The Destruction of the Bison

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Andrew Isenberg said that “the destruction of the bison was not merely the result of human agency but the consequence of the interaction of human society with a dynamic environment.” Humans and nature both played a large role in the ultimate demise of the bison.

Bison have been around for 10,000 years. Their ancestors where known as giant bison and they were hunted by the paleoindians that came over on the Bering Strait. The giant bison however became extinct because the paleoindians hunted them and at the end of the last ice age, most of the vegetation they fed off of was destroyed. Dwarf bison, the bison that are around today, survived the ice age because the dwarf bison were faster, reproduced more rapidly and required less vegetation to sustain them. The destruction of giant bison resembles what happened to the bison in modern day America; accept they had to survive droughts instead of extreme cold.

Bison were not always the main source of nomadic people’s livelihood on the plains. One example of how nomads survived is that of the Comanche’s, “they lived between the Colorado front range and the Swatch Mountains, from the San Luis Valleys in the south to the Laramie Basin in the north, they snared jack rabbits and other mammals, fished, and gathered small seeds, nuts, and berries. From the slopes of the Yampa River Valley they dug for roots of the Yampa plant, during the summer they traveled east to the plains to hunt bison on foot and south to the Pueblos to raid and trade corn” (Isenberg, 34) The nomads depended on the bison for food, shelter, cloths, and small tools. Before Euroamericans arrived in North America, nomads hunted bison as they needed them, so they wouldn’t be wasteful. In the eighteenth century nomads “a...

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...ghteen hundreds there were seventy five million bison in North America. When the nomads and euroamericans started hunting them for their hides and using them for the main form of trade, along with other natural factors there population took a devastating turn for the worst. “By the eighteen eighties only a couple hundred bison had found refuge from commercial hunters, drought, and the destruction of their grazing land by farmers and livestock in Yellowstone national park” (Isenberg 164). Yellowstone was made into a safe haven for the bison and the United States government did allow the railroad to cross throw Yellowstone because it would affect the safety of the bison. People started to capture the bison and domesticated them to rebuild the population. Bison became a symbol of the American west, which is why the euroamericans started to regenerate there population.

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