The Decline of the Great Plains

Andrew C. Isenberg. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xii +206 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $24.95 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).

Everyone knows the sad story of the buffalo's demise during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The story is often used as a morality tale to explain the near extinction of the wooly animals and the subsequent decline of Native American populations on the Great Plains. In this stereotypical version, Native Americans play the role of moral environmentalists who hunted only the buffalo they needed and used every last bit of the hunt, wasting nothing. This same version is also used as a morality tale about the evilness of white Americans who came to the Great Plains and gamely shot at the lumbering and seemingly pathetic animals from their railroad car windows. American men were often photographed next to piles of buffalo robes or next to a field strewn with buffalo carcasses. These images have been interpreted as revealing the wastefulness and corruption of Americans at the end of the frontier. As Isenberg writes, "Although its adherents may not recognize it as such, the narrative is essentially a secular form of Christian teleology: humankind sinned, fell from grace, and was banished from Eden; repentance, however, will bring a return to Paradise" (p. 197). Isenberg takes all of these icons and ideas (both Native and White) about how and why the buffalo disappeared, turns them on their head, and produces a story that is much more complex and subtle then the one most Americans have come to believe

In rich detail and with exceptional use of archival sources, The Destruction of the Bison explains the decline of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to a population of less than 1,000 a century later. In Isenberg's story everyone takes their share of the blame for the loss of the bison. Isenberg notes that "from the perspective of the bison, there were striking similarities between the nomads (Great Plains Indians) and the Euroamericans. Both were newcomers to the plains in the eighteenth century. Both employed new technologies and adopted new modes of production to hunt the bison. Both sacrificed bison to meet social demands of integration, prestige, or conquest. Both increasingly adapted to capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the end, that adaptation was fatal to millions of bison" (p. 197). As an environmental historian, Isenberg pushes his analysis farther and shows that not only were the buffalo destroyed but also the Great Plains ecosystem suffered severe losses because of the drastic changes in this ecological niche.

Isenberg's interpretation that Native Americans were destructive forces upon the bison is sure to raise controversy among Native scholars, in particularly Vine Deloria, who has been an open critic of New Western historians such as Elliot West and Richard White for their portrayal of Indians and their non-reciprocal relationship to the bison and Great Plains. Isenberg, however, carefully details how Native Americans contributed directly to the bison's demise. Isenberg argues that European influences, such as the horse, which transformed the Plains Indians' economy during the eighteenth century, combined with the later influence of the market economy, compelled Indians to hunt the bison not only for their day-to-day existence, but also for the goods that could be acquired through exchange. These Euroamerican influences created a volatile mixture with perhaps the most decisive factor: the transfer of deadly European diseases to the Native American population on the Great Plains.

Isenberg argues that at the end of the eighteenth century the Sioux, Cheyenne, Omaha and other Native societies faced a social and ecological dilemma. "As villagers they risked European contagion. As equestrian nomads their land-use strategy lacked the added security of planting and demanded social fragmentation" (p. 61). Those who chose the nomadic life of depending almost...