Posted on 09/12/2017 7:23:35 AM PDT by DFG
Train companies offered trips out west to the settlers. Tourists were about to shoot as many buffalo as they could from the train window, only stopping when they ran out of bullets. Because of this, buffalo killing contests were held. During one contest, a person from Kansas set a buffalo killing record, killing 120 buffalo in 40 minutes. Another man named "Buffalo" Bill Cody was hired to kill buffalo. Within two years, he had killed 4,000 buffalo.
Due to all the different reasons listed above, an estimated 31,000,000 buffalo were killed between the years of 1868 and 1881 with only 500 buffalo left by the year of 1885.
By the end of the 19th Century, the Native Tribe American population was only 237,000, down from one million a century earlier.
I’ve seen the pictures.
However the shock value of a mountain of skulls may be, the buffalo skins trade existed for well over 200 years before the trains arrived, and some tribes became very wealthy on their own pile of skulls.
The railroad age began about 1850 after Whitney astonished Congress in 1849 with a plan for a railroad to the Pacific - a plan that would shrink time and space. That day more than anything was the death knell for buffalo. Railroaders had shooters for the same reasons in the story of Roosevelt’s cousin that I posted. A train crew laying track out in the open wouldn’t stand a chance. Neither would a train. And forget about a settler’s home or his planted fields or any domestic critters in their 30-40mph stampede path. Railroads made money by selling the land around the tracks and they couldn’t do it if hordes of buffalo were destroying everything in sight on a seasonal basis.
Buffalo might as well have been a t-rex as far as settling America was concerned. They had to go, and good riddance. Those critters can go from a neveryoumind nonchalance to murderous charging in less than a second. More people are hurt by ‘those sweet’ buffalo in Yellowstone than lions and bears. They’ll take on a grizzly and will kill steer bulls on the range. Until the horse arrived, indians had a pretty high mortality rate in buffalo hunts, too, especially the decoy calfman. Buffalo are crazy and were and are incompatible with homesteading. There is plenty of other wild game much less dangerous that tastes just as good. So mountains of buffalo skulls, in context, don’t bother me at all.
I believe Bison carry a disease called brucellosis that would be harmful to our beef herds. Bison are magnificent animals, however. I got up close to a small herd a few weeks ago in the Black Hills, totally cool.
ping interesting comments
Intruding with reality, I see...
Most of these wild bison would not taste good at all. Give me a slaughtered one year old that is grain fed. Now you’ve got something.
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