Dr. Ben Jones:
This is History 605, where we talk about everything from crazy horse to cyberspace. I'm State Historian, Dr. Ben Jones from the South Dakota State Historical Society. All right, we are here today with Andrew Isenberg, the author of the book, The Destruction of the Bison. Andrew is the hall distinguished professor of history at the University of Kansas. And he specializes in a field of history known as environmental history. The bison is the iconic animal of the Great Plains, certainly dependent upon by American Indians for centuries. And while the bison may have numbered as high as 30 million in 1800, fewer than 1000 existed, a century later. What happened to them? Well, it's complicated. And today Drew Isenberg shares with us his research in his published book called The Destruction of the Bison, in Environmental History 1750 to 1920 published by Cambridge University press, and it was re-released recently. And so, Andrew, I was wondering if you would give us just a brief introduction.
Andrew Isenberg:
It began as my doctoral dissertation at Northwestern University, I had initially gone to Northwestern intending to be an early American historian. I was going to write about the 17th or 18th century, and I was going to write about the encounter, somewhere on the Atlantic coast or near there between English settlers and native Americans. And at the time I went to graduate school, I didn't yet know that the field of environmental history existed as a discrete field. I had read some environmental history as an undergraduate, and I'd been drawn to it, I'd liked it, but I didn't realize that it had started to coalesce in the 1980s as a field. But there was an environmental historian, Arthur McAvoy on the faculty at Northwestern and I became very intrigued with it. And at that point, in my second year of graduate school, I needed to formulate an idea for a dissertation and literally in the wee hours of the morning, as I was grading handwritten midterm exams for the US History Survey Course, where I was the teaching assistant, the idea of writing a dissertation about the bison came to me.
And at that point I didn't have a thesis, what I had was a historical question. And it's the question that you laid out in your introduction. There were 30 million or so bison in 1800, I didn't know the exact number at that point, but I knew there were very few, it turned out fewer than a thousand, buy the end of the century, and how did we get from point A to point B? So I had a built-in historical question and I didn't yet know the answer, but I knew that I had a really good question to work with. And the answer that I came up with in many ways, went back to what I intended to go to graduate school to do, the book, The Destruction of the Bison is really a story of the encounter between White Americans and indigenous people in the Great Plain.
And in a lot of ways, bison is a casualty of that encounter, that the encountered created, I argue in the book, bison hunters on both sides that the horse mounted largely nomadic indigenous hunters of the Great Plains only became that when the horse was introduced to the Americas or re-introduced to the Americas by European colonists. And on the other side of the encounter, there are White hide hunters who were created in many ways by that encounter as well. And as their hunting of the bison evolves, they are hunting the bison in order to deny its use to native Americans.
Dr. Ben Jones:
You mentioned the horse, as I was reading the book, that's the thing that fuels all of this in so many ways. Isn't there, it's certainly a part of that change over time that occurs, that when these drives get access to horses, it changes the very nature of their society. I was wondering if you could go into a little bit about those societies that go from a static agriculture-based to nomadic based and then how that changes their culture for their tribe.
Andrew Isenberg:
One of the things that really intrigued me about this history and I spend most of the first half of the book discussing this, is that a lot of the native groups that we think of as the archetypal Plains Indian groups, as it's called, the Lakota Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Comanche that these groups had not even primarily inhabited the Great Plains before the introduction of the horse, almost all of the groups that we know as the Plains Indians had inhabited the fringes of the Great Plains. And it's when the arrival of the horse in North America, that they began to, over a couple of generations, make a shift to becoming full-time inhabitants of the Great Plains and horse mounted societies and making their subsistence largely dependent on the bison.
So before the horse made its way into the Great Plains, these groups had, as I said existed on the fringes of the Plains, and they made seasonal trips into the Great Plains to hunt bison from foot, and they came across the horse, not as it's sometimes said by capturing wild horses that had escaped from the Spaniards to the South, but in fact, because the Spanish had brought horses up to New Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries. And when the Pueblo natives revolted against the Spanish in 1680, and took control of those horses that started an inter-tribal trade in horses and horses percolated up all the way into the Northern Great Plains, by the middle of the 18th century. So they acquired it via inter-tribal trade.
Dr. Ben Jones:
And how much debate might a tribe like the Comanche or the Cheyenne have about whether they should take on the horse into their lifestyle, or was that just something that neighbors were doing? Because there are tribes that do not take on the horse.
Andrew Isenberg:
That's exactly right.
Dr. Ben Jones:
And so how do you compare say the Mandan to the Lakota in that regard?
Andrew Isenberg:
Or say the Pawnee who famously, they acquire horses as do the Mandan, but they don't give up their villages in river valleys in the Great Plains where they're planting corn beans and squash and sunflowers, they just combine the horse and now hunting bison from horseback with those agricultural villages. Whereas other groups such as the Cheyenne or the Lakota had been agricultural societies and gave that up. And it's clear that this is not a transformation that happens right away, it happens over a couple of generations and embedded in the folk tales of some of these groups. You can clearly see that this was not an easy transformation to make. I mean, the reason why these groups had combined hunting with agriculture is that that provides more subsistent security. So giving up those sedentary villages is a big step to make. And it's pretty clear that what makes a lot of these groups turn the corner is that it's not only horses that percolate up into the Great Plains from Mexico in the 18th century, but also smallpox percolates up into Great Plains from Mexico. And there's a devastating smallpox epidemic in the 1780s.
And actually until the 1780s, both the Cheyenne and a couple of divisions of the Lakota had still been planting corn and beans and other things. And combining that with seasonal bison hunting from horseback, but smallpox thrives in among dense populations that are relatively sedentary. And so after that smallpox epidemic, those groups give up their villages and they become full-time nomadic hunters.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Okay. As a way to combat the smallpox, or just a combination of factors?
Andrew Isenberg:
Yeah. I think, as a way to avoid living in those kinds of villages, where it was clear that smallpox was thriving. I mean, it could not have escaped their attention that smallpox was affecting the Mandan and the Hidatsa and other groups in the Northern Great Plains that were primarily sedentary agricultural villagers. And that groups that spent most of their time dispersed into small hunting groups, following the bison were managing to avoid smallpox.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Another aspect that you go into is just over the long span of history and watching the environmental change that the rainfall, the drought then followed by longer spans of greater than average rainfall and so forth and the ability to look at tree rings or other sources of evidence about rainfall and so forth. And this one, a bit here you have from 1406 to 1940, this area near Bismarck, had 11 periods of low precept lasting 10 years more, and then nine wet periods lasting 10 years more. It seems to be this wide swing in extremes. How would the bison combat that prior to, if you take out the hunting that might go on, how would the bison combat that extreme?
Andrew Isenberg:
Yeah, that's a great question. When I first started looking at this topic, when I first began my research into it, I spent time in the Great Plains, in the grasslands, but I didn't really understand how that environment worked. And I think like a lot of people, I assumed it was relatively stable within certain variations. What I discovered was, I think as anybody who lives in the Great Plains for any length of time knows is that the Great Plains is a really dynamic environment. In which extremes of temperature and precipitation are to be expected, especially in terms of precipitation, there were wet years when parts of the Great Plains look like Iowa and then there are other years when the same areas look like New Mexico. That we can talk about in most of the Great Plains an average annual precipitation of about 20 inches. But the average doesn't really tell you very much because it really varies quite dramatically.
And so what this meant is that at the beginning of this, you mentioned that maybe there were 30 million bison in the Great Plains at the most in the late 18th, early 19th century. But that number wasn't stable, that the bison population was fluctuating up and down pretty dramatically, primarily in response to drought because when drought came, it tripled the grasses on which the bison depended and the bison had to spread out to other kinds of areas and that upset their patterns of reproduction. So the bison population was not static, it was moving up and down. And then when you added human pressures in the 19th century, especially when a dry period began throughout most of the Plains, I mean, in patchy ways, but throughout most of the Plains in the 1850s or so, that's when you really started to see a decline in the bisons numbers.
Dr. Ben Jones:
And you found evidence of that based on the lack of bison remains and kill sites and so forth?
Andrew Isenberg:
And you can go back into the prehistoric period and archeologists have done, they've looked at these prehistoric kill sites where hunters would drive bison off a cliff or an escarpment. And there're accretions of bison bones going back many centuries. And there are long periods where there's very few bison bones that are being accumulated there. And there are other scientists who've looked at tree ring data, and the width between the rings tells you how much rain there was in a particular season. And again, those studies go back many hundreds of years and one can pretty accurately chart when and where there was sufficient rainfall and those periods when there aren't many bison at those kill sites correspond pretty well to periods when there was not a lot of rainfall.
Dr. Ben Jones:
That number of 30 million, I was wondering if you could compute some of that. And that of course, is a high end possibility. What's the thinking that goes in, or how has the math done on computing the 30 million?
Andrew Isenberg:
Well, it's a kind of seat of the pants effort to do some estimate of what the carrying capacity of the Great Plains would be. So what I did, to be very brief about it, is I looked at the national bison range in Montana, and what the managers of the national bison range calculated, the carrying capacity of that area was, for bison. And then I extrapolated from there to the size of the Great Plains and how many bison might have been in the Great Plains. So what I came up with was actually something more between 24 and 27 million. There are other historians have looked at this same problem, and one of them, Tom McHugh looked at the number of bison in Yellowstone, and he did a similar extrapolation from the number that Yellowstone could sustain to the Great Plains. And floras looked at the number of cattle in the Southern Plains and carrying capacity for cattle and because cattle and bison have similar kinds of needs for forage. He extrapolated from there, he came up with around 30 million.
So those of us who looked at this come up with similar kinds of numbers in this respect.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Yeah. Well, environmental history as a field is really intriguing. I wonder that you use things like tree rings and climate data and some geological formations and some archeology and so forth to see change over time. Are there things that have come along or source basis that you've used that we have not talked about today?
Andrew Isenberg:
I mean, I think any historian is always looking for any new kind of source space and environmental history is not unique in this respect. I think particularly in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of cultural history, people drawing in cognitive fields like anthropology, fields in history, in which we started looking at material culture and trying to think about how that informs what we know about the past. I think the environmental history and trying to draw in what historical ecologists have said about environments is just part of that broader effort on the part of professional historians in the last gosh, 50 years now, to broaden our base so that we're not just looking at the relatively few written records that we have.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Yeah. I was impressed and glad to see in the book, your use of the winter counts. How did you-?
Andrew Isenberg:
In fact, if I have any regrets about this book looking back many years, I wish I'd done more with the winter count. I really wish that I had delved into them and really drawn out some of the really interesting cultural insights that come from looking at those winter counts. But it was my first book, I was relatively young when I wrote it. And sometimes when you're just starting out as a historian, you don't know when you have a great source in front of you. That's something that takes actually a couple of decades to figure out.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Well, I wonder for our listeners too, if you can describe what a winter count is and how you came across the ones that you use for your book.
Andrew Isenberg:
Oh, sure. So a lot of groups in the Great Plains kept a pictographic calendar of their own society. And so what this meant is they would, I guess at the end of every year, think about what the most notable events of that year was. And then they would create a picture of what that was, and they would record these in sequence. Oftentimes they would paint them on bison robes, oftentimes in a spiral starting to beginning and then moving around. And so if there's something really notable, like a comet or an eclipse, that might be what happened that year, years when these epidemics happen, that would be noted and they will draw, for instance, a figure, a human figure with spots on it that indicated either small pox or measles, the first acquisition of horses shows up in some of these. And so different divisions of Lakota each kept their own winter count, the Kayla kept a winter count, some of the Blackfoot kept winter counts and we can line these up, and they are indigenous narrative histories.
One has to read into them, but one has to read into any historical documents and we have a lot of these because there were some anthropologists who recorded them in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Dr. Ben Jones:
We have, I think, two or three at our museum in Pier. And they're fascinating just to take in.
Andrew Isenberg:
They absolutely are. I've been to a couple of museums have them and I spent a long time staring at them.
Dr. Ben Jones:
So by then you can put a spot on the calendar when say the Oglala first took on horses? And I think you mentioned that in your book, frankly, and in the early is it 1704, something like that?
Andrew Isenberg:
Yep. Early on the groups, different divisions of Lakota acquired horses and by the middle of the 19th century, having horses wasn't anything significant, but you can see how early on in the 18th century, it was something really notable. Because a year in which they raided another group and came away with a couple of horses was something that was the notable event of the year. Whereas again, by the early 19th century, that would have been a relatively common occurrence.
Dr. Ben Jones:
As far as the hunting of the bison, that the Lakota do, the Cheyenne do and so forth, and the trade that they're engaging in with the United States in the 1840s, 1850s, I was fascinated by that trade going up and down the Missouri of the Buffalo hides. And what were they getting from that trade? What was coming up the river and traded with that?
Andrew Isenberg:
Well, that trade in Buffalo robes, the bison's winter, heavy, warm coat, that only begins in the early 1830s, because it's not until, I believe 1832 that a steam boat ascends the Missouri river from St. Louis as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone river. And it's not until the steam boat that the bison robe trade begins because bison robes are too bulky to ship in large quantities out of the Great Plains by canoe. So it's really from the early 1830s until the mid 1860s or so, a relatively brief period when these indigenous hunters are hunting bison robes and then trading them for goods from Whites. And what they're getting in return are manufactured goods, firearms, metallic weapons, knives, arrowheads, they're getting woven cloth, various kinds of decorative items, beads, mirrors, and they're also getting alcohol. Alcohol is in many ways, not just in the Great Plains, but throughout North America, kind of driver of the fur trade, alcohol and firearms are the two biggest items in the fur trade over a couple centuries across the entire continent.
Dr. Ben Jones:
And that's enabled by the steam boat?
Andrew Isenberg:
In Great Plains, it's absolutely enabled by the steam boat. And I should add native hunters are killing probably for their own subsistence, all the native groups in the Great Plains, maybe 450 or 500,000 bison every year. That's to have enough to eat and to create bison robes for themselves and bison hides for lodging. And they're maybe harvesting another hundred thousand bison every year above that for commerce with Whites. And that's putting a dent in the bison population, but it's hard to say initially that it's a perceptible dent. I think by the 1860s, it's clear to a lot of people that the number of bison are declining, not just because of this native commercial hunting, but also because of drought and the impact of Overland immigrants and other things. But that's the scale of the hunting we're talking about, raising what they were already taking by about 20% or so.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Okay. All right. I think one of the most impressive things about the book is how you contextualize everything and the relationships between the climate things like drought, the invention of the steam boat, how that impacts trade, what the indigenous people need themselves for food and shelter and tools. And then this impact of the United States and the Whites coming up the river, or moving West and so forth. You really do a great job explaining the context of all this and the different pressures that say today, a modern game warden would see on any population of animals in the wild, it's really fascinating to see this across such a large span of time. So I was wondering if you-
Andrew Isenberg:
When I started the book, I didn't realize how many factors were going to be involved, but by the time I finished it, I realized this is the largest land mammal in North America. It was the dominant animal, or perhaps the most important animal in the largest biome in North America, the Great Plains. And so there's going to be more than one thing at play in nearly causing this animal to go extinct. So there's bound to be a lot of factors at work.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Well, in the re-edition of the 20th anniversary of the book, did you come across other things that would change the nature of the book, or how did you approach the re-edition?
Andrew Isenberg:
I made a decision to leave the text more or less the way it was. I updated some of the scientific nomenclature, which had changed in the 20 years, they've re-categorized some plants and animals, so I updated the scientific nomenclature. I wrote an introduction or a forward in which I discussed the ways in which I would have written this book differently whereas write it now, I decided to go that route rather than try to rewrite the book. And I would say just writing that forward, in which I had to think about the ways I would have written it, was a difficult enough intellectual exercise than actually going through and rewriting it. I would probably still be working on rewriting it, it'd be the 30th anniversary reissue if that were the case. But one of those things I've already mentioned, I wish I had paused and ruminated more on things like the winter count and indigenous folk tales that I uncovered and try to draw out more of the native cultural context around the hunting of the bison.
I wish that I had taken more time to think about the impact of the bison trade on gender and how the native groups in the Great Plains needed a lot of laborers to process bison robes for trade. And so they actually started pressing women into service and taking women as captives from other groups in order to put them to work, preparing robes for trade. And I knew I was onto something, but it wasn't until after the book came out, that there were some other books that were published, James Brooks, his Captives and Cousins, and Alan Gallay's book about the Indian slave trade in East and North America, that I realized that forced labor was actually something within indigenous societies that I should have thought about some more. So I wish I'd drawn that out.
And I'll also say that at the time I sent the book to Cambridge University Press in draft form, I thought I'd made some really good transnational gestures across the border into Canada and across the border into Mexico. And I think by the standards of the late 1990s, perhaps it was adequate. Within a couple years though, transnational history had exploded and my gestures in that direction look inadequate nowadays. So I really wish I had made this more of a transnational history rather than a story about the United States Great Plains.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Oh, yeah. I see. Yeah. The bison don't care about borders, do they?
Andrew Isenberg:
No, they do not. And I think one of the reasons I fell into that is that a large part of the second half of the book is about United States policy toward indigenous people in the Great Plains. And so that drew me more toward a national story rather than a transnational one.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Yes, I see. Well, and you end the book talking about how the bison become, they move from energizing or being a function of the environment to instead now they're part of the economy. And I was wondering if we could just end on that. How are the bisons saved in the end and what's their role that you make them out to be?
Andrew Isenberg:
Well, I mean, I really was fortunate for that last part of the book, in that I went to the Denver Public Library to their conservation collection and just delved into the papers of the American Bison Society, which was group founded in 1905, by a lot of pretty wealthy Eastern men. Teddy Roosevelt was the honorary president of that society and Andrew Carnegie was a member, and these guys made it their mission to try to preserve the bison from extinction. And so they created four or five, relatively small bison preserves that National Bison Range, in Montana that I mentioned earlier is one of them. And they installed a few dozen bison on each one and they also sent some bison to Yellowstone. And then they said, okay, we're done, we've done what we need to do.
What they were interested in doing in many ways was not preserving the bison as a functioning part of the Great Plains environment, because from their point of view, the transformation of the Great Plains, from a place that had been populated by bison and by indigenous people, to a place that was now populated by ranchers and farmers, White ranchers, and farmers was a good thing. They just wanted to kind of preserve a little semblance of that frontier as they thought so that people could go and see it and experience it. And they were helped out in this. The only reason why there were bison that they could put on these preserves was that there were some ranchers in the Great Plains who rounded up some surviving bison calves and raised them alongside their cattle and were selling them to zoos and to Wild West shows and to private menagerie. And the American Bison Society bought their bison from these ranchers. So there were these ranchers interested in making a profit who are raising them as novelties and the American Bison Society tapped into that.
So, yes, the bison was preserved from extinction, but I think not as a functioning part of the Great Plains environment, the way it had been in the beginning of the 19th century, but as a novelty and tourist attraction.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Well, in South Dakota Custer State Park, has a bison herd, the management of that herd is something that public takes great interest in and drives a lot of tourism to come in the State.
Andrew Isenberg:
And you're correct to point that out because if you end the story in the 1920s as the book does or the first edition of the book does, yes, that's where it ends with this curious preservation of the bison. But in the new edition, I have an afterword where I try to take the story up to the present. And the number of bison has been on the increase throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. There are about 20,000 bison on public preserves, State and federal preserves throughout the United States. There's also about 20,000 bison on native American reservations because they've been working really hard to try to restore the bison, at least in those places. Both of those numbers are dwarfed however, by the number of bison on private ranches, I mean, there are several hundred thousand on private ranches that are just raised for meat.
So the bison is one of these strange animals that, I mean, apart from having been declared by Barack Obama, to be the national mammal, it's an animal that you can go see at Yellowstone, or you could sometimes see in a preserve, but you can also go to the supermarket and get a bison steak. So we have a strange way of thinking about this animal, both as a supply of meat and as this national icon at the same time.
Dr. Ben Jones:
Well, Andrew, thanks so much for joining us today. I truly appreciate it.
Andrew Isenberg:
It's been my pleasure.
Dr. Ben Jones:
And good luck with the re-edition of the book.
Andrew Isenberg:
All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Dr. Ben Jones:
We'd like to thank our sponsor, the South Dakota Historical Society Foundation and our partner of the 605 podcast, South Dakota Public Broadcasting. But most importantly, I really thank you, our listener to the show. If you enjoyed it, I hope you'll share on social media and tell your friends about us. Now, go do some history.
History 605 explores the history of South Dakota, the northern Great Plains, and the Midwest. South Dakota’s State Historian Ben Jones will visit with guests about their books, museum exhibits and artifacts, and historic sites in the state and region. Along the way, you’ll learn how to think, not what to think, about history and the people of the past.
The host is Dr. Ben Jones, State Historian and Director of the South Dakota State Historical Society. Ben grew up in Sioux Falls and De Smet, served in various locations around the world while in the USAF. He returned to South Dakota to become Dean of Arts and Sciences at Dakota State University, then served as South Dakota’s 15th Secretary of Education. Along the way, he earned his PhD in history and enjoys sharing history’s insights with all of you.