Why the Southern Plains lost their bison: drought, horses, trade and war

In 1806, crossing the Southern Plains, Zebulon Pike wrote of bison herds that "exceeded imagination." By the 1850s, many of the Native nations that depended on bison for food, among them the Kiowas, Comanches, Cheyennes and Arapahoes, were seeing fewer of them than ever. This National Park Service article, filed under its national historic trails, asks what happened and lists several causes.

A rich grassland, then drought

An immense drought ended in the early 1300s, and bison and many other species benefited from 500 years of a wetter and cooler climate. South of the Arkansas River, near where Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas now meet, lay an especially rich habitat with mild winters, plentiful water and ample grass. Rainfall there was above average for the first four decades of the 1800s, which made the grasslands almost impossibly rich. Around 1846, the Southern Plains began to dry again.

Horses, wolves and hunters

Drought was only one reason for the decline. Horses came onto the Great Plains from New Mexico in the late 1600s and early 1700s and stressed bison populations. The Comanches, eminent riders of the Southern Plains, kept vast herds for riding and trade. Horses made bison hunting very efficient, and they also competed with bison for food and water.

The article says it is hard to tell how wolves affected bison. It adds that trappers who poisoned wolves for their pelts may have unintentionally poisoned the grass many bison relied on.

People between 1825 and 1850

Humans played an important role, especially in these years:

• Heavier traffic on the Santa Fe Trail disturbed the herds.
• New Mexican ciboleros, bison hunters, kept killing between 15,000 and 25,000 bison each year.
• Federal removal policies sent roughly 50,000 eastern Native people into present-day Oklahoma, where many were granted hunting rights on the prairies.
• Perhaps most important, shrinking herds led the Comanches and their Kiowa allies to make peace in 1840 with the Cheyennes, Arapahoes and Kiowa-Apaches.

That peace turned the prime bison habitat of the Arkansas Valley, once a boundary zone between warring nations, into a shared hunting ground, and the herd could not keep up. It also gave the Comanches and Kiowas access to William Bent's fort, where they and other Plains peoples were drawn into the busy bison robe trade. Driven by market forces, they harvested bison as never before.

War and near extinction

From the 1860s the US Army fought on the prairies to subdue the Plains Indians and open the way for settlers and railroad lines. Federal officials understood that bison mattered to Native nations that had not yet been forced onto reservations. In 1873 the Secretary of the Interior noted that "the civilization of the Indian is impossible while buffalo remain on the plains." Following that logic, the Army gave free ammunition to hide hunters, who brought bison to the brink of extinction.

By 1894, Yellowstone National Park held the only known wild herd in the United States. The article notes the irony that the Army, which managed Yellowstone, would help bring the bison back a few decades later.

Sources

• National Park Service, "What Happened to the Bison?" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/what-happened-to-the-bison.htm), filed under the Park Service's national historic trails; it cites Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850", The Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991), and Phyllis Morgan, "Buffalo on the Santa Fe Trail", Wagon Tracks 18, no. 3 (May 2004); rewritten in hubnx's own words.