Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History Review

Overview of Isenberg's Argument

The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 by Andrew Isenberg is an account of the near-total extermination of the American bison on the Great Plains. The bison population declined from approximately 30,000,000 in the eighteenth century to fewer than 1,000 by the end of the nineteenth. In recounting how the bison population was decimated, Isenberg examines the historical, cultural, economic, and ecological factors that contributed to the animal's collapse.

Isenberg challenges two conventional explanations for the bison's destruction, both of which largely placed blame on white Euro-American predators. The first held that Euro-American settlers in the Great Plains acted with reckless wastefulness, while Native American Indians were conscious environmentalists who preyed on the buffalo only out of necessity and never killed bison faster than they could naturally reproduce. The second viewed the ecosystem as a stable habitat disrupted solely by capitalist human greed. Isenberg rejects both claims, arguing instead that American Indians significantly contributed to the destruction of the bison, and that the unpredictability of the natural world played an equally significant role in the massive decline of the bison population.

There is no single party or group solely to blame for the destruction of the bison, Isenberg argues. The story of the bison on the 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 this destruction included grassland ecology, smallpox, horses, the fur trade, Euro-Americans, Native Americans, and various cultural beliefs of both Euro-American and Indian societies. Because of Euro-American invasion of the Great Plains, many sedentary Native American tribes became nomadic; with the introduction of horses — which both competed with the buffalo for scarce resources and made hunting far more efficient — many Indians began to overhunt for economic purposes. The final blow came when white Euro-Americans displaced Indians and began hunting bison as a sport, as well as a deliberate strategy for undermining Native American populations. For believers in Manifest Destiny, the destruction of the bison represented the triumph of civilization over savagery.

Ecological Instability and the Natural Environment

Isenberg compellingly argues that the interaction between Euro-Americans and American Indians, and their behavior toward the bison, cannot be understood in isolation from the functioning of the nonhuman natural world. Drawing his understanding of that world from chaos theory, Isenberg rejects the notion that the environment tends toward order and equilibrium unless disrupted by human action. The Great Plains grasslands inhabited by the buffalo were volatile and dynamic even without human intervention. The ecological habitat was unpredictable due to irregular periods of rain, drought, and blizzards, and the western plains in particular were subject to frequent ecological instability.

To illustrate this point, Isenberg details how drought significantly affected the Plains in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were periodic droughts from 1761 to 1773, from 1798 to 1803, and again from 1822 to 1832. These extended dry periods, Isenberg notes, typically killed 70–90% of the vegetation, which in turn killed large numbers of bison. Such natural unpredictability was entirely beyond human capacity to control. While ecological irregularity significantly contributed to the decline of the bison population, it did not, on its own, bring the species to the brink of extinction. Isenberg treats ecology as a contributing force — one that set the stage for human economic and social pressures to deliver the decisive blow.

Economic and Social Factors Driving Overhunting

Economic and social forces further accelerated the decimation of the bison. Euro-Americans forced many American Indians into the Great Plains, and as a result many sedentary Indian communities adopted a nomadic way of life. This social transformation compelled them to hunt bison at an unprecedented rate. The introduction of domesticated animals such as cattle also disrupted the environmental equilibrium, while the arrival of horses proved catastrophic for the bison population: horses competed directly with bison for food, and Native Americans became far more effective hunters once they mastered equestrian hunting. The growth of industrialization and capitalism compounded these pressures, fundamentally altering the ecological character of the Plains and incentivizing Indian hunters to harvest more bison to meet the demands of the fur trade.

The military dimensions of this dynamic are illustrated by General Philip Sheridan, veteran of the Indian Wars, who openly defended bison killers. In his view, the hunters "have done in the last two years and will do in the next years, more to settle the vexing Indian question than the entire regular Army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indian's commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage" (cited in Dolph & Dolph, 15). This perspective reveals how the destruction of bison was not merely incidental to Euro-American expansion but was in some quarters a deliberate instrument of conquest.

Works Cited

Cronon, William. "The Uses of Environmental History." Environmental History Review, 17 (Fall 1993), 1–22.

Dolph, James A., and Dolph, C. Ivar. "The American Bison: His Annihilation and Preservation." The Magazine of Western History, 25.3 (Summer 1975), 14–25.

Gore, Al. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992.

Isenberg, Andrew. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.