Where the Buffalo Roam(ed)
(Author’s note: In North America, though technically scientifically inaccurate, the words Bison and Buffalo are used interchangeably. I will do so here.)
It is the summer of 2021, and I am on a road trip of National Parks with my boyfriend, celebrating our dual graduation from our master’s degree program in Landscape Architecture. We have been on the road for over a month, camping in a tent and living out of my beaten-up 2006 Subaru Forester. Today we are driving through Yellowstone, or rather inching through Yellowstone. A massive line of cars has come to a dead halt on the main road through the park so that people can take photos of a herd of bison peacefully grazing in a meadow spread out under the big sky. It would be an idyllic scene if it weren’t for the tourists blatantly ignoring the warning signs and stepping out of their cars for selfies with the 2,000-pound bovids. The small herd ignores the idling cars wafting exhaust over their meadow, chewing dolefully as phone cameras flash and selfie sticks wave in their faces. One massive bull crosses the road in front of us. He seems hardly able to support the weight of his ponderous head upon his massive shoulders, and every movement he makes feels like a colossal effort. What would several hundred thousand of these beasts look like, thundering together across the prairie? Several million? A man nearby opens his car door not four feet from the bull to stick out his phone for a picture, laughing as his daughter squeals in terror. I take my own obligatory photos from the car window as we finally pass and feel slightly sick. Hard to believe that these sideshow creatures were once kings of the plains.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 30 to 60 million bison once lived in North America. Not only residents of the great plains, the elimination of the American bison began with the first European settlers on the East Coast. Records from the early 1700s and 1800s report the species being mostly eliminated from Virginia and Pennsylvania early in colonization, with only about 300 remaining in Pennsylvania by 1800. In 1769 the South Carolina Gazette proclaimed them “being wholly hunted out of this province, and fled to the mountains.” Even before western expansion, bison herds were a part of frontier life. Bison calves were a common sight in Eastern settlements as curiosities or local mascots; wild calves were said to stand meekly by their dead mother’s side while she was butchered and her meat laid onto wagons or horseback, then, instinctually following their mother’s scent in a heartbreaking scene that even Disney wouldn’t stoop to, calves would follow hunters back into town, where they were adopted by townsfolk. As settlements moved west, greater and greater herds of buffalo were discovered, and the great buffalo plains seemed to provide an endless supply of the species. It is hard for a modern American to fathom what several million bison would have looked like, let alone how they would have smelled or sounded, or how the bass beat of their hooves would rattle your very bones. It seemed impossible that the herds’ numbers could possibly be dented.
Three factors led to these massive herds dwindling to just twenty-three individuals at their lowest point; machinery, Native American persecution, and cattle. Buffalo hide was discovered by early settlers to be perfect for making cheap leather machine belts, and as industrialization was beginning to take hold in New England, demand and prices were driven up, sealing the bison’s fate. The new railroads striking boldly into the plains of the west made it cheap to ship buffalo hides to the factories back east, and hunters began making fortunes on the seemingly endless resource. In the early days of the buffalo hunts, the new railroads could find their trains delayed for hours as massive buffalo herds wandered across the tracks, which hurt profits from impatient industrialist customers. To remedy this problem, the railroad companies invested in the promotion of buffalo hunting not just as a way to make a living, but as an iconic frontier sport. Even ladies of the era took part in shooting buffalo directly from their perfumed train car windows. The burgeoning cattlemen of the west enthusiastically welcomed and took part in the buffalo hunting, happy to remove the animals that interfered with their cattle and ate their grass. The less bison on the range, the more cattle there could be. The slaughter of the bison had another benefit for cattle ranching, and the white settlers in general; it began to starve the Native Americans.
In 1873 Columbus Delano, then Secretary of the Interior, stressed the importance of the Native Americans’ dependence upon the buffalo in a speech to his constituents.
“The civilization of the Indian is impossible while the buffalo remains upon the plains.” He said, “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians, regarding it as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own lands.”
Delano got his wish; the buffalo began to disappear. Desperate Sioux, Kiowa, and Comanche peoples, unable to find enough of their traditional meat source, turned to the new and very edible inhabitants of their ancestral grasslands- the cows. The Chicago Daily Tribune wrote in 1873 of a “depredation” by a band of Cheyenne in the Arkansas valley;
“There is intense excitement among settlers and stock-men in the Arkansas Valley south of Pueblo, on account of depredations committed by a moving band of Cheyenne Indians, who have already wantonly killed several hundred head of cattle. The Indians say the White man killed the buffalo last winter, and now they are going to kill all the cattle of the Whites. Thus far no murderers are reported, but the Indians have visited a number of houses, carrying away blankets and anything else they desired, and destroying other property. Many families sought safety in Pueblo. The schools have been dismissed, the scouts are going over the country collecting men, arms, and ammunition, and the Indians will be severely punished if they can be overtaken.”
Reading between the lines of the fear-mongering article, a tragic tale of a people forced off their lands, starving and low on basic supplies, forms. In response, local cowboys slaughtered the hunters for theft. In a cruel irony, these same tribes, once diminished and strong-armed onto reservations, were forced to eat beef shipped in from the plains or starve. The death of the bison and the forced removal of the Native Americans gifted ranchers with the verdant shortgrass prairies of the Texas Panhandle, a region still known today for its cattle ranches.
Many a history describes the buffalo as vanishing; a fantastical term that calls to mind the great herds tragically but peacefully disappearing into the mists of time. The reality was much more brutal. Buffalo carcasses- deemed worthless once stripped of their valuable hides, hooves, tongues, and horns- littered the prairies. Theodore Roosevelt recorded meeting a rancher who had traveled 1,000 miles and told Teddy that he was “Never out of sight of a dead buffalo, and never in sight of a live one.” Once the meat had rotted away and the bones were bleached white, they were shuttled east to be ground into fertilizer. In 1874 it was estimated that ten to twenty tons of buffalo bones were shipped by rail every day.
The ever-expanding railroad had split the remaining buffalo population into two dwindling herds. Of the 30 to 60 million buffalo that had predated settlers, about 4.5 million were left by 1870; four million south of the railroad and 500,000 north of it, and the United States government was still encouraging buffalo hunting as a further means of controlling the remaining Indians on the plains. The slaughter increased in fervor. Colonel Dodge of Dodge City fame declared that “every buffalo dead is an Indian gone!” And dead and gone they were. By 1877 buffalo numbers had become so low that Congress passed a bill to protect the remaining populations as part of the North-West Territories Act. The bill would have made it unlawful to hunt or kill buffalo for “the mere motive of amusement, or wanton destruction, or solely to secure their tongues, choice cuts, or peltries”, would have made it unlawful to kill buffalo under the age of two, and would have established a closed season for female buffalo during breeding and calving time. This bill would have saved the buffalo, without question. Their numbers would never have again reached the tens of millions that they had boasted before western expansion, but they would perhaps still be a ubiquitous part of the wilderness in the Midwest and western United States, as common a sight as elk. Alas, Congress had not considered the power of the cattle industry’s influence in politics. President Ulysses S. Grant revoked the bill on the grounds that the elimination of the buffalo would usher in a golden era of the cattle industry (and usher out the era of the Indian). “Your prairies can be covered with cattle,” He said, “and the cowboy will follow the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization.”
Grant, too, got his wish. Even before the last of the buffalo perished, hundreds of thousands of cattle were taking their place across the great plains. Before colonization there were an estimated 30 to 50 million bison on the entire continent. As of today, over 93.8 million cows graze in the United States alone. But did the cattle truly take the place of the native bison herds? What ecological niche did bison fill, and do the cattle now fill that niche in their stead? The short answer is no. Despite some ranchers’ insistence that cattle emulate the effects of wild bison on the landscape, there are many differences in the two species’ impacts on grasslands. Cattle are individual grazers, while bison were aggregate grazers. Individual grazers preferentially graze one species over another in a given season, which allows some plants to grow to maturity, lose nutritional value, and become more “woody”. Aggregate grazers keep grasses in early growth stages, creating more diverse vegetation types and heights, and maximizing both nutrient content and photosynthetic activity. That cattle allow plants to mature and become woody is a huge issue on North American rangelands. As the buffalo numbers declined, the biodiverse grass plains were overrun by encroaching woodlands and invasive European grasses which outcompeted the native buffalograss. Pioneers tended to interpret the spread of the European grasses and trees as the “civilization of the land” and the betterment of the ecosystem, because they interpreted the greener grasses and more colorful invasive species as more beautiful (and therefore more valuable). This rhetoric remains ingrained in society today, where the preservation of grasslands, badlands, wetlands, and prairies is woefully underfunded compared to more traditionally “picturesque” landscapes such as rainforests, mountains, and coasts. These less visually appealing landscapes are no less important and provide vital ecosystem services and habitat in their untouched state. Very few of these untouched grasslands now remain. Woody species such as juniper and pinion pine have overrun western grasslands, leading to plummeting amounts of grass and diversity of grass species. An extract from the Pennsylvania Harrisburg Telegraph in 1867 read;
“The buffalo gone, and the annual fires kindled by the Indians discontinued and domestic stock even sparsely introduced, the vendure of this vast region will be immediately and permanently changed… The trampling, rolling, and browsing buffalo gone and the firing of the dead grass to start an early growth for feed discontinued, trees, by a law of nature, will immediately spring from the soil…”
As grasses decline, erosion increases, and less moisture is allowed to infiltrate into the soil, lowering the water table. Those same invading juniper plants thrive in these conditions- their taproots can extend 150 feet below the soil to find water, while short-rooted grasses dry up and die. Cattle are far less effective at utilizing dry forage than bison, increasing wildfire danger. Not only did bison eat differently than cattle, they used the land differently in other ways. Bison spent less time at and roamed further from water sources than cattle do, so they didn’t erode riverbanks in the same way. Bison “smooth” cut banks in rivers through their usage of the land, while erosion from cattle deepens channels and creates gullies.
You have seen a gully, whether you know it or not. A gully is a landform created by running water eroding away soil, creating a ditch. These ditches can increase in size to be massive- hundreds of feet wide in some cases- and shape the landscape accordingly. In the desert, an overgrazed, trampled landscape reduces the infiltration rate of the soil, causing water to move across its surface faster than it would if the landscape were covered in grass and forbs; this fast-moving water creates a channel as it moves, and pulls the arid desert soil with it, essentially digging a trench as it goes. As the water flows down the newly formed gully, it scours away the soil from the sides and bottom of the gully, deepening and widening the landform in a process known as channel erosion. As gullies become deeper, they create negative pressure, and actually suck water from springs and wells as they pass and spread, lowering the water table. In the dry season this process increases the dewatering of the surrounding habitat, creating drier soil which then increases erosion in a vicious cycle. Nearly every long-term cattle range has gullies scattered across it, some wide enough to fragment the land like a cliff. You have seen gullies as the locations for shoot-outs in Westerns and driven over them via small overpasses on highways in the west. You have gazed at them out your car window as you drive through the southwest and clambered through them while hiking. They are a common sight in the American landscape, one we think of as completely natural, but one which is both harmful and avoidable. Gullies lower the water quality of the surrounding area, add sediment and other pollutants to water reservoirs, and increase flood risks. They change the surrounding landscapes by sucking away water, draining stream habitat, wetlands, and springs, causing sinkholes and destroying roads. They erode away topsoil, creating dustbowl-like conditions, and they are only increasing with climate change and the western water crisis.
There are some land managers, such as the celebrity TED-Talk speaker Allan Savory, who tout that cattle can be good for the land if they are managed to simulate bison. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of modern ranch ranges, cattle can’t migrate the way native bison did, following the best grass conditions. Cattle herds are not allowed to dwindle during droughts or winter storms as bison populations did, ebbing and flowing with the carrying capacity of their environment. Any cow lost is income lost, and the carrying capacity of the land is not a factor that income cares about. It is impossible, on limited, degraded rangelands overwhelmed by invasive species and plagued with drought, for cattle to come even close to emulating the effects of wild bison on their native environment, however hopeful an idea that might be. Only bison, a species perfectly adapted to their native environment over millennia, can shape and heal the range in that particular way.
Could we not add more bison to the range, then? A few isolated populations of wild bison, such as those in Yellowstone National Park, still exist today. The remaining bison within the confines of the park face habitat fluctuations due to climate change, increased natural disasters, and hordes of tourists come to gawk at the last living remnants of the kings of the American plains. This year has seen more conflicts between tourists and buffalo than ever before as social media spurs ever-increasing crowds to seek closer and more incredible photographs to share with their followers. Could these buffalo not expand and graze, possibly alongside cattle, on our public rangelands to lend their ecological benefits to the landscape and to allow them more space? Of course not. There is a massive battle between the livestock industry and wild buffalo- another battle which buffalo are likely to lose.
Brucellosis is an infectious bacterial disease that affects livestock and wildlife, sometimes causing infected cattle to abort their first calf after the mother contracts the infection (another unallowable loss of profit). Brucellosis originated in European livestock and was first detected in Yellowstone’s buffalo in 1917, after cattle were first allowed to graze in the park. Though there has never been a documented case of a wild, free-roaming bison infecting a domestic cow with the disease, ranchers insist that any bison approaching the edges of Yellowstone and the beginning of cattle range should be killed immediately. In 2016 Yellowstone enacted a buffalo quarantine procedure, where calves are removed from the herd and confined as livestock for two to four years. About half of the bison do not survive the process, and those remaining are transported to fenced- albeit large- pastures and no longer allowed to roam freely. All those ecological benefits restricted to a fenced-in field. The mission statement of the Buffalo Field Campaign, a non-profit working for the benefit of the remaining members of the species, “envision[s] a world in which buffalo and all other native wildlife are allowed to exist for their own sake, are given priority on public lands, and herds are allowed to maintain self-regulating, sustainable populations.” As of 2022, Yellowstone’s bison herds are subject to an annual slaughter of up to 20% of their population to satisfy the American livestock industry’s Brucellosis anxieties. It is clear that in the modern age, despite the fact that they do not fill the same ecological niche, the buffalo has been replaced on the range by the cow. And as the Midwest has developed its plains, that range has been pushed further and further west.
Water in the arid west is precious. We have all shaken our heads at the statistics on how much water it takes to grow an almond tree or irrigate an orange orchard, but the usage of water by the livestock industry is no less egregious. In dry states where water tables have dropped, such as Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and California, cattle conglomerates now move into the areas and drill incredibly deep, expensive wells on the cheap land (often deeper than 1,000 feet). This undercuts existing well owners and lowers the entire water table deeper than the areas’ existing wells, forcing residents and small farms to sell their land on the cheap to the same company that forced them off it. Water regulation legislation which would require water use reports or pumping statistics are opposed by the Cattle Growers Association lobbyists and lawmakers with vested interests in the cattle industry.
Livestock usage is estimated to account for 68% of water used in agriculture; 30% for the actual livestock production and 38% for the production of feed crops for livestock. In fact, most of the farmlands in the United States are not growing food for human consumption; most of our farmlands are devoted to hay, corn, and silage to fatten livestock. These statistics do not take into account the hidden toll of all those aforementioned gullies; it is impossible to estimate the loss of water through the negative pressure of gullies across the country, but you can be assured that it is high. The high deserts are now under threat from climate change as well as overgrazing and water loss. As temperatures increase and snowpack melts earlier, invasive species are wreaking havoc across these delicate ecosystems, already strained from centuries of overgrazing. According to the 2022 Climate Report, many natural systems are near the hard limits of their natural adaptation capacity and additional systems will reach limits with increased global warming.
All these changes in the landscape- the removal of the buffalo and encroachment of woody plants, the overgrazing of the range and lowering of the water tables, the creation of gullies and the desertification of arid lands- began during the Beef Bonanza in the 1800s and continue to this day. Cattle take up nearly half of the land mass in the United States in 2023, and are the number one agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. Each year, a single cow will belch about 20 pounds of biogenic methane, which is shorter-lived than Carbon Dioxide, but 28 times more potent. We can only look back at the destruction and the privatization of the range and weep for what might have been, if President Grant had not vetoed that bill to save the remaining buffalo herds. His goal was to usher in a “golden era of cattle industry”, and he succeeded. The problem is, it looks much less golden from this side of history.
References:
Miller, Phil (2010). Cattle and Railroads- The Flint Hills Connection. Symphony in the Flint Hills Journal.
McClung, Robert M (1969). Lost Wild America. William Morrow and Company, NY:
The Oxford History of the American West. (1994). United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Flannery, Tim (2002). The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples. United States: Grove Press.
Wrobel, D. M. (2017). America’s West: A History, 1890–1950. United States: Cambridge University Press.
