Bison, People, and Plains

No animal is more iconic to the North American wilderness than the bison, and it's almost impossible to imagine the Great Plains without them. In 2016, the American bison was named the National Mammal of the United States, and one could argue that this was long overdue. Because for nearly 200 years, they've been used in American seals, flags, and logos. They loom large in the American imagination. For thousands of years, long before humans had ever arrived, they were a fixture on the North American continent. As humans settled the Great Plains, they took advantage of the bison herds to such an extent that they depended on the bison and bison products, not just for food, but for clothing, shelter, and even tools and personal defense. In traditional Plains cultures and religion, they occupy a very important place. So today, we're going to explore the ancient relationship between bison and people. Originally, I was going to include this as part of my Great Plains episode, but as you can see from the boggling length of this video, this became such a huge part of that video that I decided to spin it off into its own episode. So for anyone watching in the future, this is intended to be watched in conjunction with my video on the Great Plains. For those stuck in the present, you're going to have to wait until the next video. One more thing before we get started. I will be using the term bison to refer to these prairie tanks, rather than the more common term buffalo. The reason is that the word buffalo actually refers to wild cattle in a separate taxonomic subfamily that includes animals like Cape buffalo in Africa and water buffalo in Asia. Bison are in their own separate genus, and that includes American bison, which has the adorable scientific name of bison bison, and European bison, which has the more boring scientific name of bison bonasses. Now, I'm not trying to stand on a soapbox here. If you want to use the term buffalo, that's perfectly fine, and there's nothing wrong with it, but bison is the term that I will be using. To start things off, we are going to introduce the star of today's show and discuss its biology and evolution. Modern bison trace their roots to Eurasia, where they evolved before migrating across the Bering land bridge into North America around 130,000 years ago. Now, these animals migrating into the continent were not the lovable bison that we see today. These were steppe bison, which were absolutely huge, standing two meters tall at the shoulder with giant sweeping horns. They spread out across the continent, but their numbers were pretty limited. This is because during the Pleistocene, North America was home to several large grazing animals like horses, mammoths, and camelids, so competition for space and food was tight. During that time, those steppe bison evolved into bison antiquus, the ancestor of all American bison, but bigger changes were afoot. At the end of the Pleistocene, the planet began to warm up, and the retreat of the glaciers produced huge environmental changes. By this time, humans had entered the continent and were spreading out rapidly across North America and hunting large game when they could. The powerful impact of these changes were that the megafauna, which had always acted as a powerful check on the bison populations, began to die off. For one reason or another, the bison endured. Some have speculated that the smaller size and faster reproduction rates were better suited to new conditions. Regardless, this was the moment of the bison, and they made the most of it by exploding across the new grasslands and becoming the dominant large grazer on the plains. The bison also had to adapt to the new climate, and to that effect, they began to get smaller and more compact. The end result is that modern bison are about 25% smaller than their Ice Age ancestors. Speaking of size and statistics, let's take a look at bison up close. Bison are big animals. Male bison, bison bulls, weigh about 900 kilograms or 2,000 pounds on average, while female bison, bison cows, clock in at about 500 kilograms or 1,100 pounds on average. Bison may look like awkward and clumsy beasts at first glance, but bison actually have a remarkable speed and agility. They can sprint for short distances at over 50 kilometers an hour, which is almost as fast as a horse, despite the fact that bison are usually much larger. They also possess incredible endurance that allow them to cover great distances and wear out pursuing predators. Bison can also be unpredictably aggressive, and a startled or trapped bison has little problem trampling or goring would-be predators. Bison rely on their keen sense of smell to detect predators and threats. Their eyesight by contrast is poor. For food, bison graze principally on grasses and sedges. On average, they consume about 2% of their body mass per day. Because they live in herds, they need to move regularly to find enough fresh forage for sustenance. Bison have a very fixed and predictable seasonal cycle. Spring is when new bison calves are born. This is the ideal time because it gives the calves time to grow in warm weather when the environmental threats are minimalized. Herds will aggregate into larger units as the spring wears on. The spring is important because it's peak grazing season and allows the bison to replace weight lost during the winter months. For most of the year, bulls and cows live in separate herds. The exception to this is that female herds, also called nursery herds, will also have juvenile males. This division of the sexes changes in the summer when males join the female herds for the rut, the bison mating season. During this time, males will aggressively duel for access to females and this takes an exhausting toll on the males that are able to stay in the herd and mate. The bulls lose a lot of body weight as they patrol the herds and ward off challengers. By autumn, the bison separate again into male and female herds. These herds will disperse into smaller and smaller herds before the winter. Despite being well adapted to winter foraging, winter months are rough on bison and poor quality forage means that bison lose a lot of weight during the winter. In fact, in Yellowstone Park, severe winter weather is the main cause of bison death. Now, this might seem pedantic but this is important because seasonal activity was closely considered when, where, and how Plains people hunted bison. Hunters know their prey intimately and Plains hunters were no different. They would have learned important lessons from generations of curiosity, observation, and their own experiences of success and failure and these would have dictated hunting practices. They would have understood that these seasonal cycles produced important changes in the physiology of the bison and in the composition of the herds. This has profound consequences when we remember that bison had a multitude of uses beyond just their meat. For example, bison hides were incredibly important in their use for shelter, clothing, and leather. If you were a Plains hunter and wanted prime bison hides, you would ideally wait until the autumn when the winter coats had grown and insect damage to the hides during the summer had healed. If you wanted fat from bison, you might target bulls in the summer just before the rut because it's when bulls put on all the weight that they can to combat other males for access to females. As I mentioned earlier, the bison bulls lose a lot of body weight during the rut and the raging hormones that make them aggressive and potent will taint the flavor of their meat. Thus, people on the Plains had a well-understood seasonal round that they followed and balanced with their long and short-term needs. Some of you may be wondering about what the bison population was in ye olden times. Although estimates range wildly, it's generally agreed that prior to European contact, there were likely around 30 million bison on the Plains of North America, though I've seen estimates go as high as 60 million. Those numbers are staggering but difficult to comprehend. It's illuminating to look at accounts of early European explorers on the Plains to see how they describe the multitudes of bison that they encountered. The astonishing size and number of bison herds left them in awe. To quote British fur trader and explorer Peter Fiddler in 1792, The buffalo are very numerous on the northeast side of the Red Deer River and near, the ground is entirely covered by them and appears quite black. I never saw such amazing numbers together before. I am sure there were some millions in sight as no ground could be seen for them in that complete semicircle and extended at least 10 miles. Another account from naturalist John J. Audubon reads, It is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now and feed on these ocean-like prairies. For those who are curious, the current bison population is 0.1% of that figure and while that is worthy of the saddest emoji ever, that actually represents an almost miraculous recovery of what the herds were a century ago, but we'll discuss that later. However, if I can have a quick aside for a minute, I occasionally see videos or forum posts asking why bison were never domesticated and the answers range from Native Americans didn't know how to domesticate to Bison can't be domesticated, which are both clearly nonsense. Native Americans did domesticate animals and buffalo and wild cattle got domesticated on the other side of the world, but when I was reading these accounts about the sheer abundance of bison, it dawned on me that there was probably no reason to even bother with domestication. If bison were everywhere and people knew how to hunt them, what would be the point of putting all that effort into domestication, especially when you're a nomadic and mobile people that aren't living in the same spot every year? Shower thoughts, am I right? But let's get back on track. Now that we have an appreciation for the bison as an animal, let's look at their relationship with humans. We're actually blessed with a wealth of sources that we can draw on to reconstruct this important relationship, such as native traditions, archaeology, and written accounts by early European and American explorers. As I mentioned earlier, bison and humans coexisted in North America for over 10,000 years. Since the end of the Pleistocene, however, the bison population expanded rapidly as other megafauna dwindled. This meant that people living on the plains became more and more dependent on the bison. One way that we can really see this is taking a look at how bison were utilized. I know there's that old tired cliché that people supposedly used every part of the bison, and while that's not true, it's no less impressive how many goods came from bison. This is not an exhaustive list, but should give you a good idea. First and foremost, bison were sources of meat and food. Bison meat is delicious and nutritious, and a single bison could feed many hungry mouths. As someone who has had bison meat on multiple occasions, I can attest to this. Meat could also be dried, mixed with tallow, and turned into pemmican, a calorie-rich food that was not only very portable, but could also be stored for months or even years. Bison hides were also very important resources. These thick hides provided covers for houses, lodges, and teepees, and in some cases, even boats. Hides could also be used for clothing. Overcoats, gloves, moccasins, and caps made of bison pelts were greatly valued in the cold plains winters, where the thick fur provided crucial insulation. In fact, bison have 10 times more hair per square inch than modern cattle, which means that their hides are insanely good at insulating heat. Those hides were so rugged and tough that they were also used for war shields. Raw hide could be used as rope or as cords to fasten tools to shafts. Horns could be fashioned into spoons and drinking cups. Sinew could be used for cordage and thread. Bones had a litany of uses. They could be boiled to extract grease that could be used in cooking. This might sound strange until you consider that this was a world without dairy and plant oils, so fat had to come from animals. In fact, many bison butchering sites have remains of burned bones left over from attempts to extract fat, marrow, and grease. Scapula were prized as farming hoes by agriculturalists. Other bones could be turned into tools like needles, scrapers, points, pipes, and jewelry. Even bison tails were used as fly swatters. Truly few, if any other animal, has been so vital to the survival of a people. Plains people were keenly aware of this, and a quote from the famous Lakota elder John Fire Lane Deer captures this elegantly. To quote, The buffalo was part of us, his flesh and blood being absorbed by us until it became our own flesh and blood. Our clothing, our teepees, everything we needed for life came from the buffalo's body. It was hard to say where the animals ended and the human began. It also shouldn't be surprising that bison also had important places in the spiritual lives of Plains people. Many historical Plains cultures performed regular ceremonies to ensure that the bison would prosper. Bison also featured as characters in mythologies that bestow things like corn, tobacco, and even their own flesh to the first humans of creation. Professor Neoshet Graymorning states, The creation stories of where buffalo came from put them in a very spiritual place among many tribes. The buffalo crossed many different areas and functions, and it was utilized in many ways. So how did people on the Plains acquire everything that they needed from the bison? Since bison were very plentiful across the Plains, they were continuously hunted. It's often said that Plains people followed the bison across the Plains, but this is nonsense. A person, to say nothing of an entire family group, cannot keep up with a bison herd. They move too far and too quickly for people to keep pace. Instead, Plains hunters needed to predict where and when herds would appear and use the environment around them to their advantage. Most hunts were probably small affairs made up of a small group of hunters from a nearby camp or settlement scouring the locale for bison to kill. Bison don't tolerate humans getting too close, so early hunters had to get creative. They knew from generations of observation that many animals like pronghorn, elk, and deer could linger close to herds. Even coyotes and wolves were common sights around the herds, ever vigilant for a stray bison or calf. Plains people watching these interactions would have realized that disguising themselves as one of these animals could allow them to get nice and close to a desired bison before firing a spear or arrow into the unsuspecting prey. In better scenarios, hunters could lure or drive bison into disadvantageous terrain. In optimal conditions, it could be relatively easy to pick off a few bison from a herd or to surround an isolated bison and bring it down. Driving bison through deep winter snow or waiting at river crossings were tried and true tactics. These kinds of efforts would have yielded limited returns, but larger and more elaborate hunting methods were available that could result in dozens of killed bison, sometimes even hundreds. These are referred to as communal hunts, and they require the involvement of large numbers of people. These typically involve channeling bison herds into poor or confined terrain where they could be easily picked off or even killed in a stampede. Archaeology can detect these kill sites because they contain either a single layer of densely packed bison bones or even multiple layers of bones from reuse of the site. These will also have evidence of butchering and in some cases may even be accompanied by a campsite, which would have been a temporary processing facility. Such hunts required a very detailed knowledge of the landscape and bison behavior. Contrary to what you might think, people didn't just wait to find a herd of bison in the right place and then spring on them. They carefully orchestrated these massive operations. They would have taken lots of advanced planning and rehearsal, but the results were well worth it. A successful hunt like this could supply months worth of food, clothing, and shelter for a community. This is really where the ingenuity of plains hunters really shines. Let's take a deep dive into these communal hunting practices. Communal hunting goes back thousands of years and we even see communal hunting practiced by Paleo-Indians. These sites are associated with the larger bison antiquus. One common early type of communal bison hunting sites are arroyo traps, and the earliest of these date back to the Paleo-Indian period at the end of the Pleistocene. They show that people were already devising bison hunting techniques as other megafauna became scarce. Arroyos are basically steep-walled gullies formed by erosion during repeated flash floods. These arroyo traps worked by maneuvering a group of bison into the mouth of an arroyo so that they would charge in and get trapped by the steep walls. The only available exit for the bison would be the way they came in, but turning around in such a confined space with so many other bison would have been difficult and confusing. This gave hunters stationed at the top of the rim more than enough time to dispatch the bison they needed. One early kill site, the Cooper site, is worth highlighting because excavations revealed a bison skull at the site that was painted with red ochre. This is a 10,000-year-old site and it suggests that there was already ritual activity associated with these communal hunts. Arroyos weren't the only features that were used by Paleo-Indian hunters. At the Casper site in Wyoming, hunters drove bison into the trough of a U-shaped sand dune where the bison got bogged down in the sand. Several sites are suspected of being winter hunting sites where bison were driven into large snow drifts where they would be slowed. In later times, these communal hunts got more elaborate and we see new strategies appear in the archaeological record. Two new strategies that epitomize these were bison jumps and bison corrals. A bison jump involves driving bison over a cliff where they would tumble over and be killed by the fall. Obviously, a jump depended on local topography being rugged and broken and it was only suited for certain areas on the plains. Corrals, on the other hand, depended less on geography and could be used in more areas. These operated similarly to jumps but the key difference here was that the bison were not driven over a cliff but rather into an enclosure in which they could be penned in. These are usually referred to as bison corrals but you may also see them called bison pounds or bison tracks. The corrals were made of wood fencing and required access to wood and other building materials. They would not have been feasible in areas with limited wood supplies. Post holes from these corrals are visible in the archaeological record at such kill sites and so we can see how large these were. For those who like statistics, let's look at the Wardell site in Wyoming to get an idea of what a bison corral looks like. At this site, dating to approximately 1500 years ago to 1000 years ago, the remains of a bison corral roughly 15 by 10 meters were excavated along with the remains of 150 bison. But because the entire site wasn't excavated, it's likely that the number of bison killed there over the years may have been as high as 700. The scale of these enclosures and the bison killed in them should be starting to dawn on you. We aren't talking about a few wayward bison in a corral. We are talking about huge numbers of bison penned up and slaughtered. A quote from Canadian explorer Henry Ewell Hynde in 1858 paints a pretty gruesome picture of the scale. Tossed in every conceivable position lay over 200 dead buffalo, from old bulls to calves of three months old. Animals of every age were huddled together in all the forced attitudes of violent death. Some lay on their backs with eyes starting from their heads, tongue thrust out through clotted gore. Others were impaled on the horns of the old and strong bulls. Others again, which had been tossed, were lying with broken backs two and three deep. One little calf hung suspended on the horns of a bull, which had impaled it in the wild race round and round the pound. Okay, if you're still with me after that grisly account, you may be asking how on earth a wood corral could contain a host of panicked bison. Wouldn't they just plow through the fence like a semi-truck going through your grandma's garden? As it turns out, indigenous people figured out a very useful trick. They realized that when bison can see through fencing, or any obstacle for that matter, they will try to break through it during a panic. However, if the barriers appear more solid and no escape is immediately visible, the bison would simply run around the enclosure until they were tired out. This is actually something that has been corroborated by modern bison ranchers. Bison pens and chutes that are solid on either side will keep the bison calm. If the bison can see through them, they are more prone to panic. Neat. But how did indigenous people do this with their corrals? They would cover the walls of the enclosure with thick brush, or in a best case scenario, bison hides. Don't get the idea that this was all foolproof. The possibility of bison destroying and breaking out of the pen was ever real, and this could lead to disaster. Despite that, corrals were an ingenious method of trapping large numbers of bison. Now corrals weren't the only communal hunting method on the plains, and now we are going to turn our attention to the other big communal hunting strategy, bison jumps. Keep in mind that most of the strategies used to drive bison in a bison jump would have also been used at corral sites. One famous site that can be very instructive in understanding bison jumps is the fittingly named Head Smashed In site in Alberta, Canada. No, I did not make that up. That's the real name, and it's actually a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so if you're ever in the area in Alberta, check it out. The site has been extensively studied for decades, so we know this site in detail, and it has a long history. Bison jumps were done here on and off for approximately 5,000 years, with the earliest recorded jumps dating to about 3,800 BCE, and the archaeology there attests to the degree of destruction. The bone beds at the bottom of the jump are 10 meters thick. Not 10 feet, 10 meters. And before you think that this is some tiny pit, the kill area spreads over 300 meters at the base of the jump. That's a lot of bison. You may be wondering how people drove these bison over cliffs, and it's actually much more involved than what you're probably imagining. These took weeks, probably months of planning. Nobody was camping next to the cliff waiting for errant bison to show up so that they could startle them over the edge. The odds of that ever working would be nil. To put this in modern, cozy terms, this isn't like pushing your unsuspecting friend into the pool for a laugh. This is the delicate art of luring your sworn enemy to the pool and getting them to jump in on their own. At Headsmashed Inn, the topography is perfectly suited to this. The drop is well hidden, and the path to it runs downhill, making it difficult for bison to stop. But beyond these natural features, there's an entire natural and artificial infrastructure in place. To discuss it, we need to actually move several kilometers away from the jump to the collecting area. In a given bison jump site, this would usually be an expanse of flat or rolling prairie with good grazing and access to water, a great area for the bison to congregate. One way of giving the bison an incentive to gather at the spot would be to burn the local prairie. Fire was a common sight on the plains, and it actually plays an important role in rejuvenating the environment. As it turns out, the new growth that comes out of the ground after a fire is preferred by bison and attracts them. At Headsmashed Inn, the collecting area is referred to as the Gathering Basin, and it's a natural depression about 40 square kilometers. Connecting the Gathering Basin to the jump itself are drivelings, which we can actually see clearly at Headsmashed Inn and other similar sites because they're marked by a series of small rock piles, sometimes called cairns. Putting drivelines on a map shows a V-shaped path designed to funnel the bison into a tight space, not unlike what you'd see in a fishing weir. But how exactly were these rock piles along the lanes used? For years, it was believed that these were actual cairns that hunters could stand behind to keep the bison moving and panic, but further study has shown that the rock piles were never taller than a foot or two, making them impractical to hide behind. So what were these for? Obviously, these marked the drivelines so that when hunters returned to the site after years of absence, they had a ready-made blueprint for the drive. But these also had other important uses, and early historical accounts can cue us into their function. Based on these accounts, hunters would line the drivelines with stakes made up of tree branches and brush. Thus, these rock piles would be used to anchor the brush and stakes to the ground. The same accounts tell us that the brush could also be anchored with mud or bison dung. This could have accomplished two important things during the drive. First, these brush piles may have been designed to resemble people, which may have exaggerated the number of people along the drivelines helping to drive the bison. Second, these brush piles from a distance would have appeared like a natural barrier. In the same way that telephone poles or fence posts appear closer together when viewed at an angle, these brush piles would have made the boundaries of the lanes look much denser than they actually were. This makes way more sense when you consider that bison have relatively poor eyesight, and this was a brilliant way to take advantage of that. With all this in mind, let's look at the logistics of a bison jump to see how it would have worked. These would have been huge events that drew various communities together for the hunt. Those drivelines we mentioned earlier required a lot of time and labor to construct, but even the hunt itself required a lot of people. Scholars believe that these hunts probably drew upon hundreds of people who were eager to share the great numbers of bison that would be killed. In a way, these would have been important social gatherings, where distantly related families and far-off friends reunited for a hunt of epic proportions. But there was also an important spiritual aspect to this as well. Getting the playing field ready was only half the battle. Sacred forces also had to be mustered to bless and aid the efforts of everyone. Medicine men and tribal leaders would perform important ceremonies and pray for a successful hunt. Such ceremonies would have also been present on smaller-scale hunts, but the magnitude of such a large communal hunt would have called for much more elaborate ceremonies and rules. These often continued during the hunt itself, even if it took days to complete. After everything was prepared and the herds arrived in the collecting area, came the daunting task of getting the bison into the drive lanes. This was very delicate work. The jump at this point was still several kilometers away, and if the herd panicked or even smelled people getting close, the bison could disperse in any number of directions. Not a good use of everyone's time. Instead, these hunters drew on an arsenal of tactics to lure or pressure the bison into the lanes. As I mentioned earlier, animal disguises were commonly employed to allow hunters to get close, but in this case, they weren't getting close to strike. They were trying to herd them. These people in the hunt are often referred to as bison runners or hazers, and they'd be staffed by the youngest and fastest people in the hunt. In many cases, a runner might don a bison hide and use bison calls to get the attention of the herd so that they'd follow. Bison, like many animals, have a natural curiosity that can be exploited. There are even some crazy accounts of bison runners dancing, running, jumping, falling, laying in wait, and repeating these motions to get the attention of the bison and lure them towards them. Another useful disguise could be a bison calf. Bison cows are always on high alert for calves in distress, and a well-experienced runner could learn to mimic the bleeding of a separated calf, which would instantly get the attention of the mothers in the herd. Sometimes, disguises could be combined so that runners disguised as wolves and calves could simulate a calf in danger and draw in the bison to protect the calves. Whatever tactic was used, it was very important to be downwind of the bison. Remember what we said earlier, bison compensate for their poor vision with a keen sense of smell. If the herd catches the odor of a person, they will immediately be alerted and could disperse. And speaking of smell, a commonly mentioned tactic in historical accounts is using fires to drive the bison in a certain direction. But researchers I read consider this an extremely risky strategy, and I imagine Smokey the Bear would probably freak out if he saw this in action. The few viewers who have actually seen a prairie fire rage know how quickly these can go out of control. Try to start a fire on a dry prairie in the summer, and a sudden change of wind could send that fire at you. If fire was used, it probably depended greatly on topography and weather conditions. It would have to be tightly controlled. Lighting small controlled fires with wet fuel could create a lot of smoke, and doing this upwind could trick the bison into thinking that a fire was approaching and prompt them to move away. These deceptions had to be done with the utmost care and could take hours, possibly even days. The animals had to be slowly and patiently moved into the lanes, and there were likely frequent moments of rest to make sure that the herd remained calm. This would have been tense and grueling, but with carefully rehearsed roles, agreeable weather, the favor of the spirits, and a little bit of luck, the bison would make their way into the drive lanes. Once the bison were into the drive lanes, they could be more easily controlled. Until now, the movements of the bison would have been slow and paced. It was important not to panic them early, but once they were in the lanes, the tempo of the drive would increase. Along the sides of the lanes would have been people clamoring, waving bison hides, and making a scene to keep the bison moving in the lanes. Some plains groups are known to have used women, children, and elderly to fulfill these roles, but this was still pretty risky. If the bison panicked and escaped the lanes, they were wont to trample anything in their path. To help with this, the bison runners kept coaxing and pressuring the herd down the lanes. In a way, these runners acted similar to rodeo clowns in modern-day rodeos by fixing the attention of the bison on them. This is where their speed was crucial, because once the bison started to gallop, these guys had to run their guts out while keeping up their ruse for as long as possible, and later historical accounts note that this job could be lethal to the runner. You think bullfighters have a dangerous job? Those guys are playing Little League compared to those bison runners. Sometimes, exits or shelters were deliberately constructed along the drive lanes for the runners so that they could duck out of the way before getting caught by the herd, but this still would have been an insanely dangerous job. As the bison picked up speed and began to gallop, the herd would gather more and more inertia. The bison at the front of the herd would find it difficult to stop at the sight of danger due to the rumbling mass barreling behind them. As they turned towards the precipice, that critical mass would finally be brought to bear. All of their natural agility would have been neutralized. No matter how hard the bison at the front would have tried to stop, the mass of the bison behind them would have forced many over the edge, sending them tumbling down the cliff. If all went well, dozens of bison, perhaps even more than a hundred, would plummet over the edge, dying upon impact or being maimed in the fall. For any bison that miraculously survived the ordeal, hunters would be stationed at the bottom to dispatch them. Not until the advent of modern technology could such a huge number of large animals be killed in a single moment. With the remainder of the herd at the top dispersing, thanks could be given to the spirits and the leaders who organized the hunt. This would have been a thrilling moment of triumph. Those who had shown particular bravery would have been allowed to take choice cuts of the bison. Even with hundreds of people participating in the hunt, only a portion of the bison would be butchered. This had to be done in an orderly fashion so that as many useful products as possible could be harvested. The bison carcasses would quickly begin to putrefy if it was a spring or summer jump. Winter jumps and corrals would have allowed more time for this. But just like in the old Oregon Trail video game where you shoot every bison that dares cross your screen only to find out that you can carry 80 pounds back to the wagon, there would have been way too many to butcher and carry away. So people would take everything that they needed and then burn the remaining bison to combat the stench and to ward off scavengers like wolves and grizzly bears. Now, I've probably made this sound easier than it was. In reality, many bison jump attempts would have ended in failure and that must have been absolutely agonizing at times. And there must have been a lot of trial and error in honing these elaborate communal hunts. What the rates of success actually were in such hunts is anyone's guess. But these tactics did pay off handsomely when they worked. Such techniques were the result of thousands of years of hunting experience, observation, and shared knowledge. I'm sure a few people in the audience might look at the results of a successful bison jump and offer up a critique. These methods, while impressive feats of hunting, were incredibly wasteful. Only a fraction of the bison could actually be processed and the rest would be discarded intact. This is a fair point. While it's possible that hunting parties may have tried to limit the number of bison that were killed, they never allowed survivors in the trap to get away. In the worldview of many plains people, bison had souls and many human attributes. And thus, a surviving bison could alert other bison about the dangers of the jump. And for lack of a better word, jinx future hunts. Thus, these strategies could not be divulged to the prey. In a world where hunting was the very basis of your survival, this was important. Tactics like these allowed people on the plains to hunt bison on an incredible scale and actually create a thriving enterprise around moving bison goods like meat, hides, and other products to the edges of the plains and beyond. Agricultural communities had a high demand for these products. Remember how I mentioned earlier that bison scapula were used as blades for farming hoes? Those bison scapula appear often in the archaeological remains of plains communities. Meat, fat, and hides were also well appreciated by them as well, and they were willing to trade crops and agricultural products to get these goods from hunters and traders. It's worth pointing out that this mirrors similar relationships we see in the old world between pastoralists and agriculturalists, except in this case, the plains people were not herding domesticated animals. They were hunting wild bison. We also know from historical accounts that some agriculturalists only grew crops part-time and still hunted bison at other times of the year. So don't think of these roles as strictly binary. There was a lot of overlap. As human populations grew on the edge of the plains, the demand for such bison products increased. After 2000 BCE, the archaeological record shows a shift towards massive bison kills, and this is where jumps and corrals really start taking off. Some authors have even described this intensification as an industrialization of bison hunting. Now, before you clutch your pearls and recoil in horror at the growing extent that the bison were being hunted, I want to bring everyone back to Earth for a second. We shouldn't get the idea that indigenous people on the plains were just mindless bison-killing machines. As I mentioned earlier, these people were keenly aware of their dependence on the bison, and thus would have known that when the bison flourished, they flourished as well. While it's true that bison populations were never stable and rose and fell with environmental conditions, people took conscious steps to carefully manage their landscape and to make it as hospitable as possible to the bison. In this endeavor, they had a very special friend, fire. Indigenous fire regimes could honestly be their own episode and we could go down a huge rabbit hole, but that's going to have to wait another day because today we only care about the bison. Fire is no stranger to the plains. Dry conditions in the summer combined with lightning strikes or an errant bonfire can set the plains ablaze. Bison from time immemorial would have encountered it, and recall what I said earlier, recently burned areas produce new growth and vegetation that is highly sought after by bison. They love it, and plains people ever observant would have noticed this. Fire could thus serve two purposes. First, it could rejuvenate areas and make them more enticing to bison. Second, fire could literally make more prairie by burning forests and parkland. Burning forests over and over again allowed the prairies to expand and thus gave the bison greater space to graze, which increased the land's carrying capacity. Over the centuries, indigenous people turned millions of acres of eastern forests into grassland, and when the grasslands expanded, so did the bison. This is why when you look at old maps that show the range of bison, they extend way beyond the plains to the east. In fact, since colonization ceased these fire regimes, eastern sections of the plains that were once tall grass prairies at contact have now been reclaimed by forests. All this allowed people on the plains to harvest more and more bison without overhunting them. Plains historian and professor Jeff Kunfer sums this up nicely with this quote. There's no evidence that the increased harvesting of bison diminished herd sizes. Indeed, the contrary may be true. In fact, in 1540, when Spanish conquistador Francisco Coronado became the first European to enter the Great Plains, bison and human populations were at their highest levels ever, thanks to very savvy and sophisticated environmental management. All that changed, however, with the arrival of Europeans. Initially, colonial ambitions tended to focus away from the plains, which were regarded widely as a wasteland. However, Europeans brought something to the plains that would completely change life there forever. Horses. We could say much more about horses on the plains, but today we'll stick to summarizing their impact on the bison. Anytime you imagine native bison hunters, you probably imagine a scene like this, with a hunter on horseback chasing down a bison at high speed. But until very recently, this wasn't the case. Horses play a huge role in the collective American mythology of the Great Plains. And that's no surprise, because the Great Plains were a great habitat for the horse. In fact, horses had existed there during the Pleistocene, but went extinct at the end of the period. So a much more accurate way to look at this was that horses were reintroduced into North America. Horse use among the plains nations began in the south, where the first Spanish horses were captured, and then spread north throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Horses gave plains people a speed and mobility that they had never imagined. Remember when I said earlier that ancient hunters could never follow the bison on the plains? Well, the horse changed that, and afterwards, people could hunt bison on horseback, which was faster, safer, and more efficient. A single hunter could now kill multiple bison among a stampeding herd, and coordinated hunts on horseback could bring down as many as 300 bison. In this new world, the ancient communal bison drives began to disappear. Those methods were outdated and outclassed with horses. In fact, the horse made plains life so appealing that many nations moved into the plains. Nations like the Sioux and Cheyenne moved east into the plains from Wisconsin and Minnesota to pursue the plains lifestyle full-time. Some scholars have even traced the beginning of the bison's decline to the introduction of the horse and the adoption of horseback hunting, which supposedly started to deplete the herds faster than they could reproduce. But this remains somewhat controversial among scholars and especially controversial among native descendants. What really doomed the bison populations, though, wasn't the horse. At the end of the day, it was colonization and industrialization. American and Canadian industry also had huge demand for bison products, particularly for hides and leather, which were used in industrial machines and for clothing. The expansion of railroads and settlements also brought enormous pressure on the bison populations. It's worth noting that the U.S. government specifically earmarked the extermination of the bison as a tactic to bring the plains nations to heel. In 1872, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, wrote in a report, The rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs. It's fitting, therefore, to look at the conquest of the plains not just as a conquest of the native people, but as a conquest of the native bison as well, since the two were so closely linked. By the late 19th century, the bison population in North America had completely collapsed from a pre-contact population of about 30 million to less than a thousand. On the brink of extinction, conservation efforts finally kicked off and started gaining support. In 1905, the American Bison Society was formed and pressured the U.S. Congress to create several bison herds. And today, the bison population has staged a truly remarkable recovery to about 360,000. It's a bittersweet ending to a tragic tale where something magnificent and iconic was almost lost before people decided that these incredible animals were worth saving. Today, the bison don't roam free across the vast plains as they once did, instead being confined to national parks and ranches. But that's the price we've paid for helping them survive the catastrophe of overhunting and extermination. Actually, the word survive is a perfect note to conclude on. The American bison are survivors. They lived through the Pleistocene and emerged from a climatic transformation that ended the reign of most of the other North American megafauna. By surviving the Pleistocene and then thriving on the plains, they allowed humans to survive and thrive on the plains as well. This was not lost on indigenous plains peoples. They knew that they were intimately linked with the bison, and to this day, plains nations have a very deep cultural resonance with the bison. Even as European contact began to cast doubt on the future of the bison, bison continued to survive in American political and social consciousness. Thankfully for us today, the bison did survive westward colonial expansion due to conservation efforts. Let's hope that the future keeps looking up for these beloved animals, prairie tanks, and icons of North America. And that's going to wrap us up for today. Once again, a special thanks to my patrons for supporting my work. You guys are the best. If you would like to join the ranks of these fine individuals and support the show, you can do so on Patreon. The link will be in the description below. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on Facebook. We'll see you in our next episode. Take care.