Speaker 1: For more than one hundred centuries, Native people in Bison
Speaker 1: had been enjoined in an evolutionary economic and religious relationship
Speaker 1: in the West, only to witness something that appeared timeless
Speaker 1: collapsed completely by the eighteen eighties. I'm Dan Florries, and
Speaker 1: this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet
Speaker 1: Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion
Speaker 1: of each battle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
Speaker 1: Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com.
Speaker 2: Enjoy responsible.
Speaker 1: A Dream of Bison, Part one. The fall of eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty six, Willmt. Hornaday, taxidermist at the National Museum in Washington,
Speaker 1: stepped off a train in Miles City, Montana, on a
Speaker 1: truly historic mission. The American bison, an animal whose charisma
Speaker 1: and staggering abundance had for three centuries stood as shorthand
Speaker 1: for North America to the world, somehow, was on the
Speaker 1: brink of extinction, except in remote parts of Texas, Montana,
Speaker 1: and Alberta, where rumors held there might be two or
Speaker 1: three tiny herds of wildly spooky survivors. A creature whose
Speaker 1: range had once extended from northwestern Canada to Florida, whose
Speaker 1: herds sometimes took the better part of a week for
Speaker 1: mounted horsemen to pass, was tottering on the precipice of
Speaker 1: total disappearance. The bison hunt in America was an ancient economy,
Speaker 1: going back multiple thousands of years. Now, Native people like
Speaker 1: the Blackfeet, who had often taken twenty thousand by a year,
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty three had killed all of six. This
Speaker 1: was why Hornaday was in Montana. Stunningly, bison were on
Speaker 1: the verge of becoming little more than a memory, and
Speaker 1: the National Museum at least wanted a representative collection that
Speaker 1: might become a museum exhibit, since that was all future
Speaker 1: citizens might ever see of America's most iconic creature. The
Speaker 1: Horneday Party's goal was to obtain twenty to thirty specimens,
Speaker 1: which the scientists understood might represent as many as half
Speaker 1: of the wild bison left in the United States. He
Speaker 1: had narrowed his search to west central Montana, between the
Speaker 1: Yellowstone and the Missouri, using the lu Bar Ranch as
Speaker 1: headquarters to hunt a rumored herd of thirty five in
Speaker 1: the area. The US Army provided support, and two soldiers
Speaker 1: and two cowboys from the ranch accompanied Hornaday and his
Speaker 1: assistant Harvey Brown, on Calf Creek, a southern tributary of
Speaker 1: the Musselshell. In October, this party began to find buffalo.
Speaker 1: The stories about the survivor animals were true, though these
Speaker 1: buffalo were extraordinarily wild and perceiving themselves. Pursued fled nearly
Speaker 1: fifteen miles across the badlands of Montana Territory. Nonetheless, as
Speaker 1: dusk was falling on October sixteenth, two of Hornaday's hunters
Speaker 1: managed to down.
Speaker 2: A huge bull.
Speaker 1: Because of the lateness of the hour, the party left
Speaker 1: their prize where it fell, with a plan to return
Speaker 1: the following day. Here is how Harvey Brown described the
Speaker 1: scene when they arrived the next morning, Sunday, October seventeenth,
Speaker 1: to our great dismay, the noble red men had visited
Speaker 1: the bull which Boyd and mcnahi had killed the day before.
Speaker 1: Astonishment evolved into a general confusion and then anger about
Speaker 1: what had taken place during the night.
Speaker 2: All that remained of.
Speaker 1: The bull, he wrote, was the head painted red on
Speaker 1: one side, yellow on the other, with a red and
Speaker 1: yellow rag tied to one horn, and eleven notches cut
Speaker 1: in the other horn.
Speaker 2: All around were.
Speaker 1: Moccasin tracks, Hornaday's party went on to take twenty two
Speaker 1: buffalo out of this last remnant of animals, a tiny
Speaker 1: puddle that was almost all that was left of a
Speaker 1: once vast, now evaporated ocean of animals. As director of
Speaker 1: the New York Zoological Park and a founding member of
Speaker 1: the American Bison Society, Hornaday would spend much of the
Speaker 1: next four decades of his life trying to save the
Speaker 1: bison from complete extinction. That fall of eighteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: he believed that not more than thirty animals remained alive
Speaker 1: in Montana, where the last great bison hunts had taken place.
Speaker 1: He would eventually conclude that at the time of this hunt,
Speaker 1: only one thousand and seventy three wild bison were still
Speaker 1: drawing breath in North America. No one ever identified just
Speaker 1: who those native hunters were who had located Hornaday's downed bull,
Speaker 1: or exactly what ceremony they had performed around it during
Speaker 1: the night of October sixteen, seventeen, eighteen eighty six. But
Speaker 1: from the evidence they left, they too understood that something
Speaker 1: truly profound was happening. A bison bull whose head was
Speaker 1: marked and decorated and painted red and yellow in the
Speaker 1: night may have signaled an ending of something large, something
Speaker 1: that defined the world. The end of bison was a
Speaker 1: historical change so traumatic that, as the crow leader plenty
Speaker 1: Coup would put it, after that nothing happened. We now
Speaker 1: know that one of the long term consequences of the
Speaker 1: Pleistocene extinctions ten thousand years ago were a handful of
Speaker 1: animal survivors that benefited from the loss of competition. In
Speaker 1: the American West, the primary benefactor was the new, smaller bison,
Speaker 1: which underwent a massive population explosion when other grass eaters disappeared,
Speaker 1: half the size of their Pleistocene ancestors, reaching reproductive maturity
Speaker 1: far faster. Buffalo adapted perfectly to the grasslands of the
Speaker 1: interior of the continent. Their population was no doubt highly variable,
Speaker 1: but based on the number of livestock that replaced them,
Speaker 1: their numbers in their core range likely ranged between about
Speaker 1: twenty and thirty million. Great climate swings like the Alta
Speaker 1: thermal redistributed them and shrank or grew their numbers, but
Speaker 1: never pushed them towards extinction. Buffalo grew so numerous and
Speaker 1: were such a perfect fit to plastisine conditions that no
Speaker 1: amount of predation, either from gray wolves or humans, seemed
Speaker 1: to diminish them. Biologists now believe modern bison in fact
Speaker 1: are a classic example of anthropogenic selection. Their size and
Speaker 1: rapid reproduction a natural increase of about eighteen percent selected
Speaker 1: by human and gray wolf predation that made the modern
Speaker 1: bison one of the most perfectly adapted of all American species.
Speaker 1: The way to imagine these immense herds is by understanding
Speaker 1: their seasonal rounds, and the proper beginning is in the
Speaker 1: scorching heat of late summer, when bison cows become receptive
Speaker 1: to sex. Over the next chaotic few weeks, the rumbling
Speaker 1: bellows of two thousand pounds bulls created a dan herd
Speaker 1: nowhere else on the planet, audible for miles across the
Speaker 1: boundless plains. The oddly front weighted males jousted, headbutted, and
Speaker 1: hooked at one another in dust shrouded battles for females
Speaker 1: half the size of the bulls. Cows didn't always honor
Speaker 1: the winners of these contests, often rejecting both strivers for
Speaker 1: a higher ranking bull elsewhere. Over the few weeks of rut,
Speaker 1: some bulls bred as many as forty cows others completely
Speaker 1: struck out.
Speaker 2: Once the rut was over, bison.
Speaker 1: Would began their general seasonal drift southward, the small grouping
Speaker 1: herds led by high ranking cows until they were eight
Speaker 1: years of age. Younger cows were subordinate to older females,
Speaker 1: whether southward or somewhere more local. The destinations for these
Speaker 1: migrations were forested river valleys, where bison spent months of
Speaker 1: snow and cold, protected from the winds that swept open
Speaker 1: country snow in the drifts. As winter wound down in April,
Speaker 1: pregnant cows dropped their young, and while eagles waddled around
Speaker 1: among them picking at after birth, the cows urged their
Speaker 1: bright red calves to stand, pop their tails over their
Speaker 1: backs and run. Gray wolves, knowing well when a bison
Speaker 1: herd was vulnerable, were certain to be trotting by yellow eyes,
Speaker 1: fixed red tongues lolling. Following the spring green up into
Speaker 1: open country. The herds then sorted themselves into gender groups.
Speaker 1: Through spring and early summer, bachelor bulls worked their way
Speaker 1: across the Upland plains in all boy posses, while cow
Speaker 1: calf herds stayed separate and distant until the pheromones of
Speaker 1: late summer began to drift through the hot air once again.
Speaker 1: Like many prey animals, bison evolved to be highly social
Speaker 1: herd creatures. Numbers mean lots of eyes on predators and
Speaker 1: enhanced chances you're not the target. The herds varied in
Speaker 1: size and makeup across the seasons. At the macro level,
Speaker 1: three massive groupings spread across the western landscapes of the continent,
Speaker 1: in timbered parts of Alberta, the Yukon, and Alaska. There
Speaker 1: was a distinctive type we now called the wood bison
Speaker 1: out on the grassy sweeps east of the Rockies. A
Speaker 1: northern herd of plains bison ranged from Alberta to Nebraska.
Speaker 1: From there to the yellow expanses of Texas. Another mass
Speaker 1: worked across the southern plains in search of rains and
Speaker 1: greening grasses. These big aggregations of animals groupings really made
Speaker 1: up of thousands of smaller herds, drifted southward in winter,
Speaker 1: then reversed direction to shift northward in the summer. While
Speaker 1: human rituals that charmed and lured bison may have been
Speaker 1: under the sway of supernatural animal deities, all those bison hunters,
Speaker 1: over all, those thousands of years understood from observation that
Speaker 1: the animals' movements were predictable. They also understood that bison
Speaker 1: preferred green grasses from freshly burned country. Humans had been
Speaker 1: using fire to alter the world to their advantage for
Speaker 1: a million years. In the eastern woodlands, regular human firing
Speaker 1: produced patchy ecotones whose rebounding forests created brows for white
Speaker 1: tailed deer. In the west, fires produced wildlife parks savannahs
Speaker 1: for bison, prong horns, elk, and wolves. These fires actually
Speaker 1: pushed the aerial extent of the savannahs and their animals
Speaker 1: nearly to the Mississippi River, wherever bison hers ranged. Archaeology,
Speaker 1: they just have map out a predatory human pattern that
Speaker 1: mimicked the prey. In the fall, the hunters set fire
Speaker 1: to specific upland grasslands they wanted to hunt in the spring,
Speaker 1: knowing this would draw the herbs. In winter, those same
Speaker 1: hunters moved into the forested river valleys to set up
Speaker 1: their camps, aware that bison, elk, and deer would congregate there,
Speaker 1: allowing local hunts to take place throughout the cold months.
Speaker 1: These hunters were pedestrians whose only beasts of burden were dogs,
Speaker 1: and preserving meat by air drying was a huge undertaking. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: in suitable topography like head smashed in in Alberta and
Speaker 1: First People's and Madison buffalo jumps in Montana. Under the
Speaker 1: supervision of hunt managers, they ran bison off cliffs, a
Speaker 1: strategy they learned by observing wolves. They also knew buffalo
Speaker 1: were entirely capable of exchanging cultural information, so at these
Speaker 1: jumps they attempted to kill every last animal to prevent
Speaker 1: buffalo's survivors from passing on knowledge about the strategy. The
Speaker 1: great bison bell of the savannahs east of the Rockies
Speaker 1: was the modern animal's evolutionary home, but bison were not
Speaker 1: just of the interior. Archaeologists reconstructing past climates have mapped
Speaker 1: out a whole sequence of bison's presence absence periods across
Speaker 1: ancient America. The Alta thermal a thirty seven hundred year
Speaker 1: heat wave thousands of years ago, was one of the
Speaker 1: absence periods across much of.
Speaker 2: That core Great Plains country.
Speaker 1: That huge drought, and another one only a thousand years
Speaker 1: ago that lasted for six centuries shriveled western grasslands. Bison
Speaker 1: numbers likely plunged as the herd's sought out better watered
Speaker 1: refuges both east and west of the Great Plains, then
Speaker 1: trickled back in when weather improved. Then, between fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: and sixteen hundred, as Old Worlders were settling America, a
Speaker 1: climate changed to wet and cool conditions grew bison into
Speaker 1: vast numbers, sending teeming herds in the west eastward beyond
Speaker 1: the Mississippi River, again convincing Europeans they had found the.
Speaker 2: Eden of the animals in America.
Speaker 1: For some ten thousand years, a lengthy sequence of different
Speaker 1: human cultural groups archaeology has given them fanciful names like
Speaker 1: Mummy Cave, ox Bow, McKean, Pelican Lake, bisont A, Vineley,
Speaker 1: and old Women's lived on bison, drove rivers of bison
Speaker 1: over cliffs, corralled and stalked bison, and built their religions
Speaker 1: around them. This was the oldest sustained human economy and
Speaker 1: American history. Two thousand years ago, when Rome was transitioning
Speaker 1: from a republic to an empire, Besant and Avonley hunters
Speaker 1: were undergoing a transition of their own on America's bison planes.
Speaker 1: The decent people still relied on at adult technology invented
Speaker 1: by Folsome hunters twelve thousand years ago, but the Avonley
Speaker 1: had the newest hunt technology, the bou, introduced to America
Speaker 1: by the ancestors of the Innuit. Even so, the bou
Speaker 1: hardly dented the enormous bison herds. In the early United States,
Speaker 1: thinkers and policymakers tended to follow old world models for
Speaker 1: imagining human history. The emerging idea was that all humans
Speaker 1: shared a common origin, and if that was true, then
Speaker 1: all of us were on the same ladder of progress,
Speaker 1: as it was known, like Europeans, people who hunted would
Speaker 1: eventually become herders, then farmers who built cities, wrote constitutions,
Speaker 1: and founded capitalist republics. It was no doubt comforting to
Speaker 1: think that everybody else in the world wanted nothing so
Speaker 1: much as to become just like you. Certainly, no one
Speaker 1: was supposed to retreat back down the ladder. This was
Speaker 1: the organizing principle behind an Indian policy in America of
Speaker 1: converting tribes to agriculture, the ownership of private property, and
Speaker 1: eventually assimilation. But for many Native people the America of
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds through the eighteen hundreds offered a perfect
Speaker 1: opportunity to descend the ladder not climate. In those years,
Speaker 1: an unusual number of Native people, who in fact had
Speaker 1: long been farmers, reverted to full time hunting. This had
Speaker 1: been an old fear for Europeans about their their own people.
Speaker 1: Would colonial Americans survive the enticements of wilderness that lured
Speaker 1: young men away from farms to hunted trap. With a
Speaker 1: continental market economy focused on reducing wild animals to commodities,
Speaker 1: not just Europeans, but Native people across the country began
Speaker 1: to abandon their cornfields and village lives and move west
Speaker 1: to hunt again. What drove this for thousands of Native
Speaker 1: people wasn't just the market, but an animal revolution. Their
Speaker 1: acquisition of horses created a grand historical moment, one that
Speaker 1: has ever since captured the imagination of the world for
Speaker 1: roughly ten human generations. Conditions were perfect for fashioning a
Speaker 1: legendary American scene, the horse mounted Indian as hunter of
Speaker 1: buffalo and other Western animals. A kind of identic opportunity
Speaker 1: emerged around sixteen fifty and lasted until the early eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1: Out on the continent's Great grasslands, buffalo numbers were soaring
Speaker 1: to its high at thirty million animals in good years history, climate,
Speaker 1: and soon enough trade in the market would set the
Speaker 1: stage for a legendary time for Native people to live large.
Speaker 1: Missing from Western ecology for thousands of years, horses seemed
Speaker 1: to appear almost magically from the southern end of the
Speaker 1: Rocky Mountains. Native people trained to herd Spanish stock, and
Speaker 1: colonial New Mexico were riding off on horses by the
Speaker 1: sixteen fifties. Then came the revolt of the Pueblo people
Speaker 1: against Spanish settlers in sixteen eighty, the rebels seizing thousands
Speaker 1: of horses along with goats, sheep.
Speaker 2: And cattle.
Speaker 1: The cattle ended up eating The Navajos or DNA traded
Speaker 1: for most of the goats and sheep, but the horses
Speaker 1: attracted customers across the West. Pueblos and Navajos traded horses
Speaker 1: to the Utes, who traded them to the Shoshones, who
Speaker 1: dispersed horses throughout the Upper West. Some of those groups
Speaker 1: were in southern Canada, about as far north as desert
Speaker 1: adapted Spanish barbed horses could survive the winners.
Speaker 2: By seventeen point.
Speaker 1: Thirty, peoples who had been on foot for one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty centuries were swinging onto horses and riding them
Speaker 1: into history. Horses carried big implications for buffalo about to
Speaker 1: enter a modern world. Natural selection hadn't prepared them for
Speaker 1: competing with buffalo for grass and water. Horses were restoring
Speaker 1: a measure of the Pleisocene. But for tribal bands learning
Speaker 1: from one another how to ride, care for horses, breathe them,
Speaker 1: all manner of possibilities open dozens of tribal groups. A
Speaker 1: common estimate is three dozen dropped what they were doing
Speaker 1: and rode off to hunt buffalo. Some of them, the
Speaker 1: Comanches of the Great Basin the Suing speakers of the
Speaker 1: Great Lakes Woodlands had never farmed propel. Now by horses,
Speaker 1: they switched their focus from jack rabbits or whitetailed deer
Speaker 1: to buffalo. Some groups from outside the plains did very
Speaker 1: well as buffalo hunters. The Comanches migrated towards the source
Speaker 1: of horses and established a powerful empire on the southern plains.
Speaker 1: The Suing Speakers, who rode westward out of Great Lakes Forest,
Speaker 1: did the same on the northern plains. Others, the Pueblos,
Speaker 1: the Utes, the Salish nest purses west of the Buffalo range,
Speaker 1: and the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, Osages, Aricaras, and Mandans to
Speaker 1: the east remained in their villages but rode off to
Speaker 1: hunt buffaloes several times a year. The Pueblos were farmers,
Speaker 1: the nest purses deer hunters, but with horses, both could
Speaker 1: now make big journeys to haul bison products home from
Speaker 1: hundreds of miles away. The most surprising of the new
Speaker 1: buffalo hunters came from villages of farmers. Though classic buffalo
Speaker 1: hunters like the Crows, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas all came
Speaker 1: out of farming backgrounds. All the Eastern Indians who went
Speaker 1: west to hunt were former farmers too. There were class
Speaker 1: distinctions in most of the farming towns, and the evidence
Speaker 1: is that it was the lower classes who often mounted
Speaker 1: up to ride away to hunt buffalo. Elite families had
Speaker 1: political power to lose if they left, so did women
Speaker 1: who owned the crop fields in farm towns. So for women,
Speaker 1: joining a group now counting wealth and status based on
Speaker 1: the number of horses you own that intended to live
Speaker 1: by hunting could be a sobering step for one it
Speaker 1: implied the backbreaking work of hide process. Becoming one of
Speaker 1: several wives for a buffalo hunting man at least meant
Speaker 1: some sharing of the work burden. But if the band
Speaker 1: participated in the market hunt, a woman didn't just become
Speaker 1: a plural wife. She joined a labor force for men.
Speaker 1: Traversing the planes, hunting bison, training and accumulating horses, and
Speaker 1: engaging in trade with the whites. Was life in a
Speaker 1: state of perfection for women? Well Sue and Speakers had
Speaker 1: a ribald story about ever conniving coyote that helped put
Speaker 1: this new life in some perspective.
Speaker 2: It went this way.
Speaker 1: Coyote had spied a beautiful young chief's daughter he badly
Speaker 1: wanted to bed, but as beautiful chiefs daughters tend to do,
Speaker 1: she scarcely acknowledged him. But hearing that the whites coming
Speaker 1: into their country possessed many wonderful things, Coyote used magic
Speaker 1: to go among them and return with four objects no
Speaker 1: Indian had ever seen. Coyote set up a lodge near
Speaker 1: the girl's tepee, and over the next four nights began
Speaker 1: pounding and banging away as if he were a mad inventter.
Speaker 1: The first morning he emerged with a choker of brightly
Speaker 1: colored glass beads. When the chief's daughter saw Coyote idling
Speaker 1: holding the choker up to the sunlight, she boldly offered
Speaker 1: him a kiss if she could have it. The next day,
Speaker 1: Coyote produced an iron pot better for cooking than anything
Speaker 1: else in camp to possess that. The chief's daughter let
Speaker 1: Coyote fondle her breasts. The third day, Coyote showed off
Speaker 1: a red wool blanket with stripes in several colors, and
Speaker 1: for that she let Coyote feel her buttocks. Finally, on
Speaker 1: the fourth day, Coyote produced a beautiful mirror. After observing
Speaker 1: herself in it for several long moments, the chief's let
Speaker 1: Coyote look between her legs, But Coyote's response to this
Speaker 1: favor was a frown.
Speaker 2: Too bad.
Speaker 1: He said that you've been made upside down. That really
Speaker 1: should be fixed. The beautiful chief's daughter took her mirror home,
Speaker 1: but thought long and hard about what Coyote had said.
Speaker 1: If her sex truly did need remaking, who else should
Speaker 1: do it but the coyote, who'd made so many magical
Speaker 1: new things, Go and fetch Coyote. She told her girlfriend
Speaker 1: and do it quickly. To human observers, bison thronging the
Speaker 1: planes seemed like the stars in the night sky, a
Speaker 1: flow of animal life on a scale only the supernatural
Speaker 1: seemed capable of explaining. The elders of one of the
Speaker 1: historic bison hunting groups, the Lakotas, perceived a connecting energy
Speaker 1: flow in the constant air movements of planes among Western creatures.
Speaker 1: These were connections Lenaean science, Darwinian evolution. Our twenty first
Speaker 1: century genetic science would never think to link together.
Speaker 2: What the Lakotas.
Speaker 1: Called umi or yum was world wind power, the unrestrained
Speaker 1: residue of the energy of the four winds. WorldWind power
Speaker 1: was much sought, in part because possessing it made one
Speaker 1: difficult to attack in battle. But only a small number
Speaker 1: of special animals spiders, moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk and
Speaker 1: bison shared the whirlwinds. Secret air movement in the form
Speaker 1: of seasonal winds, also seemed part of the bison's special mystery,
Speaker 1: bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might
Speaker 1: produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon,
Speaker 1: but the animals could entirely disappear with a north wind.
Speaker 1: That inclination for bison to vanish led to a widespread
Speaker 1: belief in Native America that the animals had their origins
Speaker 1: underground and sometimes returned there. The precise regeneration places tended
Speaker 1: to move as people relocated as tribes migrated onto the
Speaker 1: Great Plains. In the seventeen hundreds. Among the Kiowas, the
Speaker 1: place where bison poured from the earth was the Wichita
Speaker 1: Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. For the Comanches, bison regenerated in
Speaker 1: the canyons of a West Texas plateau. The Yanos Daccato
Speaker 1: the Lakotas believed this mysterious renewal happened in caves like
Speaker 1: Ludlow Cave in and near the Black Hills, which Native
Speaker 1: people surrounded with petroglyphs of buffalo tracks and human vaginas
Speaker 1: enjoined symbols of fertility. Most buffalo hunting peoples believed the
Speaker 1: bison to have been present very early in creation. In
Speaker 1: this kind of cosmic origin, they were like the other
Speaker 1: great forces of the universe, the sun and moon, the
Speaker 1: sky overhead that would always exist, much as we're all
Speaker 1: utterly convinced today that there's no force capable of erasing
Speaker 1: the night sky of its stars.
Speaker 2: For humans who had.
Speaker 1: Been among bison for thousands of years, the animals were
Speaker 1: similarly beyond all time all history. In the Plains Indian
Speaker 1: creation accounts that undergirded this kind of understanding, the most
Speaker 1: important animals are there at the beginning with the creators,
Speaker 1: before humans joined the world, and it was not just
Speaker 1: themselves as flesh that bison would offer up as gifts.
Speaker 1: Among the Cheyennes, buffalo and thunder gave fire to their
Speaker 1: culture hero sweet medicine. For the Mandana Datzas, it was
Speaker 1: a buffalo bull who gave their culture hero lone man tobacco.
Speaker 1: Somewhat in the same manner that the Greeks regarded their
Speaker 1: gods as partly mortal, most Plains tribes thought of buffalo
Speaker 1: in their worldly form in the same terms as humans.
Speaker 1: Buffalo had families and societies and opinions and memories. They
Speaker 1: were people. In other words, In some traditions, buffalo had
Speaker 1: the ability to renew themselves after death. The Crees told
Speaker 1: ethnographer James Mooney that if you left the head, tail,
Speaker 1: and four feet of a buffalo at a place of
Speaker 1: its death, the animal would regenerate, although bison might regenerate
Speaker 1: and the earth could disgorge a fresh body of them
Speaker 1: like a hive of bees. The hunting tribes understood that
Speaker 1: animal masters controlled access to buffalo. That made access then
Speaker 1: fraught with taboos designed to convey proper respect for creatures
Speaker 1: willing to sacrifice themselves for the human good. Among the Cheyennes,
Speaker 1: their access to buffalo was the legacy of their several
Speaker 1: culture heroes, Coyote Man and his daughter Yellow Haired Woman,
Speaker 1: who had first released the animals of the planes, along
Speaker 1: with banded specific heroes named erect Horns and Sweet Medicine.
Speaker 1: Like most buffalo hunters, the Cheyennes had stories about times
Speaker 1: when all the buffalo disappeared. In one instance, erect Horns
Speaker 1: performed a particular ritual that persuaded them to return. Later,
Speaker 1: in the beginning time of creation and Cheyenne history, the
Speaker 1: people had forsaken the hero's Sweet Medicine, and once again
Speaker 1: the buffalo and all.
Speaker 2: The animals disappeared.
Speaker 1: An apology to Sweet Medicine led him to reaffirm that
Speaker 1: it was a ceremony that would call on the animals
Speaker 1: to reappear. This ceremony was called among the Cheyennes the Massam.
Speaker 1: It was a great animal dance at bare Butte that
Speaker 1: recreated Coyote Man's and yellow haired Woman's release of the
Speaker 1: animals in mythic time. Two of the arrows in their
Speaker 1: sacred arrow bundle gave Cheyennes the power to kill as
Speaker 1: many buffalo as they wanted, and that buffalo was opened
Speaker 1: during the Massom. Cheyennes performed the Massam well past eighteen fifty.
Speaker 2: Others of their.
Speaker 1: Bands set up a lone teepee at their summer sun dances,
Speaker 1: representing the mountain from which the Sioux Tai band's hero
Speaker 1: erect horns had once released Buffalo from hiding and reanimated
Speaker 1: the earth in the animal life of the Planes. The
Speaker 1: Blackfeet and the Grovans also had stories about what happened
Speaker 1: when Buffalo disappeared, a calamity finally rited by their own
Speaker 1: cultural heroes. Nappy among the black Feet and meet Aught
Speaker 1: in the case of the Grovants, who turned themselves into dogs,
Speaker 1: found the cave where the gods were holding the animals
Speaker 1: and drove them out. The Blackfeet called the entity that
Speaker 1: kept Buffalo away Buffalo Steeler. When he was unhappy, he
Speaker 1: kept buffalo secreted away in a cave up Cutbank Canyon.
Speaker 1: The Mandans too had a traditional story about a time
Speaker 1: when all the buffalo disappeared. In this case, it was
Speaker 1: because Hoida, a speckled eagle who was the master of
Speaker 1: all the animals, had quarreled with Lone Man, the first Mandan,
Speaker 1: and his punishment decided to withhold all the animals inside
Speaker 1: dog den. Butte after involved negotiations, Lone Man finally convinced
Speaker 1: Hoida to release the animals to the people. Among the Mandans,
Speaker 1: the ceremonies that re enacted these negotiations were known as
Speaker 1: snow owl and okeepa. The primary animal access ceremony of
Speaker 1: the hadassas known as red stick. How did the culture
Speaker 1: heroes perform these miracles? Generations of living alongside planes animals
Speaker 1: had fashioned among Indian people a body of cultural stories
Speaker 1: that credited the buffalo's willingness to render itself to hunters
Speaker 1: to the mythic kinship pies between the two species. The
Speaker 1: common thread was ritually re establishing the kinship tie between
Speaker 1: human beings and buffalo through ceremonies that got at the
Speaker 1: heart of the native explanation of their world. Thanks to
Speaker 1: artists George Catlin and Carl Bodmer, were at least nominally
Speaker 1: conversant with the outer skins of some of them. What
Speaker 1: the artists portrayed were animal costume dancers recreating the ancient
Speaker 1: stories with special lodges and altars that represented the mountains
Speaker 1: or caves where the animal masters hid by buffalo and
Speaker 1: other creatures when they were displeased. Ceremonies like snow Owl
Speaker 1: and red Stick even featured symbolic sexuality to stimulate bison fertility.
Speaker 1: In the early eighteen hundreds, when descriptions of these parts
Speaker 1: of the ceremonies by observers like Lewis and Clark appeared
Speaker 1: in print, they were primly rendered in Latin. As bison
Speaker 1: began appreciably to diminish in numbers and the ancient ceremonies
Speaker 1: failed to restore them, some Native people seemed to adjust
Speaker 1: their thinking. We can't know what the Indians who danced
Speaker 1: around and painted William T. Horned as bull in eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty six thought about why bison had become so few.
Speaker 1: But in the eighteen sixties, a US Peace Commission had
Speaker 1: asked tribal representatives why they believed bison were going away.
Speaker 1: By then, planes Indians clearly were worried about the trend.
Speaker 1: The Kiowa calendars and aunt Kiowa historians painted on buffalo
Speaker 1: robes by the eighteen forties had begun referring to such
Speaker 1: shortages of buffalo and the southern plains that it was
Speaker 1: impossible for their bands to assemble to hold sun dances anymore.
Speaker 1: Among the Western Siouan peoples, their version of tribal histories
Speaker 1: were called winter counts, and these showed that from eighteen
Speaker 1: forty two to eighteen forty four, the most significant events
Speaker 1: were the extended buffalo calling ceremonies their shamans performed the tribes.
Speaker 1: The Peace Commission interviewed offered various explanations for what was
Speaker 1: happening to Buffalo, most of which laid blame on either
Speaker 1: of the whites on the overland trails. Are on may
Speaker 1: Tea hunters from Canada, one western Lakota A pine that
Speaker 1: he thought bison were becoming so few because they simply
Speaker 1: couldn't abide the smell of white people. By this point,
Speaker 1: the Indian hunt for bison rode for trade was decades old,
Speaker 1: and another thought Indians themselves were killing too many for
Speaker 1: the trade, as the Nez Perce hunter yellow Wolf later confessed,
Speaker 1: I killed yearlings. Mostly it was robes. We were after
Speaker 1: more than meat, he said. By the time of the
Speaker 1: peace commission, there was growing inner tribal competition for every
Speaker 1: remaining pocket of buffalo in the less hunted zones between tribes,
Speaker 1: pockets that got doubled up one by one as expansionist
Speaker 1: Lakotas and Comanches displaced tribes with prime remaining buffalo pastures.
Speaker 2: We stole the.
Speaker 1: Hunting grounds of the crows. One Cheyenne later boasted about
Speaker 1: the war. The Lakotas and Cheyennes prosecuted against the Crows
Speaker 1: because they were the best. Then suddenly it was all
Speaker 1: over on the southern plains, the kaiawas concluded that the
Speaker 1: bison had finally returned to the earth. For other groups,
Speaker 1: the ceremonies the culture heroes taught had somehow lost their power.
Speaker 1: A new pan tribal ceremony, the Ghost Dance, now swept
Speaker 1: across the plains, with a promise that buffalo would re
Speaker 1: emerge in the millions and overspread the world again. Even
Speaker 1: after Lakota's at wounded me were mowed down for dancing
Speaker 1: the ghost dance. A Southern Cheyenne priest in western Oklahoma
Speaker 1: named Buffalo coming Out repeatedly performed ceremonies in treating the
Speaker 1: bison to re emerge from hiding mountain in the Wichita Range,
Speaker 1: but by eighteen ninety five even he had given up.
Speaker 1: When the photographer Edward Curtis interviewed Lakota elders at Pine
Speaker 1: Ridge in nineteen o five and asked them what became
Speaker 1: of the buffalo, their answer was simple, confused and unsatisfying
Speaker 1: so far as they could determine. They told Curtis the
Speaker 1: explanation was walk on a mystery.
Speaker 3: When we talk about bison and people in North America
Speaker 3: specific I mean, I've obviously taught a class on people
Speaker 3: and bison and horses in North America, and it's one
Speaker 3: of those animals where you have to understand its life
Speaker 3: history to really better understand its relationship with people. And
Speaker 3: I find that to be a really that was one
Speaker 3: of the things that I think blew my mind when
Speaker 3: when I was initially familiarizing myself with like serious scholarship
Speaker 3: on this subject. But the biology of the animal is
Speaker 3: has this really formative influence on its relationship with people
Speaker 3: and you kind of get into that in this in
Speaker 3: this chapter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do, I try to, you know, so the bison,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, you have to start out by
Speaker 1: conceding that this was, for many centuries of American history
Speaker 1: the kind.
Speaker 2: Of animal that.
Speaker 1: Around the world was most closely identified with America. And
Speaker 1: when people anywhere around the globe thought of America, they
Speaker 1: imagined vast herds of these animals that had been in
Speaker 1: place for who knew how long, and of course those
Speaker 1: animals being hunted by native people on horseback. And what
Speaker 1: we know from the historical story is that particular image
Speaker 1: is actually one of a fairly limited range in terms
Speaker 1: of time. It only occurs for maybe two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years at least, the horseback part. But people had
Speaker 1: been engaged with bison in North America for twenty thousand years, probably,
Speaker 1: and long enough, in fact, that large versions of the
Speaker 1: bison that had existed during the Pleistocene had become extinct.
Speaker 1: And we think that the animal that survived, the historic
Speaker 1: and modern bison that we all know today, was an
Speaker 1: animal that biologically was Its evolution was in part anthropogenic.
Speaker 1: It was shaped by the presence of human and canid predators,
Speaker 1: and those pressures caused that animal to become smaller than
Speaker 1: the creatures of the than its predecessors in the Pleistocene,
Speaker 1: to have a quicker generational turnover, and probably to adapt
Speaker 1: almost perfectly to the grasslands of the middle of the continent.
Speaker 1: And so it's an animal that is kind of not
Speaker 1: just in a historic sense, one that the world knows
Speaker 1: about with respect to America, but it's one that has
Speaker 1: been in place for a very, very long time, and
Speaker 1: the human engagement with it is very old. I make
Speaker 1: the point in this particular episode that the oldest economy,
Speaker 1: sustained economy we have for human beings in North America
Speaker 1: is the buffalo hunt. I mean, it's gone on for many, many,
Speaker 1: many thousands of years, and so that made it a
Speaker 1: particular shock for it to only one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: years ago to come to an end. That's part of
Speaker 1: the I think the psychic effect of losing that still.
Speaker 1: Maybe a lot of modern Americans don't think about that
Speaker 1: anymore or experience it, but those of us who pay
Speaker 1: attention to history I certainly do.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, when we were just working on this
Speaker 3: Most and Hide Hunter's audiobook, Steve and I were trying
Speaker 3: to come up with even global analogs to the the
Speaker 3: duration of that human I mean, I can't really think
Speaker 3: of any other example in world history. There's probably fishing
Speaker 3: villages that have caught some of the same fish for
Speaker 3: twelve thousand years, but it doesn't I mean, there's really
Speaker 3: nothing else that comes to mind that approximates the relationship
Speaker 3: between Native people and bison and North America.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not even globally. I think you're right about that,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, and you can you can kind
Speaker 1: of argue in a biological or an ecological sense it okay,
Speaker 1: so will debase in Africa kind of serve a similar
Speaker 1: role as a planes animal that migrates in very large
Speaker 1: herbs back and forth across through East Africa. But the
Speaker 1: kind of close relationship between bison and nat if people,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't really. I mean, the Cariboo hunters of
Speaker 1: the far North may be come as close as we
Speaker 1: can find, and you know, and those people I think,
Speaker 1: as the people I've talked to in Alaska and the
Speaker 1: Brooks Range country, for example, the gwich And people kind
Speaker 1: of thinking themselves as caribou hunters that I mean, and
Speaker 1: they use this because I think they know that the
Speaker 1: rest of us in America can relate to the bison story.
Speaker 2: They call themselves Okay, so we're we're that's what we are.
Speaker 1: We hunt caribou the same way people hunting bison. But
Speaker 1: it's probably only a shadow really of what this bison
Speaker 1: story was. So, yeah, it's it's something if you can,
Speaker 1: if you know, if listeners can wrap their minds around it.
Speaker 1: It's the sort of thing that has gone on here far,
Speaker 1: multiple times, longer than the United States has existed as
Speaker 1: a country. And you have to rich your imagination out
Speaker 1: to comprehend vast reaches of time, rather than doing what
Speaker 1: most of us do, which is, you know, you just
Speaker 1: focus on the immediate present of your moment in time.
Speaker 2: I find it.
Speaker 1: Stimulating to stretch my imagination to try to look at
Speaker 1: a part of the world, like say eastern Montana, for example,
Speaker 1: or West Texas and say, wow, just one hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years ago, this was a completely different place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it had been that kind of place for a
Speaker 1: long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think stemming from that long relationship there's between
Speaker 3: Native people in Buffalo, they have a highly specialized understanding
Speaker 3: of Buffalo behavior in buffalo habits, and.
Speaker 2: They have this.
Speaker 3: Incredible knowledge of the animal and what it does sort
Speaker 3: of seasonally, but they explain it in ways that don't
Speaker 3: align with what the Western science tells us. And I
Speaker 3: always think this is like an interesting distinction to sort
Speaker 3: of wrap your mind around, is that they explain these
Speaker 3: things in terms of obligations and reciprocity, and there's sortain
Speaker 3: moral there's a moral relationship with the animal, And even
Speaker 3: though it doesn't explain things in the way that we
Speaker 3: would explain them today, it does explain these things in
Speaker 3: a way that makes sense and is sort of functionally,
Speaker 3: you know, useful knowledge, right, Like, just the difference in
Speaker 3: understanding between Western science and sort of indigenous knowledge of
Speaker 3: these creatures is sort of fascinating.
Speaker 1: Oh man, Yeah, it's it is really fascinating. And I
Speaker 1: think what stories, like particularly the ceremonies that I was
Speaker 1: describing in this the script for this episode, what they
Speaker 1: get us is an opportunity to really look back in time.
Speaker 1: I think, probably farther back than just say the eighteen
Speaker 1: seventies or the seventeenth or eighteenth century. I think these
Speaker 1: are probably really old ways that humans have thought about
Speaker 1: the animals that are around us. And it's, to be sure,
Speaker 1: very different from doing ecological studies or heard counts of
Speaker 1: the number of males and the number of females and
Speaker 1: so this is the number that you can take when
Speaker 1: you're harvesting them, or even modern genetic science, certainly Darwinian
Speaker 1: evolutionary science. Their take on it was completely different from
Speaker 1: all of those. And yet it's somehow, I think, when
Speaker 1: you read it and understand what they were doing, what
Speaker 1: these ceremonies were all about, it is truly to me understandable.
Speaker 1: It's something that seems very very human and probably very
Speaker 1: very old, and it also I think probably had the
Speaker 1: effect of enabling a kind of a conservation preservation cinema
Speaker 1: about the natural world around humanity to prevail. And so
Speaker 1: I really was excited about learning about those those ceremonies
Speaker 1: in particular. I mean, one of the great lines about
Speaker 1: them is that whenever they were successfully performed, the animals
Speaker 1: came dancing. I mean, the idea is that the animals
Speaker 1: have disappeared, and you have to engage in these reciprocal
Speaker 1: and kinship based ceremonies to cause them to return, and
Speaker 1: when you do so, they return joyously. The animals come dancing,
Speaker 1: and it's a Yeah, it's something that I think it's
Speaker 1: it's sort of like, you know, learning about far Eastern religions.
Speaker 1: I think it broadens your horizons to understand the human
Speaker 1: condition as seen by a completely different group of people.
Speaker 3: And again going back to this sort of long people
Speaker 3: in bison in North America, there are two huge changes,
Speaker 3: you know, after the arrival of Europeans that upend this
Speaker 3: I don't want to call it an equilibrium, but this
Speaker 3: very long, seemingly sustainable relationship. And one you've already alluded
Speaker 3: to is the horse, which brings people onto the planes
Speaker 3: and fundamentally reshapes where people live and how they live.
Speaker 3: And then two is the market. And even though it's
Speaker 3: this invisible force like that's probably in all likelihood the
Speaker 3: biggest turning point in this entire story is the beginning
Speaker 3: of the rope trade.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it is a critical part of the story.
Speaker 1: And what you have to recognize is that the global
Speaker 1: mark it was able in a brilliant kind of way
Speaker 1: to incorporate indigenous people producing their own particular local products
Speaker 1: that were valued by the market all over the globe.
Speaker 1: And so Native people who participated in the robe trade
Speaker 1: who hunted bison for rose that they then traded to
Speaker 1: American and European traders. They were not doing something singular
Speaker 1: or one off. It was something that happened all around,
Speaker 1: all around the world. And one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: happened is because as a result of their particular circumstances
Speaker 1: in Eurasia connected to the largest land mass of the world,
Speaker 1: so that you Old Worlders got the benefit of everything
Speaker 1: everybody invented, from China to India, to Africa to Europe.
Speaker 1: What happened then for a group of people like Native Americans,
Speaker 1: who were isolated from all that is that Old Worlders
Speaker 1: had gone through a metal revolution that enabled them to
Speaker 1: arrive in North America with a transformative technology iron and steel,
Speaker 1: iron products in particular, that basically put indigenous people. Put
Speaker 1: Native people into this kind of position. If we don't
Speaker 1: participate in this trade and someone down the river does,
Speaker 1: we have disadvantaged ourselves to the point that we're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to compete or survive. And so everybody,
Speaker 1: in order to keep up with this new world and
Speaker 1: to of course take on this transformative technology, is going
Speaker 1: to engage in the market. So Native people get caught
Speaker 1: up in it, and the bison robe trade becomes a
Speaker 1: critical part of it in the West.
Speaker 3: And I think one of the interesting parts of that
Speaker 3: is that Native people had always produced some surplus amount
Speaker 3: of robes to trade with other native people on the periphery,
Speaker 3: and so it's not this they don't have to do something.
Speaker 3: It's within the historic sort of economy that they've always
Speaker 3: operated in. Only now the market's ability to absorb robes
Speaker 3: is bottomless.
Speaker 1: It's bottomless, and so the demand is enormous and the
Speaker 1: supply steadily dwindles. I mean, that's kind of what an
Speaker 1: effect happens with so many of the animals that become
Speaker 1: targets of the global market in North America, is that
Speaker 1: the demand is insatiable and the supply is gradually diminishing
Speaker 1: over time, to the point where why when you get
Speaker 1: into the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties and eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: Native people, through their own ceremonies, their winter counts, their calendars,
Speaker 1: they're yearly calendars that they keep, are already noticing that
Speaker 1: bison numbers are dwindling. They're going down. I mean, the
Speaker 1: kiawas are no longer able to have sundances after the
Speaker 1: middle eighteen thirties because they can't assemble all of their
Speaker 1: bands in one place, since there's not a sufficient number
Speaker 1: of bison to support them in one spot long enough
Speaker 1: to do the sundance. The winter counts among the Sue
Speaker 1: And speaking peoples on the northern Plains by the eighteen
Speaker 1: forties are all about their shamans, doing these ceremonies, trying
Speaker 1: to call them bison. So what in effect happens is
Speaker 1: that before the hide hunt takes place in the post
Speaker 1: Civil war years, as a result of a number of factors,
Speaker 1: and I go obviously into as many of them as
Speaker 1: we understand these days, the role of a changing climate,
Speaker 1: the role of competition for grass and water from horses,
Speaker 1: the role probably of accidentally introduced old world ovine diseases
Speaker 1: like anthrax, for example. As a consequence of all of
Speaker 1: those plus the market, you begin to get a draw
Speaker 1: down of the supply of animals even by the eighteen
Speaker 1: forties and eighteen fifties. And of course, during this whole time,
Speaker 1: as I described in this episode, some three dozen Native
Speaker 1: people who are peripheral to the Great Plains are going
Speaker 1: to mount up on horses and flock to the planes
Speaker 1: to participate in the hunt. And of course there are
Speaker 1: all sorts of other influences taking place as well, the
Speaker 1: overland trails on the part of whites and the shrinking
Speaker 1: of the bison range on all sides. As the removal
Speaker 1: policy puts nearly ninety thousand Eastern and Midwestern Indians into Oklahoma,
Speaker 1: and suddenly the bison are not able to migrate in
Speaker 1: that direction. And because the growth of the human population
Speaker 1: in places like Utah and New Mexico is also going up,
Speaker 1: bison can't go westward. So it's just a it's a
Speaker 1: perfect storm of causes that by around eighteen fifty eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty or so are beginning to bring about a reduction
Speaker 1: in the number. And then after the Civil War, of course,
Speaker 1: as we can talk in the next about the next
Speaker 1: episode comes the High Hunt.
Speaker 3: We'll get into that next time. Thanks Dan, you bet