Native Food - 9C = Settlers' Cattle Replace Indians' Bison

The interdependence between Indian and buffalo is exemplified in the words of John Fire Lame Deer (1903–1976), a Lakota holy man, wrote, "The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis 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. Out of his skin we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a red-hot stone dropped in to it, became our soup kettle. His horns were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women's awls and needles. Out of his sinews we made our bowstrings and thread. His ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was our sacred altar. The name of the greatest of all Sioux was Tatanka Iyotake—Sitting Bull. When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian—the real, natural, "wild" Indian."

Buffalo once roamed from the eastern seaboard to Oregon & California, from Great Slave Lake in northern Alberta down into northern Mexico. Although no one will ever know exactly how many bison once inhabited North America, estimates range from 20 to 40 million.

William Temple Hornaday (1854-1937) a naturalist & a founder of the American conservation movement, who spent considerable time in the West both before & during the most severe years of buffalo slaughter, commented on the seemingly boundless bison population & the impossibility of estimating their quantity: It would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes living at any given time during the history of the species previous to 1870.

The great herds were not decimated overnight. The slaughter was a gradual process, reaching its full momentum in the 1870s. The Native Americans of the Great Plains had relied upon & hunted buffalo for thousands of years. Without the arrival of the Caucasians—& with them the gun, the horse, & the market for bison products—it seems likely the Indians could have lived sustainably with the bison far into the future. 

However, as the plains tribes acquired horses & guns from their southern neighbors—who in turn had received them from the Spanish—the Indians were able to kill buffalo with greater ease. As the market for buffalo (particularly hides) emerged in the 1820s & as more Eastern bison hunters also came westward, the bison population began to decline precipitously.

In the 1870s, more buffalo were killed than in any other decade in history. The years of 1872, '73, & '74 were the worst. One buffalo hunter, who based his calculations on 1st hand accounts & shipping records, 4.5 million buffalo were slaughtered in that 3-year period alone.

See Buffalo Field Campaign 

"The opening up of the American plains transformed cattle farming in the United States. Until the early 1870s Texas ranchers had held great cattle drives of hundreds of thousands of lanky longhorns, urging them along a 700-mile Chisolm Trail from San Antonio direct to the stockyards of Abilene, at a rate of about a dozen miles a day. From Abilene they were taken by rail to the new meat processing plants in Chicago and Kansas City. 

But when the Great Plains were cleared of bison and the Indians who had depended upon them, the new land was opened to range cattle. What happened then was that the land Texans sent their cattle to the plains on the hoof to rest and fatten up before the last, easy journey to the stockyards, while new ranchers went into business on a massive scale, financed by the capital poured into the industry by American and foreign investors. The profits were substantial...In 1880 Kansas had sixteen times as many cattle as twenty years earlier."

Food in History

, Reay Tannahill [Three Rivers Press:New York] 1988