The Lightbulb Moment 💡

The U.S. military and government in the mid-nineteenth century played one of the biggest roles in the hunts. Numerous officials from both encouraged the hunting to continue as a way for them to deal with Indians. The idea was that if they could get rid of the buffalo, Plains Indians would lose a reliable source of food and resources (like bison hides) and they'd become weakened enough for America to be able to take over the Plains.

Reservations were an important idea. President Grant made it one of the goals of his administration to manage Indians, ideally forming a peace between them and the still-growing America. This was meant to result in Indians settling down on reservations. However, he held onto some highly assimilationist views that I believe contributed to his policies around the buffalo hunts — Grant infamously put a stop to a buffalo protection bill during this time. Grant's Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, was more open about his opinions; he stated outright that he believed the end of the bison would finally "civilize" nomadic Indians, who would be forced to settle down and assimilate.

Out of the government and military, General Sheridan might be the most well known when it comes to the bison hunts. He's mentioned extremely often in many different aspects of the bison hunts, almost always regarding how he celebrated the decline. Most infamously, he's known for a speech he apparently made to the Texas legislature where he directly connected the decline of bison to the pacifying of Indians (a story retold in John R. Cook's The Border and the Buffalo, the memoir I'm examining in my paper). It is so incredibly dense with colonialist ideas, it's difficult to know where to even start. Have a look yourself:

General Philip Sheridan | Image

[Sheridan] told them that instead of stopping the hunters they ought to give them a hearty, unanimous vote of thanks, and appropriate a sufficient sum of money to strike and present to each one a medal of bronze, with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other. He said: "These men have done in the last two years and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but, for the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle, and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization” (Cook 113).

Let's finish annihilating a whole species across the span of an entire continent. Shoot some more buffalo!

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Sources:

Cook, John R. The Border and the Buffalo: An Untold Story of the Southwest Plains. Crane & Company, 1907.