The Massive Hunting Of What Animal Hurt The Plains Indians?

This 1 startling photo captures the horrifying extent of the buffalo slaughter carried out by early settlers of the American West.

Buffalo Slaughter

This mountain of skulls piled up in the Midwest in the mid-1870s captures the extent of the buffalo slaughter carried out by American settlers. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

The American bison was once the symbol of a vast, limitless land filled with seemingly endless country and equally countless opportunity. Simply American settlers presently ensured that the bison would ultimately symbolize the dark, ugly side of "manifest destiny."

Estimates of how many bison used to roam the Midwest, before European settlers moved in, range from 30 to 60 one thousand thousand. Native Americans one time lived in harmony with these migratory herds, while using the bison for food, their hides for clothing and shelter, and their bones for tools and weapons.

Just the American settlers advancing from the e were hungry for more land and more than resources, including bison. Hunters on cross-land trains would fifty-fifty take aim at the wild creatures from their windows and shoot down several at a time.

The hunting railroad train would then slow to a stop for people to skin the animals for coats, or cut out their tongues for culinary delicacies in the cities along the Eastern seaboard. Different the Native Americans, these hunters left the rest of the bison to rot.

Overall, betwixt 1800 and 1900, the bison population was brought downward from the estimated xxx-lx million to approximately 325. While more exact statistics on the corporeality of bison killed by settlers are hard to come by, the full scope of the problem can be glimpsed in the numbers from i railroad visitor: 500,000 bison hides shipped east between simply 1872 and 1874.

As startling equally the numbers behind this mass buffalo slaughter are, most settlers seemed to view the brute every bit just one small-scale step in manifest destiny, the quasi-religious belief that American settlers were destined to own the land of the New World all the manner from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Even the extermination of Native American populations — another enormous casualty of manifest destiny — is directly tied to the bison.

"I would non seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western plains, in its effect upon the Indians," Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior, wrote in 1873.

The post-obit twelvemonth, General Philip Sheridan, a leading fighter in the Indian Wars, told the Texas Legislature that bison hunters were "destroying the Indian's commissary," and the people should let them "kill, peel, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated."

Conflicts and ideologies like these are often difficult to visualize in concrete terms and solid images. Merely in the instance of manifest destiny, i need look no further than the buffalo slaughter.

Today, all the same, through careful conservation and land management efforts, the bison population has been brought dorsum up to around 500,000.