Buffalo β more scientifically called the American bison β are perhaps one of the most iconic animals of North America. They certainly show up in any modern-day adaptations of the Wild West and the Great Plains. And when they aren't making a guest appearance as gentle, roaming titans on the horizon, they show up in death. In fact, the sign of their deaths, the truly iconic bleached-white bison skull, is one the most recognizable symbols of the colonized Western prairies and deserts.
Buffalo nowadays are known largely as game animals. They have a deep relationship with hunting that, in fact, extends all the way back to the nineteenth century, when American Indians (mostly for food and resources) and Euro-Americans (largely for sport and hides) killed them in great numbers. Watching modern-day hunts, like the one shown in the video on the right, had me thinking about the historical ones and what they said about American culture.
Buffalo and death go hand in hand. One of the most major ecological events of western America was the near-complete devastation of the once-massive herds of bison that populated the plains. Over the span of about just a decade, from the early 1870s to the early 1880s, the number of buffalo walking the West dropped from what was estimated to be in the magnitude of tens of millions all the way down to just mere hundreds. Such unbelievable destruction of living beings was tied to a huge range of factors, from economic to social to military.
In my research project, I am arguing that we need to view the bison decline through its cultural side, specifically through the lens of colonialism. The fall of the buffalo, from extreme overhunting by white hunters and additional contributions by the U.S. military and government, led directly to preventable conflict between the young United States and the indigenous peoples on its frontier who relied on the buffalo heavily for food and resources. As bison were hunted, Indians were essentially indirectly hunted alongside the animal. Efforts from the military to prop up the bison hunters, by providing them weapons and encouragement, as well as government support for the hunts were part of the growing American state's management of Indians at its edge. By draining a vital resource, Euro-American officials and hunters alike effectively "herded" Indians into reservations to make room for white settlers. The buffalo and their decline were inherently tied to and accelerated the oppression of Indians and takeover of their lands, advancing a process of settler colonialism across the Plains.
Overall, I want to contribute to the conversation around the bison decline by taking a deeper look into the Euro-American culture aspect of the phenomenon. I find much of the current scholarly discussion on this topic, especially when it comes to the involvement of the military and government, tends to overlook the social and cultural sides of the event and why that would matter. They focus on a more purely historical way of examining the decline, debating the exact causes and surrounding context and who was involved in what way. However, I would like to see the bison for how they reflected attitudes around colonialism, conquest, and Indians. I'm using The Border and the Buffalo, the memoir of bison hunter and military member John R. Cook, to examine those cultural aspects. By looking at the decline as a colonialist effort, I'm hoping to reframe the event and those involved in a new light.
In this highly interconnected situation, American civilians were not innocent at all. In fact, when looking into the bison decline, the actions of everyday white Americans were some of the most shocking. Scholar C. C. Rister describes how thanks to new railways, "hundreds of travellers, passing over these lines, carried rifles with them and shot the buffaloes from the windows of the train coaches for the sport of seeing them fall" as the population of bison took a massive fall. For many Americans, the buffalo's crisis was their entertainment. So what better way to delve into the cultural side of this phenomenon than by engaging in it?
Let's shoot some buffalo! There's an interesting point of discussion underneath each luxurious, highly profitable hide.
Sources:
Rister, C. C. βThe Significance of the Destruction of the Buffalo in the Southwest.β The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1, 1929, pp. 34β49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30237207. Accessed 14 April 2021.
Railway Image: https://www.loc.gov/resource/cph.3c33890/