the world, the agrarian way of life began to dominate, resulting in the fall of hunting. The agrarian mode gained momentum when it became clear that hunting and gathering, and the nomadic life that went with it, was an arduous and doomed existence.
By about ad 1500, hunter-gatherers still retained a hold on about one-third of the world’s land mass (Australia, the northwestern half of North America, the southernmost part of South America, isolated regions in central and southern Africa, and scattered parts of Asia). But the agrarian producers had expanded at a steady rate and commanded the best soil and land for growing and for horticulture, and they had access to the best water. The remaining hunters were frequently stigmatized and marginalized until at last they were seen as the enemy.
The hunter-gatherers who began colonizing North America, however, from about 12,000 to 11,000 bc, were probably more fortunate than other nomadic hunting cultures in their choice of hunting grounds. According to recent theories, they might have been preceded by a contingent of hunters who first settled on the islands of the West Coast around 15,000 years ago. But the largest, most prolific colonists are believed to have descended from Alaska along a newly opened corridor, freed from ice, as though eternal spring had at last been declared.
The first of these people arrived about 11,000 bc at the northwesternmost extension of the Great Plains and gathered, yes, around my hometown of Edmonton. Well, it wasn’t quite Edmonton back then. The great hunters descending from the Bering land bridge and Alaska would search for evidence of Wayne Gretzky in vain. But in that place where, as a young man, I began to wonder where my dad and I had acquired such an avid taste for the hunt, the first pioneers gathered and multiplied, and their newfound success had much to do with hunting.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond tells us that, at this time, the North American West looked like “Africa’s Serengeti Plains . . . with herds of elephants and horses pursued by lions and cheetahs, and joined by members of such exotic species as camels and giant ground sloths.” The great wealth of Clovis sites tells us that these huge mammals were hunted with bow and arrow and with impressively large spears. Indeed, the bulkier, more exotic mammals were hunted to extinction. The Clovis hunters continued to follow their quarry southward into the Americas, and as the largest of the mammals began to disappear, various groups of hunter-gatherers evolved into agricultural communities.
This evolution of agricultural settlements was modest and very slow, because in vast areas of the Americas, such as the Great Plains, there was a lot of buffalo and not much of an incentive to move on from hunting and gathering. Hunting cultures persisted into the age of the railroad. For about ten thousand years, their main quarry was the bison. Liz Bryan, in The Buffalo People, put it this way:
Seldom in the history of the Earth has a single animal species had such drastic influence on humanity. Without the bison, it is doubtful if people could have existed at all on the arid plains; certainly not in the way that they did. For the bison was much more than a food source; its hide provided shelter, clothing, shoes, bedding and blankets; its bones were made into tools for shaping stone, scraping hides, working leather and for sewing; its sinews and hair were twisted into cordage; its horns, bladder, paunch and scrotum were used as containers; its dried dung was indispensable as fuel on the treeless plains. Tied inexorably to the movements of the wild herds . . . the people became nomads, following the source of their sustenance in daily and seasonal cycles from the high plains in summer to the shelter of the foothills and valleys in winter. If the herds prospered, the people prospered; when the herds failed, the people starved.
BRYAN RECOUNTS THAT the bison occupied a central role in the mythology of the people who lived off these animals. In their creation stories, the buffalo was an object of worship as the ultimate source of life. These stories constituted a kind of oral scripture that included tales of people and bison intermarrying, which seemed to suggest a mutual ancestry of the two species and the all-encompassing symbiosis between humans and buffalo. Just as the hunting peoples of the Far North maintained a strong spiritual connection to the caribou, so the hunting peoples of the Great Plains were strongly connected to the buffalo.
It is tempting to wonder if, out of this bison-centered religion, a conservation ethic might have come into play. Like all the emerging hunting peoples of the world, the people of the northwestern plains killed as many buffalo as they needed to feed their hungry. Unlike the great ice age mammals that were hunted to extinction, however, the great herds of buffalo seemed to go on and on into eternity—as though the animals and their hunters had struck some sort of balance. At their peak, the bison were said to number fifty to sixty million animals.
On the Great Plains, for perhaps ten millennia, the people hunted buffalo on foot with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. They would frequently hunt in large groups on the prairie above river valleys, first alarming the great bison then driving them over the edges of steep inclines known as buffalo jumps. At the bottom of these jumps, the foot soldiers, men and women, waited to kill and butcher the crippled animals. Where there were no river valleys or steep coulees, the hunters built buffalo pounds in dips and declivities in the prairie. Above these walled-in corrals made of stone, the men and women would pile rocks on both sides of the run to guide the bison toward the pound, which the animals could not see. The hunters then drove the animals into a wild stampede, and some of them would run into the pound and be slaughtered by waiting hunters with bows and arrows. A pound could contain two or three dozen animals. The weapons were like miniature longbows, some of them less than three feet long, tillered from chokecherry trees, green ash, maple, and even the trunks of saskatoon berry bushes.
This kind of hunting was dangerous, especially driving the bison, which was done on foot. The drives suddenly became more efficient when horses were introduced from the south, about a century after Columbus made first contact. Horses did not reach the northwestern plains in any numbers, however, until around the end of the seventeenth century. By a process of tribal rivalries and trading by Aboriginal groups, the horses made their way north to the Canadian prairie.
It was primarily the Shoshones, kin to the Comanche, who brought the horses north as part of their conquest of the Great Plains. For a long time, the Shoshones, and their greatest allies the Crows, were the dominant tribe on the central and northern prairie. Their horses were first deployed in the buffalo hunt, but by the early eighteenth century, they were enlisted in battle. The Shoshones, with their mounted warriors, presented such a terrifying spectacle that they sent the Cree and Blackfoot north in droves.
The Cree and Blackfoot didn’t take long to acquire horses and learn to ride them. They took even less time to trade their goods for muskets, metal tools, and other weapons with the French and English traders. In a decade or so, the Shoshones were sent packing, and the buffalo hunt, the high-tech version of it, spread over the northwestern plains.
By about 1730, the hunters on the Great Plains were able to use horses to herd buffalo to the edge of the jumps instead of doing all of this work on foot. They had learned as well to work with the dogs they had domesticated to help with the hauling. Now they could chase the buffalo and shoot them with muskets or, if not exclusively with muskets, with steel arrow and lance points. The bow-and-arrow hunters still had a big advantage over the musket hunters, because a man with a musket had only one chance to kill a buffalo. By the time he had reloaded, the entire herd would have stampeded away from him. Arrows were silent and accurate, and a good hunter could loose many arrows in a short period of time.
The buffalo were at last driven from the land on the Canadian prairie around 1890. Again, it is difficult to find any evidence of efforts to conserve the bison herds. Native hunters on the grasslands discovered that they could trade for guns, steel arrow points, and tobacco with pemmican. This dried-meat-and-berry mixture was in high demand by the voyageurs, who found it very nourishing. It was usually made from buffalo meat. Eventually the bison hunters were able to trade for repeating rifles, rather than the single-shot muskets of the early eighteenth century. Thus, a party of hunters with breech-loading repeating rifles could kill more bison by shooting them from a greater distance than
