hornaday estimates that by 1880 there were still more than a million bison residing down south and at least a million in the north of the country, citing reports of “over 500,000” animals near Miles City, Montana. He describes the Northern Pacific Railway facilitating the northern hunt and tells of “75,000 dry/untanned hides” going down the Missouri River in 1881 for export from Bismarck, North Dakota. The zoologist suggests the northern hunt peaked with what he considers heavy shipments of hides, 100,000 in both 1881 and ‘82, and also tells us the bulk of the hunt was over in 1883.

Not until the 20th century did anyone consider what the carrying capacity of the land might be, how many animals might reasonably live there given the natural productivity of the forage within the territory bison were known to roam. In 1910 and again in 1929 a census of all the livestock on America’s plains were attempted. The math was spelled out at that time by Ernest Thompson Seton (British-born, Canadian-American author, wildlife artist, and pioneer of the Boy Scouts.) In the third volume of Seton’s acclaimed work The Lives of Game Animals, in a section on bison, the author offers that there were roughly 24 million cows and horses and six million sheep surviving on just half the historical range of America’s plains bison. This generous estimate provided for a total historic population of roughly 45-65 million; but also with Seton’s strong suggestion that the figure was likely not less than 60 million and maybe could have even reached 75 million.

Over the century that followed Seton’s work his guess remained effectively unchallenged and the general consensus today remains between 30 and 60 million — given our current understanding of biology, serious people are unable to justify numbers as high as 75 or 100 million. Still, missing entirely from these estimates, and severely impacting their accuracy and validity for a total population figure, is, of course, any data on the historic bison range north of the 49th parallel. This omission is a curious one as it can only result in a serious underestimation of any possible total bison population across their known range, a landscape with no meaningful barriers other than the Rocky Mountains and Great Lakes. If Idaho, Wyoming, and South Dakota comprise suitable range for tremendous numbers of plains bison then so too was an area the size of five or ten midwestern states making up only territory ideal for bison within the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and northern British Columbia. This still says nothing of a land mass as big again from central Manitoba, across the vast swathe of Boreal forest, ideal wood bison territory, and throughout Alaska where both plains and wood bison are said to have roamed (and currently reside on private land and in local and national parks and wildlife refuges.) But if you want to consider the higher range (or, like Wade Davis and friends, double the number) you still have to contend with what that would mean.

UNSUSTAINABLE YIELD?

There’s an episode of the podcast Canadian History Ehx on this topic, under the title The Decline of the Bison. The podcast’s website offers an essay to accompany the episode explaining how, “Reverend John McDougall stated that he estimated herds were half a million when he saw them in Manitoba in 1873. In 1875, a police officer travelling from Fort MacLeod to Fort Qu’Appelle [more than 700km across most of Alberta and Saskatchewan] claimed he was never out of sight of the herds. But by 1880, they were gone.” With this we’re also told that, “The sheer amount of export of bison products was staggering. In 1873, 50,000 buffalo robes were shipped out of Canada alone. From this point, as herds began to get smaller, 30,000 robes were shipped out in 1877, 12,797 in 1878 and 5,764 in 1879.”

Okay, let’s go with that. A “sustainable yield” refers to the harvest rate permissible to safely maintain a population of any species, cedar on your tree farm or trout in the river. For large herbivores like elk, moose, caribou, or bison, who produce around one calf per year and whose numbers are near the carrying capacity of the land, the annual sustainable yield is typically understood to be between 10% and 20% of the total. Of course it differs a bit by species and particular population due to their different birth rates, with the quality of the habitat in a given area, and with shifting circumstances such as severe weather events or outbreaks of illness, obviously. However, having bounced back to roughly 400,000 animals in North America today, according to America’s National Bison Association, these creatures are now sustainably harvested at around 20% per year, with 80,000 on record being killed in 2023.

So if, as above, there were just 500,000 bison in all of Canada in 1873, not in just one herd or one province but everywhere, and 50,000 were killed for their hides, this would not be a staggering number of animals killed but something like the lowest, most conservative end of what we would consider a sustainable yield. Even taking 100,000 a year, 20%, for several years would only be at the high end of a “sustainable harvest” for this species and something unlikely to cause them to disappear from view, never mind go extinct. What am I missing?

Zooming out from the Canadian Prairies, if the North American total was in the 60 million range this species would have seen an annual birth rate of approximately 12-15 million calves. And if the largest number of bison killed in a year is estimated at 1.2 million then not even close to 3% of the total population was killed. And that highest rate of kills was only sustained for about three years. A couple other years saw numbers about half that rate but most annual estimates were nowhere near this number and maybe at or below 100,000. You can find publications, such as the Chicago Daily Tribune, telling of the total annual bison hunt in the early 1870s bringing in skins “to the number of more than 100,000 per annum.” That’s 0.16% of 60 million or 0.33% of 30 million, not 33%. The Pittsburgh Commercial claimed “A quarter of a million bisons are annually destroyed on the plains.” So, 0.4% or 0.8%, and nowhere even near just 4%. The overwhelming majority of accounts from this period talk in numbers like this, in the low hundreds of thousands not in the millions per season during the worst of the mass slaughter. And in modern times one anywhere can point to anything that suggests an annual kill count reached just 6% of the current favoured population estimates, never mind going beyond a sustainable harvest and hitting 25% or 35% even in a single year. And, of course, if your preference is for 100 million you have to explain how humans shot in excess of 15-20 million bison per annum, not ignore or wave away all of reality.

And, coming from a communication background, it’s difficult to avoid mentioning that newspapers of the time, particularly in the US, were known to use sensational violence and scandal, wildly misleading headlines, fake interviews, and ludicrous illustrations to sell papers (not unlike today). This phenomenon, what became known as ‘yellow journalism’, the original ‘fake news’, was the norm and even became newspaper policy, actively pushed by publication owners like Hearst and Pulitzer, in the last decades of the 19th century.

Pretend all the population estimates are way off and there were only ever at most 20 million bison on the continent. If you more than double the highest annual kill counts, going all the way to 2.5 million, you’ve only reached a low-end of a sustainable yield at 12.5%. If the population was this low and even if disease and/or drought and unusually severe coldsnaps hit several regions of the continent and multiple herds year after year, or several populations inexplicably stopped reproducing entirely, with harvest numbers as low as suggested I don’t see how the result would be the species being wiped clean from the entire continent. But, of course, no one ever talks of a decade of particularly harsh winters or grass refusing to grow. And, with such intimate proximity (an unending sea of bison between towns from Texas and Oklahoma to Alberta and Saskatchewan), no one reports thousands of sickly animals or their cattle herds picking up strange illnesses as bison herds pass through. This is exactly the kind of thing folks would notice and the kinds of rumours that would end up in the local paper, other historical accounts, and modern research.

So, for real, where’s the narrative explaining what happened to the other 18, 26, 54, or 95 million bison? Given their numbers and distribution, even if they were abducted by aliens that still would have taken some time and effort as yet unaccounted for.

WHO DUNNIT? AND HOW?

Probably the most confusing thing I found was that the modern accounting of the bison hunt suggests very few men actually took on the task of shooting bison. To this point I imagined many thousands of men, effectively a vast army. However, the concerted side of this effort wasn’t just fewer numbers than those involved in the US Civil War but most histories tell of merely “2,000 active hide-hunters” (or, to contrast with the 10% who fought in the war, just 0.005% of the population). Paired with that, most estimates from the time suggest that those fellows all together averaged “5,000 bison per day” or 2.5 bison per man per day at the height of the hunt. At the same time, in 1874, the Decatur Daily Republican noted that hunters “with their Texan reinforcement – two hundred guns in all – will be able to slaughter an average of 500 buffaloes per day.” That same year, in the February 1st edition of the Daily Nebraska State Journal, they corroborate that “There is no law for the protection of the buffalo. The consequence is that these animals are being slaughtered at such a wholesale rate as will insure their total destruction within a very few years. … That a terrible warfare is being waged against these poor brutes is certain from the fact that one firm on the [Union Pacific] railroad has been shipping their hides at a rate of 500 a day.”

In 1887, a General Stewart Van Vliet, informed the Smithsonian Institution that he had personally killed “hundreds” during his time in bison country. This is presented as a large number but he’s talking about hundreds of kills over the 20 year period following the end of the Civil War that he, a member of the military, spent in bison country. He is said to be exactly the sort of person focussed on a superhuman campaign to “exterminate” these animals. Yet he doesn’t report thousands or hundreds of kills per year but maybe on the order of 10-20 (maybe as few as 1-2 per month) — so General Van Vliet’s lifetime bison cull count would be a fraction of what others (dubiously) claim a hide-seeker would take in one weekend.

The highest harvest rates tend to claim men were capable of killing 15 bison a day and that “at that rate, hunters were killing thirty thousand buffalo per day in one small region.” That said, you can occasionally find people offering far larger numbers. The Smithsonian zoologist, Hornaday, gives us an assessment of the most aggressive shooting to have ever taken place. He tells of the three largest and quickest “bests” he came across. Mr Andrews is said to have shot 115 rounds and killed 63 animals in under an hour. Another fellow, Mr McNaney, tells of hearing of another man shooting 91 bison in one afternoon while Colonel Dodge describes having counted 112 downed bison. And it is pretty common for folks describing the slaughter today to repeat these largest numbers. For instance, a volunteer from the Wyoming State Museum discussing the hunt insists “hunters would kill up to 100 a day.”

Are these plausible accounts or at very high risk of being exaggerated for dramatic storytelling effect and/or self-aggrandizement? (“Nah, hunters have never been known for such things. How dare you!”) I can find historical accounts and modern ones, of hunters and gun enthusiasts deploying old rifles and remakes, describing a typical weapon of the time needing to be cleaned out after just a handful of shots; of only a few rounds resulting in a barrel overheating and needing to be plunged into water or snow; and of the larger, denser rounds needed to kill a bison with one round, certainly at a hundred rounds an hour, slowly damaging a barrel’s rifling and impacting its accuracy.

Regardless, wouldn’t extreme cases of the sort described above represent the maximum destructive potential and maximum efficiency of a hunter on the best outing of their life? Effectively every other person and every other outing, even from these same folks, would surely see a far lower number of kills and of more shots, two or ten, per kill? Certainly. In fact, I just watched a podcast on bison recovery in Alaska. A biologist from the restoration project told a story about local hunter mistaking one of their protected bison for a bear and, shooting from hundreds of yards similar to that described in historic bison hunts but with a new weapon and modern ammunition, taking 10 rounds to finally kill the animal. I assume the hunter wasn’t using bird shot or blanks on what he thought was a bear and that the animal didn’t die of freight.

One article I found offered that this wholesale killing was so severe that by the end of the peak, after just two serious hunting seasons, that there were "no buffaloes to be seen on the plains except dead ones." In the Fall of 1873, the aforementioned Colonel Dodge described the situation with the southern herd in Kansas, saying “Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.” Not in 1880 or 1900 but in January of 1874 the Nashville Union ran an article explaining the situation similarly, offering specific numbers for a high kill count (and thus more details posing still more problems):

Mr. Lessing estimates that there are at least two thousand hunters in camp along there waiting for buffalo. He came across one party of sixteen, who stated that they killed twenty-eight thousand buffaloes during the past summer, the hides of which only were utilized. If sixteen hunters can kill this many animals, how great must be the slaughter upon the broad extent of the bison range? Evidently millions of the animals must have been killed during the past summer alone. Mr. Lessing says there are no buffaloes to be seen on the plains except dead ones, and that hunt as much as they may, the sportsmen cannot at present find any game. The value of the hides has deteriorated considerably, owing to a great increase of the article in the market. Heretofore they were worth $3 delivered at the railway stations, while now a distinction is made as to the size, and paid for accordingly, the prices ranging from 4¢ to $1.00 per hide.

Though the above account mentions the Summer, most tellings of the bison hunt talk about the season lasting up to five months, typically mid-October to mid-February. I’m told this was because at this time the hide was of the highest quality and yielded the best price for the hunters. As far as I can tell then, by this account of 28,000 killed, this one small team (not even 1% of the 2,000-man bison-killing army) had to see each man shoot 1,750 bison for the season or 11 to 12 per day, every day.

As ever, unexplained is how 16 men fired, what, 200-400 rounds per day — even at a great distance and even if they coordinated their explosive fire to ring out at less than one shot a minute — into a herd of bison without spooking so many animals. Could you approach a herd of wild bison on horseback? Could a dozen or more do so together or even far apart? If you found a herd by foot or by horse, if you have a rifle, 100 rounds of ammunition, and below you, at 300 yards, was 20,000 or maybe 200,000 bison, how could you only hit two of them over 24hrs as in some accounts? And if you dropped 10 (or 100) how does all that gunfire and all the collapsing bulls and cows not scatter the herd? And then how does none of the requisite infiltration, skinning, and exfiltration fail to arouse any interest or panic, either? Could you do that even with pacified, domesticated cattle? And then how do you even move ten bison hides without a horse or wagon and all the disturbance inherent in that? (I have questions!) Well, there were some authoritative sources from around this time who spelled some of this out.

Dr Hornaday describes, in his 1889 book, what he says “may fairly be taken as a typical illustration of the life and work of the still-hunter at its best.” Though providing many specifics, it, as ever, poses only more problems as I see it. Hornaday tells us about a Mr McNaney who worked as a hunter around this critical period:

Although at that time only seventeen years of age, [McNaney] took an elder brother as a partner, and purchased an outfit in Miles City, of which the following were the principal items:

Two wagons, 2 four-horse teams, 2 saddle-horses, 2 wall-tents, 1 cook-stove with pipe, 1 40-90 Sharp’s rifle (breech-loading), 1 45-70 Sharps rifle (breech-loading), 1 45-120 Sharps rifle (breech-loading), 50 pounds gunpowder, 550 pounds lead, 4,500 primers, 600 brass shells, 4 sheets patch-paper, 60 Wilson skinning knives, 3 butcher’s steels, 1 portable grindstone, flour, bacon, baking-powder, coffee, sugar, molasses, dried apples, canned vegetables, beans, etc., in quantity.

The entire cost of the outfit was about $1,400. Two men were hired for the season at $50 per month, and the party started from Miles City on November 10, which was considered a very late start. The usual time of setting out for the range was about October 1.

The outfit went by rail northeastward to Terry, and from thence across country south and east about 100 miles, around the head of O’Fallon Creek to the head of Beaver Creek, a tributary of the Little Missouri. A good range was selected, without encroachment upon the domains of the hunters already in the field, and the camp was made near the bank of the creek, close to a supply of wood and water, and screened from distant observation by a circle of hills and ridges. The two rectangular wall-tents were set up end to end, with the cook-stove in the middle, where the ends came together. In one tent the cooking and eating was done, and the other contained the beds.

It was planned that the various members of the party should cook turn about, a week at a time, but one of them soon developed such a rare and conspicuous talent for bread-making and general cookery that he was elected by acclamation to cook during the entire season. To the other three members fell the hunting. Each man hunted separately from the others, and skinned all the animals that his rifle brought down.

There were buffalo on the range when the hunters arrived, and the killing began at once. At daylight the still-hunter sallied forth on foot, carrying in his hand his huge Sharps rifle, weighing from 16 to 19 pounds, with from seventy-five to one hundred loaded cartridges in his two belts or his pockets. At his side, depending from his belt, hung his “hunter’s companion,” a flat leather scabbard, containing a ripping knife, a skinning knife, and a butcher’s steel upon which to sharpen them. The total weight carried was very considerable, seldom less than 36 pounds, and often more.

Inasmuch as it was highly important to move camp as seldom as possible in the course of a season’s work, the hunter exercised the greatest precaution in killing his game, and had ever before his mind the necessity of doing his killing without frightening away the survivors.

With ten thousand buffaloes on their range, it was considered the height of good luck to find a “bunch” of fifty head in a secluded “draw” or hollow, where it was possible to “make a kill” without disturbing the big herd.

The still-hunter usually went on foot, for when buffaloes became so scarce as to make it necessary for him to ride his occupation was practically gone. At the time I speak of, the hunter seldom had to walk more than 3 miles from camp to find buffalo, in case there were any at all on his range, and it was usually an advantage to be without a horse. From the top of a ridge or high butte the country was carefully scanned, and if several small herds were in sight the one easiest to approach was selected as the one to attack. It was far better to find a herd lying down or quietly grazing, or sheltering from a cold wind, than to find it traveling, for while a hard run of a mile or two often enabled the hunter to “head off” a moving herd and kill a certain number of animals out of it, the net results were never half so satisfactory as with herds absolutely at rest.

Having decided upon an attack, the hunter gets to leeward of his game, and approaches it according to the nature of the ground. If it is in a hollow, he secures a position at the top of the nearest ridge, as close as he can get. If it is in a level “flat,” he looks for a gully up which he can skulk until within good rifle-shot. If there is no gully, he may be obliged to crawl half a mile on his hands and knees, often through snow or amongst beds of prickly pear, taking advantage of even such scanty cover as sage-brush affords. Some Montana still-hunters adopted the method of drawing a gunny-sack over the entire upper half of the body, with holes cut for the eyes and arms, which simple but unpicturesque arrangement often enabled the hunter to approach his game much more easily and more closely than would otherwise have been possible.

So, as suspected, the train didn’t get them anywhere near their hunting ground. They had to travel another 100 miles. Once in the territory of a herd it was normal to travel several miles by foot, not on horseback, to get within rifle’s reach of the animals. Why? Because they were easily spooked. Obviously. And, to further avoid spooking the herd, one tended use camouflage and/or to sneak up on the animals by crawling on their belly in the dirt, mud, and frost for half a mile or more just to get within the 250-500 yard range afforded by a high-caliber rifle — so as to not spook these skitterish animals.

Just think about this. For scale, if your walk was, as above, just three miles (almost 5km) that would be from Victoria’s Legislature to Swan Lake, Mount Tolmie, or the Victoria Golf Club in Oak Bay. If you’re quick, that’s two hours walking the sidewalk. Once at Mount Tolmie, say, you’re on your belly crawling all the way to UVic — maybe another hour or even two, half an hour if you’re impatient, risk spooking the beasts, and merely crouch low, walking in a squat for the first half and only on your belly the last half of the way. Three to four hours in, now at UVic, within range, now you have to shoot a bison or two (or 15 or 86). But that’s not really even half the battle.

The common narrative fails to delve into the necessity of skinning, moving, stretching, and drying a million bison hides or just 150. As in the story from Hornaday, this work is commonly being done by teenagers who are giving it a go one season or maybe three (just as you find in similar seasonal labour today, like treeplanting or fruit picking) not teams of professionals for whom this is all they have ever done. And the facts of the matter are clear. A small bison would be well over 800lbs and a big one up to 2,800lbs. The hide on such an animal would be larger than the comforter on your bed and would weigh around 150lbs raw (commonly referred to as “green”, which makes me want to *barf*), prior to being fully dried and thinned. The traditional method of tanning, and even that still being used in the late 1800s, certainly that out in the field, was described as back-breaking and requiring between one and two weeks of labour per robe, a multi-stage project of “20 to 56 hours of direct, strenuous effort.” If these hunters did the minimum and just skinned the bison they shot (not thinning and fully tanning them) and only stretched and dried the hide then the task still remained considerable.

Just actually think about doing this yourself. With a razor sharp knife and some expertise, you were looking at up to an hour of labor per hide. So, just to skin, if you worked 12 hour days then 25 bison would take two days of sustained labour and 100 would see you working non-stop and the job completed only on day nine. And that’s before you faced the labour of moving those hides back to camp. If you don’t crawl, it’s a two hour walk with, what, 300-400lbs (or 4,000lbs or, by some accounts, 20,000lbs [which is nine metric tons!]) of bloody bison on your back. Or maybe you made 10 or 50 such trips. Do these crazy numbers explain why it is often said hunters took on average just two animals in a day and why 15 or 100 seems so very unlikely and more like boastful bluster or newspaper nonsense? But, actually, is any of this realistic? Consider it. The typical narrative requires (or, more commonly, entirely neglects) huge commitments of time: 3-4 hours of walking, plus many hours of skinning, along with huge numbers of daily kills. How does that add up? If you shoot 25 or 100 bison on day one, and take a few days or a week to skin those animals, you would have to kill 1,000 on your next day of hunting just to reach the requisite figures folks demand hunters were taking for the season. If you had a crack team of skinning ninjas who can do it in a fraction of the time, on man per bison, and just half an hour per hide you are certainly scattering every animal for ten miles around and any lingering bison, who you then have to find the following day… You can’t have it all. The math here is a serious problem and we’ve only talked about the hunting and only part of the processing. Also unexplained is just the very next step.

How do you deal with 190 bison hides per day (in the moderate case from the newspaper, of 16 men each shooting just 12 bison daily) and, again, doing so without spooking the herd. I found that at around 50-100sq/ft each, it took something like 20 pegs to stretch a single hide and each required 5-10 days to dry with daily flipping — if you wanted to get the most money possible for your efforts. You’re talking about a serious operation just on day one. By day ten, before the first batch is stretched, dried, and stacked, you’ve felled trees for, what, 30,000-40,000 pegs? (I don’t know if you’ve been to North Dakota, bison country, but it’s not British Columbia. I can report that there are about three-and-a-half trees in the whole damn state.) And with that you would have bison hides covering every inch of something like four or five acres of land. There are no free lunches: building frames to drape or hang them and thereby taking up half the space only requires much more wood and materials to bind with. Again, these acres of land is just one operation, just 16 men, and not 1% of what is said to be the total professional bison hunt. If other hunters were not nearly as successful as these fellows, you’re still talking about a herd of bison surrounded in all directions by hundreds of acres of drying bison hides (to say nothing of the requisite sea of carcasses said to have been left behind). And none of this activity or the sea of corpses said to be left behind, apparently, is spooking the herd or drawing in any of those who might do so, such as: bears, cougars, wolves, coyotes, raccoons, vultures, hawks, crows, or any other furry or feathered scavenger during this most popular bison hunting season: immediately prior to or at the end of Winter. Okay, bro.

This resembles the project management paradox. You’ve probably seen it as a meme. You can have it: fast and cheap (but of poor quality), fast and high quality (but very expensive), or high quality and inexpensive (but very slowly produced), what you cannot have is something high quality, at very little expense, and arrived at very quickly. You can only pick two. That’s similar to the bison hunt. You simply cannot have: A) 60-100 million bison AND B) huge annual kill counts AND C) hunting and processing taking no time, energy, or resources. Pick two. Whatever two you pick destroys the favoured story about what happened to the bison.

Even if all that makes sense to you then you can delve into any of the economics already mentioned. Just contend with the concept of supply and demand, never mind the price offered for a bison hide. How does the math work on the sustained demand for hides, the profits needed to make bison hunting worthwhile for anyone, and what we’re told folks were getting paid (or any company could plausibly spend)?

DOLLA’ BILZ, Y’ALL

The first thing to notice is that the North American fur trade was at its height between the 1760s and the 1840s and was effectively over by the 1870s. For example, we know that the Hudson’s Bay and North West companies, the two main players who operated largely in Canada but had operations across the continent, rose to their most profitable between the late 18th and early 19th century, in the years leading up to their merger in 1821. And the highest number of bison hides the company ever moved in one year is reported. The year was 1844, during which the company traded roughly 75,000 bison hides throughout Canada and internationally — a full thirty years prior to the peak of the bison hunt. And, as spelled out in a US National Park Service explainer on this very topic, titled The Business of Bison, we are told the American Fur Company (the dominant company in America in the first half of the 19th century, and supplying folks as far away as Europe and China) stated about bison that “it is seldom that a lodge trades more than twenty skins a year.” This was offered in writing around the time of the company’s collapse in the 1840s. How does this context fit the picture?

With the existing bison extermination narrative we are led to believe that — a full generation after this well-documented collapse of the largest player in the US fur trade, the peak numbers traded by leading traders, and the near disappearance of the North American fur trade altogether — there was suddenly a desire to buy and capacity to process, store, and ship a million or two bison hides per year (not fine beaver or fox pelts but the largest and roughest of all animal pelts). Yet we know there was virtually no demand for bison hides at any point, and very low prices as a result, and by the time of the commercial hunt there was less demand and only lower rates. But even at a historically low rate you still had to pay these men. If a pelt paid $3-4 at the start of the commercial hunt, as told in the newspapers of the time, then someone had to pay out that money, at least $100 million in today’s dollars. If you demand the kinds of numbers necessary to wipe out 60-100 million bison, you actually need to explain where the gazillions of rounds of ammunition, trillions of hours of labour, and quadrillions of dollars for hides came from… Obviously. If HBC traded in nothing but bison pelts (though we know they traded in very few — their highest numbers were not 5% of the highest recorded annual kill and came a generation prior to the commercial bison hunt), how would the company afford, ship, store, sell, or export those to overseas markets and why are there no accounts of anything of the sort? And then, surely, just as in the above newspaper account, after the first million arrived in season one, the value of a pelt was, on record, driven to just a fraction of that it once brought — or perhaps down to nothing at all making hunting impossible to justify.

Notice that even to start with, at $3, bison was almost worthless. I found a typical beaver pelt (five sq/ft and 1.5lbs) brought $6, usually paid by the pound at $4/lb. So, at best, a nice bison hide at the top rate earned something like $0.02 per pound. Still, we’re told a typical hide-seeker might bring along an acquaintance and hire two more fellows for a season at a cost of $1,400. Before making any money, at $3 per hide the group would have to procure 470 for the season (or just over three hides per day x 150 days). And at just $1 per hide, of course, they needed more than nine hides per day, not to make a living but just to cover the $1,400 invested at the start of the season. For each man to earn just an additional dollar a day at this lower rate they needed to take another 600 hides (2,000 on the season or over 13 per day) — and skin, move, and dry those (and keep the lot away from owls, ravens, wolves, racoons, and rats, of course…)

Also consider that cattle and ranching were common along what is today the US-Mexico border since Spanish times, a whole century prior to the bison hunt. Cattle ranching really took off throughout America’s grasslands starting in the 1840s — with the first cattle drives from Texas into areas north, the growth of “cattle towns”, and even the explosion of Indigenous cattle ranching, and all still preceding the decline of the bison. Beef, tallow, and hide rapidly grew in demand during and after the US Civil War, driving up the price and causing an explosion in the industry in the 1860s through 1880s. Some accounts tell of five million head of cattle, about the same count as the commercial bison hunt, being slaughtered in these years. These were animals of the same size as bison and already being killed for their meat as well as having all other possible resources made use of. The reality of a rapid, exponential growth of cattle products didn’t somehow create a huge additional demand for bison hides or leather.

MOUNTAINS OF RESOURCES

Weirder than all of the above, to my mind, is that we’re commonly told that at best only the hides of bison were taken and that the rest was left to putrefy. And the wackiest bit if this version of events is that not only can anyone easily find photographs of mountains of valuable bison bones and skulls from this time (used for china, fertilizer, needed for sugar-making, and more, with accounts of tremendous volumes being shipped to markets overseas) but to help visualize the horror of this history, pictures of a sea of bones often accompany these same denials of the existence of this very trade. Still more curious, the most famous image used to visualize the slaughter, you’ve probably seen it, shows two men in some kind of industrial yard dwarfed by a mountain of skulls. It turns out this image actually comes NOT from the 1860s, ‘70s, or even the ‘80s but from 1892, a full generation after there were said to be, as above, no more bison to be found anywhere… These bones were clearly not left to rot on America’s Great Plains but were collected and used. An, like any hunt of any size, required great time, labour, and expense, to ship to a factory for grinding into fertilizer. Right. “There are no free lunches.” “Pick two.” How does any of this obvious reality fit with the typical stories that abound? But that’s just the bones!

If you dare to look, you can also find reference to the millions of pounds of bison meat being annually transported by train to the major cities of the midwest and east and this resource filling the nation’s refrigerated train cars and butcher shops. The Daily Milwaukee News, from Christmas of 1874 (after there were no bison to be found), for example, tells us — now get this:

…[S]till greater importance than bone-picking or hide-hunting [*ZOINKS!*], is the trade in buffalo meat … During these five months as much as 2,000,000 pounds are shipped from the station on the Kansas Pacific to all parts of the country. In the Winter months a buffalo steak can be obtained as easily and almost as cheaply in the butchers stalls of the leading northern cities as a beefsteak or a mutton chop, and in Colorado and Kansas it is as common as antelope…

The leading markets for buffalo meat “in the rough,” are St. Louis, Chicago and Indianapolis, whence it is reshipped, and cleaner and more artistic condition, to cities of the seaboard. At Kansas City, too, large quantities are cured and packed for Easter, and some successful experiments have been made in shipping direct to New York and Philadelphia on refrigerator cars. The price in the towns along the middle and eastern divisions of the Kansas Pacific ranges from $50 to $80 per ton in bulk, and the local dealers retail at six to eight cents per pound.

What would Hornaday make of two million pounds of meat being shipped out of one train station? Can we safely go ahead multiply that by three and then tack on a few million more for good measure to say there were ten million pounds of bison meat being consumed annually at this time? However the math breaks down, this is a clear and easily uncovered record of something other than the “nothing” so typically insisted upon, even in print by experts and our leading scholars.

SO WHAT?

So the story we’ve been told makes perfect sense — if you first start by slashing the bison population to just 10-20% of the most common numbers cited; contend that bison were more fragile and their range far more confined than we know to be the case; pretend the human population, transportation routes, and technology west of the Mississippi was a hundred times greater than know it to have been; and assume there were climactic events not found in the historical record…

DETAILS

Railroads and the Making of Modern America - US railroad map - 1870

https://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document_id=rail.str.0244.html

Blackmore, 1877 - A Brief Account of the North American Indians

https://archive.org/details/BriefAccount/page/n3/mode/2up

Hornaday, 1889 - The Extermination of the American Bison: with a sketch of its discovery and lifehistory

https://archive.org/details/exterminationofa00horn/page/366/mode/2up

Seton, 1929 - The Lives of Game Animals (Vol III, Part II)

https://archive.org/details/livesofgameanima0000erne/page/638/mode/2up

Garretson, 1938 - The American Bison: the story of its extermination as a wild species and its restoration under federal protection

https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_American_Bison.html?id=_rUm8n0fg98C&redir_esc=y

McHugh, 1972 - The Time of the Buffalo