WEBVTT - Ep. 16: A Dream of Bison 0:00:01.400 --> 0:00:04.600 For more than one hundred centuries, Native people in Bison 0:00:04.720 --> 0:00:09.600 had been enjoined in an evolutionary economic and religious relationship 0:00:09.640 --> 0:00:13.440 in the West, only to witness something that appeared timeless 0:00:13.520 --> 0:00:18.759 collapsed completely by the eighteen eighties. I'm Dan Florries, and 0:00:18.840 --> 0:00:22.840 this is the American West, brought to you by Velvet 0:00:22.920 --> 0:00:26.560 Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest. A portion 0:00:26.720 --> 0:00:30.280 of each battle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers. 0:00:30.880 --> 0:00:35.440 Limited supply available at Velvetbuck Vineyards dot com. 0:00:35.680 --> 0:00:37.240 Enjoy responsible. 0:00:52.880 --> 0:01:00.760 A Dream of Bison, Part one. The fall of eighteen 0:01:00.800 --> 0:01:05.320 eighty six, Willmt. Hornaday, taxidermist at the National Museum in Washington, 0:01:05.760 --> 0:01:09.240 stepped off a train in Miles City, Montana, on a 0:01:09.280 --> 0:01:14.479 truly historic mission. The American bison, an animal whose charisma 0:01:14.560 --> 0:01:18.240 and staggering abundance had for three centuries stood as shorthand 0:01:18.400 --> 0:01:21.480 for North America to the world, somehow, was on the 0:01:21.520 --> 0:01:25.759 brink of extinction, except in remote parts of Texas, Montana, 0:01:25.840 --> 0:01:28.880 and Alberta, where rumors held there might be two or 0:01:28.880 --> 0:01:33.240 three tiny herds of wildly spooky survivors. A creature whose 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:38.199 range had once extended from northwestern Canada to Florida, whose 0:01:38.240 --> 0:01:41.520 herds sometimes took the better part of a week for 0:01:41.720 --> 0:01:45.959 mounted horsemen to pass, was tottering on the precipice of 0:01:46.120 --> 0:01:51.600 total disappearance. The bison hunt in America was an ancient economy, 0:01:51.960 --> 0:01:56.640 going back multiple thousands of years. Now, Native people like 0:01:56.760 --> 0:02:00.680 the Blackfeet, who had often taken twenty thousand by a year, 0:02:01.040 --> 0:02:06.800 in eighteen eighty three had killed all of six. This 0:02:06.960 --> 0:02:11.640 was why Hornaday was in Montana. Stunningly, bison were on 0:02:11.720 --> 0:02:14.640 the verge of becoming little more than a memory, and 0:02:14.720 --> 0:02:19.040 the National Museum at least wanted a representative collection that 0:02:19.240 --> 0:02:22.880 might become a museum exhibit, since that was all future 0:02:22.960 --> 0:02:28.320 citizens might ever see of America's most iconic creature. The 0:02:28.360 --> 0:02:33.240 Horneday Party's goal was to obtain twenty to thirty specimens, 0:02:33.480 --> 0:02:37.919 which the scientists understood might represent as many as half 0:02:38.160 --> 0:02:41.800 of the wild bison left in the United States. He 0:02:41.880 --> 0:02:45.840 had narrowed his search to west central Montana, between the 0:02:45.919 --> 0:02:49.960 Yellowstone and the Missouri, using the lu Bar Ranch as 0:02:50.040 --> 0:02:53.840 headquarters to hunt a rumored herd of thirty five in 0:02:53.919 --> 0:02:58.280 the area. The US Army provided support, and two soldiers 0:02:58.320 --> 0:03:01.880 and two cowboys from the ranch accompanied Hornaday and his 0:03:02.120 --> 0:03:07.720 assistant Harvey Brown, on Calf Creek, a southern tributary of 0:03:07.760 --> 0:03:12.680 the Musselshell. In October, this party began to find buffalo. 0:03:14.080 --> 0:03:18.239 The stories about the survivor animals were true, though these 0:03:18.280 --> 0:03:23.760 buffalo were extraordinarily wild and perceiving themselves. Pursued fled nearly 0:03:23.840 --> 0:03:29.280 fifteen miles across the badlands of Montana Territory. Nonetheless, as 0:03:29.400 --> 0:03:34.200 dusk was falling on October sixteenth, two of Hornaday's hunters 0:03:34.240 --> 0:03:35.600 managed to down. 0:03:35.440 --> 0:03:37.360 A huge bull. 0:03:37.480 --> 0:03:40.360 Because of the lateness of the hour, the party left 0:03:40.360 --> 0:03:43.360 their prize where it fell, with a plan to return 0:03:43.680 --> 0:03:48.720 the following day. Here is how Harvey Brown described the 0:03:48.760 --> 0:03:53.600 scene when they arrived the next morning, Sunday, October seventeenth, 0:03:53.960 --> 0:03:58.000 to our great dismay, the noble red men had visited 0:03:58.000 --> 0:04:01.440 the bull which Boyd and mcnahi had killed the day before. 0:04:02.000 --> 0:04:06.920 Astonishment evolved into a general confusion and then anger about 0:04:06.920 --> 0:04:08.760 what had taken place during the night. 0:04:09.280 --> 0:04:10.360 All that remained of. 0:04:10.320 --> 0:04:14.120 The bull, he wrote, was the head painted red on 0:04:14.120 --> 0:04:17.719 one side, yellow on the other, with a red and 0:04:17.839 --> 0:04:22.200 yellow rag tied to one horn, and eleven notches cut 0:04:22.320 --> 0:04:23.119 in the other horn. 0:04:23.680 --> 0:04:25.200 All around were. 0:04:25.080 --> 0:04:30.280 Moccasin tracks, Hornaday's party went on to take twenty two 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:34.719 buffalo out of this last remnant of animals, a tiny 0:04:34.760 --> 0:04:37.919 puddle that was almost all that was left of a 0:04:38.000 --> 0:04:43.560 once vast, now evaporated ocean of animals. As director of 0:04:43.600 --> 0:04:46.800 the New York Zoological Park and a founding member of 0:04:46.839 --> 0:04:50.640 the American Bison Society, Hornaday would spend much of the 0:04:50.680 --> 0:04:53.479 next four decades of his life trying to save the 0:04:53.560 --> 0:04:58.080 bison from complete extinction. That fall of eighteen eighty six, 0:04:58.240 --> 0:05:02.240 he believed that not more than thirty animals remained alive 0:05:02.320 --> 0:05:06.279 in Montana, where the last great bison hunts had taken place. 0:05:06.880 --> 0:05:10.279 He would eventually conclude that at the time of this hunt, 0:05:10.680 --> 0:05:15.599 only one thousand and seventy three wild bison were still 0:05:15.720 --> 0:05:21.320 drawing breath in North America. No one ever identified just 0:05:21.440 --> 0:05:25.679 who those native hunters were who had located Hornaday's downed bull, 0:05:26.080 --> 0:05:29.719 or exactly what ceremony they had performed around it during 0:05:29.760 --> 0:05:34.560 the night of October sixteen, seventeen, eighteen eighty six. But 0:05:34.680 --> 0:05:38.720 from the evidence they left, they too understood that something 0:05:38.839 --> 0:05:43.840 truly profound was happening. A bison bull whose head was 0:05:43.920 --> 0:05:47.120 marked and decorated and painted red and yellow in the 0:05:47.240 --> 0:05:51.719 night may have signaled an ending of something large, something 0:05:51.760 --> 0:05:55.640 that defined the world. The end of bison was a 0:05:55.760 --> 0:05:59.440 historical change so traumatic that, as the crow leader plenty 0:05:59.440 --> 0:06:06.040 Coup would put it, after that nothing happened. We now 0:06:06.080 --> 0:06:09.280 know that one of the long term consequences of the 0:06:09.320 --> 0:06:13.800 Pleistocene extinctions ten thousand years ago were a handful of 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:18.839 animal survivors that benefited from the loss of competition. In 0:06:18.880 --> 0:06:23.640 the American West, the primary benefactor was the new, smaller bison, 0:06:24.000 --> 0:06:29.760 which underwent a massive population explosion when other grass eaters disappeared, 0:06:30.839 --> 0:06:35.680 half the size of their Pleistocene ancestors, reaching reproductive maturity 0:06:35.800 --> 0:06:40.000 far faster. Buffalo adapted perfectly to the grasslands of the 0:06:40.040 --> 0:06:44.840 interior of the continent. Their population was no doubt highly variable, 0:06:44.960 --> 0:06:48.400 but based on the number of livestock that replaced them, 0:06:48.600 --> 0:06:53.040 their numbers in their core range likely ranged between about 0:06:53.200 --> 0:06:58.120 twenty and thirty million. Great climate swings like the Alta 0:06:58.240 --> 0:07:02.760 thermal redistributed them and shrank or grew their numbers, but 0:07:03.000 --> 0:07:07.720 never pushed them towards extinction. Buffalo grew so numerous and 0:07:07.760 --> 0:07:11.720 were such a perfect fit to plastisine conditions that no 0:07:11.880 --> 0:07:16.080 amount of predation, either from gray wolves or humans, seemed 0:07:16.120 --> 0:07:20.160 to diminish them. Biologists now believe modern bison in fact 0:07:20.200 --> 0:07:25.960 are a classic example of anthropogenic selection. Their size and 0:07:26.160 --> 0:07:31.120 rapid reproduction a natural increase of about eighteen percent selected 0:07:31.200 --> 0:07:35.280 by human and gray wolf predation that made the modern 0:07:35.320 --> 0:07:39.080 bison one of the most perfectly adapted of all American species. 0:07:40.400 --> 0:07:43.840 The way to imagine these immense herds is by understanding 0:07:43.880 --> 0:07:47.760 their seasonal rounds, and the proper beginning is in the 0:07:47.840 --> 0:07:53.320 scorching heat of late summer, when bison cows become receptive 0:07:53.400 --> 0:07:57.560 to sex. Over the next chaotic few weeks, the rumbling 0:07:57.640 --> 0:08:02.280 bellows of two thousand pounds bulls created a dan herd 0:08:02.520 --> 0:08:06.520 nowhere else on the planet, audible for miles across the 0:08:06.560 --> 0:08:12.440 boundless plains. The oddly front weighted males jousted, headbutted, and 0:08:12.520 --> 0:08:16.760 hooked at one another in dust shrouded battles for females 0:08:17.600 --> 0:08:21.240 half the size of the bulls. Cows didn't always honor 0:08:21.280 --> 0:08:25.120 the winners of these contests, often rejecting both strivers for 0:08:25.200 --> 0:08:29.280 a higher ranking bull elsewhere. Over the few weeks of rut, 0:08:29.480 --> 0:08:33.439 some bulls bred as many as forty cows others completely 0:08:33.480 --> 0:08:34.040 struck out. 0:08:35.120 --> 0:08:37.280 Once the rut was over, bison. 0:08:36.920 --> 0:08:41.160 Would began their general seasonal drift southward, the small grouping 0:08:41.240 --> 0:08:44.719 herds led by high ranking cows until they were eight 0:08:44.840 --> 0:08:48.439 years of age. Younger cows were subordinate to older females, 0:08:49.240 --> 0:08:53.640 whether southward or somewhere more local. The destinations for these 0:08:53.679 --> 0:08:58.680 migrations were forested river valleys, where bison spent months of 0:08:58.720 --> 0:09:02.760 snow and cold, protected from the winds that swept open 0:09:02.880 --> 0:09:06.960 country snow in the drifts. As winter wound down in April, 0:09:07.120 --> 0:09:11.559 pregnant cows dropped their young, and while eagles waddled around 0:09:11.640 --> 0:09:15.360 among them picking at after birth, the cows urged their 0:09:15.440 --> 0:09:19.160 bright red calves to stand, pop their tails over their 0:09:19.200 --> 0:09:23.760 backs and run. Gray wolves, knowing well when a bison 0:09:23.840 --> 0:09:28.000 herd was vulnerable, were certain to be trotting by yellow eyes, 0:09:28.080 --> 0:09:33.440 fixed red tongues lolling. Following the spring green up into 0:09:33.480 --> 0:09:37.760 open country. The herds then sorted themselves into gender groups. 0:09:37.920 --> 0:09:41.840 Through spring and early summer, bachelor bulls worked their way 0:09:41.840 --> 0:09:46.319 across the Upland plains in all boy posses, while cow 0:09:46.520 --> 0:09:51.000 calf herds stayed separate and distant until the pheromones of 0:09:51.080 --> 0:09:54.960 late summer began to drift through the hot air once again. 0:09:57.280 --> 0:10:01.480 Like many prey animals, bison evolved to be highly social 0:10:01.679 --> 0:10:06.240 herd creatures. Numbers mean lots of eyes on predators and 0:10:06.440 --> 0:10:10.440 enhanced chances you're not the target. The herds varied in 0:10:10.600 --> 0:10:14.680 size and makeup across the seasons. At the macro level, 0:10:15.080 --> 0:10:19.600 three massive groupings spread across the western landscapes of the continent, 0:10:20.120 --> 0:10:24.160 in timbered parts of Alberta, the Yukon, and Alaska. There 0:10:24.280 --> 0:10:27.760 was a distinctive type we now called the wood bison 0:10:28.400 --> 0:10:31.240 out on the grassy sweeps east of the Rockies. A 0:10:31.400 --> 0:10:36.199 northern herd of plains bison ranged from Alberta to Nebraska. 0:10:36.880 --> 0:10:40.800 From there to the yellow expanses of Texas. Another mass 0:10:40.840 --> 0:10:44.440 worked across the southern plains in search of rains and 0:10:44.520 --> 0:10:49.960 greening grasses. These big aggregations of animals groupings really made 0:10:50.080 --> 0:10:54.280 up of thousands of smaller herds, drifted southward in winter, 0:10:54.720 --> 0:10:59.680 then reversed direction to shift northward in the summer. While 0:11:00.040 --> 0:11:03.839 human rituals that charmed and lured bison may have been 0:11:03.960 --> 0:11:09.360 under the sway of supernatural animal deities, all those bison hunters, 0:11:09.600 --> 0:11:14.320 over all, those thousands of years understood from observation that 0:11:14.440 --> 0:11:20.200 the animals' movements were predictable. They also understood that bison 0:11:20.360 --> 0:11:25.440 preferred green grasses from freshly burned country. Humans had been 0:11:25.520 --> 0:11:28.120 using fire to alter the world to their advantage for 0:11:28.160 --> 0:11:33.079 a million years. In the eastern woodlands, regular human firing 0:11:33.120 --> 0:11:38.560 produced patchy ecotones whose rebounding forests created brows for white 0:11:38.559 --> 0:11:44.720 tailed deer. In the west, fires produced wildlife parks savannahs 0:11:44.760 --> 0:11:50.120 for bison, prong horns, elk, and wolves. These fires actually 0:11:50.160 --> 0:11:54.040 pushed the aerial extent of the savannahs and their animals 0:11:54.200 --> 0:12:00.000 nearly to the Mississippi River, wherever bison hers ranged. Archaeology, 0:12:00.000 --> 0:12:03.760 they just have map out a predatory human pattern that 0:12:04.000 --> 0:12:07.960 mimicked the prey. In the fall, the hunters set fire 0:12:08.120 --> 0:12:12.480 to specific upland grasslands they wanted to hunt in the spring, 0:12:12.920 --> 0:12:16.839 knowing this would draw the herbs. In winter, those same 0:12:16.960 --> 0:12:20.680 hunters moved into the forested river valleys to set up 0:12:20.720 --> 0:12:25.720 their camps, aware that bison, elk, and deer would congregate there, 0:12:26.120 --> 0:12:29.680 allowing local hunts to take place throughout the cold months. 0:12:30.320 --> 0:12:34.640 These hunters were pedestrians whose only beasts of burden were dogs, 0:12:34.960 --> 0:12:40.040 and preserving meat by air drying was a huge undertaking. Nonetheless, 0:12:40.360 --> 0:12:45.160 in suitable topography like head smashed in in Alberta and 0:12:45.320 --> 0:12:49.800 First People's and Madison buffalo jumps in Montana. Under the 0:12:49.800 --> 0:12:53.960 supervision of hunt managers, they ran bison off cliffs, a 0:12:54.080 --> 0:12:59.240 strategy they learned by observing wolves. They also knew buffalo 0:12:59.320 --> 0:13:04.600 were entirely capable of exchanging cultural information, so at these 0:13:04.679 --> 0:13:08.360 jumps they attempted to kill every last animal to prevent 0:13:08.440 --> 0:13:14.120 buffalo's survivors from passing on knowledge about the strategy. The 0:13:14.160 --> 0:13:17.360 great bison bell of the savannahs east of the Rockies 0:13:17.800 --> 0:13:22.200 was the modern animal's evolutionary home, but bison were not 0:13:22.520 --> 0:13:27.800 just of the interior. Archaeologists reconstructing past climates have mapped 0:13:27.800 --> 0:13:33.080 out a whole sequence of bison's presence absence periods across 0:13:33.200 --> 0:13:38.520 ancient America. The Alta thermal a thirty seven hundred year 0:13:38.760 --> 0:13:42.160 heat wave thousands of years ago, was one of the 0:13:42.360 --> 0:13:45.440 absence periods across much of. 0:13:45.280 --> 0:13:47.320 That core Great Plains country. 0:13:48.040 --> 0:13:51.480 That huge drought, and another one only a thousand years 0:13:51.520 --> 0:13:56.760 ago that lasted for six centuries shriveled western grasslands. Bison 0:13:56.880 --> 0:14:01.640 numbers likely plunged as the herd's sought out better watered 0:14:01.720 --> 0:14:05.400 refuges both east and west of the Great Plains, then 0:14:05.600 --> 0:14:11.319 trickled back in when weather improved. Then, between fifteen hundred 0:14:11.400 --> 0:14:15.920 and sixteen hundred, as Old Worlders were settling America, a 0:14:16.000 --> 0:14:20.440 climate changed to wet and cool conditions grew bison into 0:14:20.600 --> 0:14:25.000 vast numbers, sending teeming herds in the west eastward beyond 0:14:25.040 --> 0:14:30.000 the Mississippi River, again convincing Europeans they had found the. 0:14:29.960 --> 0:14:31.680 Eden of the animals in America. 0:14:32.520 --> 0:14:36.880 For some ten thousand years, a lengthy sequence of different 0:14:37.040 --> 0:14:41.120 human cultural groups archaeology has given them fanciful names like 0:14:41.280 --> 0:14:47.160 Mummy Cave, ox Bow, McKean, Pelican Lake, bisont A, Vineley, 0:14:47.560 --> 0:14:52.000 and old Women's lived on bison, drove rivers of bison 0:14:52.080 --> 0:14:57.120 over cliffs, corralled and stalked bison, and built their religions 0:14:57.160 --> 0:15:02.080 around them. This was the oldest sustained human economy and 0:15:02.160 --> 0:15:07.040 American history. Two thousand years ago, when Rome was transitioning 0:15:07.120 --> 0:15:11.400 from a republic to an empire, Besant and Avonley hunters 0:15:11.600 --> 0:15:16.520 were undergoing a transition of their own on America's bison planes. 0:15:17.280 --> 0:15:22.280 The decent people still relied on at adult technology invented 0:15:22.320 --> 0:15:26.600 by Folsome hunters twelve thousand years ago, but the Avonley 0:15:26.960 --> 0:15:31.520 had the newest hunt technology, the bou, introduced to America 0:15:31.560 --> 0:15:35.880 by the ancestors of the Innuit. Even so, the bou 0:15:36.400 --> 0:15:42.160 hardly dented the enormous bison herds. In the early United States, 0:15:42.480 --> 0:15:47.200 thinkers and policymakers tended to follow old world models for 0:15:47.360 --> 0:15:52.440 imagining human history. The emerging idea was that all humans 0:15:52.640 --> 0:15:56.040 shared a common origin, and if that was true, then 0:15:56.240 --> 0:15:59.800 all of us were on the same ladder of progress, 0:16:00.040 --> 0:16:04.520 as it was known, like Europeans, people who hunted would 0:16:04.520 --> 0:16:09.960 eventually become herders, then farmers who built cities, wrote constitutions, 0:16:10.000 --> 0:16:13.560 and founded capitalist republics. It was no doubt comforting to 0:16:13.600 --> 0:16:16.480 think that everybody else in the world wanted nothing so 0:16:16.600 --> 0:16:20.600 much as to become just like you. Certainly, no one 0:16:20.840 --> 0:16:24.880 was supposed to retreat back down the ladder. This was 0:16:24.960 --> 0:16:29.680 the organizing principle behind an Indian policy in America of 0:16:29.760 --> 0:16:34.680 converting tribes to agriculture, the ownership of private property, and 0:16:34.800 --> 0:16:40.360 eventually assimilation. But for many Native people the America of 0:16:40.440 --> 0:16:44.480 the sixteen hundreds through the eighteen hundreds offered a perfect 0:16:44.560 --> 0:16:49.280 opportunity to descend the ladder not climate. In those years, 0:16:49.480 --> 0:16:52.480 an unusual number of Native people, who in fact had 0:16:52.560 --> 0:16:57.080 long been farmers, reverted to full time hunting. This had 0:16:57.120 --> 0:17:00.640 been an old fear for Europeans about their their own people. 0:17:01.120 --> 0:17:05.840 Would colonial Americans survive the enticements of wilderness that lured 0:17:05.880 --> 0:17:09.359 young men away from farms to hunted trap. With a 0:17:09.400 --> 0:17:13.879 continental market economy focused on reducing wild animals to commodities, 0:17:14.040 --> 0:17:18.040 not just Europeans, but Native people across the country began 0:17:18.200 --> 0:17:22.479 to abandon their cornfields and village lives and move west 0:17:22.680 --> 0:17:27.199 to hunt again. What drove this for thousands of Native 0:17:27.240 --> 0:17:31.600 people wasn't just the market, but an animal revolution. Their 0:17:31.680 --> 0:17:36.399 acquisition of horses created a grand historical moment, one that 0:17:36.440 --> 0:17:40.000 has ever since captured the imagination of the world for 0:17:40.119 --> 0:17:44.520 roughly ten human generations. Conditions were perfect for fashioning a 0:17:44.600 --> 0:17:50.000 legendary American scene, the horse mounted Indian as hunter of 0:17:50.119 --> 0:17:55.720 buffalo and other Western animals. A kind of identic opportunity 0:17:56.040 --> 0:18:01.640 emerged around sixteen fifty and lasted until the early eighteen eighties. 0:18:02.320 --> 0:18:06.600 Out on the continent's Great grasslands, buffalo numbers were soaring 0:18:06.640 --> 0:18:11.240 to its high at thirty million animals in good years history, climate, 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:14.240 and soon enough trade in the market would set the 0:18:14.320 --> 0:18:21.280 stage for a legendary time for Native people to live large. 0:18:21.320 --> 0:18:25.320 Missing from Western ecology for thousands of years, horses seemed 0:18:25.359 --> 0:18:28.600 to appear almost magically from the southern end of the 0:18:28.680 --> 0:18:33.399 Rocky Mountains. Native people trained to herd Spanish stock, and 0:18:33.480 --> 0:18:37.240 colonial New Mexico were riding off on horses by the 0:18:37.320 --> 0:18:41.600 sixteen fifties. Then came the revolt of the Pueblo people 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:46.879 against Spanish settlers in sixteen eighty, the rebels seizing thousands 0:18:46.920 --> 0:18:49.440 of horses along with goats, sheep. 0:18:49.240 --> 0:18:49.800 And cattle. 0:18:50.600 --> 0:18:54.400 The cattle ended up eating The Navajos or DNA traded 0:18:54.440 --> 0:18:57.280 for most of the goats and sheep, but the horses 0:18:57.320 --> 0:19:02.600 attracted customers across the West. Pueblos and Navajos traded horses 0:19:02.640 --> 0:19:05.960 to the Utes, who traded them to the Shoshones, who 0:19:06.000 --> 0:19:10.919 dispersed horses throughout the Upper West. Some of those groups 0:19:10.960 --> 0:19:14.640 were in southern Canada, about as far north as desert 0:19:14.680 --> 0:19:18.080 adapted Spanish barbed horses could survive the winners. 0:19:18.960 --> 0:19:20.080 By seventeen point. 0:19:19.920 --> 0:19:23.000 Thirty, peoples who had been on foot for one hundred 0:19:23.000 --> 0:19:27.400 and fifty centuries were swinging onto horses and riding them 0:19:27.480 --> 0:19:32.760 into history. Horses carried big implications for buffalo about to 0:19:32.880 --> 0:19:37.080 enter a modern world. Natural selection hadn't prepared them for 0:19:38.119 --> 0:19:42.400 competing with buffalo for grass and water. Horses were restoring 0:19:42.480 --> 0:19:46.720 a measure of the Pleisocene. But for tribal bands learning 0:19:46.760 --> 0:19:50.879 from one another how to ride, care for horses, breathe them, 0:19:51.160 --> 0:19:55.760 all manner of possibilities open dozens of tribal groups. A 0:19:55.840 --> 0:19:59.520 common estimate is three dozen dropped what they were doing 0:19:59.760 --> 0:20:03.560 and rode off to hunt buffalo. Some of them, the 0:20:03.560 --> 0:20:07.520 Comanches of the Great Basin the Suing speakers of the 0:20:07.560 --> 0:20:12.200 Great Lakes Woodlands had never farmed propel. Now by horses, 0:20:12.480 --> 0:20:16.200 they switched their focus from jack rabbits or whitetailed deer 0:20:16.440 --> 0:20:20.680 to buffalo. Some groups from outside the plains did very 0:20:20.720 --> 0:20:25.119 well as buffalo hunters. The Comanches migrated towards the source 0:20:25.160 --> 0:20:29.760 of horses and established a powerful empire on the southern plains. 0:20:30.359 --> 0:20:34.080 The Suing Speakers, who rode westward out of Great Lakes Forest, 0:20:34.320 --> 0:20:38.360 did the same on the northern plains. Others, the Pueblos, 0:20:38.480 --> 0:20:42.240 the Utes, the Salish nest purses west of the Buffalo range, 0:20:42.440 --> 0:20:48.080 and the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, Osages, Aricaras, and Mandans to 0:20:48.160 --> 0:20:51.520 the east remained in their villages but rode off to 0:20:51.600 --> 0:20:55.879 hunt buffaloes several times a year. The Pueblos were farmers, 0:20:56.119 --> 0:20:59.960 the nest purses deer hunters, but with horses, both could 0:21:00.160 --> 0:21:04.040 now make big journeys to haul bison products home from 0:21:04.200 --> 0:21:09.439 hundreds of miles away. The most surprising of the new 0:21:09.440 --> 0:21:14.760 buffalo hunters came from villages of farmers. Though classic buffalo 0:21:14.800 --> 0:21:19.760 hunters like the Crows, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas all came 0:21:19.840 --> 0:21:24.040 out of farming backgrounds. All the Eastern Indians who went 0:21:24.080 --> 0:21:27.800 west to hunt were former farmers too. There were class 0:21:27.840 --> 0:21:30.960 distinctions in most of the farming towns, and the evidence 0:21:31.080 --> 0:21:34.200 is that it was the lower classes who often mounted 0:21:34.320 --> 0:21:38.400 up to ride away to hunt buffalo. Elite families had 0:21:38.480 --> 0:21:42.159 political power to lose if they left, so did women 0:21:42.480 --> 0:21:46.280 who owned the crop fields in farm towns. So for women, 0:21:46.760 --> 0:21:49.960 joining a group now counting wealth and status based on 0:21:50.000 --> 0:21:53.040 the number of horses you own that intended to live 0:21:53.119 --> 0:21:56.879 by hunting could be a sobering step for one it 0:21:57.000 --> 0:22:01.520 implied the backbreaking work of hide process. Becoming one of 0:22:01.720 --> 0:22:05.400 several wives for a buffalo hunting man at least meant 0:22:05.440 --> 0:22:08.440 some sharing of the work burden. But if the band 0:22:08.480 --> 0:22:12.800 participated in the market hunt, a woman didn't just become 0:22:12.960 --> 0:22:17.120 a plural wife. She joined a labor force for men. 0:22:17.600 --> 0:22:22.600 Traversing the planes, hunting bison, training and accumulating horses, and 0:22:22.720 --> 0:22:25.679 engaging in trade with the whites. Was life in a 0:22:25.760 --> 0:22:31.160 state of perfection for women? Well Sue and Speakers had 0:22:31.160 --> 0:22:36.720 a ribald story about ever conniving coyote that helped put 0:22:36.760 --> 0:22:38.959 this new life in some perspective. 0:22:39.680 --> 0:22:41.000 It went this way. 0:22:41.240 --> 0:22:45.400 Coyote had spied a beautiful young chief's daughter he badly 0:22:45.440 --> 0:22:48.680 wanted to bed, but as beautiful chiefs daughters tend to do, 0:22:48.960 --> 0:22:52.800 she scarcely acknowledged him. But hearing that the whites coming 0:22:52.840 --> 0:22:58.120 into their country possessed many wonderful things, Coyote used magic 0:22:58.200 --> 0:23:01.639 to go among them and return with four objects no 0:23:01.840 --> 0:23:05.480 Indian had ever seen. Coyote set up a lodge near 0:23:05.520 --> 0:23:08.840 the girl's tepee, and over the next four nights began 0:23:09.080 --> 0:23:12.480 pounding and banging away as if he were a mad inventter. 0:23:13.560 --> 0:23:17.240 The first morning he emerged with a choker of brightly 0:23:17.359 --> 0:23:21.600 colored glass beads. When the chief's daughter saw Coyote idling 0:23:21.680 --> 0:23:25.240 holding the choker up to the sunlight, she boldly offered 0:23:25.320 --> 0:23:28.760 him a kiss if she could have it. The next day, 0:23:29.080 --> 0:23:33.480 Coyote produced an iron pot better for cooking than anything 0:23:33.560 --> 0:23:38.080 else in camp to possess that. The chief's daughter let 0:23:38.160 --> 0:23:42.800 Coyote fondle her breasts. The third day, Coyote showed off 0:23:43.000 --> 0:23:46.800 a red wool blanket with stripes in several colors, and 0:23:46.920 --> 0:23:51.439 for that she let Coyote feel her buttocks. Finally, on 0:23:51.480 --> 0:23:56.639 the fourth day, Coyote produced a beautiful mirror. After observing 0:23:56.680 --> 0:24:00.640 herself in it for several long moments, the chief's let 0:24:00.720 --> 0:24:04.639 Coyote look between her legs, But Coyote's response to this 0:24:04.720 --> 0:24:06.000 favor was a frown. 0:24:06.680 --> 0:24:07.359 Too bad. 0:24:07.640 --> 0:24:11.240 He said that you've been made upside down. That really 0:24:11.280 --> 0:24:15.760 should be fixed. The beautiful chief's daughter took her mirror home, 0:24:16.000 --> 0:24:19.359 but thought long and hard about what Coyote had said. 0:24:19.920 --> 0:24:23.359 If her sex truly did need remaking, who else should 0:24:23.359 --> 0:24:27.240 do it but the coyote, who'd made so many magical 0:24:27.359 --> 0:24:31.760 new things, Go and fetch Coyote. She told her girlfriend 0:24:31.960 --> 0:24:38.720 and do it quickly. To human observers, bison thronging the 0:24:38.800 --> 0:24:43.040 planes seemed like the stars in the night sky, a 0:24:43.080 --> 0:24:47.080 flow of animal life on a scale only the supernatural 0:24:47.240 --> 0:24:51.760 seemed capable of explaining. The elders of one of the 0:24:51.920 --> 0:24:56.960 historic bison hunting groups, the Lakotas, perceived a connecting energy 0:24:57.040 --> 0:25:02.080 flow in the constant air movements of planes among Western creatures. 0:25:03.040 --> 0:25:08.879 These were connections Lenaean science, Darwinian evolution. Our twenty first 0:25:08.960 --> 0:25:12.560 century genetic science would never think to link together. 0:25:13.520 --> 0:25:15.240 What the Lakotas. 0:25:14.680 --> 0:25:20.600 Called umi or yum was world wind power, the unrestrained 0:25:20.680 --> 0:25:25.159 residue of the energy of the four winds. WorldWind power 0:25:25.320 --> 0:25:28.680 was much sought, in part because possessing it made one 0:25:28.720 --> 0:25:32.240 difficult to attack in battle. But only a small number 0:25:32.280 --> 0:25:38.520 of special animals spiders, moths, dragonflies, and bears, elk and 0:25:38.600 --> 0:25:43.680 bison shared the whirlwinds. Secret air movement in the form 0:25:43.720 --> 0:25:48.840 of seasonal winds, also seemed part of the bison's special mystery, 0:25:49.160 --> 0:25:52.640 bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might 0:25:52.640 --> 0:25:56.480 produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon, 0:25:56.960 --> 0:25:59.720 but the animals could entirely disappear with a north wind. 0:26:00.560 --> 0:26:05.000 That inclination for bison to vanish led to a widespread 0:26:05.000 --> 0:26:08.840 belief in Native America that the animals had their origins 0:26:09.000 --> 0:26:14.480 underground and sometimes returned there. The precise regeneration places tended 0:26:14.480 --> 0:26:19.080 to move as people relocated as tribes migrated onto the 0:26:19.119 --> 0:26:22.600 Great Plains. In the seventeen hundreds. Among the Kiowas, the 0:26:22.680 --> 0:26:26.280 place where bison poured from the earth was the Wichita 0:26:26.320 --> 0:26:32.159 Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. For the Comanches, bison regenerated in 0:26:32.240 --> 0:26:36.359 the canyons of a West Texas plateau. The Yanos Daccato 0:26:37.160 --> 0:26:42.159 the Lakotas believed this mysterious renewal happened in caves like 0:26:42.320 --> 0:26:45.920 Ludlow Cave in and near the Black Hills, which Native 0:26:45.960 --> 0:26:51.200 people surrounded with petroglyphs of buffalo tracks and human vaginas 0:26:51.320 --> 0:26:56.320 enjoined symbols of fertility. Most buffalo hunting peoples believed the 0:26:56.359 --> 0:27:00.480 bison to have been present very early in creation. In 0:27:00.520 --> 0:27:03.520 this kind of cosmic origin, they were like the other 0:27:03.600 --> 0:27:06.840 great forces of the universe, the sun and moon, the 0:27:06.880 --> 0:27:10.800 sky overhead that would always exist, much as we're all 0:27:10.960 --> 0:27:14.720 utterly convinced today that there's no force capable of erasing 0:27:14.760 --> 0:27:16.320 the night sky of its stars. 0:27:16.520 --> 0:27:17.520 For humans who had. 0:27:17.400 --> 0:27:21.240 Been among bison for thousands of years, the animals were 0:27:21.359 --> 0:27:28.040 similarly beyond all time all history. In the Plains Indian 0:27:28.119 --> 0:27:32.160 creation accounts that undergirded this kind of understanding, the most 0:27:32.200 --> 0:27:35.760 important animals are there at the beginning with the creators, 0:27:35.960 --> 0:27:39.199 before humans joined the world, and it was not just 0:27:39.280 --> 0:27:43.160 themselves as flesh that bison would offer up as gifts. 0:27:43.600 --> 0:27:48.760 Among the Cheyennes, buffalo and thunder gave fire to their 0:27:48.840 --> 0:27:53.639 culture hero sweet medicine. For the Mandana Datzas, it was 0:27:53.720 --> 0:27:58.280 a buffalo bull who gave their culture hero lone man tobacco. 0:27:59.400 --> 0:28:02.520 Somewhat in the same manner that the Greeks regarded their 0:28:02.520 --> 0:28:07.080 gods as partly mortal, most Plains tribes thought of buffalo 0:28:07.400 --> 0:28:11.200 in their worldly form in the same terms as humans. 0:28:11.720 --> 0:28:16.840 Buffalo had families and societies and opinions and memories. They 0:28:16.880 --> 0:28:21.080 were people. In other words, In some traditions, buffalo had 0:28:21.119 --> 0:28:25.520 the ability to renew themselves after death. The Crees told 0:28:25.600 --> 0:28:28.879 ethnographer James Mooney that if you left the head, tail, 0:28:29.160 --> 0:28:31.560 and four feet of a buffalo at a place of 0:28:31.600 --> 0:28:37.040 its death, the animal would regenerate, although bison might regenerate 0:28:37.320 --> 0:28:40.080 and the earth could disgorge a fresh body of them 0:28:40.240 --> 0:28:43.720 like a hive of bees. The hunting tribes understood that 0:28:43.920 --> 0:28:49.200 animal masters controlled access to buffalo. That made access then 0:28:49.480 --> 0:28:54.120 fraught with taboos designed to convey proper respect for creatures 0:28:54.160 --> 0:28:58.800 willing to sacrifice themselves for the human good. Among the Cheyennes, 0:28:59.200 --> 0:29:02.960 their access to buffalo was the legacy of their several 0:29:03.120 --> 0:29:08.520 culture heroes, Coyote Man and his daughter Yellow Haired Woman, 0:29:08.800 --> 0:29:12.360 who had first released the animals of the planes, along 0:29:12.440 --> 0:29:19.240