How the bison disappeared in America. The extermination of bison in the United States. Reproduction and offspring

Until the early 19th century, there were about 30 million bison in the United States. These giants, whose body length sometimes reaches 2.5-3 meters, felt great on the wide and almost untouched plains. Of course, they were always hunted by the Indians for the sake of skin and meat, but they could not cause significant harm to huge herds, and they were not going to. After all, bison meant too much to them: meat helped the indigenous people of America gain strength and survive the winter, clothes were made from animal skin, dwellings were built and shoes were sewn, and bones served as material for tools and utensils.

1870 Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library

However, beginning in the 1930s, some Native American tribes began to hunt bison for commercial purposes, selling their skins to white people on the East Coast of the United States. Such a business has become so attractive that the Europeans themselves decided to participate in it. Hundreds of hunters were drawn inland in the hope of earning good money. Moreover, not a single living creature could resist lead and gunpowder.

The terrible years began for the unfortunate bison. They were killed by the thousands, immediately skinned on the spot, and the bodies were sent to special fields so that after a time when the meat rotted, their bones could be collected. The hunters did not need the meat itself in such huge quantities, and you cannot transport it fresh across the continent.

The skin of bison was used to make warm blankets, carpets and clothes, durable skin turned out to be indispensable for a variety of industrial machines, and bones and skulls were used for fertilizer. It would seem that an ideal resource has finally been found to meet human needs. But it ended much faster than everyone expected.

In just a hundred years from 1800 to 1900, American hunters managed to reduce the bison population from several tens of millions of individuals to several hundred. And even those miraculously survived only in national parks, on the territory of which there were restrictions on hunting. In just 5 years - from 1870 to 1875 - 12.5 million bison were destroyed.

By the way, not only hunters had a hand in this. The young American railroad companies, with very ambitious leaders, disliked the buffalo. Still would! These hulks had the audacity to occasionally cross the railroad tracks, hide from the sun in the shade of the embankments and fall under the wheels of locomotives, which leads to many hours of delay in the movement of trains.

And these people once again came up with a "brilliant" way out: they allowed their passengers to shoot at defenseless bison from the windows of the cars. Moreover, they made it one of the "chips" of rail travel. So much more fun than just looking at a dull landscape behind glass ...

Of course, not all Americans supported the brutal extermination of bison. Some of them tried to somehow stop this madness. So, in 1872, through the efforts of private organizations and philanthropists, Yellowstone National Park was created, on the territory of which a small herd of bison lived. It was these animals that later became the basis for the restoration of the entire population.

In addition, some politicians have tried to prevent the hunters by legislation. Thus, bills to restrict the hunting of animals were submitted to the US Senate in 1872, 1874 and 1876. However, the first of them was not even discussed. In 1874, after heated debate, a law was nevertheless passed to prohibit the useless killing of animals, but President Grant vetoed it.

Why? Because the extermination of bison was economically beneficial - the Indians depended on them, who at that time did not really want to move to reservations specially allocated for them. The destruction of their primary food source convinced the natives much faster than all the weapons of the American army. The white people won, but at what cost?

The extermination of bison in the United States since the 1830s, sanctioned by the local authorities, was intended to undermine the economic way of life of Indian tribes and doom them to starvation. The Indians, on the whole, never engaged in agriculture and lived by hunting (the exception was, perhaps, only the Cherokee - they just led a sedentary lifestyle, cultivated cereals, and preferred capital houses to wigwams).

The main food source of the Indians was bison, innumerable herds of which inhabited the endless prairies created by the great Gitch Manito. The Indians never killed bison (and game in general) for fun, only to get food. If the meat remained, they made a kind of canned food: "pemmican" - a specially cured "buffalo meat".

Indian Territories (Oklahoma). bison hunting

The "fathers of the American nation" themselves testify to the genocide of the Indians with undisguised cynicism. American General Philip Sheridan wrote: “The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They destroy the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill, skin and sell them until they have exterminated all the buffalo!”

Sheridan in the US Congress proposed to establish a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of the extermination of bison. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said: "The death of every bison is the disappearance of the Indians."

This slaughter reached a particular scale in the 60s during the construction of the railway. Not only did they feed the entire huge army of workers with bison meat, and they sold the skins. The so-called "hunt" reached the point of absurdity, when only tongues were taken from animals, and the carcasses were left to rot.

Shooting buffalo from the train

The wholesale extermination of bison reached its peak in the 60s of the XIX century, when the construction of the transcontinental railway began. Buffalo meat was fed to a huge army of road workers, and the skins were sold. Specially organized groups of hunters pursued bison everywhere, and soon the number of animals killed was about 2.5 million per year. Railroad advertisements promised bloody entertainment for passengers: shooting at buffaloes right from the windows of the cars. The hunters sat on the roofs and platforms of the train and fired for nothing at the grazing animals. No one picked up the carcasses of the dead animals, and they were left to rot on the prairies. The train passing through huge herds left behind hundreds of dying or maimed animals.

As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison decreased by the beginning of the 20th century. from several tens of millions to several hundreds. The French biologist Jean Dorst noted that the original total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885, the stories of the hunters of the North of the USA talked about hunting for the “last” bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million bison were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote of a decline in bison from 30 million in 1800 to less than a thousand by the end of the century.

Bison were also killed for fun: American railroad companies advertised for passengers to shoot buffalo from the windows of their train cars. In 1887, the English naturalist William Mushroom, who traveled across the prairies, noted: There were buffalo trails everywhere, but there were no live bison. Only the skulls and bones of these noble animals turned white in the sun.

The winters of 1880-1887 became hungry for the Indian tribes, among them there was a high mortality rate.
The hunter Buffalo Bill, hired by the administration of the Kansas Pacific Railroad, gained great fame, having killed several thousand bison. Subsequently, he selected several dozen people from the starving Indians and staged "performances": the Indians acted out scenes of attacks on the settlers in front of the audience, shouted, etc., then Buffalo Bill himself "saved" the colonists.

Poster: Buffalo Bill show

William Frederick Cody (aka Buffalo Bill)

Map of the extermination of the American bison by 1889, showing the boundaries of the initial range

The settlers, whose story Hollywood never ceases to sing, simply destroyed the bison and the Indians died of hunger. U.S. National Hero William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, in eighteen months (1867-1868) single-handedly killed 4280 (!) bison. The glorification of Buffalo Bill, for example, on Wikipedia, comes to the ridiculous - he is served as a caring supplier - he allegedly provided food for the workers who cost the Trans-American railroad. Descriptions of atrocities such as Cody, who destroyed bison for fun, or because of cutting out their tongues (the carcasses of the killed giants were simply left to rot) are diligently blurred by stories about the heroic pages of the “battle for the country”. But these were ordinary villains, murderers, no different from the stamp “bloodthirsty redskin”. The same Cody, already from 1870 being the hero of cheap novels, in 1876 personally scalped the leader of the Shaen tribe, Yellow Hand (according to other sources - Yellow Hair).

When the Americans (we will already call them that) realized that there were still too many Indians, they simply began to be massively driven from all over the country along the infamous “Trail of Tears” to concentration camps (reservations). One of the many gangs that fed on this field destroyed 28,000 bison in a year. A monument to Buffalo Bill, the buffalo killer, was erected.

In the huge Cherokee tribe, whose leader was once an outstanding scientist, politician and culturologist Sequoyah (his name is immortalized in the name of the largest trees on Earth), one in four died. By the way, the same statistics in Belarus - during the war, the Nazis destroyed a quarter of the population there ... I remember the heart-wrenching monument - three birch trees, instead of the fourth - Eternal Flame ... The Cherokee had an amazing culture, their own written language (which they still keep) ... Most the British and French who arrived from Europe were completely illiterate, homeless bandits. In accordance with the US Indian Removal Act of 1830, Oklahoma, where the indigenous people of America were driven like cattle, received the status of "Indian Territory".

The Nazis, who organized the extermination of entire peoples in the furnaces of Buchenwald, Treblinka, Salaspils in the 20th century, had someone to learn from - from 1620 to 1900, the number of Indians in the territory of the modern USA was reduced by the efforts of "enlighteners" from 15 million to 237 thousand people. That is, the grandparents of modern white Americans destroyed ... 14 million 763 thousand Indians! You can find out from which animals in the very recent past these modern lovers of reading morality to humanity can be found in the same Wikipedia (so as not to engage in lengthy scientific research):
“... Massacre at Yellow Creek near modern Wellsville (Ohio). A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by... Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 Mingos, including Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister, and cousin. The murdered daughter of Logan, Tunai, was in her last pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was taken both from her and from the fetus, which was cut out of her. Other mingos were also scalped…”

There are thousands of such examples. But the most interesting thing is that all this was done quite officially, in full accordance, if not with the letter, then with the spirit of the law. So, in 1825, the US Supreme Court formulates the "Doctrine of Discovery", according to which the rights to "discovered" lands belonged to those who "discovered" them, and the indigenous population retained the right to live on them, not owning the land. On the basis of this doctrine, already in 1830, the United States adopted the Indian Removal Act, the victims of which are already millions of people, as noted earlier, who had a highly developed culture.

When there were very few Indians left, and the Americans began to demonstrate their exclusivity to the world, claiming the role of a world guru with an atomic club, a defender of "democratic ideals", reinforcing them with a policy of "battleship pacification", and building the foundations of today's tolerance, they remembered the redskins. They were apologized to (recall the anecdote about the doctor asking his relatives if the patient was sweating before his death). They gave bonuses - here and free education in US universities, and the opportunity to "roof" the gambling business, and they began to give land! And the Oak of the Council in Tulsa was fenced with a lattice ... A wonderful Italian word is comedy!

A mountain of bison skulls exterminated by enlightened Americans

40,000 buffalo skins in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878

Wall of bison skulls

More mountains of skulls

Steppe bison feed on grass, and in addition, forest bison use leaves, shoots and branches of shrubs and trees for food. These powerful animals are able to feed in snow cover up to 1 m deep: first they scatter the snow with their hooves, and then dig a hole with the rotational movements of the head and muzzle. Once a day, the bison go to the watering place, and when severe frosts come and the water sources are covered with ice, they eat snow. They usually graze around the clock. Of the sense organs in bison, the sense of smell is best developed: bison smell danger at a distance of up to 2 km, and they smell water even further - 7-8 km away. Their hearing and vision are somewhat weaker, but they cannot be called bad.

Bison are very curious, especially calves: every new or unfamiliar object is able to attract their close attention. The voice of the bison is often given: when the herd moves, grunting sounds of different tones are constantly heard. Bulls during the rut emit a rolling roar, which in calm weather can be heard for many kilometers. Such a roar sounds especially impressive when several bulls participate in the “concert”. Despite their powerful build - old bulls can weigh a ton - bison are exceptionally fast and agile.

They easily reach speeds up to 50 km / h. The buffalo is not aggressive, but when cornered or wounded, it easily switches from fleeing to attacking. To the category of natural enemies of the bison, perhaps, only wolves can be attributed, other predators are not afraid of him. Huge herds of bison made regular migrations. Surely it was a breathtaking sight when at the same time millions of animals set off on their way, strictly observing the direction. Animals always traveled the same routes and as a result trodden wide, straight paths.

Of course, bison have been hunted for a long time. For many Indian tribes, these animals were a real granary, carefully "supplying" meat for food and skins for clothes and wigwams. The Indians roamed along with gigantic herds, and neither one nor the other did not experience any inconvenience from this. True, it cannot be argued that the native inhabitants of America and the pale-faced hunters who appeared later were especially trembling about the preservation of the bison population. Abundance breeds extravagance, and in the history of the Wild West there are many cases of the senseless extermination of a huge number of bison by the same Indians.

Nomadic white merchants and taper hunters were witnesses, and often participants in a cruel and unprofitable, as they would say now, hunt: Indian beaters set fire to the grass in front of the herd and, with screams and noise, drove part of the bison that had strayed from the herd into a deep ravine. Then the hunters ran up to the wounded animals and finished them off with spears and arrows. For food, the Indians took the meat of young females, and did not even look at the dead males. Sometimes only tongues were cut out of animals as a delicacy. Along the way, a myriad of animals could die from the fire, but the tribe did not care much. Heritage of the Stone Age. Archaeological excavations show that this method of obtaining food has been used by people since ancient times. In many places where Stone Age man hunted, scientists find huge piles of bones. So did the ancestors of the Indians.

Archaeologists conducting excavations in the southern United States, in the state of Colorado, found about two hundred bison skeletons in one of the canyons. A herd of wild bulls crashed here eight thousand years ago. The ancient Indians used part of the prey, but, as the study showed, they did not even touch several dozen carcasses. Many historians believe that the hunter, armed with stones and a spear, is directly responsible for the extinction of ancient large animals. With his primitive weapons, he could kill a few small animals, but the fire and the earth's landscape helped him destroy hundreds of large animals. Such hunting methods, coupled with periodic epidemics among animals and frequent droughts, would sooner or later lead the bison to extinction. But the white aliens managed to speed up this terrible process many times over.

If at the beginning of the century several thousand buffalo skins were sold annually, by 1830 this number had increased to 130 thousand! Apocalypse!

We can safely say that the Americans changed their mind literally at the last moment, when there were only 835 animals in the entire New World. In December 1905, the American Society for Saving the Buffalo was formed. First in Oklahoma, then in Montana, Nebraska and Dakota, special reserves arose where bison could feel safe. By 1910, the number of bison had doubled, and after another 10 years there were about 9,000 of them. A movement to save the bison was also launched in Canada.

In 1907, the government bought a herd of 709 heads from private hands and moved it to Wayne Wright (Alberta), in 1915, Wood Buffalo National Park was established for the few surviving wood bison, between the Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca. Now in the USA and Canada there are 30,000-50,000 bison. True, various subspecies, due to extermination by people and crossing among themselves, have not been preserved.

The American bison, or buffalo, is a prairie legend, one of the main characters in the history of the Wild West, which practically disappeared and was miraculously revived.

The Indians hunted 450,000 bison a year. For a herd of tens of millions of heads, this was not overfishing.

Herds of bison appeared before the eyes of the first settlers in myriad numbers: it seemed that they occupy the entire space from horizon to horizon.

There were more of them than the wildebeest and zebras in Africa today (up to two million heads participate in the Great Migration). Seton-Thompson estimated that in 1800 there were 60 million bison in America. And at the end of the 19th century, only 25 heads remained.

In a mere forty years (1830-1870) the buffalo disappeared, and this disappearance was one of the most mystical events in world wildlife history.

And in the 20th century, bison, almost swept off the face of the earth, miraculously revived. Why did they die and who is the author of the "American miracle" - the revival of the bison?

AMERICAN LEGEND

The bison is as much a symbolic animal in America as the bear is in Russia. Who in childhood did not read about the noble Indians of the prairies, who roamed behind countless herds of bison and lived in perfect harmony with nature!

The buffalo was at the heart of the life of the Indians: meat was their main food, the skins were used for wigwams, for bedding, clothes and for sale; bowstrings were made from tendons; glue was cooked from the hooves.

By all accounts, and this is portrayed in books and Hollywood movies, all misfortune came on the prairies with the palefaces. The politically “literate” will add that the Indians lived in a communal system, and the whites attacked them with the “capitalist cleansing”, as a result of which the bison fell victim to private property self-interest.

The most advanced will tell that the extermination of the buffalo was precisely aimed at depriving the Indians of their main source of livelihood and forcing them to live settled in reservations under the control of the federal government.

That is why the destruction of bison was sanctioned, and hunters in a matter of years reduced their millions of herds to several dozen individuals, miraculously preserved in Yellowstone.

Indeed, before the appearance of the pale-faced Indians lived mostly sedentary, the bison did not dominate their culture in the way that it did with the advent of the horse and firearms.

The transition to nomadic life gave rise to the dependence of the Indians on bison meat as the main food product, and the two main hunting trophies - bison and beaver skins - became practically the only commodity for exchange for guns, knives, axes, metal utensils, fire water.

Even in the “before-pale-faced” times, the predatory extermination of bison by the Indians appeared, when the herds were surrounded by fires and many animals burned in the fire. The same applied to the corrals of herds to the cliffs, under which dozens and even hundreds of smashed bison were left to rot.

The ease of getting buffalo led to the fact that the Indians cut only the best pieces of meat from the carcass, leaving the rest untouched.

The Indians believed that the buffalo was inexhaustible, while the pale-faced ones killed the buffalo in order to deprive the Indians of the provision of their nomadic and uncontrolled life. Therefore, the army distributed free ammunition for hunting buffalo.

WAR TO DESTROY

A successful hunter could get and skin with assistants a dozen or more bison in the morning. The warehouses of buying companies were overcrowded, and the presence of 60-80 thousand skins in the warehouse was no exception.

A dollar was given for the salty tongue of a bison (a carpenter had to work 12 hours a day to get two dollars). For the skin of a bison, they paid 3-3.5 dollars, a carcass weighing a ton was thrown on the spot.

The construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, which ran through the deserted expanses of the American plain, prompted construction companies to hire professional hunters to supply workers with food.

Normal conditions included the production of 10-12 bison per day, but this could not affect any noticeable decrease in the number of a herd of many millions.

The killing of buffalo by train passengers became a byword when the railroad cut the prairie. Countless herds of buffalo stopped trains for a long time and damaged the railroad tracks when they crossed the line in their endless migrations; shooting from the windows of the carriages was encouraged by the railway company, and hundreds of buffalo carcasses were left to rot along the tracks.

The problem discussed in the newspapers was the terrible smell that accompanied the movement of trains on the desecrated prairie. But these losses of livestock were again negligible from the point of view of its total number.

Of course, the fact that the bison was not afraid of a man on a horse also played a role and allowed the hunter to approach him practically for point-blank shooting. By the way, first of all they shot females - because of the better skin and tender meat.

WHAT'S WORSE BULLETS?

I calculated that in order to destroy a population of 60 million bison with an annual replenishment of 5-7 million, with a life expectancy of 25 years, you need to get about 8-10 million head per year. And it takes about 600 tons of lead per year to shoot such a large number of bison.

Even the most implacable accusers of hunters cannot provide statistics confirming this fabulous value.

What was the main reason for the extinction of the bison?

First of all, the general advance of civilization with its cattle ranches, towns, roads. The displacement of the "king of the prairies" with the advance of the white man to the west of America was inevitable.

The settlers cut forests to the vine, and the bison lost their winter shelter. Herds of livestock increasingly competed with buffalo for grazing, and diseases carried by cattle, never before seen on the prairies, turned out to be deadlier than lead and arrows.

It was large-scale epizootics brought by livestock that led to the mass death of countless herds of bison, the microbe turned out to be more powerful than lead. This has happened many times in history.

The plague of the mid-14th century in Europe led to the death of 50 million people - a third of the population of the continent. The Spanish flu caused the death of 42 million people at the end of World War I, taking more in a few months than the bullets and shells of the warring armies in four years of war.

Unknown epizootics led to the death of bison in different US states throughout the 19th century. Eyewitnesses described the prairie filled with thousands of buffalo corpses to the horizon, and no traces of bullets or arrows were found on the carcasses.

But who will write books and make films about the pandemic after the First World War - except perhaps microbiologists! About the war on the plains of Europe or on the prairies of America, you can write and make films endlessly.

MAN'S FAULT WITH GUN

The buffalo hunter did not play the main role in this tragedy, although history gave him all the signs of the main villain. The accusations against them were based on impressive numbers.

W. Hornady, one of the first accusers of hunters in the destruction of bison, cites terrible data: over 1.3 million buffalo skins were sent by rail in three years. But this is against the backdrop of a total herd of tens of millions of heads!

The female brings calves (usually one, rarely two) from the age of three, and this happens every year until the end of her life. The ability of a healthy herd to expand reproduction led to the achievement of the number of bison in America to a fabulous 60 million head. Shooting in those years could not reduce such a population to practical zero for several decades.

What is the role of the hunter, red-skinned and white-faced, in the destruction of the buffalo? Did the “great army of the prairies” really perish under the bullets of Sharps, Winchesters and Remingtons?

It should be noted that bison grazed in countless herds in the territory where the railways were not laid - they appeared only in the 19th century. How could hunters cover the boundless expanses, penetrate into all corners of the habitat of the buffalo population, where the hostile Indians were in charge?

How was it possible to kill 60 million animals in the forests and prairies, starting from the northern territories of Canada and ending with the lands of modern Mexico, using antediluvian vehicles (mule-drawn carts), with the help of archaic weapons with black powder (single-shot, initially muzzle-loading at all)?

How many bison per year could be shot by one hunter on a horse not from an automatic rifle, even if it were the legendary Sharp - a “weapon of mass destruction” of the second half of the 19th century, which allowed up to 10 shots per minute and largely decided the outcome of the wars with the Indians in 1870 -X?

Could an antediluvian firearm of the century before last have reduced the population of a normally breeding beast to 25 heads? Note: in densely populated Europe, the last wild bison, a relative of the bison, was killed in 1919.

In the complex of reasons for the dramatic extinction of the prairie giants, the main one is the attack on the biotopes of bison by an aggressive pastoral civilization as a whole, which carried both epizootics, and the displacement of buffalo from their usual habitats.

PHOENIX PRAIRIE

At the end of the 19th century, bison remained practically only in zoos, and no one believed that their “second coming” was possible: miracles do not happen. But a miracle happened. Now the buffalo has once again become an icon of the prairies and forests of America, and the reason for this was private interest, the same market motivator that underlay the almost complete destruction of the bison.

Already in the 1880s, the first private herds of bison appeared in the States, living on a ranch, where hunting for them was even sold and where the number of livestock increased. Meanwhile, there were less and less of these animals in the wild, and the state unsuccessfully fought against poachers - this scourge even in Yellowstone.

No increase in fines for illegal hunting could save the “state” bison - the desperate American lads, accustomed to the freemen of bygone years, continued to reduce this livestock, while the private ranch owner, just as desperate, gave a tough rebuff to the robbers (a matter for an American on Wild West habitual).

A cultural interest arose in the bison as part of American heritage and Native American culture.

One hundred years after their almost complete disappearance, the bison herds revived, and the private owner, due to obvious benefits, became the main owner of the bison in America, created a whole business similar to other types of cattle breeding.

By the 1990s, more than 90% of bison in America lived on private ranches (now almost 95%). In total, there are currently more than half a million bison in state national parks and 4,000 private ranches in the United States.

Yes, American hunters have contributed to the near extinction of the once innumerable mighty beast of the prairies and forests. But the Americans managed to return the symbol of the Wild West from oblivion, and the saga of the fate of the bison in America became one of the canonical stories of sin and salvation.

I continue to acquaint readers of the "highway" with exterminated and endangered species of animals. In my previous articles, I wrote about sea cows and American passenger pigeons, which were savagely exterminated by man in a very short period of time.

In my Black Book of Records of Humanity, sea cows are "leading" in the category faster than exterminated, and the following two species: American passenger pigeons and bison are among the most numerous and ruthless beatings. If we never see passenger pigeons again, then for now we can watch bison in reserves and national parks.

European colonists can be safely called the most cruel people in relation to nature. It is only worth saying that after the development of the representatives of the Old World of the African continent, only 10% of the biodiversity that was before remained on it. The first to distinguish themselves were the Dutch. Zebras were their first prey. Moreover, they were exterminated so intensively that the colonists did not even have enough balls: they cut them out of the bodies of dead animals, loaded their guns with them and continued to kill. But even this was not enough for them.

As always, Homo sapiens come up with brilliant ideas in terms of killing either their own kind or other living creatures. The "genius" of the idea was the economy and efficiency of the new way of killing zebras. They were surrounded, driven to the abyss, and the animals fell from a height of many meters and were smashed to death. In this way, the Dutch saved gunpowder and lead and could kill many more animals.

The rigidity of the Europeans has led to the fact that now there are very few herds of zebras in Africa, and one of the most interesting - the quagga zebra was completely exterminated.

However, this article is not about zebras and Dutch colonists, but about animals that lived on another continent, in another hemisphere.

American colonists, no less than African, harmed the animal and plant world. Vivid examples of the relationship between the conquerors of North America and the natural environment were large-scale and terrible extermination of passenger pigeons and bison.

Therefore, let's talk about the American bison (Bison bison Linnaeus). With the beginning of the development of North America in the early XVIII century. more than 75 million bison lived on a vast territory, from Lake Erie and the Great Slave in the north to Texas, Mexico and Louisiana in the south, from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Atlantic coast in the east.

The first travelers were amazed at the sight of the millions of buffalo herds that grazed the plains. Each of these bison weighed more than 1350 kg, besides, they had no natural enemies, with the exception of coyotes, which attacked young individuals on occasion. Wolves can also be called among the enemies, but they attack either small calves or old bison.

And very quickly an enemy appeared in these large animals. And not one...

So it turns out that what a person is fond of soon becomes destroyed. Indeed, at first people admired bison, and very soon the barbaric extermination of these animals began. One American scientist said that the colonists "killed, being possessed by some diabolical power, makes everyone and everything kill" ...

The extermination of bison can be divided into two periods.

First period (1730-1840) At this time, there was a gradual transformation of the untouched territory into cultivated lands, an increasing number of immigrants from Europe moved to the New World, so the need and demand for food and skin grew. The presence of huge herds of large animals, which, moreover, were constantly moving, could not be desirable in areas occupied by crops, but then it was only about reducing the number of bison and effectively exploiting their population. It should be noted that the existence of the indigenous inhabitants of America - the Indians - their customs and entire life system were closely connected with the bison. However, the hunting of the Indians had little effect on the number of bison, and the first white settlers in the first period did not fundamentally change the state of affairs, killing animals only to satisfy basic needs or protecting their crops.

And second period, which began around the 1830s, was of a different nature, since its goal was the wholesale extermination of bison. In the northern habitats of the bison, it was destroyed in order to doom the Indian tribes, against which the colonists waged a merciless struggle, to starvation. But this was not the end of the matter.

The slaughter reached its peak in the 1860s, when the construction of the transcontinental railroad began. Bison meat fed a huge army of road workers, skins were sold. Often the "hunt" reached the point of absurdity: only the tongue was taken from the bison, leaving countless carcasses to rot. Railroad advertisements promised passengers an astonishing attraction: shooting buffalo right from the windows of the train. The train, which passed through herds of buffalo, left behind hundreds of dying or maimed animals. In one hunting season of 1872-73, no less than 200,000 bison were killed in the state of Kansas alone. Special detachments of shooters pursued bison everywhere, and in the 70s of the XIX century. the number of animals that were killed annually was about 2,500,000. Just one fact: the “legendary” William Cody, nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who supplied meat to railway workers, killed 4280 bison in 1.5 years, i.e. he actually killed one buffalo every three hours!

Over time, hundreds of tons of buffalo bones were harvested and used to make fertilizer and black paint. Special companies were created to collect and deliver bones to the railways. The scope of the massacre can be judged from archival materials: in heaps of bones prepared for loading into freight cars, there were up to 20 thousand skeletons. Almost 5,000 tons of buffalo bones were transported along the famous Santa Fe railroad between 1872 and 1874. Not surprisingly, sometime around 1868, the bison virtually disappeared from the southwestern United States. Of course, in some places separate herds of bison still roamed, but their number was so small that disappointed hunters abandoned further fishing. Herds of bison also decreased in the North of the United States, and in 1880, Indian tribes specially armed for this went on the last assault on them. During the hunting season (November to February), one hunter killed from one to two thousand bison. Soon these animals became so rare that in the stories of hunters of the period 1880-1885, hunting for the “last” bison in the area is mentioned, and this indicates not only an extreme reduction in the number of bison, but also a multiple rupture of its range.

Bison were not only shot, they were destroyed in the most barbaric and painful ways. On the way of herds of buffalo, around lakes and along the banks of rivers, bonfires were lit so that exhausted and thirsty animals could not approach the water. The bison went to other reservoirs, but everywhere they were met by a wall of fire. Many of them could not stand this torture and died. Others were killed by letting them into the water.

The almost total extermination of the bison was undoubtedly a tragic episode in the entire history of the relationship between man and nature, and, unfortunately, not the only one: other mammals also experienced serious losses. Their populations sometimes decreased to alarming sizes, and their ranges narrowed.

By 1889 it was all over. In a vast area where herds of millions grazed, only 835 bison remained, including a herd of 200 animals that escaped in Yellowstone National Park. And yet it was not too late.

In parallel with the extermination of bison, there was another significant destruction, which I have already mentioned - the destruction of passenger pigeons. And if the birds could not be saved, then in the case of the bison, people still managed to come to their senses.

In 1905 the American Society for Saving the Buffalo was founded. Literally in the last days, in the last hours of the bison's existence, society managed to turn the wheel of history. First in Oklahoma, then in other states, special reserves were established, where the bison were safe. After 4 years, the number of bison doubled, and after another 10 years there were about 9,000 of them.

A movement to save the bison was also launched in Canada. In 1907, a herd of bison, numbering 709 heads, was bought from private hands and transported to Wayne Wright (Alberta), and in 1915, Wood Buffalo National Park was established for some of the surviving wood bison, between the Great Slave Lake and the lake Athabasca. Unfortunately, more than 6,000 steppe bison were brought there in 1925-1928, which brought tuberculosis, and most importantly, freely interbreeding with the wood bison, threatened to “absorb” it as an independent subspecies.

And only in 1957, in a remote and hard-to-reach northwestern section of the park, a herd of purebred wood bison of about 200 heads was discovered. From here, in 1963, 18 bison were caught and transported to a special reserve across the Mackenzie River, where in 1969 there were about 30 of them. Another 43 wood bison were moved to Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton.

Now in the national parks and reserves of Canada there are more than 30 thousand bison, of which about 400 are forest; in the USA - more than 10 thousand individuals. Of course, their current number cannot be compared with that of some 300 years ago. Yes, for us, people, 300 years is a long time, but for the planet it is only one moment.

As in the case of the stray pigeon, the Americans were shocked by the destruction of the bison and began to come up with ridiculous theories of their disappearance. Recently, American scientists put forward a "brilliant" theory of the disappearance of tens of millions of bison on the American continent.

In particular, today they seriously believe that climate change, and not barbaric extermination, caused the extinction of bison and other large mammals from the American prairies.

Their new research has shown that bison began to disappear about 37,000 years ago, 20,000 years before large human communities settled in the areas. At the same time, the bison managed to survive the period of melting glaciers - about 10,000 years ago, when other mammals of that era, such as saber-toothed tigers, died. For scientists, "it came as a big surprise" to find out that the extinction of bison began with a mass migration of people. “Humans could have wiped out the last remaining members of this group, but climate change is to blame, it was she who turned large mammals into “walking victims,” said Oxford University professor Alan Cooper.

The researchers found that bison DNA found in individuals that lived 50,000 years ago is strikingly different from those that live today. Modern North American bison are descended from a single female who lived about 15,000 to 22,000 years ago, a study shows.

Interestingly, in general, such a difference can be explained by ordinary evolution according to Darwin's theory, but today's scientists interpret information in a way that is beneficial to them at the moment. And today it is very fashionable to say that climate change and bad ecology are to blame for all our troubles. Although it is silent at the same time who spoiled this ecology and became an indicator of the Earth's climate change, which is impressive in terms of pace.

The story of the destruction of the American bison is instructive. Despite the catastrophic extermination, these large animals were saved. And even if today there are tens of thousands of times less of them than it was before (although only the naive can hope that animal populations will decrease, because due to the growth of the human population, animals, unfortunately, are declining, or even completely disappear), but never it's too late to stop and change your mind. Therefore, today Americans and tourists can watch beautiful and kind animals that survived a real genocide in the 19th century.

The extermination of bison in the United States since the 1830s, sanctioned by the local authorities, was intended to undermine the economic way of life of Indian tribes and doom them to starvation. The Indians, on the whole, never engaged in agriculture and lived by hunting (the exception was, perhaps, only the Cherokee - they just led a sedentary lifestyle, cultivated cereals, and preferred capital houses to wigwams). The main food source of the Indians was bison, innumerable herds of which inhabited the endless prairies created by the great Gitch Manito. The Indians never killed bison (and game in general) for fun, only to get food. If the meat remained, they made a kind of canned food: "pemmican" - a specially cured "buffalo meat".

Indian Territories (Oklahoma). bison hunting

William Frederick Cody (aka Buffalo Bill)

Poster: Buffalo Bill show

In the huge Cherokee tribe, whose leader was once an outstanding scientist, politician and culturologist Sequoyah (his name is immortalized in the name of the largest trees on Earth), one in four died. By the way, the same statistics in Belarus - during the war, the Nazis destroyed a quarter of the population there ... I remember the heart-wrenching monument - three birch trees, instead of the fourth - the Eternal Flame ... The Cherokee had an amazing culture, their own script (which they still keep) ... Most of the same the British and French who arrived from Europe were completely illiterate, homeless bandits. In accordance with the US Indian Removal Act of 1830, Oklahoma, where the indigenous people of America were driven like cattle, received the status of "Indian Territory".

A mountain of bison skulls exterminated by enlightened Americans

"... General Philip Sheridan: "The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them to kill ... until they exterminate all the buffalo!” Sheridan in the US Congress proposed to establish a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of exterminating bison.

Colonel Richard Dodge: "The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians." As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison by the beginning of the 20th century decreased from several tens of millions to several hundreds. The French biologist Jean Dorst noted that initially the total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885, the stories of the hunters of the North of the United States spoke of hunting the “last” bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million bison were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote of a decline in the number of bison from 30 million in 1800 to less than a thousand by the end of the century ... "

Wall of bison skulls

Shooting buffalo from the train

Heaps of bison skins

Massacre at Yellow Creek near present-day Wellsville, Ohio. A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by... Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 Mingos, including Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister, and cousin. Logan's murdered daughter, Tunay, was in her last pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was taken both from her and from the fetus, which was cut out of her. Other mingos were also scalped...

There are thousands of such examples. But the most interesting thing is that all this was done quite officially, in full accordance, if not with the letter, then with the spirit of the law. So, in 1825, the US Supreme Court formulates the "Doctrine of Discovery", according to which the rights to "discovered" lands belonged to those who "discovered" them, and the indigenous population retained the right to live on them, not owning the land. On the basis of this doctrine, already in 1830, the United States adopted the Indian Removal Act, the victims of which are already millions of people, as noted earlier, who had a highly developed culture.

When there were very few Indians left, and the Americans began to demonstrate their exclusivity to the world, claiming the role of a world guru with an atomic club, a defender of "democratic ideals", reinforcing them with a policy of "battleship pacification", and building the foundations of today's tolerance, they remembered the redskins. They were apologized to (recall the anecdote about the doctor asking his relatives if the patient was sweating before his death). They gave bonuses - here and free education in US universities, and the opportunity to "protect" the gambling business, and they began to give land! And the Oak of the Council in Tulsa was fenced with a lattice ... A wonderful Italian word - comedy!