The American Buffalo | Why Is Destruction Part of Our Story?

[Train whistle blowing] That same year, the Northern Pacific reached Miles City in Montana Territory.

Soon, 5,000 hide hunters and skinners were spilling over the plains, from the Yellowstone River to the Upper Missouri, where they set up what one army lieutenant called "a cordon of camps, blocking the great ranges "and rendering it impossible for scarcely a single bison to escape."

[Gunshot] The killing commenced all over again.

["Wagoner's Lad" by Jacqueline Schwab playing] Narrator: Meanwhile, in New York, 31-year-old George Bird Grinnell had become editor of "Forest and Stream," a publication for hunters and fishermen that he was prodding to take on issues of conservation with more urgency.

During the hide-hunting on the southern Plains, he had advocated for policies he called "just" and "honest" toward Native Americans that would, he wrote, "conscientiously aid "in the increase of the buffalo, instead of furthering its foolish and reckless slaughter."

Now Grinnell turned his attention to what was unfolding in Montana.

Man as Grinnell: Up to within a few years ago, the valley of the Yellowstone River has been a magnificent hunting ground.

The progress of the Northern Pacific Railroad, however, has changed all this.

The buffalo will disappear unless steps are taken to protect it there.

[Buffalo grunts] Punke: This is the era of the myth of inexhaustibility, the belief that the West is so vast, that the resources are so vast that they can never be exhausted.

But it was so much in front of them, what was happening, that I think they began to figure it out.

It became more and more difficult to find buffalo, and there were ominous signs.

Weird things began to happen, like they would find herds that were comprised entirely of calves.

But there also was a capacity to deny and to believe that they had just gone over the next ridge line, gone into the next territory, and so all of that kind of mixes together.

Narrator: In Miles City, in the fall of 1883, the hide hunters prepared for another winter on the Plains, believing there must still be plenty of buffalo between the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers.

They came back in the spring with almost nothing to show for their efforts.

Steven Rinella: There are people in Miles City who had been hide hunters, and they're simply lolling around, waiting for the return of the herds.

They still thought there has to be some somewhere.

When they had finished, they didn't know they'd finished.

They felt that, well, it can't be over...and it was over.

[Train chugging] Narrator: In 1884, the total number of hides brought to the Northern Pacific fit in a single boxcar.

[Train whistle blows] ["Juniper" by Kevin Hoetger, Kyle Crusham playing] Man as Mayer: "One by one, we runners "put up our buffalo rifles, "sold them, gave them away, "or kept them for other hunting, "and left the ranges.

"And there settled over them "a vast quiet.

The buffalo was gone."

Frank Mayer.

There is no... no story anywhere in world history that involves as large a destruction of wild animals as happened in North America in the Western United States, in particular, between 1800 and about 1890.

I mean, it is the largest destruction of animal life discoverable in modern world history.

Lapier: Why Americans are so destructive, I think, is an important question to ask.

Why is that part of our story?

Why is that part of our history?

Narrator: When the hide hunters went broke, some turned to killing other animals for the market, like antelope, elk, and grizzly bears.

With wolf pelts worth $2.00 each in New York City, some hunters began lacing bison carcasses with strychnine, which poisoned not only wolves, but other scavengers: coyotes, foxes, bobcats, skunks, vultures, ravens, eagles.

[Eagle screeches] Other buffalo hunters left to pursue other work.

["Two Rivers" by Larry Unger, Ginny Snowe playing] Native people had no choice.

They had to stay, and without buffalo meat to supplement their meager government rations, many starved.

On the Blackfeet reservation, an inspector checked on 23 lodges in one village.

He reported seeing a rabbit being cooked in one and a steer hoof in another.

The other 21 lodges had no food at all.

Six hundred Blackfeet-- a quarter of the tribe-- perished during that winter of famine.

Marcia Pablo: But that's really what the government wanted, was for Indian people to have to turn to the government.

And they had to take away all of the resources for that to happen.

It was devastating, and it was heartbreaking.

We had the songs, but no buffalo to sing 'em to.

It's like a spiritual trauma.

Woman as Pretty Shield: "Nobody believed, even then, "that the white man could kill all the buffalo, "even when he did not want the meat.

"Not believing their own eyes, "our hunters rode very far looking for buffalo, "so far away that even if they found a herd, we could not have reached it in half a moon."

"'Nothing, we found nothing,' "they told us, and then, hungry, "they stared at the empty plains, as though dreaming."

Pretty Shield.

♪ Narrator: "A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell," Sitting Bull said.

"A death wind for my people."

Baker: It was devastating for us.

That would have been the most heartbreaking thing.

I couldn't imagine it.

I couldn't imagine the people, what they were-- what they went through, especially a father, saying, "I got to-- "I got to take care of my children.

"I got to take care of my clan, I got to take care of my society, and I can't do it."

["Kills Tomorrow" by Bobby Horton playing] Narrator: Now a new buffalo business sprang up.

Millions of buffalo skulls and bones were bleaching under the prairie sun, and it turned out there was money to be made from them, too.

Companies in the East offered an average of $8.00 a ton for bones they could grind into fertilizer or use in refining sugar.

Buffalo horns were turned into buttons, combs, and knife handles.

Hooves became glue.

Homesteaders in Nebraska and Kansas-- desperate for cash because drought was withering their crops--turned to harvesting the skulls and skeletons still littering the Plains.

One entrepreneur in Texas stacked mounds of bones along the tracks of the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad and made $25,000.

"Buffalo bones," a Kansas newspaper reported, "are now legal tender in Dodge City."

A company in St. Louis processed more than one million tons of bison bones.

The Michigan Carbon Works became Detroit's largest industry.

In the end, the bone trade would generate more profits-- for the bone pickers, the railroads, and the industries-- than the buffalo hides ever had.

Momaday: Even what remained of them was being taken away from their native ground.

It was--it was, like, uh, grave-robbing, in a way.

It just strikes me as--as, uh... a society trying to clean up, uh, you know, a crime scene.

This is the murder of buffalo, our brothers, and let's get rid of that, let's hide it.

Let's get not only the buffalo out, let's get the bones out, too.

Baker: So they took everything from us, and we understood that as a way of killing us off.

They're taking away our grocery store, and that's what they did; the buffalo was our grocery store.

They killed the spirit of the buffalo, in some cases, we thought.

But that's why our prayers got stronger.

That's why our people got stronger; they had to.

If they didn't, we would have been killed off like the buffalo.

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