The slaughter, precipitated by Nineteenth Century world views and conditions, is seen as a closed chapter in the history of the West. It is viewed from the standpoint of the Twentieth Century as a necessary but somewhat regrettable evil. Most of all, it is considered a completed event, something that had to be done once and for all but is completely done. The Indians were put on reservations, the bison on ranches; end of story. Or is it?
This struggle, between white and Indian, between cattle and bison, between two strikingly dissimilar ways of life, is alive and strong today. The extirpation of the herds in the last century and the current slaughter taking place outside Yellowstone National Park are closely related and fueled by many of the same economic motivations, personal fears, and misunderstandings. The bison were exterminated as a means of creating and maintaining the dominance of the cattle culture across the Great Plains and the West. On the eve of the Twenty-first Century, many of the same forces are still in place.
The primary focus of my research has been on the bison/cattle conflict and the way this conflict has affected relations between the government and the Indian tribes. As I conducted my research I discovered striking parallels between the prevailing views of yesterday and those of today. In 1876, while the buffalo were being killed by the millions, General Nelson Miles predicted the future: "When we get rid of the Indians and buffalo, the cattle will fill this country (Brown, 98). His prophesy, which he helped to create, proved true.
The bison/cattle conflict remains strong today. The Yellowstone herd is the only herd descended from continuously wild buffalo in this country (Meagher, 1). Lee Alley is Chairman of the U.S. Animal Health Association (USAHA), a government body whose actions have spurred the Yellowstone slaughter. In 1998 he said if it were up to him, "the herd would be depopulated, the animals destroyed. All of them." In the past decade alone, more than 2000 Yellowstone buffalo have been killed--more than half of them during the winter of 1996-1997. I will discuss the current bison slaughter and the forces behind it in further detail starting on page thirteen. But first, some historical background is needed.
Buffalo once ranged from the eastern seaboard to Oregon and California; from Great Slave Lake in northern Alberta to northern Mexico. Although no one will ever know exactly how many bison once inhabited North America, estimates range from twenty-five to seventy million. William Hornaday, a naturalist who spent considerable time in the West, both before and during the most severe years of the slaughter, comments on the seemingly infinite bison population and the impossibility of estimating their quantity:
It would have been as easy to count or to estimate the number of leaves in a forest as to calculate the number of buffaloes living at any given time during the history of the species previous to 1870 (quoted in Rifkin, 74).
The great herds were not decimated overnight. The slaughter was a gradual process, reaching full momentum in the 1870s. It started with the Indians, who had relied upon and hunted buffalo for thousands of years. Without the arrival of the whites--and with them the gun, the horse, and the market for bison--the Indians probably could have lived in perpetuity with the bison. But with horse and gun--which plains tribes received from their southern neighbors who, in turn, received them from the Spanish--the Indians were able to kill buffalo with greater ease. As the market for buffalo, particularly their hides, emerged in the 1820s, the bison population began to decline.
By the end of the 1850s, with the demand for the hides increasing, the number of bison killed in a single year had reached the millions. According to F.F. Gerard, a Cree interpreter and trader who worked for the American Fur Company in the upper Missouri country, nearly a million and a half buffalo were killed in 1857 alone (Dary, 78).
The westward advancement of the railroads in the 1860s played a crucial role in the buffalo's demise in four major ways. First, the railroads, penetrating the great herd on the plains, split the bison's range in two. Trains provided easy access to the hunters while simultaneously facilitating the shipment of hides to markets in the East. They also created a new American "sport," shooting bison from the windows of passenger cars. In the January 1869 issue of Harpers, Theodore Davis romanticized this new pastime:
It would seem to be hardly possible to imagine a more novel sight than a small band of buffalo loping along within a few hundred feet of a railroad train in rapid motion, while the passengers are engaged in shooting, from every available window, with rifles, carbines, and revolvers. An American scene, certainly (cited in Dary, 88).
Certainly. Second, buffalo meat provided a cheap and plentiful means of subsistence for the railroad workers, creating increased demand for the animals which made buffalo hunting a more lucrative endeavor. William Cody, popularly known as Buffalo Bill, made his name and fortune in this capacity, contracting with the Kansas Pacific Railroad who fed its construction crews bison meat.
Third, the railroads, by promoting excursions into and romanticizing the buffalo country, stimulated demand for buffalo robes in Eastern markets. People in the East, hearing tales of adventure in the buffalo land, wanted robes of their own, as symbols of the excitement and freedom to be had in the West and as practical items. Robes were used as covers on sleighs, wagons, buggies and other forms of open transportation in winter months. They were used as blankets on beds and made into coats as well (Dary, 88).
Finally--and most pertinent to this discussion--the railroads created an economical means of shipping Texas cattle to markets in the East. Previous to the railroad, it was very difficult for ranchers to connect their cattle with the markets in the North and East. While a few adventurous ranchers did make the journey from Texas to Illinois and Iowa on foot, it was a long and dangerous trip up the center of the continent. Facing raids from outlaws, natural calamities, and weight loss on the arduous trek, the animals were often in rough shape by the time they'd reached market (Rifkin, 70).
When the railroad reached Kansas, enabling cattle to be shipped to the Eastern markets, hundreds of thousands of cattle, sometimes in herds of 10,000 or more, were moved north from Texas to the railroad depots. The now famous Chisholm trail--which linked Texas with the railroad depot of Abilene, Kansas--supported a steady stream of Texas longhorns throughout the 1870s. In 1871 alone, 700,000 longhorn steers were shipped east from Abilene's depot (Rifkin, 71).
The railroads set in motion forces that spelled doom for the buffalo. The emergence of the livestock industry, combined with the increased demand for buffalo as a commodity and the ease with which prospective settlers could reach the West, contributed to the buffalo's demise. But it was the rise of the livestock industry as a powerful political force, more than any of the other factors, which sealed the buffalo's fate. Charles Wilkinson comments on the rapid ascension of the livestock industry:
There were probably no more than 3 or 4 million cattle in the West, mostly in Texas, in 1865 when the war ended. Two decades later, the figure was 26 million, along with nearly 20 million sheep. The diminished range resource, coupled with excessive hunting, drove out the buffalo, the main competitor for forage (Wilkinson, 1992).
In the years following the Civil War demand for beef, hides, and tallow skyrocketed as the North began to rebuild its economy and expand its industrial base. (This increased emphasis on industrialization simultaneously increased demand for buffalo hides, which provided a strong yet elastic material from which to make belts to drive machinery.) The growing middle and upper classes had a nearly insatiable appetite for beef, and the postwar economic boom gave them the buying power to satisfy it. Texas alone could not feed the demand. In response ranchers turned to the western plains, a vast area that had already demonstrated its ability to sustain large and healthy populations of ungulates.
But first, the plains' inhabitants--the Indian and the buffalo--had to be removed . This fit in well with the U.S. government's agenda of "civilizing" or assimilating the Indians. Their nomadic way of life, dictated by the migrations of buffalo, deer, and elk, did not lend itself to the European notion of private property ownership and flew in the face of white attempts to fence and segregate tracts of land for individual use. Cattlemen formed alliances with the U.S. Army, the railroads, and eastern bankers to rid the western range of both the buffalo and the Indian (Rifkin, 73).
The establishment of reservations was an attempt to tame the Indians of their nomadism and to establish clear boundaries between Indian and non-Indian lands. Some treaties "protected" the Indian's right to hunt buffalo in perpetuity, so long as the buffalo remained. The Treaty of 1868, which established the Great Sioux Reservation was one such treaty:
In consideration of the advantages and benefits conferred by this treaty, and the many pledges of friendship by the United States, the tribes who are parties to this agreement hereby stipulate that they will relinquish all right to occupy permanently the territory outside their reservation as herein defined, but yet reserve the right to hunt on any lands north of North Platte, and on the Republican Fork of the Smoky Hill River, so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase (Geist 85).
"So long as the buffalo may range." This clause created a clear incentive for the eradication of the bison.
As the availability of public lands for livestock grazing and white settlement increased--through the signing of treaties--the fate of the Indian became inextricably linked to the redistribution of public lands. Senator Henry Stuart Foote, speaking before Congress in 1849, made this clear:
What two things can be mentioned more closely connected than our Indian policy and the policy of the public lands? We claim the fee simple title to all the lands on the continent possessed by the various Indian tribes; we only recognize them as having a usufructuary interest, and some immense span of territory is every year or two falling into our hands by some treaty effected with them (Congressional Globe, March 3, 1849).
Much of the public domain land, intended for disposal under the Homestead Act, proved to be unproductive and incapable of supporting agriculture and grazing. Congress, under pressure from ranchers and homesteaders--who felt that too much good, irrigable land had been "given" to the Indians--repeatedly adjusted and readjusted reservation boundaries and opened these lands to cattle grazing and homesteading. These were lands that had supposedly been "reserved" for the Indians in perpetuity. During the peak period of such acquisitions, between 1853 and 1857, 174 million acres of Indian lands were either redistributed or sold (Danz, 4). When these lands had all been transferred, ranchers and other powerful whites lobbied Congress for passage of the Allotment Act, which penetrated the reservation boundaries and provided for private, non-Indian ownership of lands within reservations.
The large blocks of land set aside for the Indian tribes initially posed problems because the reservations were off-limits. The cattle ranchers ran stock on Indian lands anyway. Finally, the cattlemen, with the help of other interest groups, achieved the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887. The Dawes Act, as it is also called, resulted in the sale of 90 million acres of the 140-million-acre Indian estate and allowed low-cost grazing leases on the remaining reservation range lands (Wilkinson, 84).
Not only did the Dawes Act open reservation lands without claim or title to homesteading by white settlers, it made it possible for whites to purchase lands within reservations from tribal members. This was desirable to the whites, who believed it necessary for Indians to adopt European notions of private land ownership and capitalist principles. While increasing the amount of land available to non-Indian settlers and ranchers, the Act also served the related white agenda of "civilizing" the Indians. In the words of Missouri Senator Parker in 1874,
The solution of the Indian problem is to confine these Indians upon as small a tract of land as possible, and if possible to make it a necessity for them to learn to labor and to get a sustenance from the soil as the white man does, and not depend upon the rivers and the plains to furnish them their fish and their game (Congressional Record 3/10/74, 2108).
The settlers were threatened by the nomadic ways of the plains Indians, who for thousands of years had lived migratory lives following the great herds of buffalo. To these people, the buffalo was the ultimate resource. It provided not only food, clothing, and shelter but nearly every material need. Because the Indians of the plains depended so much on the bison for their existence, their very religions were centered around the buffalo. This interdependence between Indian and buffalo is exemplified in the beautiful words of John Fire Lame Deer:
The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy. Out of his skin we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a red-hot stone dropped into it, became our soup kettle. His horns were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women's awls and needles. Out of his sinews we made our bowstrings and thread. His ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was our sacred altar. The name of the greatest of all Sioux was Tatanka Iyotake--Sitting Bull. When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian--the real, natural, "wild" Indian (Fire, 130).
In the 1870s, more buffalo were killed than in any other decade in history. The three years of 1872, '73, and '74 were the worst. According to one buffalo hunter, who based his calculations on first-hand accounts and shipping records, 4.5 million buffalo were slaughtered in that three year period alone (Mayer, 87).
Influenced by forces discussed above, the U.S. government pursued a policy to eradicate the buffalo and thereby extinguish the Indians' very sustenance, forcing them onto reservations. The following speech, recounted by John Cook--a buffalo hunter, was delivered by General Phil Sheridan to the Texas legislature in 1875. The legislature, as the story goes, was discussing a bill to protect the buffalo when the General took the floor in opposition:
These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle (Cook, 164).
This testimony, spoken by an Army leader in the Indian wars, spells it out: The buffalo and the Indian were obstructing the march of civilization. Kill the buffalo and not only would the Indian wars be won, but the vast tracks of public land would be opened for cattle.
This belief, that the U.S. government willfully drove the bison to the brink of extinction, is not embraced by all. Dan Flores, a historian at the University of Montana, says he's been unable to locate a record of Sheridan's speech before the legislature and he believes it to be apocryphal. According to Flores, the notion of a conspiracy has become fact through repetition (Robbins). Dr. Drew Isenberg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, concurs: "I don't think there was a conspiracy by any means. The army was happy to see hide hunters, but they were not commanding them to kill bison" (Robbins).
Whether the hide hunters were "commanded" or not, and whether or not Sheridan actually made the speech attributed to him is irrelevant. The evidence weighs heavily in favor of a government policy to eradicate the bison. Whether such a policy was overt or covert, the end results were the same. The buffalo were driven to the brink of extinction and the Indians confined to reservations. The following statements, made by high ranking government officials and those with the power to create and carry out policy, attest to a concerted campaign to clear the western range of buffalo.
Frank Mayer hunted buffalo in the 1870s. In Harold Danz's book, Of Bison and Man, Mayer is quoted as follows:
The buffalo was hunted and killed with the connivance, yes, the cooperation, of the Government itself. That this will be denied I have little doubt. (Danz, 115).
In Mayers' own book The Buffalo Harvest, he comments on the government's role in the extirmination:
Army officers in charge of plains operations encouraged the slaughter of buffalo in every possible way. Part of this encouragement was of a practical nature that we runners appreciated. It consisted of ammunition, free ammunition, all you could use, all you wanted, more than you needed. All you had to do to get it was apply at any frontier army post and say you were short of ammunition, and plenty would be given you. I received thousands of rounds this way. (Mayer, 29).
Mayer tells a story in which he has just obtained free ammunition from a high ranking Army officer. As the two share a cigarette, the officer explains why the army is giving away ammunition:
Mayer, either the buffalo must go or the Indian must go. Only when the Indian becomes absolutely dependent on us for his every need, will we be able to handle him. He's too independent with the buffalo. But if we kill the buffalo we conquer the Indian. It seems a more humane thing to kill the buffalo than the Indian, so the buffalo must go (Mayer, 29).
Eradicating the buffalo as a "humane" alternative to killing the Indian directly was a prominent theme in the 1870s and '80s (see congressional discussion of buffalo preservation bills below). Leaders held fast to the belief that killing the buffalo would bring peace to the frontier. Cook, the buffalo hunter responsible for preserving the famous Sheridan speech, reflects the prevailing attitude among the Army officers he knew:
Then again I thought of what General Sheridan said, which every old-time army officer with whom I talked sanctioned: destroy the buffaloes and make a lasting peace" (Cook, 284).
As the testimony of Mayer and Cook illustrate, the Army--the governing body with the most direct influence on the plains--had an articulated agenda regarding extermination. Even if we discount Sheridan's Texas speech, other officers expressed similar views. Colonel Richard Dodge, without mincing words, made it quite clear:
Kill every buffalo you can, every buffalo gone is an Indian gone (Danz, 112).
These sentiments were also common in the nation's capital. Columbus Delano, Secretary of Interior under President Grant, was perhaps the one man most directly responsible for management of the public lands. A personal friend and advisor to the president, Delano held considerable political influence. In his 1873 Annual Report of the Department of the Interior, he reported to Congress:
The civilization of the Indian is impossible while the buffalo remains upon the plains....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 labors (Dary, 127).
That Delano impressed his point upon members of Congress is a matter of public record. In a hearing held in the House of Representatives in March of 1874, Representative Garfield and other members of Congress referred to Delano and admitted that they shared his views. Garfield, arguing against a bill to protect the buffalo, paraphrased Delano, "The Secretary of the Interior said that he would rejoice, so far as the Indian question is concerned, when the last buffalo was gone" (Congressional Globe).
These sentiments, which held that all the buffalo should be killed, continued to be prominent among high ranking politicians. In 1876, Representative James Throckmorton of Texas expressed his belief that the mere existence of buffalo posed a serious obstacle to civilization:
There is no question that, so long as there are millions of buffaloes in the West, so long the Indians cannot be controlled, even by the strong arm of the Government. I believe it would be a great step forward in the civilization of the Indians and the preservation of peace on the border if there was not a buffalo in existence (Geist, 84).
Although there may have been no "official" government policy to exterminate the buffalo, there didn't need to be. The sentiment among politicians in Washington who made the laws and military officers on the frontier who enforced them was that the buffalo should be killed. Whether or not the army participated in or assisted with the slaughter of the buffalo, it allowed the slaughter to take place--even when it violated federal laws. Much of the killing occurred on lands recognized by the government as belonging to the Indians. It was unlawful for whites to trespass onto these lands without permission, let alone hunt buffalo. Seeking information regarding Army enforcement of the laws against buffalo hunters, David Dary concludes,
I have found no official records indicating that the government, especially the military, stopped buffalo hunters or even tried to stop them from intruding on Indian land, land acknowledged by numerous government treaties as belonging to the Indians. It is probably one of the few times that the US. government, and especially the Army, accomplished what they wanted by officially doing almost nothing (Dary, 128).
By 1880 the entire southern herd had been decimated and most of the northern herd as well. With their food source gone, the Indians were forced to rely on government rations for survival. Ironically, these rations consisted primarily of beef. In 1880, the government delivered 39,160,729 pounds of beef from western ranchers "to be delivered on the hoof at 34 Indian Agencies in ten western states (Frink, 13). Not only did bison eradication clear the plains of bison to make way for livestock, it created a tremendous demand for beef in the process.
The buffalo were gone. A chapter in history, tens of thousands of years in the unfolding, came to a sudden close in a very few short years. Colonel Dodge, himself a player in the great extermination, eulogized the bison:
Where there were myriads of buffalo, there was now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert. (Rifkin, 74).
By the turn of the century there was only one wild herd of bison remaining in the United States. Finding haven in the remote backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, twenty-three buffalo escaped slaughter. Ranchers, some hoping to cross-breed buffalo and cattle, others trying to make money through the preservation of the species, captured and bred buffalo in captivity. In 1902 the Federal Government purchased twenty-one bison from herds in Montana and Texas and released them into Yellowstone National Park (Meagher, 28). Over the years, the herd swelled to as many as 4000 animals. Today's Yellowstone herd of 2000--the only descendants of continuously wild buffalo in this country (Meahger, 1)--traces its ancestry to these forty-four bison.
In just the past five years 2,050 members of this herd have been slaughtered as they leave Yellowstone, making the 1990s the bloodiest decade for buffalo since the 1870s. Today's slaughter is driven by many of the same influences which precipitated last century's near extinction, namely the protection of the special interests of the livestock industry and a continued attempt to disempower the Native American population and keep it removed from its former strength and way of life. In order to see who is responsible for the slaughter one need only look at the name of the agency behind it: The Montana Department of Livestock (DOL).
The ostensible justification for the killing, the one given by the DOL in its statements to the press, is the presence of the brucellosis bacteria in Yellowstone's bison. Fearing an outbreak of the disease among cattle bordering the park, the state has adopted a zero tolerance policy for bison leaving the Yellowstone. Bison are killed as they enter Montana.
The brucellosis organism affects an animal's reproductive system. Cows infected with brucellosis usually abort their first calf. They tend to birth normally in subsequent pregnancies. Among cattle it is spread through afterbirth or aborted fetal material. Recognizing that bulls, yearling calves, and non-pregnant cows don't produce fetal material, APHIS has classified them as "low-risk animals."
The ranching community has spent millions of dollars eradicating the disease--a disease which, like the cattle, originated in Europe. Montana is afraid that other states, fearing the spread of brucellosis, will place sanctions on Montana livestock--making it more difficult and costly to export cattle. Montana is also afraid of losing its "brucellosis free" status, a designation it gained in 1985, after eradicating the disease from its cattle herds. The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the federal agency responsible for granting such status, does not, however, have the power to downgrade a state based solely on the presence of infected wildlife. There must also be an outbreak among cattle.
The likelihood of such an outbreak is extremely remote. Bison and livestock have shared grazing lands on numerous occasions without a single transmission. According to one prominent wildlife biologist, in Grand Teton National Park, where a greater percentage of bison are infected with the disease--and where bison and cattle have shared grazing lands for over forty years--the cattle have remained brucellosis free (Ravndal, 1999). During the winter of 1988-89 when 569 bison were killed near Gardiner, Montana, DOL officials tested 810 cattle from 18 herds that had shared range with those bison and not a single one tested positive for the disease (Keiter, 4). John Mack, a scientist with the National Park Service, makes the point quite clearly:
There is no evidence of wild free-roaming bison transmitting brucellosis to cattle. The state is saying this is a grave threat, and here you had all these bison mingle with livestock and nothing happened (Wuerthner, 39).
In a 1992 study, the United States Congress' General Accounting Office (GAO) concluded that Yellowstone's bison pose no threat of transmitting brucellosis to livestock (GAO 1992).
An investigation of the DOL's actions make it quite clear that brucellosis is not the State's true motivation behind the slaughter. Even APHIS thinks Montana's livestock department is going too far. APHIS spokesperson Patrick Collins, in a December 16 article, criticized the state for unnecessarily slaughtering the animals: "We don't feel there's a need to kill every bison that comes out of the park" he said (Kolman, 1).
Under current policy, Montana kills bison in one of two ways: they are either shot in the field when they exit the Park or they are captured live, corralled, and blood-tested for brucellosis. Buffalo shot in the field are not tested for the disease.
Because brucellosis is a reproductive tract disease, all pregnant females, regardless of how they blood-test, are slaughtered. Bulls, cows, and calves (all "low risk" animals) testing positive are also killed. The blood-test used to determine whether the buffalo are positive or negative has been widely criticized for it inaccuracy. According to Mary Meyer and Mary Meagher, two of the world's leading experts on bison:
Although more than 50% of Yellowstone's bison test positive for Brucella antibodies through blood tests, tissue culture tests--ordinarily viewed as a more reliable testing protocol for identifying active infection--indicate a much lower infection rate (Meyer and Meagher 1995a).
Indeed, the difference between the results of blood and tissue tests is striking. Ironically, the more accurate (and expensive) tissue test is conducted only after the animals have been killed. Mac Carelli, a slaughterhouse owner who subcontracts for the DOL, said that in a shipment of 200 bison he slaughtered during the winter of 1997, only two tissue tested positive for brucellosis (Mease). Both of these animals were "low risk" bulls. During February of this year, when the DOL had killed nineteen of the 94 buffalo it would kill last winter, I called APHIS and asked for the result of the tissue test. Of the nineteen buffalo slaughtered, only two had culture tested positive. Again, both were "low risk" bulls incapable of transmitting the disease.
In the very improbable event of a brucellosis outbreak, APHIS has the legal power to isolate the problem by subdividing the state for brucellosis classification purposes. Thus, if a herd near Yellowstone were infected, the entire state's brucellosis-free status would not be jeopardized. Yet the Department of Livestock and Montana Governor Marc Racicot repeatedly defend their actions with the assertion that the Yellowstone herd threatens the livelihood of all Montana ranchers. Additionally, if a rancher's herd were affected, federal and state law require that he or she be compensated for any loss incurred. It would be much more efficient and effective to concentrate brucellosis disease control efforts on cattle rather than on the current and costly bison policy currently in place. Robert Keiter, having conducted extensive legal and scientific research on the issue, agrees:
A comprehensive disease control policy would provide the regional livestock industry with adequate protection against brucellosis in wildlife while also acknowledging the national importance of Yellowstone's wildlife (Keiter, 10).
There are many inconsistencies in Montana's assertion that brucellosis is driving the slaughter. West of the park, where all the killing of bison has occurred in the past two winters, bison and cattle do not come in contact with one another. Because of the severity of the winters, cattle are only present on those lands from June to September, by which time the buffalo have returned to their summer range inside the park. Without any overlap, there is obviously no risk of transmission.
Another glaring inconsistency is the presence of brucellosis in Yellowstone's elk and other wildlife species. For some reason, the elk don't raise the ire of the Department of Livestock. Again I draw from the research of Bob Keiter, a professor of law at the University of Wyoming:
No provision is made for addressing the related problem of brucellosis in the region's elk population (Keiter, 8).
An effective policy must address the disease in both bison and elk. A policy directed solely at bison cannot succeed as long as elk carry the disease and as long as the two species continue to congregate annually in close quarters (Keiter, 3).
Why are the elk, who are acknowledged to have brucellosis, allowed to range freely between Yellowstone and public and private lands surrounding the park while the buffalo are killed for crossing the invisible boundary? According to Louis LaRose, a member of the Winnebago tribe, it all has to do with economics: Elk can cross the boundary freely "because they represent an economic resource to the state of Montana" (LaDuke). The state earns eleven million dollars annually on the sale of elk hunting licenses. In the eyes of the state, elk leaving the park and entering Montana bring money. Bison, who compete with the cattle over limited grazing range, cost the cattle producers. This, more than the threat of brucellosis, drives the slaughter of Yellowstone's buffalo.
Indeed the bison are discriminated against on federal lands bordering the park, lands designated as "wildlife habitat." Buffalo find themselves in a Catch-22 situation. Inside the park they are treated as wildlife yet on their winter range in Montana they are routinely rounded up and slaughtered like cattle. Many people are beginning to wonder why the bison are treated so differently than deer, elk, antelope, and other wildlife, which are allowed to freely migrate at their will. Conducting research for the December 1997 issue of National Parks magazine, George Wuerthner interviewed an official working with the Wyoming Department of Game and Fish. The official, who asked to remain anonymous, provides an answer to this question:
If the public gets used to the idea that bison, like elk and deer, should be free to roam on federal lands managed by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, then it may lead to a reduction in the amount of public lands forage allotted to livestock. That's what the ranchers really fear (Wuerthner).
This fear, that bison will eat the cattle's grass, is strong among ranchers. Additionally, notions of "civilization," which established a foothold in the West through eradication of the great bison herds, have become entrenched in the American mind. Reluctant to relinquish the idea that the western range was created for the cattle, the livestock industry fears the vision of buffalo on lands outside the Park. The words of Representative Conger, spoken on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives more than a hundred and twenty years ago, reflect an attitude toward bison still prevalent today:
They eat the grass. They trample upon the plains upon which our settlers desire to herd their cattle and their sheep. There is no mistake about that. They range over the very pastures where the settlers keep their herds of cattle. They destroy the pasture. They are as uncivilized as the Indian (Rep Conger C.R. 2107).
This is at the heart of the issue. The successful recovery of the Yellowstone herd, in the minds of the cattle barons, represents a threat to the livestock industry. Buffalo, as they were in 1870, are seen as an obstacle to be overcome. Unlike the cow, the buffalo is not "civilized." He eats grass, after all! Nor do Buffalo respect the barbed wire fence or respond well to domestication. There is no room for such a creature in the white man's view of the world. Sentiments like one above and the one to follow, spoken by the buffalo hunter Frank Meyer, express the true motivations behind the slaughter:
The buffalo didn't fit in so well with the white man's encroaching civilization--he didn't fit at all, in fact. He could not be controlled or domesticated. He couldn't be corralled behind wire fences. He was a misfit. So he had to go (Mayer, 27).
With the Yellowstone herd reaching 4000 animals by the mid 1990s and threatening to re-establish itself on public lands surrounding the park--lands designated as "wildlife habitat," the livestock industry became alarmed. If bison were allowed--like deer, elk, and other wild species--to roam freely across the park boundary, it would send a message to a changing West: buffalo can survive outside the park. Speaking with a DOL agent--who wouldn't tell me his name--last winter, I asked him why the buffalo are being killed. "Because," he told me, "They'd be swimmin' in the sea if we didn't kill them." To the vested powers of the livestock industry--conditioned to believe that grass was put on the public lands to feed livestock--this would be unacceptable.
The Gallatin National Forest abuts Yellowstone to the north and west. The majority of bison exiting the park winter on the Gallatin. Most of the buffalo killed in the past 5 winters were killed on the Gallatin. Although the Forest Service, under the National Forest Management Act, is charged with conserving biological diversity, none of the national forests around the park have designated bison as an indicator species--a move that would offer them significant protection. Additionally, because the Forest Service is in charge of permitting livestock grazing on lands under its management, it could regulate grazing permits to eliminate any possible conflicts between bison and livestock, including the potential transmission of brucellosis (Keiter, 6). To date, the Forest Service has done neither.
In recent years the Forest Service has faced a barrage of criticism for its mismanagement of public lands. According to a recent investigative article in the San Jose Mercury News, the Forest Service and the BLM only spent half as much money on restoring endangered species as they lost on their grazing program (Rogers). The agency often defends itself by passing the buck to the state wildlife agencies, saying it is they who are responsible for managing wildlife. Dave Garber, Forest Supervisor for the Gallatin, is a case in point: "The public should not assume," he said, "that there is any wildlife on the land we manage as wildlife habitat." His colleague, Rich Inman clarified, "the Forest Service only manages the habitat, not the wildlife" (Ravndal).
The irony in these statements becomes even more apparent when you consider the fact that thousands of bison have been killed on these lands which carry the "wildlife habitat" designation. In fact, these very lands were specifically set aside by Congress in the 1926 Gallatin Land Agreement to protect wildlife. The legislation was enacted to:
make additions to the Absaroka and Gallatin National Forests, and the Yellowstone National Park, to improve and extend the winter feed facilities of the elk, antelope, and other game animals of Yellowstone National Park and adjacent land (69th Congress).
According to the Gallatin's Forest Plan, the goals for management of these lands are: "1. Maintain and/or enhance big game habitat. 2. Meet grizzly bear mortality reduction goals as established by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee. 3. Provide forage for livestock consistent with goal 1" (Gallatin National Forest, p. III-44).
The Forest Service is acting in a clear conflict of interest. By buckling to pressures from the livestock industry and assisting the DOL with the capture and slaughter of bison (a capture facility is operated on Forest Service land near West Yellowstone at Horse Butte, MT) the agency seems to be violating both the original intent of the lands under its management and its own Forest Plan.
The Forest Service, so clearly violating its own mandate to protect habitat, is betraying an influence with deeper roots than the "scientific management" by which it is supposed to operate. In the words of Native American activist Wanona LaDuke, "This is not a 'wildlife management issue.' It is a deeper spiritual issue that connects [tribal nations] to the very fabric of who they are" (LaDuke).
Just like last century, the influence of the cattle baron is heard loud and clear while the Native American voice falls on deaf ears. To the western cattle rancher, the cow represents an economic interest and a way of life barely a hundred years old. To Native Americans the buffalo represents the essence of their social, cultural, and spiritual identity and a relationship going back tens of thousands of years. That the tribes haven't even been allowed to sit at the table while the ranchers and politicians decide the fate of the buffalo reflects both the lack of wisdom and the utter disrespect of those in charge. No one has a closer relationship to the buffalo than the Native American. Why are the tribes being left out?
Absent are the people who actually know the buffalo: the Nez Perce, Blackfeet and Crow, and others whose treaties encompass part of Yellowstone National Park, or the Winnebago, Ho Chunk, Lakota, Anishinabe, Kiowa, Gros Ventre, Cheyenne, Shoshone Bannock and others, whose spiritual practices, cultural practices, languages and lives are entirely intertwined with buffalo. To us, the buffalo is the Western Doorkeeper, the Elder Brother, the Great One (LaDuke).
Not only is the tribal voice being ignored--but as the actions of policy makers and enforcers in the field attest--the religion and culture of those who consider the buffalo sacred are being willfully disrespected and insulted. The actions of the Department of Livestock are not unlike the actions of their predecessors, the buffalo hunters and Army officers who perpetrated the slaughter of the 1870s.
On March 7, 1997, during a winter when 1,084 buffalo were killed, American Indian tribal leaders from around the country gathered near Gardiner, Montana, to hold a day of prayer for the buffalo. The ceremony was disrupted by the violence of gunshots. Lakota elder Rosalie Little Thunder left the prayer circle to investigate the shots. Less than two miles away, Department of Livestock agents had killed fourteen buffalo. Walking across a field to pray over the bodies, she was arrested and charged with criminal trespass. To Little Thunder and other tribal members present there was no question of coincidence: "They shot the buffalo because we were at that place on that day at that time," she told me (Little Thunder).
The extirpation of the herds during the last century and the current slaughter taking place on the boundaries of Yellowstone National park are fundamentally one and the same. They are fueled, at a base level, by many very similar economic motivations, fears, and misperceptions.
While last century's slaughter was motivated by fears of the pre-cattle West, it might be said that the current slaughter grows from similar fears of a post-cattle West. In recent years there has been an emerging vision of bison repopulating the plains. This vision is encouraged and embraced by Native American and environmental organizations (Ravndal). Bumper stickers saying "Bring Back the Bison" and "Bison Belong" have sprung up. Scholars like Debra and Frank Popper have developed and encouraged the idea of a "Buffalo Commons" as a way to save the ailing economies of the Great Plains states. The Intertribal Bison Cooperative, a group of some fifty tribes, is working to restore buffalo to native lands and renew the cultural and spiritual relationship with the buffalo. Bison numbers on Indian lands have more than tripled since 1992 (Popper and Popper, 1998). These are all hopeful signs of a healthy future. To get there we must come to see the current slaughter for what it is. It is with this goal in mind that I set out to write this paper. I hope that it has helped.
Bibliography
Brown, Mark and W. Felton, Before Barbed Wire. Henry Holt, New York, 1956.
Callenbach, Ernest. "Rangelands are Waiting for Bison." Defenders Journal: Winter, 1995-96. Defenders of Wildlife.
Clawson, Marion. The Bureau of Land Management. Praeger Publishers, New York, 1971.
The Congressional Globe. 43rd Congress. 1st Session. Part 3. 2105-2109.
Cook, John. The Border and the Buffalo. R.R. Donnelley and Sons, Chicago, 1938.
Danz, Harold. Of Bison and Man. University Press of Colorado, Niwot, CO, 1997.
Dary, David. The Buffalo Book. Avon Books, New York, 1974.
Frink, Maurice. When Grass Was King. University of Colorado Press, Boulder, CO, 1956.
Fire, John and R. Erdoes. Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1972.
Gallatin National Forest. Forest Plan. United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service.
Geist, Valerius. Buffalo Nation: History and Legend of the North American Bison. Voyageur Press, Stillwater, Minnesota, 1996.
General Accounting Office. Wildlife management: many issues unresolved in Yellowstone bison-cattle conflict. GAO Report RCED-93-2. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1992
Little Thunder, Rosalie. Personal Communication. 11/5/99.
Keiter, Robert. "Greater Yellowstone's Bison: Unraveling of an Early American Wildlife Conservation Achievement." Journal of Wildlife Management, 61 (1): 1-11. January 1997.
Kolman, Joe. "Feds pull out of bison talks with Montana." Billings Gazette: Bozeman Bureau. December 16, 1999.
LaDuke, Winona. "Winter Comes to Yellowstone: Ushering in Another Bison Kill." Indian Country Today, 12/13/99.
Mayer, Frank and Charles Roth. The Buffalo Harvest. Sage Books, Denver, 1958.
Meagher, Mary. The Bison of Yellowstone National Park. United States Department of the Interior. National Park Service, 1973.
Mease, Mike and D. Brister. Buffalo Bull. A Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers Video Documentary. August 1998.
Meyer, M. and M. Meagher. "Brucellosis in free-ranging bison in Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Wood Buffalo National Parks: a Review. Journal of Wildlife Disease, 31: 597-598, 1995.
Popper, Frank and D. Popper. "The Bison are Coming." High Country News, 30 (2). February 2. pp. 15, 17.
Ravndal, Virginia. "Visualize Wildlife on Public Lands Designated as 'Wildlife Habitat': That May be the Only Way You're Likely to See Any." Guest Editorial: Bozeman Chronicle, September 4, 1998.
Ravndal, Virginia. Personal Communication, October 1999.
Rifkin, Jeremy. Beyond Beef. Penguin Books, New York, 1992.
Robbins, Jim. "Historians Revisit Slaughter on the Plains." NY Times. 11/16/99.
Rogers, Paul and D. LaFleur. "The Giveaway of the West: A Mercury News Special Report." San Jose Mercury News. November 7, 1999.
69th Congress, 1st Session. U.S. House of Representatives: Report no 879.
Wuerthner, George. "The Battle over Bison." National Parks: November/ December, 1995.
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Appendix: Interesting and Related Quotations
You people make a big talk, and sometimes war, if an Indian kills a white man's ox to keep his wife and children from starving. What do you think my people ought to say and do when they themselves see their cattle [buffalo] killed by your race when they are not hungry? --Cheyenne Chief Little Robe during a visit to Washington, DC, 1870s (Geist, 86)
We did not ask you white men to come here. The Great Spirit gave us this country as a home. You had yours. We did not interfere with you. The Great Spirit gave us plenty of land to live on, and buffalo, deer, antelope and other game. But you came here; you are taking my land from me; you are killing off our game, so it is hard for us to live. Now, you tell us to work for a living, but the Great Spirit did not make us to work, but to live by hunting. You white men can work if you want to. We do not interfere with you, and again you say, why do you not become civilized? We do not want your civilization! We would live as our fathers did, and their fathers before them. --Oglala Sioux Chief Crazy Horse, 1870s (Geist, 83)
Ten years ago the Plains Indians had an ample supply of food....Now everything is gone, and they are reduced to the condition of paupers, without food, shelter, clothing, or any of those necessaries of life which came from the buffalo.- Colonel Richard Dodge, Indian fighter, 1882 (Geist 85)
It may be possible in our mercy to the buffalo we may be cruel to the Indian. It is the only possible objection which can be urged to this bill (Rep Garfield, C.R. 2107).
There is just as much propriety in depopulating our rivers, in destroying the fish in our rivers, as in destroying the buffalo in order to induce the Indian to become civilized. We may as well not only destroy the buffalo, but the fish in the rivers, the birds in the air; we may as well destroy the squirrels, lizards, prairie-dogs, and everything else upon which the Indian feeds. The argument, Mr. Speaker, is a disgrace to anybody who makes it" (Rep Eldredge Wisconsin C.R. 2107).
As well might you burn all the grass in the Indian country and around it, kill every bird, dig up every root, destroy every animal, and take away from the Indian the means of living, and in that way you will, perhaps, be able to get them under your control, and be able to board them at the Fifth Avenue Hotel and civilize them to you satisfaction...Sir, I object to the inhumanity of gentlemen who wish to wipe out the buffalo in order to get the Indians upon reservations (Rep Hawley, of CT C.R. 2107).
It will not do in this age of civilization and Christianity to attempt to exterminate the Indians by starving them to death (Rep Lowe, Kansas C.R. 2108).
I do not believe that it is necessary to preserve them in order to support and maintain and civilize the Indians. I believe that so long as these buffaloes exist it will have just the opposite effect, so long as you pursue the present Indian policy (Parker of Missouri C.R. 2108).
SOURCE: Alliance for the Wild Rockies
