Genocide by Other Means: U.S. Army Slaughtered Buffalo in Plains Indian Wars
By Adrian Jawort (2011)
General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had broken the back of the South during the Civil War with his ruthless March to the Sea, helped negotiate the Fort Laramie and 1867 Medicine Lodge treaties that were supposed to end U.S. hostilities with northern and southern tribes. But that’s when officers started thinking about a new strategy. Sherman knew that during the Civil War the Confederates’ means and will to fight were extinguished by his brutal—and brutally effective—”scorched earth” policy that decimated the infrastructure of the South. Why couldn’t the same strategy be applied to Indians and their buffalo? Greymorning said, “The government realized that as long as this food source was there, as long as this key cultural element was there, it would have difficulty getting Indians onto reservations.”
Isenberg said, “Some Army officers in the Great Plains in the late 1860s and 1870s, including William Sherman and Richard Dodge, as well as the Secretary of the Interior in the 1870s, Columbus Delano, foresaw that if the bison were extinct, the Indians in the Great Plains would have to surrender to the reservation system.” Colonel Dodge said in 1867, “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” and Delano wrote in his 1872 annual report, “The rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs.” The Army had already used a similar strategy—In its 1863-1864 campaign against the Navajos, led by Colonel Kit Carson, the Army destroyed tens of thousands of sheep in a successful effort to subdue the Navajos.
There was one tactical flaw with this strategy: too many buffalo. But while it wasn’t feasible for the U.S. Army to kill tens of millions of bison, it was feasible for the Army to let hunters use their forts as bases of operation and stand by as they slaughtered the animals in staggering numbers. Another key strategy here was that the Army made no effort to enforce all those treaty obligations forbidding whites to hunt on Indian lands. Whites could needlessly kill a bison for “sport” but when an Indian killed cattle for food for his family because of the growing scarcity of bison, he was severely reprimanded.
Hide Bound
Timing was certainly one factor in the human destruction of the bison, as leather became a hugely popular commodity in an increasingly industrialized nation at about the same time the First Transcontinental Railroad was being cut through the West in the late 1860s. Bison became a cheap alternative to leather products, and hide hunters were reaping the devil’s harvest. Isenberg said, “Hide hunters who were responsible for destroying millions of bison in the 1870s were not operating under the command of the federal government. They were private citizens looking to make money, but many Army officers certainly approved of what the hunters were doing.”
For most Americans, the end of bison was assumed to be a natural and necessary by-product of manifest destiny. “There was a general belief in the 1870s that the bison were wild animals who were likely to eventually go extinct anyway,” Isenberg said. “The eradication of bison from the Great Plains and their replacement with cattle would be an improvement that turned a wilderness into a productive landscape.”
Outrage over the wanton slaughter of the bison did eventually grow, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tried to intervene on their behalf—legislation was introduced in Congress by Republican Rep. Greenburg Fort of Illinois in 1874 that would have made it, “unlawful for any person who is not an Indian to kill, wound, or in any manner destroy any female buffalo, of any age, found at large within the boundaries of any of the Territories of the United States.” Fort’s bill made it through Congress, but was vetoed by President Ulysses S. Grant. “In the debates over the bills, supporters invoked the anticruelty rhetoric of the SPCA,” Isenberg said. “Most opponents of the bills believed, like Columbus Delano, that the disappearance of the bison would be the easiest and quickest way to subdue the nomadic Indians of the Plains.”
Delano’s theory proved correct; the last bands of Plains Indians, including those led by Sitting Bull, eventually surrendered and settled on reservations.
Greymorning noted that some revisionists try to blame Indians for the death of the buffalo, but he said one picture is better than a thousand lies: “When you see a photograph of carcasses of buffalo lying miles and miles along stretches of railroad tracks, probably eight to 10 feet high, you know this was part of the government campaign to kill the buffalo.”
A Land Without Buffalo
The end came quickly—less than 400 wild bison were left by 1893. And the Plains Indians were just about pushed off the Plains as well—their warriors had fought valiantly against the Army in spite of their inferior numbers, but they now felt inadequate because they were unable to provide for their families. Those proud warriors were confined to reservations, told to farm and wait for the government to provide rations.
“It’s really hard to force another culture to recognize what your attributes are for being an upstanding man. They were told, ‘A good farmer is the best thing you can be in our culture,’ ” said Jim Stone, a Yankton Sioux and the executive director of the Intertribal Bison Cooperative. “To force that sedentary lifestyle on somebody who was out living on the adrenaline rush of hunting buffalo—either on horse or foot—I don’t know if we can fully comprehend what that would feel like. They had been the caretaker of the buffalo, and suddenly there were no more. From the cultural side, they had failed in their role as humans. I don’t know how I would deal with that.”
Crow Chief Plenty Coups (1848-1932) described the mood of his people to his biographer, Frank B. Linderman: “[When] the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground.…After this, nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere.”
The longing for the thrill of the bison hunt lingered for some Plains tribes during the early reservation days. “When the government brought in cattle, some tribes asked if they could hunt them, basically the way they hunted buffalo,” Greymorning said. “Government officials on reservations at first didn’t know how to handle that, but they saw in it something that could almost be like a show or form of entertainment. So they allowed it for a bit, but it wasn’t like that for the Natives.”
It was more than “fun” for the Indians. It was a desperate attempt to preserve their culture, their ceremonies, their identity. These cattle “hunts” gave them an opportunity to dress up in their finery, sing their buffalo songs, and recall better days. But even that was taken away from them when the government decided it would be better to package the beef for them instead of letting them slaughter it themselves.
Private owners and zoos collected some of the remaining buffalo that were scattered about the country, and some ranchers kept the animals as a novelty or tried to breed them with cattle. In 1902 Congress appropriated funds to help save the mighty beasts, and 21 bison from captive populations in Montana and Texas were put in a corral at Mammoth in Yellowstone National Park. Another 23 wild bison remained in the park, Isenberg said. “You could say that was sort of the first effort at bison preservation.”
One of the largest known private owners of bison was Michel Pablo, who sold his Flathead Indian Reservation herd of 700 bison to the Canadian Government in 1907, which put them in Buffalo National Park in Wainwright, Alberta. The same Flathead Reservation area those bison were being shipped from would serve as the American Bison Range established in 1908 under President Theodore Roosevelt, and the National Bison Society used private donations to buy a herd of 34 from a private Montana bison owner. As their numbers rose, bison were dispersed throughout other Canadian and U.S. national parks.
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