from Hacker News

Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America

by bookstore-romeo on 4/12/24, 5:15 PM with 78 comments

• by hermitcrab on 4/12/24, 7:22 PM

  Hard to read this article and feel proud to be a human.

  A world without wilderness and wild animal will be an impoverished one indeed.

  "The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children living on the planet." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-u...

  However the bison numbers have recovered somewhat. Great whale populations are increasing. Maybe there is some hope for us yet.

• by grantpitt on 4/12/24, 5:49 PM

  > "By the 1880s, their numbers had plummeted from around 30 million to a mere 325"

  I thought that must've been a typo upon first reading. Even 325,000 would be shocking. Amazing that the conservation efforts seem to have worked well.

• by shmageggy on 4/12/24, 5:53 PM

  The latest Ken Burns documenatary, "The American Buffalo" tells the story of the near-total extermination of the Bison, and by extension, the Native American Indian way of life, and includes many of these photos. I felt like it was a better presentation of the reality of the West in 3 hours than the 8-episode "The West" from the 1990s, which only spent a scant few minutes on the Bison. Highly recommended.

• by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF on 4/12/24, 6:34 PM

  “General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins.”

  Oof. I didn't know that was Sherman's take on it.

• by toss1 on 4/12/24, 7:05 PM

  The money quote, describing the root driver of the extermination — it was a policy to exterminate the primary source of sustenance for the Native Americans, to force them onto the reservations. The economic uses and mass hunting competitions were the result.

  >>The federal government promoted bison hunting for various reasons, primarily to pressure the native people onto the Indian reservations during times of conflict by removing their main food source.

  >>Without the bison, native people of the plains were often forced to leave the land or starve to death. One of the biggest advocates of this strategy was General William Tecumseh Sherman.

  >>On June 26, 1869, the Army Navy Journal reported: “General Sherman remarked, in conversation the other day, that the quickest way to compel the Indians to settle down to civilized life was to send ten regiments of soldiers to the plains, with orders to shoot buffaloes until they became too scarce to support the redskins.”

• by JohnMakin on 4/12/24, 6:10 PM

  It has always fascinated me that the people migrating to oregon territory for the gold rush in the 1850's were some of the very very last people to ever see vast swaths of the United States in its pristine, natural state. I wonder if they had any clue that within a matter of a few decades it'd basically all be gone.

• by FrustratedMonky on 4/12/24, 6:35 PM

  Almost makes it sound like if Horses alone were introduced, but no other white man colonization, that the Indians might have wiped out the buffalo also, if left to their own devices.

  Wouldn't this be more in line with other megafauna extinctions? The only reason Indians didn't also wipe out this megafauna was a technology change, the addition of horses.

• by trgn on 4/12/24, 6:02 PM

  Butcher's crossing is a great book set against this backdrop. The pithy ending - bison fur was just really a fashion fad - is, if not the entire truth, at least very sobering.

• by leobg on 4/12/24, 8:49 PM

  Isn’t there that scene in ”Dances With Wolves” where you see hundreds of dead buffaloes all the way to the horizon?

• by not_the_fda on 4/12/24, 7:12 PM

  I recently read "The Once and Future World; Nature As It Was, As It Is, As It Could Be" and basically everything think as nature is an illusion.

  We humans have decimated every species on the planet. The planet used to be teaming with wildlife, now its mostly empty and quiet except for the humans.

• by B1FF_PSUVM on 4/12/24, 7:25 PM

  The discussion here reminded me of the Pratchett Discworld story that I least liked - and I bought and enjoyed almost all the books over the decades they were published.

  It was the one about the ghouls - hated and despised, until it was figured out they made beautiful music, and were warmly applauded in a crowded concert, triumphantly closing the book.

  Whee, close call. If they didn't have any entertainment value and just propagated diseases, that would be another story.

• by johnea on 4/12/24, 5:54 PM

  > The arrival of horses, originally brought by the Spanish, revolutionized hunting techniques. By the early 1700s, horses had become integral to the nomadic hunting cultures of Indigenous groups.

  ...

  > Attracted by previously unimagined hunting possibilities, Native Americans poured into the Plains from all directions, creating one of most renowned hunting cultures in history.

  Does the author mean to imply that the plains were unihabited until the spanish introduction of horses?

• by meta-level on 4/12/24, 7:54 PM

  Homo Sapiens Sapiens

• by Curzel on 4/12/24, 6:53 PM

  My head is blowing up rn trying to understand if they are real pictures

• by sudden_dystopia on 4/12/24, 6:27 PM

  Just imagine those bison’s carbon footprint.