How did the Indians store bison meat? Destruction of bison in the USA (10 photos)

I continue to acquaint readers of the "highway" with exterminated and endangered species of animals. In my previous articles, I wrote about sea cows and American passenger pigeons, which were savagely exterminated by man in a very short period of time.

In my Black Book of Records of Humanity, sea cows are "leading" in the category of faster kill, and the following two species, American passenger pigeons and bison, are among the most numerous and ruthless beatings. If we never see passenger pigeons again, then for now we can watch bison in reserves and national parks.

European colonists can be safely called the most cruel people in relation to nature. It is only worth saying that after the development of the representatives of the Old World of the African continent, only 10% of the biodiversity that was before remained on it. The first to distinguish themselves were the Dutch. Zebras were their first prey. Moreover, they were exterminated so intensively that the colonists did not even have enough balls: they cut them out of the bodies of dead animals, loaded their guns with them and continued to kill. But even this was not enough for them.

As always, Homo sapiens come up with brilliant ideas in terms of killing either their own kind or other living creatures. The "genius" of the idea was the economy and efficiency of the new way of killing zebras. They were surrounded, driven to the abyss, and the animals fell from a height of many meters and were smashed to death. In this way, the Dutch saved gunpowder and lead and could kill many more animals.

The rigidity of the Europeans has led to the fact that now there are very few herds of zebras in Africa, and one of the most interesting - the quagga zebra was completely exterminated.

However, this article is not about zebras and Dutch colonists, but about animals that lived on another continent, in another hemisphere.

American colonists, no less than African, harmed the animal and plant world. Vivid examples of the relationship between the conquerors of North America and the natural environment were large-scale and terrible extermination of passenger pigeons and bison.

Therefore, let's talk about the American bison (Bison bison Linnaeus). With the beginning of the development of North America in the early XVIII century. more than 75 million bison lived on a vast territory, from Lakes Erie and the Great Slave in the north to Texas, Mexico and Louisiana in the south, from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Atlantic coast in the east, more than 75 million bison lived.

The first travelers were amazed at the sight of the millions of buffalo herds that grazed the plains. Each of these bison weighed more than 1350 kg, besides, they had no natural enemies, with the exception of coyotes, which attacked young individuals on occasion. Wolves can also be called among the enemies, but they attack either small calves or old bison.

And very quickly an enemy appeared in these large animals. And not one...

So it turns out that what a person is fond of soon becomes destroyed. Indeed, at first people admired bison, and very soon the barbaric extermination of these animals began. One American scientist said that the colonists "killed, being possessed by some diabolical power, makes everyone and everything kill" ...

The extermination of bison can be divided into two periods.

First period (1730-1840) At this time, there was a gradual transformation of the untouched territory into cultivated lands, an increasing number of immigrants from Europe moved to the New World, so the need and demand for food and skin grew. The presence of huge herds of large animals, which, moreover, were constantly moving, could not be desirable in areas occupied by crops, but then it was only about reducing the number of bison and effectively exploiting their population. It should be noted that the existence of the indigenous inhabitants of America - the Indians - their customs and entire life system were closely connected with the bison. However, Indian hunting had little effect on the number of bison, and the first white settlers did not fundamentally change the situation in the first period, killing animals only to satisfy basic needs or protecting their crops.

And second period, which began around the 1830s, was of a different nature, since its goal was the wholesale extermination of bison. In the northern habitats of the bison, it was destroyed in order to doom the Indian tribes to starvation, against which the colonists waged a merciless struggle. But this was not the end of the matter.

The slaughter reached its peak in the 1860s, when the construction of the transcontinental railroad began. Bison meat fed a huge army of road workers, skins were sold. Often the "hunt" reached the point of absurdity: only the tongue was taken from the bison, leaving countless carcasses to rot. Railroad advertisements promised passengers an astonishing attraction: shooting buffalo right from the windows of the train. The train, which passed through herds of buffalo, left behind hundreds of dying or maimed animals. In one hunting season of 1872-73, no less than 200,000 bison were killed in the state of Kansas alone. Special detachments of shooters pursued bison everywhere, and in the 70s of the XIX century. the number of animals that were killed annually was about 2,500,000. Just one fact: the “legendary” William Cody, nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who supplied the railroad workers with meat, killed 4280 bison in 1.5 years, i.e. he actually killed one buffalo every three hours!

Over time, hundreds of tons of buffalo bones were harvested and used to make fertilizer and black paint. Special companies were created to collect and deliver bones to the railways. The scope of the massacre can be judged from archival materials: in heaps of bones prepared for loading into freight cars, there were up to 20 thousand skeletons. Almost 5,000 tons of buffalo bones were transported along the famous Santa Fe railroad between 1872 and 1874. Not surprisingly, sometime around 1868, the bison virtually disappeared from the southwestern United States. Of course, in some places separate herds of bison still roamed, but their number was so small that disappointed hunters abandoned further fishing. Herds of bison also decreased in the North of the United States, and in 1880, Indian tribes specially armed for this went on the last assault on them. During the hunting season (November to February), one hunter killed from one to two thousand bison. Soon these animals became so rare that in the stories of hunters of the period 1880-1885, hunting for the “last” bison in the area is mentioned, and this indicates not only an extreme reduction in the number of bison, but also a multiple rupture of its range.

Bison were not only shot, they were destroyed in the most barbaric and painful ways. On the way of herds of buffalo, around lakes and along the banks of rivers, bonfires were lit so that exhausted and thirsty animals could not approach the water. The bison went to other reservoirs, but everywhere they were met by a wall of fire. Many of them could not stand this torture and died. Others were killed by letting them into the water.

The almost total extermination of the bison was undoubtedly a tragic episode in the entire history of the relationship between man and nature, and, unfortunately, not the only one: other mammals also experienced serious losses. Their populations sometimes decreased to alarming sizes, and their ranges narrowed.

By 1889 it was all over. In a vast area where herds of millions grazed, only 835 bison remained, including a herd of 200 animals that escaped in Yellowstone National Park. And yet it was not too late.

In parallel with the extermination of bison, there was another significant destruction, which I have already mentioned - the destruction of passenger pigeons. And if the birds could not be saved, then in the case of the bison, people still managed to come to their senses.

In 1905 the American Society for Saving the Buffalo was founded. Literally in the last days, in the last hours of the bison's existence, society managed to turn the wheel of history. First in Oklahoma, then in other states, special reserves were established, where the bison were safe. After 4 years, the number of bison doubled, and after another 10 years there were about 9,000 of them.

A movement to save the buffalo was also launched in Canada. In 1907, a herd of bison, numbering 709 heads, was bought from private hands and transported to Wayne Wright (Alberta), and in 1915, Wood Buffalo National Park was established for some of the surviving wood bison, between the Great Slave Lake and the lake Athabasca. Unfortunately, more than 6,000 steppe bison were brought there in 1925-1928, which brought tuberculosis, and most importantly, freely interbreeding with the wood bison, threatened to “absorb” it as an independent subspecies.

And only in 1957, in a remote and hard-to-reach northwestern section of the park, a herd of purebred wood bison of about 200 heads was discovered. From here, in 1963, 18 bison were caught and transported to a special reserve across the Mackenzie River, where in 1969 there were about 30 of them. Another 43 wood bison were moved to Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton.

Now in the national parks and reserves of Canada there are more than 30 thousand bison, of which about 400 are forest; in the USA - more than 10 thousand individuals. Of course, their current number cannot be compared with that of some 300 years ago. Yes, for us, people, 300 years is a long time, but for the planet it is only one moment.

As in the case of the stray pigeon, the Americans were shocked by the destruction of the bison and began to come up with ridiculous theories of their disappearance. Recently, American scientists put forward a "brilliant" theory of the disappearance of tens of millions of bison on the American continent.

In particular, today they seriously believe that climate change, and not barbaric extermination, caused the extinction of bison and other large mammals from the American prairies.

Their new research has shown that bison began to disappear about 37,000 years ago, 20,000 years before large human communities settled in the areas. At the same time, the bison managed to survive the period of melting glaciers - about 10,000 years ago, when other mammals of that era, such as saber-toothed tigers, died. For scientists, "it came as a big surprise" to find out that the extinction of bison began with a mass migration of people. “Humans could have wiped out the last remaining members of this group, but climate change is to blame, it is she who has turned large mammals into “walking victims,” said Oxford University professor Alan Cooper.

The researchers found that bison DNA found in individuals that lived 50,000 years ago is strikingly different from those that live today. Modern North American bison are descended from a single female who lived about 15,000 to 22,000 years ago, a study shows.

Interestingly, in general, such a difference can be explained by ordinary evolution according to Darwin's theory, but today's scientists interpret information in a way that is beneficial to them at the moment. And today it is very fashionable to say that climate change and bad ecology are to blame for all our troubles. Although it is silent at the same time who spoiled this ecology and became an indicator of the Earth's climate change, which is impressive in terms of pace.

The story of the destruction of the American bison is instructive. Despite the catastrophic extermination, these large animals were saved. And even if today there are tens of thousands of times less than they were before (although only the naive can hope that animal populations will decrease, because due to the growth of the human population, animals, unfortunately, are declining, or even completely disappear), but never it's too late to stop and change your mind. Therefore, today Americans and tourists can watch beautiful and kind animals that survived a real genocide in the 19th century.

The American bison, or buffalo, is a prairie legend, one of the main characters in the history of the Wild West, which practically disappeared and was miraculously revived.

The Indians hunted 450,000 bison a year. For a herd of tens of millions of heads, this was not overfishing.

Herds of bison appeared before the eyes of the first settlers in myriad numbers: it seemed that they occupy the entire space from horizon to horizon.

There were more of them than the wildebeest and zebras in Africa today (up to two million heads participate in the Great Migration). Seton-Thompson estimated that in 1800 there were 60 million bison in America. And at the end of the 19th century, only 25 heads remained.

In a mere forty years (1830-1870) the buffalo disappeared, and this disappearance was one of the most mystical events in world wildlife history.

And in the 20th century, bison, almost swept off the face of the earth, miraculously revived. Why did they die and who is the author of the "American miracle" - the revival of the bison?

AMERICAN LEGEND

The bison is as much a symbolic animal in America as the bear is in Russia. Who in childhood did not read about the noble Indians of the prairies, who roamed behind countless herds of bison and lived in perfect harmony with nature!

The buffalo was at the heart of the life of the Indians: meat was their main food, the skins were used for wigwams, for bedding, clothes and for sale; bowstrings were made from tendons; glue was cooked from the hooves.

By all accounts, and this is portrayed in books and Hollywood movies, all misfortune came on the prairies with the palefaces. The politically "literate" will add that the Indians lived in a communal system, and the whites attacked them with the "capitalist cleansing", as a result of which the bison fell victim to private property self-interest.

The most advanced will tell that the extermination of the buffalo was precisely aimed at depriving the Indians of their main source of livelihood and forcing them to live settled in reservations under the control of the federal government.

That is why the destruction of bison was sanctioned, and hunters in a matter of years reduced their millions of herds to several dozen individuals, miraculously preserved in Yellowstone.

Indeed, before the appearance of the pale-faced Indians lived mostly sedentary, the bison did not dominate their culture in the way that it did with the advent of the horse and firearms.

The transition to nomadic life gave rise to the dependence of the Indians on bison meat as the main food product, and the two main hunting trophies - bison and beaver skins - became practically the only commodity for exchange for guns, knives, axes, metal utensils, fire water.

Even in the “before-pale-faced” times, the predatory extermination of bison by the Indians appeared, when the herds were surrounded by fires and many animals burned in the fire. The same applied to the corrals of herds to the cliffs, under which dozens and even hundreds of smashed bison were left to rot.

The ease of getting buffalo led to the fact that the Indians cut only the best pieces of meat from the carcass, leaving the rest untouched.

The Indians believed that the buffalo was inexhaustible, while the pale-faced ones killed the buffalo in order to deprive the Indians of the provision of their nomadic and uncontrolled life. Therefore, the army distributed free ammunition for hunting buffalo.

WAR TO DESTROY

A successful hunter could get and skin with assistants a dozen or more bison in the morning. The warehouses of buying companies were overcrowded, and the presence of 60-80 thousand skins in the warehouse was no exception.

A dollar was given for the salty tongue of a bison (a carpenter had to work 12 hours a day to get two dollars). For the skin of a bison, they paid 3-3.5 dollars, a carcass weighing a ton was thrown on the spot.

The construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, which ran across the deserted expanses of the American plain, prompted construction companies to hire professional hunters to supply workers with food.

Normal conditions included the production of 10-12 bison per day, but this could not affect any noticeable decrease in the number of a herd of many millions.

The killing of buffalo by train passengers became a byword when the railroad cut the prairie. Countless herds of buffalo stopped trains for a long time and damaged the railroad tracks when they crossed the line in their endless migrations; shooting from the windows of the carriages was encouraged by the railway company, and hundreds of buffalo carcasses were left to rot along the tracks.

The problem discussed in the newspapers was the terrible smell that accompanied the movement of trains on the desecrated prairie. But these losses of livestock were again negligible from the point of view of its total number.

Of course, the fact that the bison was not afraid of a man on a horse also played a role and allowed the hunter to approach him practically for point-blank shooting. By the way, first of all they shot females - because of the better skin and tender meat.

WHAT'S WORSE BULLETS?

I calculated that in order to destroy a population of 60 million bison with an annual replenishment of 5-7 million, with a life expectancy of 25 years, you need to get about 8-10 million head per year. And it takes about 600 tons of lead per year to shoot such a large number of bison.

Even the most implacable accusers of hunters cannot provide statistics confirming this fabulous value.

What was the main reason for the extinction of the bison?

First of all, the general advance of civilization with its cattle ranches, towns, roads. The displacement of the "king of the prairies" with the advance of the white man to the west of America was inevitable.

The settlers cut forests to the vine, and the bison lost their winter shelter. Herds of livestock increasingly competed with buffalo for grazing, and diseases carried by cattle, never before seen on the prairies, turned out to be deadlier than lead and arrows.

It was large-scale epizootics brought by livestock that led to the mass death of countless herds of bison, the microbe turned out to be more powerful than lead. This has happened many times in history.

The plague of the mid-14th century in Europe led to the death of 50 million people - a third of the population of the continent. The Spanish flu caused the death of 42 million people at the end of World War I, taking more in a few months than the bullets and shells of the warring armies in four years of war.

Unknown epizootics led to the death of bison in different US states throughout the 19th century. Eyewitnesses described a prairie filled with thousands of buffalo corpses to the horizon, and no traces of bullets or arrows were found on the carcasses.

But who will write books and make films about the pandemic after the First World War - except perhaps microbiologists! About the war on the plains of Europe or on the prairies of America, you can write and make films endlessly.

MAN'S FAULT WITH GUN

The buffalo hunter did not play the main role in this tragedy, although history gave him all the signs of the main villain. The accusations against them were based on impressive numbers.

W. Hornady, one of the first accusers of hunters in the destruction of bison, cites terrible data: over 1.3 million buffalo skins were sent by rail in three years. But this is against the backdrop of a total herd of tens of millions of heads!

The female brings calves (usually one, rarely two) from the age of three, and this happens every year until the end of her life. The ability of a healthy herd to expand reproduction led to the achievement of the number of bison in America to a fabulous 60 million head. Shooting in those years could not reduce such a population to practical zero for several decades.

What is the role of the hunter, red-skinned and white-faced, in the destruction of the buffalo? Did the “great army of the prairies” really perish under the bullets of Sharps, Winchesters and Remingtons?

It should be noted that bison grazed in countless herds in the territory where railways were not laid - they appeared only in the 19th century. How could hunters cover the boundless expanses, penetrate into all corners of the habitat of the buffalo population, where the hostile Indians were in charge?

How was it possible to kill 60 million animals in the forests and prairies, starting from the northern territories of Canada and ending with the lands of modern Mexico, using antediluvian transport (mule-drawn carts), with the help of archaic weapons with black powder (single-shot, initially muzzle-loading at all)?

How many bison per year could be shot by one hunter on a horse not from an automatic rifle, even if it were the legendary Sharp - a “weapon of mass destruction” of the second half of the 19th century, which allowed up to 10 shots per minute and largely decided the outcome of the wars with the Indians in 1870 -X?

Could an antediluvian firearm of the century before last have reduced the population of a normally breeding beast to 25 heads? Note: in densely populated Europe, the last wild bison, a relative of the bison, was killed in 1919.

In the complex of reasons for the dramatic extinction of the prairie giants, the main one is the attack on the biotopes of bison by an aggressive pastoral civilization as a whole, which carried both epizootics, and the displacement of buffalo from their usual habitats.

PHOENIX PRAIRIE

At the end of the 19th century, bison remained practically only in zoos, and no one believed that their “second coming” was possible: miracles do not happen. But a miracle happened. Now the buffalo has once again become an icon of the prairies and forests of America, and the reason for this was private interest, the same market motivator that underlay the almost complete destruction of the bison.

Already in the 1880s, the first private herds of bison appeared in the States, living on a ranch, where hunting for them was even sold and where the number of livestock increased. Meanwhile, there were less and less of these animals in the wild, and the state unsuccessfully fought against poachers - this scourge even in Yellowstone.

ORDINARY MIRACLE. Bison is a relic species that once lived in the vastness of North America from the forests of Alaska to Mexico. The weight of an adult male can exceed a ton (a record wild bull weighed 1270 kg, grown on a ranch - 1724 kg). The height of the animal at the withers is 1.8 meters. Up to 25 kg of grass feed is required per day for an adult. When the herd moves, bison often make unusual sounds of different tones, similar to grunting. And during the rut, the bulls emit a rolling roar, which in calm weather can be heard for five to eight kilometers. This is not to say that bison are aggressive animals, however, if they are driven into a dead end or get injured, they will switch from flight to attack. Now these majestic owners of the prairies have become a familiar attraction of the not quite wild, but still wondrous nature of the North American continent.

No increase in fines for illegal hunting could save the “state” buffalo - the desperate American lads, accustomed to the freemen of bygone years, continued to reduce this livestock, while the private ranch owner, just as desperate, gave a tough rebuff to the robbers (a matter for an American on Wild West habitual).

A cultural interest arose in the bison as part of American heritage and Native American culture.

One hundred years after their almost complete disappearance, the bison herds revived, and the private owner, due to obvious benefits, became the main owner of the bison in America, created a whole business similar to other types of cattle breeding.

By the 1990s, more than 90% of bison in America lived on private ranches (now almost 95%). In total, there are currently more than half a million bison in state national parks and 4,000 private ranches in the United States.

Yes, American hunters have contributed to the near extinction of the once innumerable mighty beast of the prairies and forests. But the Americans managed to return the symbol of the Wild West from oblivion, and the saga of the fate of the bison in America became one of the canonical stories of sin and salvation.

The extermination of bison in the USA is the mass extermination of bison from the 1830s, sanctioned by the US authorities, which had the goal of undermining the economic way of life of Indian tribes and dooming them to starvation. The Indians traditionally hunted bison only to satisfy their vital needs: for food, as well as for the manufacture of clothing, housing, tools and utensils.

American General Philip Sheridan wrote:

The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They destroy the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill and skin and sell them until they have killed all the buffalo!

Sheridan in the US Congress proposed to establish a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of the extermination of bison. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said: "The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians."

Photos in excellent quality found on the Internet.

As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison by the beginning of the 20th century decreased from several tens of millions to several hundreds. French biologist Jean Dorst (Jean Dorst) noted that initially the total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885, hunters in the North of the United States talked about hunting for the “last” bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million bison were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote of a decline in bison from 30 million in 1800 to less than a thousand by the end of the century.

The hunter Buffalo Bill, hired by the administration of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, gained great fame, having killed several thousand bison. Subsequently, he selected several dozen people from the starving Indians and staged “performances”: the Indians acted out scenes of attacks on the settlers in front of the audience, shouted, etc., then Buffalo Bill himself “saved” the colonists.

I take information from the wiki (there are also a number of links to good articles in the notes)

The extermination of bison in the United States since the 1830s, sanctioned by the local authorities, was intended to undermine the economic way of life of Indian tribes and doom them to starvation. The Indians, on the whole, never engaged in agriculture and lived by hunting (the only exception was, perhaps, only the Cherokees - they just led a sedentary lifestyle, cultivated cereals, and preferred capital houses to wigwams).

The main food source of the Indians was bison, innumerable herds of which inhabited the endless prairies created by the great Gitch Manito. The Indians never killed bison (and game in general) for fun, only to get food. If the meat remained, they made a kind of canned food: "pemmican" - a specially cured "buffalo meat".

The "fathers of the American nation" themselves testify to the genocide of the Indians with undisguised cynicism. American General Philip Sheridan wrote: "The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill skinning skins and selling them until they have wiped out all the buffalo!"

Sheridan in the US Congress proposed to establish a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of the extermination of bison. Colonel Richard Dodge (Richard Irving Dodge) said: "The death of every bison is the disappearance of the Indians."

This slaughter reached a particular scale in the 60s during the construction of the railway. Not only did they feed the entire huge army of workers with bison meat, and they sold the skins. The so-called "hunt" reached the point of absurdity, when only tongues were taken from animals, and the carcasses were left to rot.

The wholesale extermination of bison reached its peak in the 60s of the XIX century, when the construction of the transcontinental railway began. Buffalo meat was fed to a huge army of road workers, and the skins were sold. Specially organized groups of hunters pursued bison everywhere, and soon the number of animals killed was about 2.5 million per year. Railroad advertisements promised bloody entertainment for passengers: shooting at buffaloes right from the windows of the cars. The hunters sat on the roofs and platforms of the train and fired for nothing at the grazing animals. No one picked up the carcasses of the dead animals, and they were left to rot on the prairies. The train passing through huge herds left behind hundreds of dying or maimed animals.

As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison by the beginning of the 20th century decreased from several tens of millions to several hundreds. The French biologist Jean Dorst (Jean Dorst) noted that initially the total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885, the stories of the hunters of the North of the USA spoke of hunting the "last" bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million bison were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote of a decline in bison from 30 million in 1800 to less than a thousand by the end of the century.

Bison were also killed for fun: American railroad companies advertised for passengers to shoot buffalo from the windows of their train cars. In 1887, the English naturalist William Mushroom, who traveled across the prairies, noted: There were buffalo trails everywhere, but there were no live bison. Only the skulls and bones of these noble animals turned white in the sun.

The winters of 1880-1887 became hungry for the Indian tribes, among them there was a high mortality rate.
The hunter Buffalo Bill, hired by the administration of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, gained great fame, having killed several thousand bison. Subsequently, he selected several dozen people from the starving Indians and staged "performances": the Indians acted out scenes of attacks on the settlers in front of the audience, shouted, etc., then Buffalo Bill himself "saved" the colonists.

The settlers, whose story Hollywood never ceases to sing, simply destroyed the bison and the Indians died of hunger. US national hero William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, single-handedly killed 4280 (!) bison in eighteen months (1867-1868). The glorification of Buffalo Bill, for example, on Wikipedia, comes to the ridiculous - he is served as a caring supplier - he allegedly provided food for the workers who cost the Trans-American railroad. Descriptions of atrocities such as Cody, who destroyed bison for fun, or because of cutting out their tongues (the carcasses of the killed giants were simply left to rot) are diligently blurred by stories about the heroic pages of the “battle for the country”. But these were ordinary villains, murderers, no different from the stamp "bloodthirsty redskin." The same Cody, already from 1870 being the hero of cheap novels, in 1876 personally scalped the leader of the Shaen tribe, Yellow Hand (according to other sources - Yellow Hair).

In the huge Cherokee tribe, whose leader was once an outstanding scientist, politician and culturologist Sequoyah (his name is immortalized in the name of the largest trees on Earth), one in four died.

The Cherokee had an amazing culture, their own script (which is still kept. In accordance with the US Indian Removal Act from 1830, Oklahoma received the status of "Indian Territory".

40,000 buffalo skins in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878

Wall of bison skulls

Mountains of bison skulls

Steppe bison feed on grass, and in addition, forest bison use leaves, shoots and branches of shrubs and trees for food. These powerful animals are able to feed in snow cover up to 1 m deep: first they scatter the snow with their hooves, and then dig a hole with the rotational movements of the head and muzzle. Once a day, the bison go to the watering place, and when severe frosts come and the water sources are covered with ice, they eat snow. They usually graze around the clock. Of the sense organs in bison, the sense of smell is best developed: bison smell danger at a distance of up to 2 km, and they smell water even further - 7-8 km away. Their hearing and vision are somewhat weaker, but they cannot be called bad.

Bison are very curious, especially calves: every new or unfamiliar object is able to attract their close attention. The voice of the bison is often given: when the herd moves, grunting sounds of different tones are constantly heard. Bulls during the rut emit a rolling roar, which in calm weather can be heard for many kilometers. Such a roar sounds especially impressive when several bulls participate in the “concert”. Despite their powerful build - old bulls can weigh a ton - bison are exceptionally fast and agile.

They easily reach speeds up to 50 km / h. The buffalo is not aggressive, but when cornered or wounded, it easily switches from fleeing to attacking. To the category of natural enemies of the bison, perhaps, only wolves can be attributed, other predators are not afraid of him. Huge herds of bison made regular migrations. Surely it was a breathtaking sight when at the same time millions of animals set off on their way, strictly observing the direction. Animals always traveled the same routes and as a result trodden wide, straight paths.

Of course, bison have been hunted for a long time. For many Indian tribes, these animals were a real granary, carefully "supplying" meat for food and skins for clothes and wigwams. The Indians roamed along with gigantic herds, and neither one nor the other did not experience any inconvenience from this. True, it cannot be argued that the native inhabitants of America and the pale-faced hunters who appeared later were especially trembling about the preservation of the bison population. Abundance breeds extravagance, and in the history of the Wild West there are many cases of the senseless extermination of a huge number of bison by the same Indians.
Nomadic white merchants and taper hunters were witnesses, and often participants in a cruel and unprofitable, as they would say now, hunt: Indian beaters set fire to the grass in front of the herd and, with screams and noise, drove part of the bison that had strayed from the herd into a deep ravine. Then the hunters ran up to the wounded animals and finished them off with spears and arrows. For food, the Indians took the meat of young females, and did not even look at the dead males. Sometimes only tongues were cut out of animals as a delicacy. Along the way, a myriad of animals could die from the fire, but the tribe did not care much. Heritage of the Stone Age Archaeological excavations show that this method of obtaining food has been used by people since ancient times. In many places where Stone Age man hunted, scientists find huge piles of bones. So did the ancestors of the Indians.

Archaeologists conducting excavations in the southern United States, in the state of Colorado, found about two hundred bison skeletons in one of the canyons. A herd of wild bulls crashed here eight thousand years ago. The ancient Indians used part of the prey, but, as the study showed, they did not even touch several dozen carcasses. Many historians believe that the hunter, armed with stones and a spear, is directly responsible for the extinction of ancient large animals. With his primitive weapons, he could kill a few small animals, but the fire and the earth's landscape helped him destroy hundreds of large animals. Such hunting methods, coupled with periodic epidemics among animals and frequent droughts, would sooner or later lead the bison to extinction. But the white aliens managed to speed up this terrible process many times over.

We can safely say that the Americans changed their minds literally at the last moment, when there were only 835 animals in the entire New World. In December 1905, the American Society for Saving the Buffalo was formed. First in Oklahoma, then in Montana, Nebraska and Dakota, special reserves arose where bison could feel safe. By 1910, the number of bison had doubled, and after another 10 years there were about 9,000 of them. A movement to save the bison was also launched in Canada.

In 1907, the government bought out from private hands and moved a herd of 709 heads to Wayne Wright (Alberta), in 1915, Wood Buffalo National Park was established for the few surviving wood bison, between the Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca. Now in the USA and Canada there are 30,000-50,000 bison. True, various subspecies, due to extermination by people and crossing among themselves, have not been preserved.

Elena Alexandrova

It would seem that there is nothing obscure in this story. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the prairies of North America were inhabited by about thirty million bison. It was the most numerous species of large animals on the continent. In the summer, at the time of the rut, the bison huddled in huge herds, sometimes numbering up to a hundred thousand heads.

A century has passed. There are not even a thousand living bison left in all of America. It is believed that white hunters are to blame for everything. Especially tragic for the animals was the idea of ​​​​railroads that crossed the expanses of the United States, linking separate parts of the country. “Railways,” I. Akimushkin wrote in one of his essays, “brought death to the buffalo.” It is estimated that about 5,400,000 bison were killed in the construction of the Pacific Road. Their carcasses rotted on the prairies. Their extermination was worthy of the brush of V. Vereshchagin.

Another "thunderstorm of the buffalo" was the army. In an effort to push the Indians back to the reservations, the American generals decided to cut them off from their food sources. “If the Redskins feed on wild bulls, they will not give up their positions while herds of live meat roam nearby,” said the “Malbrooks” of the US Army, preparing to march against the natives.

Debit of wolves and elements

The American tragedy ended with a happy ending. The number of almost extinct animals has already reached two hundred thousand heads due to protection and selection. But the populations of a number of other animal species - rhinos, tigers, lions, orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, elephants - have declined so much that they are now on the verge of extinction.

That is why now, after a century, I would like to once again return to the fate of the bison in America, and busily, with numbers in hand, clarify the picture and show that several factors predetermined the tragedy of this animal species. And not the last role in it was played by the Indians, "the children of Nature, who lived in accordance with her laws." How fragile is the balance in nature! How easy it is to destroy an entire species of animals!

According to a number of modern historians (their opinions are available to everyone on the “Internet” page www.bisoncentral.com), the Indians would certainly kill a millionth bison in time. Of course, they would have achieved their goal much more slowly. However, the prerequisites for this began to take shape already in the second half of the 18th century, when the "symbiosis" of Indians and bison was broken. It was then that the methods and goals of Indian hunting became completely different. Before talking about what happened, let's sum up the balance that had developed by that time.

At the end of the 18th century, there were approximately 120,000 Indians living on the prairies from Canada to New Mexico. They ate primarily the meat of bison. In a year, each of them accounted for an average of six to seven bulls. In total, 850 thousand 1 million bison had to be exterminated annually, or three percent of the total livestock. This loss seemed to be easily compensated. Every year new millions of animals grew up.

Bison were for a man both a self-assembled tablecloth that fed him for a long time, and a factory that gave him the necessary things. The American zoologist Tom McHugh called the bison "the supermarket for the Indians." In large males there were about seven hundred kilograms of meat. And it is also a skin, from which clothes and wigwams were made. These are veins that served as threads for Indian seamstresses. These are horns and bones needed for the manufacture of tools and arrowheads. These are the teeth from which the jewelry was made. Even manure was used: it was dried and used as fuel.

True, the Indians were not the only inhabitants of North America who originally hunted bison. The expanses of the continent were inhabited by about two million more wolves, who, on occasion, were also ready to attack a bull that had lagged behind the herd. Historians of zoology condemn about two million bison to this natural decline disappearance under the claws of wolves . However, these losses were also compensated.

However, extraneous factors regularly interfered with the balance of life and death of huge herds. The bison suffered from epidemics, steppe fires, cold snaps, hurricanes and floods. Such misfortunes were repeated with frightening frequency. On average, from one to three million bison perished every year due to their fault. Finally, every decade there was a drought on the prairies. Up to ten percent of bison died from starvation.

So imperceptibly reduced the number of huge bulls. By the time the Europeans arrived in America, zoologists estimate there must have been sixty million bison. By 1800—before the construction of the railroads and the new tactics of the Malbrooks—their numbers had almost halved.

"Drive Belts" of Depopulation

The last horses became extinct in North America about ten million years ago. Until the middle of the 18th century, the Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne tribes, known to us from the novels of F. Cooper, did not lead a nomadic, but a sedentary lifestyle. They cultivated maize and other cultivated plants, and only in the summer, when huge herds of animals revived the steppe, did they go hunting, including bison.

Hunting on foot required enormous effort. In the fight against large animals, success usually awaited if it was possible to use the rugged terrain and drive the beast into a trap: direct the herd to a river cliff, a ravine, a huge pit. Similar methods of hunting were practiced in the Stone Age by the inhabitants of Europe.

Meanwhile, with the advent of the Spaniards, the horse returned to America. Already in the 17th century, herds of mustangs feral horses reached the modern state of New Mexico, and in the next century their number exceeded, according to some estimates, four million animals.

These new prairie dwellers were easy to tame. The Navajo, Comanche and Shoshone Indians were especially fond of hunting horses: they caught animals, drove around them and traded them.

In the middle of the 18th century, the Indians, engaged in agriculture, began to buy horses. Young warriors became interested in horseback riding; they discovered new hunting opportunities. But the wise elders shied away from outlandish animals. According to legend, the Cheyenne shamans fasted and conferred for four days to find out what their supreme god Maheo thought about these strange beasts that turned the heads of the young men. When they completed the Areopagus, they announced on behalf of Maheo: “If you accept horses, everything will change forever. You will be on the road all day long to tend your horses. You will leave your gardens desolate and live by hunting and gathering fruits like the Comanches. You will leave your strong homes to live in wigwams.”

Contrary to the gloomy prophecy, the Cheyenne, like other settled tribes, acquired herds of horses and began to lead a nomadic life. Basically, they had no choice. The eastern plains of America were gradually settled by white colonists. The fate of the Indians was this: either the pale faces would destroy them, or push them far to the west. The natives feared not only the "fiery guns" of their enemies. With the advent of aliens, Indian villages began to die overnight from previously unknown diseases - from smallpox and measles, whooping cough and scarlet fever.

From this danger it was necessary to run. The horses carried the Indians to the steppe. One hundred and twenty thousand people became nomads. All year round they followed the bison herds. They led huge herds of horses behind them. Historians estimate that there were ten to fifteen horses for every Indian.

It was easy for riders to hunt buffalo. Speaking in the hated dialect of the pale-faced, the Indians launched a real business. Bison skins were a good commodity. They were in great demand among whites. The skin made from such a skin was stronger than cowhide. From it, drive belts of excellent quality were obtained.

At the turn of the 19th century, the demand for durable leather increased rapidly. The industrial revolution was underway in Europe. Drive belts have been an indispensable part of many mechanisms. They transmitted the torque from steam engines to weaving and lathes, threshers, and compressors.

In exchange for skins, hunters received knives, axes, guns, gunpowder, textiles, utensils, and even whiskey. More skins, more weapons and wealth. The Indians were carried away by the division of unkilled bison.

The pursuit of profit often led to conflicts. If a herd of bulls left the lands of the tribe and went to their neighbors, then the Indians, contrary to previous agreements, invaded other people's possessions, pursuing him. When the colonists poured into the prairie, the Sioux and Cheyenne had to migrate to the west altogether, pushing the Blackfoot and Ravens, fighting with them instead of uniting to fight the whites.

The pursuit of profit slowly but surely doomed the buffalo to extinction. To pay for all new purchases, the Indians had to shoot wild bulls more and more often. Now the tactics were different. Swift horses rushed across, frightening the buffalo, and the riders, taking advantage of the confusion of the animals, diligently exterminated them.

The herds thinned imperceptibly. However, there was no longer any hope that something would change in the future. The debit of the wolves, the elements and the Indians was irreparably broken. The man got the upper hand. A rider with a gun defeated a foot soldier with a spear. The stake in this game was the life of the buffalo, and ultimately the life of the Indians themselves. By exterminating the bulls, they found food; having exterminated, they would have found starvation.

There was another reason why the number of bison was declining. Huge herds of mustangs roaming the steppe ate the same as the bison. They became their competitors, gradually pushing the bulls aside.

The docs show the following. If at the beginning of the century several thousand buffalo skins entered the market annually, by 1830 this number had increased to 130 thousand. By the middle of the nineteenth century, hunting was put on a grand scale. Thus, in 1849, the Sioux and Cheyenne sold 110,000 buffalo skins to buyers from the American Fur Company.

The company's steamboats cruised the Missouri, the Red River, and Arkansas, reaching the most remote corners of the country. The Indians diligently replenished the warehouses of the company, receiving a modest fee for this. Over the years, they got paid worse and worse. Sometimes only "fire water" was the reward for the shooter who knocked down the buffalo.

The Indians hunted as ruthlessly as the white poachers. Here are eyewitness accounts. In 1805, M. Lewis, who lived for some time among the Indians of the Mandan tribe, participated in a large raid. The Indians drove a whole herd of bulls to the cliff. Then they wandered among the corpses, choosing individual tidbits. Hundreds of carcasses, broken in the fall, they left to rot. George Catlin, describing Indian customs in 1830, reports that buffalo hunters cut out the tongues of the bulls they killed - a favorite delicacy - and skinned, and the carcass was left to rot. Another eyewitness who was a prisoner of the Sioux in the middle of the century recalled: “Often the Indians kill for fun and exterminate them in large numbers. Each takes the part that pleases him most, and the rest is left to rot or leave to be eaten by wolves. So extravagantly they manage with prey.

The Indians seemed to be prosperous. "Greedy pale-faced" were ready to pay for such an affordable thing as the skin of a wild bull.

The Indians were wrong. A drought awaited them. It broke out in the late fifties. The herds of bison have drastically decreased. At times, hunters could barely find food, let alone get anything to sell.

The recent "rich" were dying in poverty. In search of food, they hunted hares, caught locusts, and dug up roots. In 1860, only about 60,000 Indians remained on the American prairies. So, for some half a century, their numbers have halved.

A good Indian is a dead bison

Other readers remember the picture drawn by G. Longfellow: “And around the green foliage the forest rustled, the branches swayed, and through the branches light and shadows, sliding along the ground, played.” The idyll is deceptive. The good children of Nature, the Indians who spoke to cedars and beavers, were ready to kill a huge buffalo in a few sips of whiskey.

In 1809, Alexander Henry, a merchant, saw the same picture when he visited the Blackfoot Indian tribe. According to him, there were so many carcasses that the Indians squeamishly selected only the meat of females. “They didn’t touch the males at all. The stench was unbearable."

So did the ancestors of these hunters. Archaeologists conducting excavations in the southern United States, in the state of Colorado, discovered about two hundred bison skeletons in the Olsen-Chubbuck Canyon. Eight thousand years ago, a herd of wild bulls, driven into a gorge, crashed here. The ancient Indians used part of the prey, but, as the study showed, they did not even touch the forty carcasses.

Often hunters set fire to grass in the prairie. Fire, human cries and noise frightened the bison. They turned to the side. The herd was running into a trap. The hunters ran up to the wounded animals and finished them off with spears and arrows. The prey was taken home together. Along the way, sometimes thousands of animals died from the fire, although the tribe could only use a few carcasses. Undoubtedly, this ancient tactic contributed to the extermination of the "megafauna" of America.

“It is very likely,” wrote the American historian K. Keram, “that the ancient hunters preferred to kill the young (it was easier and safer, and its meat was tastier than that of adult animals), and this reduced the chances of survival of entire species.”

“It is impossible to prove for sure that it was man who is responsible for the extinction of large animals,” writes the German historian Joachim Radkau in the pages of his recently published book “Nature and Power. World History of the Environment". However, all evidence indicates that they are exterminated by people. Since time immemorial, people have learned to bait animals with fire, luring them into the abyss. In many places where Stone Age man hunted, huge heaps of bones are found. One can recall the remains of over a thousand mammoths in Moravia or over a hundred thousand wild horses in the French Solutre. Ancient hunters could kill small animals in units, fighting with a stone, arrow or spear. Their weapons were powerless against a large beast, so they exterminated it by the thousands.

As long as the number of one or another type of animal was large enough, "the debit of wolves, elements and Indians" was not terrible for him. However, if the balance was disturbed, catastrophe followed. Climate fluctuations, a sudden epidemic, the onslaught of new enemies brought another animal species to the brink of extinction. This is what happened to the bison. They, like the Indians themselves, were doomed. The sudden appearance on the scene of adventurers like Buffalo Bill and generals who said "a good Indian is a dead buffalo" only hastened the denouement. Events unfolded with astonishing speed.

Eventually, the few survivors of the war retired to the reservation. Generals and politicians counted the victories, and zoologists counted the surviving bison. By the beginning of the 20th century, only about five hundred wild bulls remained, living under protection in Yellowstone National Park in the United States, as well as on some ranches. Then the Society for the Rescue of the Buffalo was created. Almost extinct animals began to breed.

Alexander Volkov