herds specifically to subjugate the Plains cultures, or whether it was a word-of-mouth strategy. Regardless, General Sherman was determined to reduce bison herds. “As long as Buffalo are up on the Republican [River], the Indians will go there,” the general wrote to his friend, General Sheridan, in 1868 from Fort Laramie in the Wyoming Territory. “I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. Until the Buffalo and consequent(ly) Indians are out (from between) the Roads we will have collisions and trouble.”50 The army was so intent on gaining the assistance of buffalo hunters to kill bison that it gave them ammunition for free.
Sherman’s proposal was not made jokingly, notes David D. Smits. A historian focused largely on the American frontier following the Civil War, Smits’s research revealed that the upper echelon of the army “routinely sponsored and outfitted civilian hunting expeditions onto the plains.” “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s reputation and nickname was built on killing bison, and he often lived up to that repute. In the fall of 1871, he led a group of newspaper editors from New York and Chicago, businessmen, General Sheridan, and fellow soldiers into the prairie not far from present-day North Platte, Nebraska, for a hunt. They wound up slaughtering more than six hundred bison, taking only the tasty tongues and leaving the rest for scavengers.51
Robert Utley long served as chief historian for the National Park Service. One of his favorite topics, despite the many possibilities that the far-flung reach of the National Park System afforded him, was the American West, about which he wrote more than fifteen books. His examination of the frontier between 1846 and 1890 called the loss of bison a “cultural catastrophe.”52 It left Plains peoples with little option but to settle on reservations. Their daily lifeblood had been wiped out, and other wild game was following that path, too, as whites moved west. The meager prospects of living off the land as they had for generations left those placed on reservations with little incentive to flee. The cultural dynamics of western life had swung; nomadic peoples were doomed, settlements were growing. It’s been an ongoing story through history: the conquerors dictate to the conquered. As whites moved west, striving to tame the landscape, game was becoming harder to find and the nomadic life of many cultures was not just threatened but ended.53 John Fire Lame Deer didn’t know Utley, but shared his opinion. A Lakota Sioux born on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota in 1906, Lame Deer struggled with finding his identity, as many young men and women of any culture commonly do. He tried his hand on the rodeo circuit as both competitor and clown, and struggled with alcohol, gambling, and chasing women. Not unlike Wovoka and Black Elk before him, when Lame Deer reached his mid-fifties he found his calling as a Sioux holy man, one who embraced his Native American upbringing and background after an early-in-life introduction to the white culture. It was an encounter with “civilization” that soured Lame Deer on whites as a nearsighted culture that failed to appreciate the wonders and beauties the natural world offered.
Lame Deer’s affinity with the natural world gave him empathy for bison. “If brother buffalo could talk,” he said, “he would say, ‘They put me on a reservation like the Indians.’ In life and death we and the buffalo have always shared the same fate.”54
That fate was destined, directly and indirectly, by the white settlers, traders, mercantilists, and opportunists looking to make a buck however possible. Those who sold liquor, brought disease, and were determined to claim lands for themselves effectively brought down the native cultures just as they contributed to the fall of bison. The disappearance of bison, it seemed to John Fire Lame Deer, would be coupled with the disappearance of tribal cultures. “The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tepees were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy,” he said.55
The sudden loss of bison—there are estimates that bison numbers dropped from millions to hundreds in just a decade late in the nineteenth century—was crippling economically as well as physically to native cultures. Three university economists, Donna Feir and Rob Gillezeau of the University of Victoria and Maggie E. C. Jones of Queens University, described those cultures that revolved around bison as “once the richest in North America, with living standards comparable to or better than their average European contemporaries.”56 Once the bison were gone, however, these cultures became some of the poorest. The economic blow continues even today, more than a century after the Great Slaughter. Communities that depended on bison for just about everything in life—food, housing, clothing, and some medicines—had per capita income levels in 2000 that were roughly 30 percent lower than those native peoples who were not so dependent on bison. Within a generation the average heights of members of “bison-dependent nations” dropped as many as two inches due to nutritional losses. “One way to understand the effects of the decline of the bison is as one of the most dramatic devaluations of human capital in North American history,” the economists held.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the future of bison would have been assured if the great herds could have been replenished simply by driving them out of caves. It was thought that there were only about 1,110 pureblood bison in private, captive, ownership in the United States on January 1, 1908, and no more than twenty-five thought to ramble wild in Yellowstone’s interior. There were another fifty-nine bison in the park at the time, but they lived essentially as domestic livestock in a fenced pasture in the Lamar Valley.57
There was a time when bison were apex creatures on the landscape. They can regain that role, though it won’t come overnight, and it certainly won’t be easy. Cattle long have owned the open range—during a six-year period, from 1874 to 1880, Wyoming’s cattle census alone reportedly jumped from ninety thousand to more than five hundred thousand58—and while bison might offer a better economic return, turning a thousand-head cattle operation into a thousand-head bison operation comes with significant costs. But incremental steps are being taken to regain a prominent role for bison. Today, more than a century after the Great Slaughter, native peoples are working hard to reawaken and strengthen their cultural, spiritual, economic, and health connections with bison. Some tribal governments have exerted their rights to hunt bison that move out of Yellowstone; since 2006, a small handful of tribes have been given permits from the state of Montana to hunt bison outside Yellowstone borders. In 2014, the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma brought an end to a four-decade absence of bison on its reservation by accepting animals from Badlands and Theodore Roosevelt national parks.59 Three years later, the Kalispel Tribe of Washington State received three bison from Wind Cave.60 The Blackfoot Nation in Montana has grown its own herds with bison from Canada.
Helping orchestrate some of these bison transfers is the InterTribal Buffalo Council, a collective organization of more than sixty tribes whose mission is to put bison back on reservations to foster their cultural, traditional, and spiritual relationships with the animals.61 But there’s a larger effort underway: to see one million bison roaming North America in the coming decades. As with other efforts through the past century, it’s an ambitious goal, driven by the InterTribal Buffalo Council, the National Bison Association, the Canadian Bison Association, and the Wildlife Conservation Society. While achieving such a goal—roughly doubling the current number of bison on the continent—could bring recognizable economic rewards to commercial operations, tribes also see the cultural benefits they would receive from having bison to use in ceremonies and powwows, and to improve the diets of their members.62
Each year the Council works to obtain surplus bison from parks and other conservation herds for its member tribes. It has landed federal grants to underwrite a program that supplied bison to school lunch programs on reservations in South Dakota.63 But bringing bison to the table is just one element of reawakening Native American culture among tribal youth. In 2017, 2,300 acres of federal lands were set aside in the Black Hills for the Sioux to both preserve the past and look to the future. Without a connection to their cultural past, younger generations of Sioux could struggle to define what they want in their future. Land tied to their cultural history is, of course, a solid connection. As is regaining
