The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (review)

The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920. By Andrew C. Isenberg. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xxii + 206 pp., introduction, maps, index. $24.95 cloth.)

For a short book, Andrew Isenberg's The Destruction of the Bison is audaciously comprehensive. It has to be. He argues that no single culture, economic system, land use strategy, or ecological event killed the bison; they all did. A host of interactions among Indians, wolves, drought, Euro-Americans, capitalism, fire, nomadism, tanneries, smallpox, steamboats, whiskey, railroads, and blue grama shortgrass conspired to destroy the species. The focus on manifold interrelationships makes the book doubly ecological. Animals and grasslands not only figure prominently as historical subjects and actors, the past itself behaves like an ecosystem. Animals, humans, and biomes create history through their chaotic interaction. Changes in one reverberate out to the others. The bison perished in a tangle of ecosocial feedback loops.

Isenberg bases his vision of nature and history on chaos theory. He rejects the notion that environments tend toward order and equilibrium unless disrupted by humans. The High Plains grasslands did not need people to make them volatile and dynamic. Irregular periods of rain and drought ensured their unpredictability. The bison thrived in this whimsical environment, but they also died in massive numbers. The animals never achieved perfect harmony with their surroundings. An ecological disaster—a prolonged drought, a colossal fire, or a vigorous disease—could have wiped the species out. The grasslands, however, did not kill the bison. They only helped.

Two societies of humans in conjunction with a fickle environment destroyed the animals. Isenberg's claim that two groups of people exterminated the beasts will no doubt raise a few eyebrows as well as some hackles. He argues that both Indians and Euro-Americans hunted bison excessively. Between 1870 and 1883, Euro-American hunters slaughtered millions of bison for their hides. They shipped the skins east (where tanners turned them into belts to drive industrial machines) and left the carcasses to rot. This is the image of waste and greed that haunts the American imagination. Isenberg accepts this scenario. Industrial hide hunters did decimate the species, but their predation was a final blow in a series of ravages humans inflicted on the population. The white hunters wallowed in a bloodbath first drawn by Indian hunters.

The native peoples of the High Plains helped drive their primary economic resource toward oblivion after their experiment in nomadism began to fail. In reaction to the arrival of horses, the extension of the fur trade, and the introduction of diseases, groups of Sioux, Crows, Comanches, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Kiowas abandoned their mixed economies to become equestrian bison-hunting nomads. This was a smart move in the eighteenth century. For example, highly mobile people living in small bands limited their exposure to communicable diseases. The nomads escaped the brunt of the smallpox outbreaks that devastated more sedentary groups like the Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras living in the Missouri River valley. Yet, the move to nomadism that brought health, wealth, and power in the eighteenth century brought sorrows in the nineteenth. Bison hunting was a trap. Isenberg argues that the shift to nomadism "atomized" native societies, disrupting the lines of authority and the cultural restraints that prevented overhunting. At the same time, drought, wars, alcohol, and debt prompted hunters to kill more bison. The nomads began destroying their principal resource as colonization limited their options.

Isenberg makes a strong case for Indian hunters' contribution to the near extinction of the bison. However, measuring the extent of their contribution is tricky. Isenberg carefully reconstructs the size of the bison herds; he estimates an annual predation rate due to other factors like wolves, droughts, and blizzards; and then he measures the impact of the Indian hunters' additive predation. From these numbers he concludes that the native hunters killed bison at a pace that outstripped the species' ability to reproduce itself...