Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison

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Speaker 1: For more than one hundred centuries, Native people in Bison had been enjoined in an evolutionary economic and religious relationship in the West, only to witness something that appeared timeless collapsed completely by the eighteen eighties. I’m Dan Florries, and this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion of each battle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: Enjoy responsible.

00:00:52
Speaker 1: A Dream of Bison, Part one. The fall of eighteen eighty six, Willmt. Hornaday, taxidermist at the National Museum in Washington, stepped off a train in Miles City, Montana, on a truly historic mission. The American bison, an animal whose charisma and staggering abundance had for three centuries stood as shorthand for North America to the world, somehow, was on the brink of extinction, except in remote parts of Texas, Montana, and Alberta, where rumors held there might be two or three tiny herds of wildly spooky survivors. A creature whose range had once extended from northwestern Canada to Florida, whose herds sometimes took the better part of a week for mounted horsemen to pass, was tottering on the precipice of total disappearance. The bison hunt in America was an ancient economy, going back multiple thousands of years. Now, Native people like the Blackfeet, who had often taken twenty thousand by a year, in eighteen eighty three had killed all of six. This was why Hornaday was in Montana. Stunningly, bison were on the verge of becoming little more than a memory, and the National Museum at least wanted a representative collection that might become a museum exhibit, since that was all future citizens might ever see of America’s most iconic creature. The Horneday Party’s goal was to obtain twenty to thirty specimens, which the scientists understood might represent as many as half of the wild bison left in the United States. He had narrowed his search to west central Montana, between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, using the lu Bar Ranch as headquarters to hunt a rumored herd of thirty five in the area. The US Army provided support, and two soldiers and two cowboys from the ranch accompanied Hornaday and his assistant Harvey Brown, on Calf Creek, a southern tributary of the Musselshell. In October, this party began to find buffalo. The stories about the survivor animals were true, though these buffalo were extraordinarily wild and perceiving themselves. Pursued fled nearly fifteen miles across the badlands of Montana Territory. Nonetheless, as dusk was falling on October sixteenth, two of Hornaday’s hunters managed to down.

00:03:35
Speaker 2: A huge bull.

00:03:37
Speaker 1: Because of the lateness of the hour, the party left their prize where it fell, with a plan to return the following day. Here is how Harvey Brown described the scene when they arrived the next morning, Sunday, October seventeenth, to our great dismay, the noble red men had visited the bull which Boyd and mcnahi had killed the day before. Astonishment evolved into a general confusion and then anger about what had taken place during the night.

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Speaker 2: All that remained of.

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Speaker 1: The bull, he wrote, was the head painted red on one side, yellow on the other, with a red and yellow rag tied to one horn, and eleven notches cut in the other horn.

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Speaker 2: All around were.

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Speaker 1: Moccasin tracks, Hornaday’s party went on to take twenty two buffalo out of this last remnant of animals, a tiny puddle that was almost all that was left of a once vast, now evaporated ocean of animals. As director of the New York Zoological Park and a founding member of the American Bison Society, Hornaday would spend much of the next four decades of his life trying to save the bison from complete extinction. That fall of eighteen eighty six, he believed that not more than thirty animals remained alive in Montana, where the last great bison hunts had taken place. He would eventually conclude that at the time of this hunt, only one thousand and seventy three wild bison were still drawing breath in North America. No one ever identified just who those native hunters were who had located Hornaday’s downed bull, or exactly what ceremony they had performed around it during the night of October sixteen, seventeen, eighteen eighty six. But from the evidence they left, they too understood that something truly profound was happening. A bison bull whose head was marked and decorated and painted red and yellow in the night may have signaled an ending of something large, something that defined the world. The end of bison was a historical change so traumatic that, as the crow leader plenty Coup would put it, after that nothing happened. We now know that one of the long term consequences of the Pleistocene extinctions ten thousand years ago were a handful of animal survivors that benefited from the loss of competition. In the American West, the primary benefactor was the new, smaller bison, which underwent a massive population explosion when other grass eaters disappeared, half the size of their Pleistocene ancestors, reaching reproductive maturity far faster. Buffalo adapted perfectly to the grasslands of the interior of the continent. Their population was no doubt highly variable, but based on the number of livestock that replaced them, their numbers in their core range likely ranged between about twenty and thirty million. Great climate swings like the Alta thermal redistributed them and shrank or grew their numbers, but never pushed them towards extinction. Buffalo grew so numerous and were such a perfect fit to plastisine conditions that no amount of predation, either from gray wolves or humans, seemed to diminish them. Biologists now believe modern bison in fact are a classic example of anthropogenic selection. Their size and rapid reproduction a natural increase of about eighteen percent selected by human and gray wolf predation that made the modern bison one of the most perfectly adapted of all American species. The way to imagine these immense herds is by understanding their seasonal rounds, and the proper beginning is in the scorching heat of late summer, when bison cows become receptive to sex. Over the next chaotic few weeks, the rumbling bellows of two thousand pounds bulls created a dan herd nowhere else on the planet, audible for miles across the boundless plains. The oddly front weighted males jousted, headbutted, and hooked at one another in dust shrouded battles for females half the size of the bulls. Cows didn’t always honor the winners of these contests, often rejecting both strivers for a higher ranking bull elsewhere. Over the few weeks of rut, some bulls bred as many as forty cows others completely struck out.

00:08:35
Speaker 2: Once the rut was over, bison.

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Speaker 1: Would began their general seasonal drift southward, the small grouping herds led by high ranking cows until they were eight years of age. Younger cows were subordinate to older females, whether southward or somewhere more local. The destinations for these migrations were forested river valleys, where bison spent months of snow and cold, protected from the winds that swept open country snow in the drifts. As winter wound down in April, pregnant cows dropped their young, and while eagles waddled around among them picking at after birth, the cows urged their bright red calves to stand, pop their tails over their backs and run. Gray wolves, knowing well when a bison herd was vulnerable, were certain to be trotting by yellow eyes, fixed red tongues lolling. Following the spring green up into open country. The herds then sorted themselves into gender groups. Through spring and early summer, bachelor bulls worked their way across the Upland plains in all boy posses, while cow calf herds stayed separate and distant until the pheromones of late summer began to drift through the hot air once again. Like many prey animals, bison evolved to be highly social herd creatures. Numbers mean lots of eyes on predators and enhanced chances you’re not the target. The herds varied in size and makeup across the seasons. At the macro level, three massive groupings spread across the western landscapes of the continent, in timbered parts of Alberta, the Yukon, and Alaska. There was a distinctive type we now called the wood bison out on the grassy sweeps east of the Rockies. A northern herd of plains bison ranged from Alberta to Nebraska. From there to the yellow expanses of Texas. Another mass worked across the southern plains in search of rains and greening grasses. These big aggregations of animals groupings really made up of thousands of smaller herds, drifted southward in winter, then reversed direction to shift northward in the summer. While human rituals that charmed and lured bison may have been under the sway of supernatural animal deities, all those bison hunters, over all, those thousands of years understood from observation that the animals’ movements were predictable. They also understood that bison preferred green grasses from freshly burned country. Humans had been using fire to alter the world to their advantage for a million years. In the eastern woodlands, regular human firing produced patchy ecotones whose rebounding forests created brows for white tailed deer. In the west, fires produced wildlife parks savannahs for bison, prong horns, elk, and wolves. These fires actually pushed the aerial extent of the savannahs and their animals nearly to the Mississippi River, wherever bison hers ranged. Archaeology, they just have map out a predatory human pattern that mimicked the prey. In the fall, the hunters set fire to specific upland grasslands they wanted to hunt in the spring, knowing this would draw the herbs. In winter, those same hunters moved into the forested river valleys to set up their camps, aware that bison, elk, and deer would congregate there, allowing local hunts to take place throughout the cold months. These hunters were pedestrians whose only beasts of burden were dogs, and preserving meat by air drying was a huge undertaking. Nonetheless, in suitable topography like head smashed in in Alberta and First People’s and Madison buffalo jumps in Montana. Under the supervision of hunt managers, they ran bison off cliffs, a strategy they learned by observing wolves. They also knew buffalo were entirely capable of exchanging cultural information, so at these jumps they attempted to kill every last animal to prevent buffalo’s survivors from passing on knowledge about the strategy. The great bison bell of the savannahs east of the Rockies was the modern animal’s evolutionary home, but bison were not just of the interior. Archaeologists reconstructing past climates have mapped out a whole sequence of bison’s presence absence periods across ancient America. The Alta thermal a thirty seven hundred year heat wave thousands of years ago, was one of the absence periods across much of.

00:13:45
Speaker 2: That core Great Plains country.

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Speaker 1: That huge drought, and another one only a thousand years ago that lasted for six centuries shriveled western grasslands. Bison numbers likely plunged as the herd’s sought out better watered refuges both east and west of the Great Plains, then trickled back in when weather improved. Then, between fifteen hundred and sixteen hundred, as Old Worlders were settling America, a climate changed to wet and cool conditions grew bison into vast numbers, sending teeming herds in the west eastward beyond the Mississippi River, again convincing Europeans they had found the.

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Speaker 2: Eden of the animals in America.

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Speaker 1: For some ten thousand years, a lengthy sequence of different human cultural groups archaeology has given them fanciful names like Mummy Cave, ox Bow, McKean, Pelican Lake, bisont A, Vineley, and old Women’s lived on bison, drove rivers of bison over cliffs, corralled and stalked bison, and built their religions around them. This was the oldest sustained human economy and American history. Two thousand years ago, when Rome was transitioning from a republic to an empire, Besant and Avonley hunters were undergoing a transition of their own on America’s bison planes. The decent people still relied on at adult technology invented by Folsome hunters twelve thousand years ago, but the Avonley had the newest hunt technology, the bou, introduced to America by the ancestors of the Innuit. Even so, the bou hardly dented the enormous bison herds. In the early United States, thinkers and policymakers tended to follow old world models for imagining human history. The emerging idea was that all humans shared a common origin, and if that was true, then all of us were on the same ladder of progress, as it was known, like Europeans, people who hunted would eventually become herders, then farmers who built cities, wrote constitutions, and founded capitalist republics. It was no doubt comforting to think that everybody else in the world wanted nothing so much as to become just like you. Certainly, no one was supposed to retreat back down the ladder. This was the organizing principle behind an Indian policy in America of converting tribes to agriculture, the ownership of private property, and eventually assimilation. But for many Native people the America of the sixteen hundreds through the eighteen hundreds offered a perfect opportunity to descend the ladder not climate. In those years, an unusual number of Native people, who in fact had long been farmers, reverted to full time hunting. This had been an old fear for Europeans about their their own people. Would colonial Americans survive the enticements of wilderness that lured young men away from farms to hunted trap. With a continental market economy focused on reducing wild animals to commodities, not just Europeans, but Native people across the country began to abandon their cornfields and village lives and move west to hunt again. What drove this for thousands of Native people wasn’t just the market, but an animal revolution. Their acquisition of horses created a grand historical moment, one that has ever since captured the imagination of the world for roughly ten human generations. Conditions were perfect for fashioning a legendary American scene, the horse mounted Indian as hunter of buffalo and other Western animals. A kind of identic opportunity emerged around sixteen fifty and lasted until the early eighteen eighties. Out on the continent’s Great grasslands, buffalo numbers were soaring to its high at thirty million animals in good years history, climate, and soon enough trade in the market would set the stage for a legendary time for Native people to live large. Missing from Western ecology for thousands of years, horses seemed to appear almost magically from the southern end of the Rocky Mountains. Native people trained to herd Spanish stock, and colonial New Mexico were riding off on horses by the sixteen fifties. Then came the revolt of the Pueblo people against Spanish settlers in sixteen eighty, the rebels seizing thousands of horses along with goats, sheep.

00:18:49
Speaker 2: And cattle.

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Speaker 1: The cattle ended up eating The Navajos or DNA traded for most of the goats and sheep, but the horses attracted customers across the West. Pueblos and Navajos traded horses to the Utes, who traded them to the Shoshones, who dispersed horses throughout the Upper West. Some of those groups were in southern Canada, about as far north as desert adapted Spanish barbed horses could survive the winners.

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Speaker 2: By seventeen point.

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Speaker 1: Thirty, peoples who had been on foot for one hundred and fifty centuries were swinging onto horses and riding them into history. Horses carried big implications for buffalo about to enter a modern world. Natural selection hadn’t prepared them for competing with buffalo for grass and water. Horses were restoring a measure of the Pleisocene. But for tribal bands learning from one another how to ride, care for horses, breathe them, all manner of possibilities open dozens of tribal groups. A common estimate is three dozen dropped what they were doing and rode off to hunt buffalo. Some of them, the Comanches of the Great Basin the Suing speakers of the Great Lakes Woodlands had never farmed propel. Now by horses, they switched their focus from jack rabbits or whitetailed deer to buffalo. Some groups from outside the plains did very well as buffalo hunters. The Comanches migrated towards the source of horses and established a powerful empire on the southern plains. The Suing Speakers, who rode westward out of Great Lakes Forest, did the same on the northern plains. Others, the Pueblos, the Utes, the Salish nest purses west of the Buffalo range, and the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, Osages, Aricaras, and Mandans to the east remained in their villages but rode off to hunt buffaloes several times a year. The Pueblos were farmers, the nest purses deer hunters, but with horses, both could now make big journeys to haul bison products home from hundreds of miles away. The most surprising of the new buffalo hunters came from villages of farmers. Though classic buffalo hunters like the Crows, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas all came out of farming backgrounds. All the Eastern Indians who went west to hunt were former farmers too. There were class distinctions in most of the farming towns, and the evidence is that it was the lower classes who often mounted up to ride away to hunt buffalo. Elite families had political power to lose if they left, so did women who owned the crop fields in farm towns. So for women, joining a group now counting wealth and status based on the number of horses you own that intended to live by hunting could be a sobering step for one it implied the backbreaking work of hide process. Becoming one of several wives for a buffalo hunting man at least meant some sharing of the work burden. But if the band participated in the market hunt, a woman didn’t just become a plural wife. She joined a labor force for men. Traversing the planes, hunting bison, training and accumulating horses, and engaging in trade with the whites. Was life in a state of perfection for women? Well Sue and Speakers had a ribald story about ever conniving coyote that helped put this new life in some perspective.

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Speaker 2: It went this way.

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Speaker 1: Coyote had spied a beautiful young chief’s daughter he badly wanted to bed, but as beautiful chiefs daughters tend to do, she scarcely acknowledged him. But hearing that the whites coming into their country possessed many wonderful things, Coyote used magic to go among them and return with four objects no Indian had ever seen. Coyote set up a lodge near the girl’s tepee, and over the next four nights began pounding and banging away as if he were a mad inventter. The first morning he emerged with a choker of brightly colored glass beads. When the chief’s daughter saw Coyote idling holding the choker up to the sunlight, she boldly offered him a kiss if she could have it. The next day, Coyote produced an iron pot better for cooking than anything else in camp to possess that. The chief’s daughter let Coyote fondle her breasts. The third day, Coyote showed off a red wool blanket with stripes in several colors, and for that she let Coyote feel her buttocks. Finally, on the fourth day, Coyote produced a beautiful mirror. After observing herself in it for several long moments, the chief’s let Coyote look between her legs, But Coyote’s response to this favor was a frown.

00:24:06
Speaker 2: Too bad.

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Speaker 1: He said that you’ve been made upside down. That really should be fixed. The beautiful chief’s daughter took her mirror home, but thought long and hard about what Coyote had said. If her sex truly did need remaking, who else should do it but the coyote, who’d made so many magical new things, Go and fetch Coyote. She told her girlfriend and do it quickly. To human observers, bison thronging the planes seemed like the stars in the night sky, a flow of animal life on a scale only the supernatural seemed capable of explaining. The elders of one of the historic bison hunting groups, the Lakotas, perceived a connecting energy flow in the constant air movements of planes among Western creatures. These were connections Lenaean science, Darwinian evolution. Our twenty first century genetic science would never think to link together.

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Speaker 2: What the Lakotas.

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Speaker 1: Called umi or yum was world wind power, the unrestrained residue of the energy of the four winds. WorldWind power was much sought, in part because possessing it made one difficult to attack in battle. But only a small number of special animals spiders, moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk and bison shared the whirlwinds. Secret air movement in the form of seasonal winds, also seemed part of the bison’s special mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon, but the animals could entirely disappear with a north wind. That inclination for bison to vanish led to a widespread belief in Native America that the animals had their origins underground and sometimes returned there. The precise regeneration places tended to move as people relocated as tribes migrated onto the Great Plains. In the seventeen hundreds. Among the Kiowas, the place where bison poured from the earth was the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. For the Comanches, bison regenerated in the canyons of a West Texas plateau. The Yanos Daccato the Lakotas believed this mysterious renewal happened in caves like Ludlow Cave in and near the Black Hills, which Native people surrounded with petroglyphs of buffalo tracks and human vaginas enjoined symbols of fertility. Most buffalo hunting peoples believed the bison to have been present very early in creation. In this kind of cosmic origin, they were like the other great forces of the universe, the sun and moon, the sky overhead that would always exist, much as we’re all utterly convinced today that there’s no force capable of erasing the night sky of its stars.

00:27:16
Speaker 2: For humans who had.

00:27:17
Speaker 1: Been among bison for thousands of years, the animals were similarly beyond all time all history. In the Plains Indian creation accounts that undergirded this kind of understanding, the most important animals are there at the beginning with the creators, before humans joined the world, and it was not just themselves as flesh that bison would offer up as gifts. Among the Cheyennes, buffalo and thunder gave fire to their culture hero sweet medicine. For the Mandana Datzas, it was a buffalo bull who gave their culture hero lone man tobacco. Somewhat in the same manner that the Greeks regarded their gods as partly mortal, most Plains tribes thought of buffalo in their worldly form in the same terms as humans. Buffalo had families and societies and opinions and memories. They were people. In other words, In some traditions, buffalo had the ability to renew themselves after death. The Crees told ethnographer James Mooney that if you left the head, tail, and four feet of a buffalo at a place of its death, the animal would regenerate, although bison might regenerate and the earth could disgorge a fresh body of them like a hive of bees. The hunting tribes understood that animal masters controlled access to buffalo. That made access then fraught with taboos designed to convey proper respect for creatures willing to sacrifice themselves for the human good. Among the Cheyennes, their access to buffalo was the legacy of their several culture heroes, Coyote Man and his daughter Yellow Haired Woman, who had first released the animals of the planes, along with banded specific heroes named erect Horns and Sweet Medicine. Like most buffalo hunters, the Cheyennes had stories about times when all the buffalo disappeared. In one instance, erect Horns performed a particular ritual that persuaded them to return. Later, in the beginning time of creation and Cheyenne history, the people had forsaken the hero’s Sweet Medicine, and once again the buffalo and all.

00:29:43
Speaker 2: The animals disappeared.

00:29:45
Speaker 1: An apology to Sweet Medicine led him to reaffirm that it was a ceremony that would call on the animals to reappear. This ceremony was called among the Cheyennes the Massam. It was a great animal dance at bare Butte that recreated Coyote Man’s and yellow haired Woman’s release of the animals in mythic time. Two of the arrows in their sacred arrow bundle gave Cheyennes the power to kill as many buffalo as they wanted, and that buffalo was opened during the Massom. Cheyennes performed the Massam well past eighteen fifty.

00:30:26
Speaker 2: Others of their.

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Speaker 1: Bands set up a lone teepee at their summer sun dances, representing the mountain from which the Sioux Tai band’s hero erect horns had once released Buffalo from hiding and reanimated the earth in the animal life of the Planes. The Blackfeet and the Grovans also had stories about what happened when Buffalo disappeared, a calamity finally rited by their own cultural heroes. Nappy among the black Feet and meet Aught in the case of the Grovants, who turned themselves into dogs, found the cave where the gods were holding the animals and drove them out. The Blackfeet called the entity that kept Buffalo away Buffalo Steeler. When he was unhappy, he kept buffalo secreted away in a cave up Cutbank Canyon. The Mandans too had a traditional story about a time when all the buffalo disappeared. In this case, it was because Hoida, a speckled eagle who was the master of all the animals, had quarreled with Lone Man, the first Mandan, and his punishment decided to withhold all the animals inside dog den. Butte after involved negotiations, Lone Man finally convinced Hoida to release the animals to the people. Among the Mandans, the ceremonies that re enacted these negotiations were known as snow owl and okeepa. The primary animal access ceremony of the hadassas known as red stick. How did the culture heroes perform these miracles? Generations of living alongside planes animals had fashioned among Indian people a body of cultural stories that credited the buffalo’s willingness to render itself to hunters to the mythic kinship pies between the two species. The common thread was ritually re establishing the kinship tie between human beings and buffalo through ceremonies that got at the heart of the native explanation of their world. Thanks to artists George Catlin and Carl Bodmer, were at least nominally conversant with the outer skins of some of them. What the artists portrayed were animal costume dancers recreating the ancient stories with special lodges and altars that represented the mountains or caves where the animal masters hid by buffalo and other creatures when they were displeased. Ceremonies like snow Owl and red Stick even featured symbolic sexuality to stimulate bison fertility. In the early eighteen hundreds, when descriptions of these parts of the ceremonies by observers like Lewis and Clark appeared in print, they were primly rendered in Latin. As bison began appreciably to diminish in numbers and the ancient ceremonies failed to restore them, some Native people seemed to adjust their thinking. We can’t know what the Indians who danced around and painted William T. Horned as bull in eighteen eighty six thought about why bison had become so few. But in the eighteen sixties, a US Peace Commission had asked tribal representatives why they believed bison were going away. By then, planes Indians clearly were worried about the trend. The Kiowa calendars and aunt Kiowa historians painted on buffalo robes by the eighteen forties had begun referring to such shortages of buffalo and the southern plains that it was impossible for their bands to assemble to hold sun dances anymore. Among the Western Siouan peoples, their version of tribal histories were called winter counts, and these showed that from eighteen forty two to eighteen forty four, the most significant events were the extended buffalo calling ceremonies their shamans performed the tribes. The Peace Commission interviewed offered various explanations for what was happening to Buffalo, most of which laid blame on either of the whites on the overland trails. Are on may Tea hunters from Canada, one western Lakota A pine that he thought bison were becoming so few because they simply couldn’t abide the smell of white people. By this point, the Indian hunt for bison rode for trade was decades old, and another thought Indians themselves were killing too many for the trade, as the Nez Perce hunter yellow Wolf later confessed, I killed yearlings. Mostly it was robes. We were after more than meat, he said. By the time of the peace commission, there was growing inner tribal competition for every remaining pocket of buffalo in the less hunted zones between tribes, pockets that got doubled up one by one as expansionist Lakotas and Comanches displaced tribes with prime remaining buffalo pastures.

00:35:38
Speaker 2: We stole the.

00:35:39
Speaker 1: Hunting grounds of the crows. One Cheyenne later boasted about the war. The Lakotas and Cheyennes prosecuted against the Crows because they were the best. Then suddenly it was all over on the southern plains, the kaiawas concluded that the bison had finally returned to the earth. For other groups, the ceremonies the culture heroes taught had somehow lost their power. A new pan tribal ceremony, the Ghost Dance, now swept across the plains, with a promise that buffalo would re emerge in the millions and overspread the world again. Even after Lakota’s at wounded me were mowed down for dancing the ghost dance. A Southern Cheyenne priest in western Oklahoma named Buffalo coming Out repeatedly performed ceremonies in treating the bison to re emerge from hiding mountain in the Wichita Range, but by eighteen ninety five even he had given up. When the photographer Edward Curtis interviewed Lakota elders at Pine Ridge in nineteen o five and asked them what became of the buffalo, their answer was simple, confused and unsatisfying so far as they could determine. They told Curtis the explanation was walk on a mystery.

00:37:18
Speaker 3: When we talk about bison and people in North America specific I mean, I’ve obviously taught a class on people and bison and horses in North America, and it’s one of those animals where you have to understand its life history to really better understand its relationship with people. And I find that to be a really that was one of the things that I think blew my mind when when I was initially familiarizing myself with like serious scholarship on this subject. But the biology of the animal is has this really formative influence on its relationship with people and you kind of get into that in this in this chapter.

00:37:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do, I try to, you know, so the bison, I mean, you know, you have to start out by conceding that this was, for many centuries of American history the kind.

00:38:17
Speaker 2: Of animal that.

00:38:20
Speaker 1: Around the world was most closely identified with America. And when people anywhere around the globe thought of America, they imagined vast herds of these animals that had been in place for who knew how long, and of course those animals being hunted by native people on horseback. And what we know from the historical story is that particular image is actually one of a fairly limited range in terms of time. It only occurs for maybe two hundred and fifty years at least, the horseback part. But people had been engaged with bison in North America for twenty thousand years, probably, and long enough, in fact, that large versions of the bison that had existed during the Pleistocene had become extinct. And we think that the animal that survived, the historic and modern bison that we all know today, was an animal that biologically was Its evolution was in part anthropogenic. It was shaped by the presence of human and canid predators, and those pressures caused that animal to become smaller than the creatures of the than its predecessors in the Pleistocene, to have a quicker generational turnover, and probably to adapt almost perfectly to the grasslands of the middle of the continent. And so it’s an animal that is kind of not just in a historic sense, one that the world knows about with respect to America, but it’s one that has been in place for a very, very long time, and the human engagement with it is very old. I make the point in this particular episode that the oldest economy, sustained economy we have for human beings in North America is the buffalo hunt. I mean, it’s gone on for many, many, many thousands of years, and so that made it a particular shock for it to only one hundred and fifty years ago to come to an end. That’s part of the I think the psychic effect of losing that still. Maybe a lot of modern Americans don’t think about that anymore or experience it, but those of us who pay attention to history I certainly do.

00:40:55
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, when we were just working on this Most and Hide Hunter’s audiobook, Steve and I were trying to come up with even global analogs to the the duration of that human I mean, I can’t really think of any other example in world history. There’s probably fishing villages that have caught some of the same fish for twelve thousand years, but it doesn’t I mean, there’s really nothing else that comes to mind that approximates the relationship between Native people and bison and North America.

00:41:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, not even globally. I think you’re right about that, you know, I mean, and you can you can kind of argue in a biological or an ecological sense it okay, so will debase in Africa kind of serve a similar role as a planes animal that migrates in very large herbs back and forth across through East Africa. But the kind of close relationship between bison and nat if people, it just doesn’t really. I mean, the Cariboo hunters of the far North may be come as close as we can find, and you know, and those people I think, as the people I’ve talked to in Alaska and the Brooks Range country, for example, the gwich And people kind of thinking themselves as caribou hunters that I mean, and they use this because I think they know that the rest of us in America can relate to the bison story.

00:42:29
Speaker 2: They call themselves Okay, so we’re we’re that’s what we are.

00:42:33
Speaker 1: We hunt caribou the same way people hunting bison. But it’s probably only a shadow really of what this bison story was. So, yeah, it’s it’s something if you can, if you know, if listeners can wrap their minds around it. It’s the sort of thing that has gone on here far, multiple times, longer than the United States has existed as a country. And you have to rich your imagination out to comprehend vast reaches of time, rather than doing what most of us do, which is, you know, you just focus on the immediate present of your moment in time.

00:43:15
Speaker 2: I find it.

00:43:16
Speaker 1: Stimulating to stretch my imagination to try to look at a part of the world, like say eastern Montana, for example, or West Texas and say, wow, just one hundred and fifty years ago, this was a completely different place. Yeah, and it had been that kind of place for a long time.

00:43:35
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:43:35
Speaker 3: And I think stemming from that long relationship there’s between Native people in Buffalo, they have a highly specialized understanding of Buffalo behavior in buffalo habits, and.

00:43:54
Speaker 2: They have this.

00:43:55
Speaker 3: Incredible knowledge of the animal and what it does sort of seasonally, but they explain it in ways that don’t align with what the Western science tells us. And I always think this is like an interesting distinction to sort of wrap your mind around, is that they explain these things in terms of obligations and reciprocity, and there’s sortain moral there’s a moral relationship with the animal, And even though it doesn’t explain things in the way that we would explain them today, it does explain these things in a way that makes sense and is sort of functionally, you know, useful knowledge, right, Like, just the difference in understanding between Western science and sort of indigenous knowledge of these creatures is sort of fascinating.

00:44:45
Speaker 1: Oh man, Yeah, it’s it is really fascinating. And I think what stories, like particularly the ceremonies that I was describing in this the script for this episode, what they get us is an opportunity to really look back in time. I think, probably farther back than just say the eighteen seventies or the seventeenth or eighteenth century. I think these are probably really old ways that humans have thought about the animals that are around us. And it’s, to be sure, very different from doing ecological studies or heard counts of the number of males and the number of females and so this is the number that you can take when you’re harvesting them, or even modern genetic science, certainly Darwinian evolutionary science. Their take on it was completely different from all of those. And yet it’s somehow, I think, when you read it and understand what they were doing, what these ceremonies were all about, it is truly to me understandable. It’s something that seems very very human and probably very very old, and it also I think probably had the effect of enabling a kind of a conservation preservation cinema about the natural world around humanity to prevail. And so I really was excited about learning about those those ceremonies in particular. I mean, one of the great lines about them is that whenever they were successfully performed, the animals came dancing. I mean, the idea is that the animals have disappeared, and you have to engage in these reciprocal and kinship based ceremonies to cause them to return, and when you do so, they return joyously. The animals come dancing, and it’s a Yeah, it’s something that I think it’s it’s sort of like, you know, learning about far Eastern religions. I think it broadens your horizons to understand the human condition as seen by a completely different group of people.

00:47:09
Speaker 3: And again going back to this sort of long people in bison in North America, there are two huge changes, you know, after the arrival of Europeans that upend this I don’t want to call it an equilibrium, but this very long, seemingly sustainable relationship. And one you’ve already alluded to is the horse, which brings people onto the planes and fundamentally reshapes where people live and how they live. And then two is the market. And even though it’s this invisible force like that’s probably in all likelihood the biggest turning point in this entire story is the beginning of the rope trade.

00:47:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it is a critical part of the story. And what you have to recognize is that the global mark it was able in a brilliant kind of way to incorporate indigenous people producing their own particular local products that were valued by the market all over the globe. And so Native people who participated in the robe trade who hunted bison for rose that they then traded to American and European traders. They were not doing something singular or one off. It was something that happened all around, all around the world. And one of the reasons that happened is because as a result of their particular circumstances in Eurasia connected to the largest land mass of the world, so that you Old Worlders got the benefit of everything everybody invented, from China to India, to Africa to Europe. What happened then for a group of people like Native Americans, who were isolated from all that is that Old Worlders had gone through a metal revolution that enabled them to arrive in North America with a transformative technology iron and steel, iron products in particular, that basically put indigenous people. Put Native people into this kind of position. If we don’t participate in this trade and someone down the river does, we have disadvantaged ourselves to the point that we’re not going to be able to compete or survive. And so everybody, in order to keep up with this new world and to of course take on this transformative technology, is going to engage in the market. So Native people get caught up in it, and the bison robe trade becomes a critical part of it in the West.

00:49:49
Speaker 3: And I think one of the interesting parts of that is that Native people had always produced some surplus amount of robes to trade with other native people on the periphery, and so it’s not this they don’t have to do something. It’s within the historic sort of economy that they’ve always operated in. Only now the market’s ability to absorb robes is bottomless.

00:50:18
Speaker 1: It’s bottomless, and so the demand is enormous and the supply steadily dwindles. I mean, that’s kind of what an effect happens with so many of the animals that become targets of the global market in North America, is that the demand is insatiable and the supply is gradually diminishing over time, to the point where why when you get into the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties and eighteen fifties, Native people, through their own ceremonies, their winter counts, their calendars, they’re yearly calendars that they keep, are already noticing that bison numbers are dwindling. They’re going down. I mean, the kiawas are no longer able to have sundances after the middle eighteen thirties because they can’t assemble all of their bands in one place, since there’s not a sufficient number of bison to support them in one spot long enough to do the sundance. The winter counts among the Sue And speaking peoples on the northern Plains by the eighteen forties are all about their shamans, doing these ceremonies, trying to call them bison. So what in effect happens is that before the hide hunt takes place in the post Civil war years, as a result of a number of factors, and I go obviously into as many of them as we understand these days, the role of a changing climate, the role of competition for grass and water from horses, the role probably of accidentally introduced old world ovine diseases like anthrax, for example. As a consequence of all of those plus the market, you begin to get a draw down of the supply of animals even by the eighteen forties and eighteen fifties. And of course, during this whole time, as I described in this episode, some three dozen Native people who are peripheral to the Great Plains are going to mount up on horses and flock to the planes to participate in the hunt. And of course there are all sorts of other influences taking place as well, the overland trails on the part of whites and the shrinking of the bison range on all sides. As the removal policy puts nearly ninety thousand Eastern and Midwestern Indians into Oklahoma, and suddenly the bison are not able to migrate in that direction. And because the growth of the human population in places like Utah and New Mexico is also going up, bison can’t go westward. So it’s just a it’s a perfect storm of causes that by around eighteen fifty eighteen sixty or so are beginning to bring about a reduction in the number. And then after the Civil War, of course, as we can talk in the next about the next episode comes the High Hunt.

00:53:26
Speaker 3: We’ll get into that next time. Thanks Dan, you bet