I'm a Nugent fan. In fact I talked to him on the phone once. Actually I was working at a radio station at the time and I was setting him up to be interviewed.
The lyrics sound a little on the romantic side. I don't doubt that Indians used to use buffalo for food, clothing, shelter and whatnot but they used to drive herds over cliffs by the hundreds, maybe thousands as opposed to killing them one-by-one as necessary.
So, if the buffalo has disappeared from the field, the Indians had as much to do with that as the white man.
I have a “Nuge Java” cap when he had a recent association with a coffee company.
"Estimates made in the 1850s suggest that Indians harvested about 450,000 animals a year, and some think the figure was far higher than that. After stripping the best meat and some useful parts, the Indians left the remainder to rot. The stench permeated the prairie for miles, and many a pioneer came across acres of bones from buffalo killed by the Indians before they moved on. Isenberg, for one, doubts whether Indian slaughter alone would have made the buffalo extinct, but when combined with natural factors-wolf predation, fire, and drought-the Indians’ annual harvest probably exceeded the ability of the herds to maintain themselves. More important, as Isenberg points out, "Even had they recognized a decline, the inherent instability of the nomadic societies made it difficult always to enforce the mandates against waste."3 Equally important, many Indian religions held that nature provided an inexhaustible supply, and thus it was impossible to "overhunt." Put another way, without private property rights, the bison were already doomed before the white man arrived...western ranchers such as Charles Goodnight, who captured buffalo calves in 1878, determined that there might be great value in private bison herds. As a result, "many of the bison that eventually populated government preserves descended from the herd of two Montana ranchers" http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/buffaloed-the-myth-and-reality-of-bison-in-america/