The story of the American buffalo (Bison bison; formally known as American bison) is steeped in legend, mythology, and controversy. Recent research has shed light on the full history, affirming portions of most stories.

The first rise: evolution with Native Americans

The species evolved with humans and spread thru human land management practices. Early Native Americans arrived in North America at least 20,000 years ago (a date that keeps being pushed back further), but didn’t move onto the Great Plains until about 13,000 years ago. Buffalo as we know them today did not yet exist. The Great Plains were still emerging from the Ice Age. The Dakotas were still covered with forest or even glacial ice.

Early Natives (generally associated with the Clovis and Folsom cultures) “especially targeted several species of mammoth and a species of giant, long-horned bison (Bison antiquus). Other now-extinct animals known to have been hunted, at least on occasion, by Paleo-Indians include varieties of caribou, musk ox, camels, horses, four-horned antelope, sloths, tapirs, dire wolves, peccary, and giant armadillos” (Cunfer and Waiser, eds, 2016. Bison and People of the North American Great Plains: A Deep Environmental History. Texas A&M University Press, p.4). This hunting was done with atlatls, a device that enabled a spear to be thrown at speeds up to 100 mph. Much of this hunting collapsed 3,000 years later as most of these species went extinct, almost certainly due to a combination of over-hunting and climatic shifts at the end of the Ice Age. This followed a similar pattern of large mammal extinction coincident with the arrival of humans in Europe, Asia, Australia, and even Madagascar.

Deer, elk, moose, and caribou remained. And buffalo. Bison bison, a smaller, faster version of Bison antiquus, evolved from that species to quickly fill the void left by the extinct herbivorous megafauna on the Great Plains. There were fluctuations in both human and bison occupation of the Plains due to climatic shifts, but in general, they increased together. Early Natives, by burning young woodlands on the eastern half of the Plains, deliberately expanded buffalo habitat. They created tallgrass prairie; it would not have existed without Native land management. Long-term fire management opened up parklands suitable for buffalo and other big game across the East, ranging from small prairies to the Shenandoah Valley. Buffalo expanded. They crossed the Mississippi River around AD 1000 and spread to the US southeast by the 1500s and into New England by the 1600s. In short, like corn, buffalo were cultivated and expanded in harmony with Native nations. Consistent with most Native legends, there were a gift from the earth.

The fall

That harmony began to dissipate with the arrival of Europeans. In the East, cattle displaced buffalo. In the West, Natives quickly adopted and mastered use of the horse, which led to a major “technological” innovation in hunting. Up through the 1600s, buffalo were hunted by teams of people herding them off bluffs or down arroyos where they could be ambushed with spears. Horses allowed for small parties, even individuals, to hunt. By 1750, every tribe on the Great Plains was fully mounted.

While most buffalo were hunted for subsistence and some trade among Native nations, a small but growing market for buffalo products—first pemmican and later hides—emerged among white traders. In later years, buffalo products were often exchanged for European products such as guns or pots. The Comanche Empire built their wealth on the buffalo trade, practically turning Spanish New Mexico into a vassal state in the late 1700s.

As with deer and beaver in the East, this market hunting led to unsustainable take. By the late 1700s, the commercial take exceeded the subsistence take, the southern Plains bison were over-hunted by about 40,000 animals per year, and whites had scarcely started hunting them yet. That said, there were still so many millions of buffalo that the decline was within normal variation caused by droughts or harsh winters.

Then things got worse. In the early 1800s, market hunting by Natives increased, fueled by Hudson’s Bay Company in the north and a market in New Orleans that exported 100,000 buffalo robes each year. In 1840, a peace treaty between the Comanche and Kiowa nations in the south and various northern tribes opened the door to more hunting. At the same time, large Native horse herds competed with buffalo for winter forage, leading to increased mortality. As early as the 1840s, Kiowa and Lakota winter robes reported fewer buffalo. By 1850, the total buffalo population fell below 20 million; they had declined a third, but were still plentiful.

Then things got much worse. After the Gold Rush in California, white pioneer trails destroyed forage in riparian corridors, critical for buffalo during winter. A massive drought from 1856 thru 1864 reduced the carrying capacity of the southern Plains about 50%. Buffalo populations, which had been falling at a rate of 40,000/year, now fell 400,000/year. By 1870, the total population fell below 10 million.

Then the “white hunt” began. Fueled by a commercial interest in buffalo leather and a military campaign to ethnically cleanse the Great Plains of Native Americans, white hunters began to take a million buffalo each year. In 1873, while “Home on the Range” was written, white hunters killed 1.5 million buffalo; Natives killed less than 10% of that number. Ten years later, the southern bison herd was extinct. In the north, only remnants remained. 

In 1878, when the Comanches were imprisoned in a concentration camp at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a small group was allowed off the reservation to conduct a traditional buffalo hunt. They returned stunned and dejected, finding only bones on the Plains.

In 1886, believing buffaloes were on the brink of extinction, the National Museum sent taxidermist William Hornaday to Montana to collect a few final specimens for their collection. On the evening of October 16, they shot a huge bull, but left it for the night, planning to return in the morning. When they arrived the next day, they reported, “To our great dismay the noble red men had visited the bull which we had killed the day before. All that remained was the head painted red on one side yellow on the other with a red & yellow rag tied to one horn, eleven notches cut in the other…. All around were moccasin tracks.” A ceremony had taken place.

The Crow chief Plenty-Coups, in telling his life story to a biographer, refused to speak about the years after the disappearance of the buffalo. “After this,” he said, “nothing happened.”

The second rise

In 1889, less than a thousand buffalo remained. White society then sought to protect them. Bison preserves were established at Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and at the National Bison Range in Montana.

Today there are about half a million buffalo, nearly all confined to preserves. Less than 10% are free ranging, and even those have limits imposed by cattle ranching concerns. Most bison today are managed like cattle by private ranchers. The only semi-wild herds are managed by the federal government, non-profits, or Native tribes. The largest wild herd is at Yellowstone National Park, with 4,000 buffalo.

From Montana to Oklahoma and beyond, Native communities are playing a critical role in bison restoration and continue to push for buffalo restoration to open lands. Among the leaders are the Fort Peck Indian Reservation (Assiniboine, Nakota, Lakota, and Dakota) and the Blackfeet, who hosted the Buffalo Treaty among 13 Native nations across the US and Canada in 2014 to promote buffalo conservation and restoration. Both to restore the species and their own cultures, it is their dream to see wild buffalo across thousands of acres of the high plains.