The North American Plains Buffalo:
The buffalo is, or was, one of the most important of the Plains animals,
and has attracted more attention than any other animal indigenous to the
United States. Originally its range was not confined to the Plains, but
it was only in the Plains that the animal grew in sufficient numbers to
exert any appreciable effect upon man. It is said that the first buffalo
seen by a white man was viewed by Cortez and his men in 1521 at Anahuac,
where Montezuma maintained a small zoo or menagerie. The nearest place
from which this animal could have come was the state of Coahuila, which
contains an extension of the Great Plains of the United States south of
the Rio Grande.
A few years later, probably about 1530, Alvar Nufiez Cabeza de Vaca
saw buffalo hides on the edge of the plains in southern Texas. He described
these animals and mentioned the fact that the Indians killed them for food.
Coronado reached the buffalo country from the other direction in 1542.
De Soto's men touched it at one time. None of the other early Spanish explorers
saw the buffalo until the beginning of the seventeenth century.
The English settlers found buffalo as early as 1612, when Samuel Argoll
records seeing the animal, probably near the head of the Potomac River.
In 1679 the French missionary Father Hennepin ascended the St. Lawrence
and went into the buffalo country bordering the Great Lakes. Colonel William
Byrd's party found buffalo in 1729, when surveying the boundary between
North Carolina and Virginia. But the important fact is that buffalo were
rare in the Eastern woodland area, not numerous enough to exert any influence
either on the native races or on the newcomers from Europe. It was not
until the settlements approached the prairies, the tall grasslands, which
stretched along the margin of the timber line, that the buffalo appear
in sufficiently large numbers to make an impression on human life.
Herds have been described which were estimated to cover fifty square
miles, containing about 500,000 animals. Some herd estimates reached a
total 12,000,000 and that they could certainly reach 4,000,000. The estimate
total population is considered to have surpassed 60,000,000 animals overall.
The important point is that under the natural conditions of the Plains
there was a nearly inexhaustible food supply, unrivaled by anything elsewhere
known to man.
Prior to the coming of man the buffalo had no truly large predators
in force such as lions or leopards as say found on the African plains.
The Giant Birds were rare and when they did come their hunting was selective
and lean, especially when compared to the numbers of buffalo. With no need
to develop sophisticated defenses they became an easy victim for the hunter,
whether the Native American with bow and arrow or the white man with his
long-range buffalo gun. The buffalo was slow of gait, clumsy in movement,
and had relatively poor eyesight and little fear of sound. Though it had
a fairly keen sense of smell, this sense was useless to it when it was
approached from down the wind.
Up until the middle of the 17th century, few people dwelt year-round
on the open grasslands of the Great Plains. Not only was the tough, thick
root masses of the prairie grass impossible to penetrate with digging sticks,
but the winter winds, driving snow storms, and often intense summer heat
made life extremely difficult for most of the year. Also, until the arrival
of the Spanish-introduced horse (in the middle of the 17th century), hunting
buffalo anywhere on the Plains, except along its margins, was difficult
for people who were on foot and possessed only their dogs to help carry
meat, hides, tools, and shelter. Instead, it was the lush river bottoms
of the major rivers that crossed the Plains that were occupied and used
to forage from to hunt.
Historically the buffalo had more influence on man than all other Plains
animals combined. It was life, food, clothing, and shelter to the Indians.
The buffalo and the Plains Indians lived together, and together both passed
away. It was only three hundred and fifty-five short years from the time
Cortez saw his first buffalo to the year 1876, which marks for the most
part, the end of the large herds. After 1876 only one major tribal
hunt occurred and that was in 1892. The Ojibwe
Chief Little Shell bolted North Dakota's Turtle Mountain Reservation
with 112 families heading toward the herds in Montana. Little Shell's attempt
to fend off starvation and return his tribe to a time before being overcome
by a vanishing heritage ended nearly as tragic as those that befell the
Giant Birds that once roamed the skies in the the same area with unbridled
freedom.
