Saturday, August 24, 2013

Historical Revisionism Or Truth?

One thing for sure, the Indian Industry isn't gonna like this: Was the Buffalo Hunted to Near Extinction?
"“In one short afternoon six hunters at a New York gun club killed 30,000 passenger pigeons.” What a lousy thing to do, I said. Then a light bulb went on. Wait a minute. Thirty thousand in a “short afternoon”? Four hours? That would be 7,500 birds per hour divided by six for 1,250 birds per hour per hunter. The initial shock at the figure momentarily replaced my friend’s usual razor-edge acumen. Market hunting sliced great inroads into passenger pigeon populations. But years later forensics would prove those beautiful birds fell victim to avian disease as well as rampant overshooting."
[---]
"How about 60 million breeding bison “shot off” in the late 1800s? That makes 30,000 passenger pigeons felled to pellets in a single afternoon plausible by comparison. And yet even we hunters have bought into the lie. We even apologize to anti-hunters for our ancestors. It never happened. Buffalo ranged over a vast domain with not a single legitimate road and few trails. The herds covered Nebraska, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Oregon, Washington—don’t forget Texas-—and the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. How about Montana? Montana alone comprises 147,138 square miles. Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon combine for 425,590 square miles.

Picture the professional hunter, or “buffalo runner,” as he preferred, on foot or horseback, wagon in tow with two to three skinners. The pros preferred Sharps and Remington Rolling Blocks, some scoped, more iron sighted. Singleshots, not machine guns. And no helicopter gunships. Blackpowder caked the bore, sometimes cleared by a urine flood. How many bison could a skinner skin in one day? A modest-sized cow ran 1,500 pounds on the hoof, her sire going a ton and more. Does the folly begin to take form? Tell a lie often enough, especially in print, and fabrication outruns truth and logic.

This is no whitewash job. The American buffalo (bison) was not shot off, because it could not be rendered extinct by bullets due to incredible numbers, vast and often unreachable habitat, primitive travel methods, and inferior firepower. Capt. William Twining, the surveyor who established the border between Canada and Montana, stood on a hill and watched a migrating herd so large that he could not determine beginning or end. Total bison numbers were beyond comprehension. Respected naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton did his best to calculate the possible number of roaming bison at 60 million, which is agreed upon today by most experts as a reliable figure."
[---]
"There were more bison than humans in North America in the 1800s, diminishing their worth. Irishman Sir St. George Gore, last name apropos, proved a symbol of wanton destruction in the name of sport."
[---]
"In 1854 he laid out an estimated half-million U.S. dollars for an expedition into the Far West. Over three years the straw-whiskered baronet shot animals for the sheer hell of it, knocking down 2,000 bison."
[---]
"A reported 8.5 million were shot inside a two-year span. These inflated figures do not match hide shipping records, but even if true, this number would not come close to matching breeding potential."
[---]
"In spite of the horrific trespass upon the bison, the on-foot, sometimes on horseback, runner could not annihilate what scientists continue to call the single largest group of sizeable mammals to roam the world—ever. So what happened to the buffalo in reality instead of fabrication? Invading Martians are destroyed in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds “by the humblest things that God had put upon this earth after all of man’s devices failed.” Microbes. Little Boy and Fat Man, dropped from the Enola Gay and Boxcar, atomized Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the waning days of World War II. But loss of life was microscopic against the onslaught of the Black Plague in Europe.

That pandemic reduced over 30 million people to corpses in the 1340s. Following World War I, Spanish Influenza took a greater toll in a couple months than all the bombs, bullets, and mustard gas railed against soldiers from 1914 to 1918. That the buffalo was wantonly slaughtered is fact. That the breed was destroyed by guns is ludicrous.

Dr. Rudolph W. Koucky, a pathologist, concluded that something far deadlier than a bullet caused the demise of the shaggy."
[---]
"In 1884 sportsmen who hired guides for buffalo were rewarded with cancellations instead of hunts. No animals could be found. One day Koucky discovered something interesting—a huge pile of bison bones on the Montana plains. The skeletons showed no signs of bullets. They had, the pathologist concluded, “simply laid down and died.” Obviously, the animals were sick."
[---]
"In 1825 an epidemic destroyed all of the buffalo in eastern Nebraska. The animals perished so rapidly that there was no provision for the Indian population in the area. Some of these people died of starvation, others from eating meat from infected animals. In 1858 another epidemic destroyed the buffalo in the Platte River Valley. The trail from Fort Laramie in eastern Wyoming to Fort Bridger in western Wyoming was noted as “one long offense to the nostrils.” These epidemics occurred in areas where immigrants brought cattle through."
[---]
"Beaver trapper Yellowstone Kelly wrote an interesting account circa 1867. “Our course led over rolling prairie when we crossed a high and level plain which extended for many miles. The plain was covered with a thin coating of ice, and on all sides as far as the eye could reach was dotted with bodies of dead buffaloes. These animals were in good condition and bore no mark of bullet or arrow wounds. (Emphasis added.) The cause of their death was a mystery to us. As we marched over the plain toward the valley of the Cheyenne, the appearance of so many carcasses scattered around made a strong impression on my mind, perhaps because they were the first buffaloes I had ever seen.”"
There's more. RTWT










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4 Comments:

Blogger Dave in Pa. said...

Well, thanks for this thread and link! I must admit I was one of those uninformed, or rather misinformed, people who had bought into the long-pushed Big Lie that whites had exterminated the buffalo.

If the total herd size of 60 million is even twice the real numbers, so that the total was around 30 million, killing even a million a year, which is way over the referenced, fairly documented numbers, wouldn't deplete the total herd number. It'd hardly dent it, in fact. But plagues contracted from domesticated cattle could do so, like the comparison with the Black Plague in Europe that in a few years killed an estimated 1/3 to 1/2 of we two-legged mammals in Europe. Or the Spanish Flue pandemic right after WW1, that killed more people globally than were killed in WW1.

When I lived in Calif., I saw a large herd of black angus-buffalo "beefalo" cross-breeds in a rural ranching/farming area n. of Sacramento. I also saw a very small herd of buffalo, perhaps a couple dozen, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. I was surprised by those in the Park, the first I'd ever seen. First, they aren't all that huge, being about the same as a large cow. I guess I'd expected something elephant-sized. Second, boy do they stink! They do a lot of wallowing, apparently to get rid of pesky flies, covering themselves with their own wastes. Phew! :-(

I've never had the chance to eat buffalo, or beefalo meat. Neither in California or here in Pa have I ever seen it for sale. I just did a quick search and you can buy it over the Internet but WOW! the prices! :-(

Any buffalo, or beefalo meat sold in Canada? Ever had any?

August 24, 2013 7:50 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

I've had buffalo burgers. Nothing special,as far as I'm concerned. Just milder flavoured beef.

There were/are two species of bison. The one of prairie fame and the subject of this article is a lot bigger than the other.

I think it's the smaller one that is raised on bison ranches and the one whose meat is sold today. Not entirely sure about that, but there are bison herds in northern Saskatchewan still today, and those are the smaller ones known as "wood buffalo".

August 24, 2013 8:13 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

And yeah, to old story about the indiscriminate slaughter is the one that everyone believes. I doubt whether this version will become too well known. This newer one is to useful to the Indian Industry.

August 24, 2013 8:18 pm  
Blogger Louise said...

*is NOT too useful*

August 24, 2013 8:20 pm  

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