On the eastern edge of the buffalo country the tribes living in the woodland fringe raised corn as their staple food, and usually made two hunting excursions each year after meat and robes. After these tribes secured horses, they continued to live in their permanent farming villages and to raise crops, but they were able to spend more time among the buffalo, going farther to the west, where the hunting was better. They could carry back much larger supplies of dried meat and buffalo hides. Since these people left most of their possessions in the villages when they went hunting, they did not need as many horses as did the roving Plains tribes.
Three hundred miles to the west of the Montana buffalo country a number of small tribes lived in the Columbia Basin. They were a sedentary people in little fishing villages, dependent on the salmon runs for most of their food. Once they secured horses, they began to cross the mountains on long hunting excursions among the buffalo. For thirty years their movement to the east was impeded by the hostile Blackfeet until smallpox reduced the fighting capacity of that tribe. Of these western tribes the Flatheads, Coeur d'Alene, and Nez Percé were the most successful at buffalo hunting. About a third of each tribe became seminomadic, spending two or three years at a time east of the mountains, but salmon continued to be their most important food.
A disturbing new factor came to the plains when the covered-wagon trains began to roll toward Oregon and California in the 1840's. At first the little trains were more of a curiosity than a danger to the Indian tribes. Then came the California gold strikes, and the trickle of wagons swelled rapidly into a rolling flood. Each year brought new gold strikes, new boom towns, and more people. From the first big gold strike in 1848 until the last one in 1865 the Overland Trail was crowded each year with the fortune hunters.
Indians along the Platte soon realized that the wagon trains were more than just a nuisance. The travelers killed off or drove out the buffalo, pastured off the grass on a wide strip all the way to the mountains, and brought in diseases that each year wiped out large portions of the tribes near their route.
Finally the trail divided the buffalo country into a northern and a southern segment. The vast herds had once roamed freely from the Dakotas south into Kansas and back, but now their movement was blocked by this wide, dusty strip, which the herds shunned. The continuing invasion of the Indian country stirred the tribes to active resistance and brought on a period of bloody fighting that did not end until the buffalo had been exterminated, the fighting power of the hostile tribes broken, and the remnants herded onto reservations.
The rapid growth of the west coast and the mining towns in the Rockies hastened the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific. Then came other railroads, the Kansas and Pacific, the Santa Fe, both into the heart of the buffalo herds. They furnished cheap transportation for western products seeking eastern markets, and high on the list of marketable goods were buffalo hides. Eastern tanneries could handle any quality of hides the hunters could ship them. The buffalo herds were mowed down by the blazing guns of thousands of eager hunters.
Army officers looked at the slaughter and approved, for once the herds were gone the Plains Indians would be more peaceful. The cattlemen were pleased too; every buffalo killed made room for one more longhorn steer. The farmers came west in droves, eager to plant wheat once the fields were safe from the trampling herds.
The Plains Indians put up a spectacular fight for their hunting grounds, their buffalo herds, and their old ways. For a decade, 1866-76, wars raged over the whole plains country, with army columns vainly chasing the elusive red men. The army finally started attacking the Indians in their winter villages, slaughtering the families, burning the lodges, destroying the food. The fighting Indians of the Great Plains gave up when the buffalo herds were gone. They had to surrender or see their families starve.
By 1900 only a few hundred buffalo were left. They were held in very small numbers in zoos or were captives on western cattle ranches, except for one wild herd in the woods of northern Alberta. Then several groups interested themselves in the preservation of the species, the most effective being the Canadian government, which added to its wild herd by securing some of the American captives. Soon the United States government joined in, establishing the National Bison Range in western Montana and putting a small herd in Yellowstone Park. Many other small herds were started from surplus stock from these government herds.
With good ranges, plenty of food, and protection from hunters, the buffalo herds grew rapidly. In twenty years it was evident that the number of buffalo that could be raised was limited only by the amount of pasture land that could be set aside for their use. The buffalo had been saved from extinction.
2. Prehistoric Bison in North America
About 40,000 years ago primitive hunting tribes from Asia moved across a land bridge into Alaska, perhaps the first men to reach North America. They were trailing herds of large grass-eaters mammoth, musk oxen, moose, and a dozen or so species of large bison. The herds found a favorable environment in the new land and prospered over a long period.
These were not the first bison to reach the American west. At least one cousin had preceded them by 200,000 years or more; a skull of the species, exposed by recent erosion in sedimentary strata in northern California, is the oldest and largest reported in North America. Presumably this giant species vanished long ago, replaced by smaller, more agile bison.
The hunters from Asia came across at about midpoint in the last ice age, when, over a few thousand years, the great Wisconsin ice sheet receded along its western edge, leaving an ice-free corridor from the Yukon Valley of Alaska across the Rocky Mountains and southward along the foothills to the southern plains. During this period large ice sheets covered northern Europe and several other areas of the globe. The oceans were lowered more than 200 feet as moisture became trapped in the ice. When the oceans shrank, a wide land bridge joining Alaska and Siberia was uncovered, an inviting highway for migrating animals. Then the ice sheet expanded again, closing off the corridor for another 10,000 or 15,000 years. About 25,000 years ago it began melting away again and opened the corridor east of the Rocky Mountains by 16,000 B.C.
As the migrating herds moved southward to the Great Plains they were followed by the primitive hunters, armed with crude spears and clubspoor equipment for attacking large, healthy animals. And so the pursuers looked for the old and crippled, or those unfortunate enough to be trapped in bogs or drowned in rivers. At times they managed to stampede a small herd over a cliff or into a swamp; even crude weapons were effective against trapped or crippled victims.
Over a period of centuries the moving herds and the hunters following them reached the southern Great Plains, where they found food in abundance. The hunters also found a bewildering variety of species new to themgiant sloths, giant beavers, mastodons, horses, tapirs, camels, and many others. While any of these animals would furnish an ample supply of meat for a band of hungry men, they were all large, tough, and hard to kill.