The Revered? Buffalo

Scrutinizing the historical record on buffalo jumps

Image from MeatEater

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“First Nations societies pre-contact were highly developed and sophisticated cultures with systems that nurtured their members, designed technologies suited to their needs and surroundings, and lived harmoniously with their natural environment.” - Assembly of First Nations, Learning Modules

By Pim Wiebel (an anonymous researcher and former Indian Residential School teacher)

Among the many “proofs” offered in First Nations circles to support the claim of a pre-contact Eden imbued with an ethos of environmental harmony, is the idea that before the Europeans arrived, the buffalo was considered sacred, treated with great respect, and killed only in numbers that would sustain it in perpetuity.

Each of these notions require scrutiny.

For the Great Plains tribes, the buffalo was an essential source of food and of materials for tools, clothing and lodges. It is unsurprising that the buffalo featured prominently in tribal mythology. Among the Blackfoot, the animal was considered Nato’ye (of the Sun) sacred and to have great power. Buffalo skulls were placed at the top of the medicine lodges and prominently featured at communal ceremonies.

It is ubiquitously asserted that the tribes only killed as many buffalo as they needed for their sustenance between hunts, and that every part of the animal was used. A Canadian history website suggests, “The buffalo hunt was a major community effort and every part of the slaughtered animal was used.” An American publication states, presumptuously: “It’s one of the cliches of the West; Native Americans used all the parts of the buffalo. It’s something that almost everyone knows, whether you are interested in history or not.” The Assembly of First Nations weighs in, teaching Canadian school children in their heavily promoted “Learning Modules,” that “Hunters took only what was necessary to survive. Every part of the animal was used.”

But was the Indigenous relationship with the buffalo in reality one of supreme reverence? Was every part of the animal used, and were the buffalo always killed only in numbers that would satisfy immediate needs while ensuring the sustainability of the herds?

The evidence suggests something quite different.

Archaeologists have studied ancient buffalo “jump sites”, places where Indigenous bands hunted buffalo herds by driving them over high cliffs. Investigations of sites from the Late Archaic period (1000 B.C. to 700 A.D.) reveal that many more buffalo than could be used were killed and that rotting heaps of only partially butchered bison carcasses were left behind.

Buffalo jumps continued to be used as a hunting method long after first contact with Europeans. Early Canadian fur trader and explorer Alexander Henry, made the following entry on May 29th, 1805 in his diary of travels in the Missouri country: “Today we passed on the Stard. (starboard) side the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffaloe which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses they created a most horrid stench. In this manner the Indians of the Missouri distroy vast herds of buffaloe at a stroke..”

Alexander Henry described how the buffalo jump unfolded. The hunters approached the herd from the rear and sides, and chased it toward a cliff. A particularly agile young man disguised in a buffalo head and robe positioned himself between the herd and the cliff edge, luring the animals forward. Henry was told on one occasion that the decoy sometimes met the same fate as the buffalo: “The part of the decoy I am informed is extremely dangerous if they are not very fleet runers the buffaloe tread them under foot and crush them to death, and sometimes drive them over the precipice also, where they perish in common with the buffaloe.”

The Blackfoot called their jump sites Pishkun, meaning “deep blood kettle”. It is not difficult to imagine the horrendous bawling of the animals that suffered physical trauma from the fall but did not immediately succumb. Did the hunters have the ability, or even make an attempt, to put them out of their misery with dispatch? We do not know.

Entrapment by fire was another method employed in the hunts. In the 1670s, Father Louis Hennepin observed the practice in the Miami country southeast of Lake Michigan. He wrote, “When they see a herd the Indians assemble in great numbers they set fire to the grass all around these animals except for one passage left on purpose. There the Indians station themselves with their bows and arrows. The buffaloes, wanting to avoid the fire, are thus forced to pass by the Indians, who at times kill as many as a hundred and twenty of them in one day.”

Early travellers to the Plains observed mounds of putrified buffalo carcasses left behind to rot. Much of the buffalo was wasted. During a visit to the Blackfoot territory in 1809, Alexander Henry noted that the hunters took only the best parts of meat. Francis Antonie Larocque, a French-Canadian trader, traveled to the Upper Missouri River in 1805 to initiate trade. He noted in his journal, “When hunting they take but the fattest part of an animal and leave the remainder.” Artist Paul Kane, whose paintings depicted the life of the Indians of western Canada in the early 19th century, remarked that the Indians “destroy innumerable buffaloes,” and he suggested that only “one in twenty is used in any way by the Indians” while “thousands are left to rot where they fall.”

Charles McKenzie wrote in 1804 that the Gros Ventre killed whole herds only for their tongues. The tongues were especially valued because of their high fat content.

The introduction of the horse and rifle to the Plains made the killing of buffalo more efficient. The horse provided more mobility, and hence the ability to move frequently to exploit bison herds, leaving fewer “refuge areas”. It also allowed the acquisition of more possessions, including larger teepees (utilizing more hides) since pack horses could move them.

By the early 1800s, traders and visitors to the plains noted the decimation of buffalo populations. In Manitoba, Metis hunters killed over 650,000 bison during the period 1820 to 1840. Fur trader, Alexander Ross, observed the Metis hunts and noted that “the great characteristic of all western hunts of buffalo, elk or antelope, was waste.” By 1847 bison were extirpated from southern Manitoba, northern Minnesota, and North Dakota.

To the south, the Comanches were killing 280,000 or more buffalo annually during the 1830s, primarily to satisfy the demand for meat and hides. In the 1840s, the 60,000 or so Plains Indians were killing over 600,000 buffalo a year, well beyond the range of sustainability.

The Indians concentrated their killing on the cows, which had more tender meat and were much easier to skin and treat. This resulted in severe damage to the herds' reproductive capacity. Most of the market hunting took place in the winter when buffalo hair was longest and thickest. This was also the time when the cows, valued for their tender meat and soft skin, were pregnant.

It is widely assumed that white commercial hunters caused the demise of the bison herds. As the population of Europeans in the plains was very small until the 1870s, however, hunting by whites was a relatively insignificant factor in the depletion of buffalo herds before that time.

(As an aside, doubt has been cast on a widely held view that the United States army spurred white hunters on to wipe out the buffalo herds. The claim rests on a memoir written by a Texas buffalo hunter in which he alleges that an army general delivered a speech to the state legislature urging the lawmakers to reject a bill to protect the buffaloes. No record of such a speech has been found to exist, and in fact, after hearing of the slaughter of thousands of buffaloes on one occasion in Montana in 1879, the general telegrammed Washington, saying, “I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the buffalo should be stopped.”)

While the buffalo population of the Plains came under pressure earlier, the threat of decimation became existential only by the late 1860s, after which the commercial markets for buffalo hides and meats grew exponentially. The westward expansion of the railways in the 1870s and 1880s in particular made possible the transportation of heavy buffalo hides to the East for use in industrial machine belts.

Commercial uses were found as well for the bones of buffalo that died of natural causes or in hunts. Over several years, the Indigenous and settlers collected millions of pounds of skeletons that littered the prairies, and carted them for sale to traders at the rail heads. From there, the bones were transported to factories where they were crushed for fertilizer or distilled into animal charcoal for filtering and purifying sugar syrup. Some were also used in the manufacture of buttons.

Although the Plains tribes had become full participants in commercial buffalo hunting and in the decimation of the herds well before the 1870s, they persisted with the slaughter in that decade. Between 1874 and 1877, between 80,000 to 100,000 buffalo hides were shipped from Fort Benton in Montana annually, with 12,000 hides contributed by the Blackfeet tribe alone.

Recognizing the impending depletion of the buffalo herds, the government of Canada in 1877 promulgated the Ordinance for the Protection of the Buffalo. The ordinance contained regulations limiting the hunting of females and calves and outlawing mass killing methods such as buffalo pounds and jumps. The law, however, was poorly enforced, and was soon repealed. Hunting by First Nations and Metis continued unabated.

By 1879, the buffalo had virtually disappeared on the Canadian side of the forty-ninth parallel; on the American side that occurred by 1883.

Fortunately, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dozens of conservation groups associated with national parks and zoological societies, as well as private individuals, took action to replenish the few remaining buffalo herds. A few Indigenous tribes began similar work far later in the 1990s. Thanks to modern sensibilities, buffalo are now “dispatched” for food and other purposes with methods that avoid the animals’ suffering as much as possible.

It is ironic that native mythology may have played a role in the continuation of the buffalo hunt even after the warnings of possible extinction.

The Comanches held that nature would provide an inexhaustible supply:

“Faith in the supernatural origin and qualities of the buffalo may have had far reaching consequences for how Comanches responded to the bison’s decline. Although Comanches undoubtedly intimately understood the dynamics of wildlife populations and the environmental and human-induced causes of buffalo mortality, they could also believe that the bison's abundance was ultimately a matter of the supernatural realm. These two sets of belief were at odds only superficially, for conservation meant maintaining a total relationship with the animals through ceremonies and rituals rather than by tracking actual numbers or densities of the species. The root of the disaster, then, was that the Comanches may have realized that the bison herds were dwindling yet remained convinced that there would always be buffalo so long as the proper rituals were observed. Unable to envision the bison's extinction, Comanches were also unable to envision a way to conserve them.”

Other tribes held the belief that the buffalo seasonally disappeared to lake-bottom grasslands, and would always return.

I will close with the observations of noted archaeologists and ecologists that counter the popular myth that traditional, indigenous societies were unique in possessing a cultural or even genetical predisposition to nurture and care for the natural environment. Author and ecologist George Wuerther writes:

“Many authors today suggest that Indigenous people somehow behaved differently from other humans, particularly western culture that now dominates the globe in their relationship and exploitation of natural lands. The general theme is that while the human influence pre-European contact was significant, human exploitation was tempered by cultural values and techniques that did not disrupt ecosystem processes. Some suggest that conservation lands would be better managed with more positive outcomes for ecological integrity if Indigenous peoples were given oversight and control of these lands.

“The idea that somehow either through cultural values or even “genetics” Indigenous people are more likely to protect and enhance biodiversity and other conservation values is widespread. But the other possibility that I think provides more explanation is that across the globe, wherever there was a low human population and limited technology, people “appeared” to live in “balance” more or less with natural landscapes. This is just as true of Celtic people in the British Isles, Mongols in the Asian Steppes, Bedouin people in the Middle East, or Africans in the Congo.

“What is common in all these instances is low population and low technology. Change these factors, and humans everywhere, no matter their religion, race, or cultural identity, frequently overexploit the land. With modern technology, medicine, food availability and other factors, including dependency on the global economy, almost all indigenous people are freed from these prior constraints. Indeed, have been freed for several centuries in most places.

“Such ideas are frequently guilty of the False Cause Fallacy. Correlation is not Causation. The False Cause Fallacy occurs when we wrongly assume that one thing leads to something else because we’ve noticed what appears to be a relationship between them.

“The fallacy is saying in times past because there were more wolves or more bison or whatever when Indigenous people occupied a specific location, it was due to the people’s cultural values.”

Research at ancient Mayan sites has revealed that during the 9th century, Maya civilization met its demise as a result of the overuse of natural resources. Archaeologists Robert Griffin and Tom Sever, explain:

"The Maya are often depicted as people who lived in complete harmony with their environment…But like many other cultures before and after them, they ended up deforesting and destroying their landscape… at the time of their collapse, the Maya had cut down most of the trees across large swaths of the land to clear fields for growing corn to feed their burgeoning population. They also cut trees for firewood and for making building materials. They had to burn 20 trees to heat the limestone for making just 1 square meter of the lime plaster they used to build their tremendous temples, reservoirs, and monuments. Loss of all the trees caused a 3-5 degree rise in temperature and a 20-30 percent decrease in rainfall.”

The environmental collapse was accompanied with civil unrest and devastating health conditions:

"In some of the Maya city-states, mass graves have been found containing groups of skeletons with jade inlays in their teeth - something they reserved for Maya elites - perhaps in this case murdered aristocracy...No single factor brings a civilization to its knees, but the deforestation that helped bring on drought could easily have exacerbated other problems such as civil unrest, war, starvation and disease.”

Indigenous archaeologist Eldon Yellowhorn of Simon Fraser University is a champion of the notion that pre-contact tribal life was nothing less than an idyllic Eden. To his credit, Yellowhorn refrains from repeating the common misconceptions that the tribes only killed buffalo in numbers that would satisfy their immediate needs and used every part of the animal. Yellowhorn concedes that there is “plenty of archaeological evidence to support the notion that they [the Indians] butchered only a few [buffalo] each time and left the rest to rot away under the prairie sun.” But then, he offers an artful interpretation of the Indigenous slaughter of the buffalo, explaining that it was simply a function of the Indigenous people playing their role in the ecological balance: “Once the Indians have taken their share, the remainder is available for scavenging. FeraI dogs, prairie wolves, coyotes, plains grizzly bears, crows, ravens, magpies, turkey vultures, and many more species, all flourished directly from the communal hunts…The act of sending buffalo over a cliff was not one of waste…rather it was the moment when the complex food chain that depends on it was served.”

We cannot know whether the Indigenous hunters conceptualized the overharvest and waste of the buffalo in the ecological terms Yellowhorn suggests. However, we can be assured that thanks to modern-day efforts to secure the survival of our “brother/sister”, we can all continue to commune with the magnificent animal in public and private sanctuaries across the North American continent.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Were Indian Residential Schools Cauldrons of Abuse?

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