Outdoors: American bison making a comeback
Often (and incorrectly) referred to as the buffalo, our national mammal, the American bison (Bison bison) roamed a great expanse of land following the retreat of the glaciers that covered the American continent during the Ice Age. This area was called the Great Bison Belt, and it extended from Alaska to the Gulf of Mexico, from California to just shy of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a wide-open grassland where as many as 60 million bison roamed in massive herds, their only real threat coming from pack-hunting wolves and native Americans, who did little to threaten their numbers.
Bison are close relatives of true buffalo, African cape buffalo and water buffalo, as well as domestic cattle. Covered in shaggy fur, they are usually around 6.6 to 9.2 feet long and weigh between 1,014 and 2,178 pounds depending on age and gender. Though they’re commonly brown in color, occasionally an all-white bison will be born.
Most times, animals become endangered due to unregulated clearing of their habitat, overhunting, or perhaps the introduction of a new disease. People aren’t typically trying to intentionally wipe the animals out. This was not the case with the American bison.
During the 1860s and 1870s, many of the Europeans moving out west had great dislike for the Native Americans and wanted to keep their numbers under control. They quickly realized that many Native American cultures depended on the bison for livelihood.
Native Americans were not wasteful either, making sure to use every part of the bison they brought down not only for food, but weapons, sewing tools, utensils, shields and even in the construction of their homes.
The Europeans realized that if they could control the bison population, they could control the Native American population too. When addressing his troops in 1867, a member of the U.S. Army gave the order to “kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
A bison massacre had begun. Nor did the average hunter go out and shoot a hundred of the animals a day, but trains would ride out over the prairie so people could shoot the bison from the train windows. It has been estimated that these shooting sprees killed off more than 100,000 bison per year.
As predicted, many Native Americans could no longer support themselves on their homeland and were “willing” to be moved to reserves set aside for them by the government.
Like a stone, bison numbers dropped from tens of millions to just 1,000 animals both in the wild and in captivity by 1905. Worried that the bison might be lost forever, a group of concerned individuals from the Bronx Zoo in New York City and the New York Zoological Society joined to create the American Bison Society, with President Theodore Roosevelt elected as its honorary president. Their mission was to collect and breed small herds of bison in various parts of the country.
It took time, but the number of bison in the United States rose to around 23,340 by 1951. Native Americans joined in on the conservation act as well and started the Inter Tribal Bison Cooperative in 1990 with the intent of reintroducing the bison back to the Plains.
More than 500,000 bison can be found in North America today. Fewer than 30,000 are kept in conservation herds and around 5,000 are living in unfenced areas. There are many places around the United States, like Yellowstone National Park, where you can see majestic herds of bison roaming much like their ancestors did thousands of years ago.
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