Destruction of Bison
The Destruction of the Bison
The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 by Andrew Isenberg is an account of the near total-extermination of the bison in Great Plains of America. The bison population declined from being around 30,000,000 in the eighteenth century to less than a 1,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. In recounting the fate of the bison population and how it was decimated in Great Plains, Isenberg looks at various historical, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that contributed to the decimation of the animal. Isenberg challenges two conventional explanations of the bison destruction, both of which largely laid blame on the white Euro-American predators. It was believed that the behavior of Euro-American settlers in the Great Plains was characterized by wastefulness, while Native American Indians were conscious environmentalists (Gore) who preyed on the buffalo only out of necessity and did not kill the bison at a greater pace than the natural reproduction of the bison itself. Many historians also viewed the ecosystem as a stable habitat, disrupted only by the capitalist greed of humans. Isenberg rejects both of these claims, arguing instead that American Indians significantly contributed to the destruction of the bison. But Isenberg also argues that the unpredictability of the natural world played no less significant a role in contributing to the massive decline of the bison population.
There is no one party or group which is solely to blame for the destruction of the bison, Isenberg argues. The story of the bison in Great Plains does not simply involve human greed, but also "a host of economic, cultural, and ecological factors that herded the bison toward their near-extinction" (Isenberg, 1). The players in the destruction included grassland ecology, smallpox, horses, the fur trade, Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and various cultural beliefs of both Euro-American and Indian societies. The natural environment, Isenberg argues, is prone to unpredictable changes, causing blizzards, drought, predation, fires, or vigorous disease, and that these natural changes in the habitat took its toll on the bison population. Because of Euro-American invasion of the Great Plains, many sedentary Native American tribes became nomadic, and with the introduction...
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