The Buffalo and the Policy Behind the Slaughter

A story that has circulated for more than a century holds that General Philip Sheridan once told Texas lawmakers the buffalo hunters deserved a medal, a dead buffalo on one side and a defeated tribe on the other, for destroying the Indians' commissary and ending armed resistance on the Plains. Historians have found no record that the Texas legislature ever considered such a bill, and most now regard the story as apocryphal, likely invented decades later.

What is not in dispute is what happened to the buffalo.

Between eighteen seventy and eighteen eighty-three, professional hunters with long-range rifles reduced the North American bison population from an estimated thirty to sixty million animals to fewer than three hundred. They took the hides and left the carcasses to rot. The southern herd was effectively gone by eighteen seventy-eight. The northern herd, which ranged through the Dakotas and Montana, was gone by eighteen eighty-three. Theodore Roosevelt arrived that same year and found almost nothing to hunt.

The nations of the Northern Plains had built their entire civilization around the bison: food, shelter, tools, ceremony. The elimination of the herds and the confinement to reservations were not separate policies. They were the same policy expressed by different means.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park now maintains a free-ranging bison herd of several hundred animals restored from a remnant population. The National Bison Range in Montana began returning to Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes management under legislation signed in December of twenty twenty, with full tribal management completed in twenty twenty-two, among the first transfers of its kind for a federal wildlife refuge in the lower forty-eight states. The restoration is partial and recent. The reckoning is ongoing.