The Demise of the Buffalo – A Not-so-simple Allegory

Everyone knows the story.  Once upon a time herds of buffalo roamed the great plains in uncountable numbers.  It is estimated that there were more than 30 million at any given time.  Indigenous people hunted them and relied on the success of those hunts to provide most of the essentials for their survival. 

They used every part of the bison.  They ate the meat and every other edible part of the animal – organs, tongues, fat, brain. They tanned the hides, or simply kept them as rawhide, and employed them for clothing and shelter.  They even used many of the skeletal components for tools.

Then along came the Europeans with their long rifles, and eventually their wagons and trains.  The market price of a bull buffalo skin was $3.50 and a man could make a good living killing buffalo, so they came by the thousands, especially after the economic depression of 1873. Buffalo Bill Cody earned his nickname by claiming to have killed 4,280 buffalo in an 18 month period. 

And as the market experienced a glut of hides, the hunters killed even more energetically to make up their losses.  They cut off the hump, the skin and the tongue.  They left the rest to rot on the plains. 

They were encouraged and aided in their work by the U.S. Army.  The battle against the plains Indians was being waged mercilessly, and Gen. Phillip Sheridan, the civil war hero, saw the extermination of the buffalo as a strategic ploy to force the Indians into reservations and agricultural work.  One army colonel wrote, “Kill every buffalo you can.  Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone!”

By 1875 the plains had become a vast graveyard, a veritable charnel house for buffalo.  Congress passed legislation to protect the buffalo, but President Grant refused to sign it. By the end of the 19^th century there were only a few hundred buffalo left in the wild. There are now twenty to thirty thousand after more than a hundred years of protection and conservation.

I started out to write this essay to condemn the European slaughter of the bison and extoll the virtues of the way the buffalo was treated by Native Americans – to portray the contrasting methods as an allegory for the excesses of our modern industrial society.

But as I read more about the topic, I learned that the plains Indians had also begun to overhunt the bison, and that the competition among Indian tribes was already paving the path to extinction for the buffalo before the Europeans built a super highway.  The acquisition of horses in the 1700’s and the subsequent dramatic increase in nomadic populations spelled disaster for the animals even before it was accelerated by the white buffalo hunters.

Make no mistake, our treatment of the plains Indians is a horrible blight on our nation’s record.  But the plains were not an idyllic place before the Europeans arrived.  The brutality and the merciless nature of intertribal warfare was a fact of life, and each group was relentless in its hunting of the poor bison.

The near extinction of the buffalo is indeed an allegory, but it is an allegory for the entirety of human impact on nature, not any particular group’s.  Human beings are clever enough to find the means to exploit nature for their benefit and increase their population exponentially.  Each step of progress, each invention, each new technique, improves their lifestyle and longevity, and consequently heightens the environmental impact of humanity. 

We have little capacity for a united approach to conserve or protect our natural world, as we have spent hundreds of years glorifying private property, personal freedom and consumption.  The ‘tragedy of the commons’ (a model used by economists to refute Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand of the Market’ concept in Wealth of Nations) is in full view everywhere these days - the use of carbon-based energy, the proliferation of plastics and other non-recyclables, the overuse of water resources and the ever-increasing materialism that infects every society on earth.

Ultimately, nature has feedback mechanisms that defeat extreme aberrations.  Our excesses are already provoking dangerous weather phenomena, wildfires, arctic and Antarctic glacier melting, and the proliferation of more deadly viruses.  The future will no doubt bring further shocking repercussions.

In the end, after painful disruption and cataclysmic events, perhaps humanity will be forced to confront and surmount its greatest challenge, the creation of a global social compact that allows it to live in harmony with the natural world.