Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  The ecological significance of the Gold Rush, however, was not confined to northern California alone. People had to get to the gold, and to do this they had to traverse the continent. For the first time, ordinary Americans tramped west in large numbers—80,000 just in 1849. They brought in their wake major changes to California. But they also figured centrally in a significant environmental disaster on the Great Plains, a crisis of subsistence for Indians rooted in the expansion of human and animal populations beyond what the land could handle.

  Gold seekers took two main trails west across the Great Plains, the vast grassland that occupies the nation’s midsection and consisting of parts of the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. The first was the Oregon-California road and the second, the Santa Fe Trail. The traffic along these routes was enormous. Some 300,000 people with more than 1.5 million four-legged creatures—cattle, horses, and oxen—set off along the Oregon road between 1841 and 1859. On the Santa Fe, the wagon traffic alone was impressive, with almost 2,000 vehicles plying the route by the end of the 1850s.

  The stream of emigrants—human beings and animals—took their toll on the Platte and Arkansas watersheds. Pioneers cut down timber on the river bottoms to cook with or keep warm. Oxen, cattle, mules, and horses chewed up the region’s forage, putting a significant dent in what had once seemed like an almost limitless supply of grass that thrived in the dry environment. The gold seekers even timed their journey west to coincide with the availability of grass. They tried not to leave before it had sprouted enough to support their herds but were wary of setting off too late, when all the forage would have been eaten. All the foot and hoof traffic also trampled a great deal of vegetation. Then there was the damage caused by wagon wheels. Sometimes bunched together in groups 12 abreast, the caravans moved across the region like giant steamrollers.11

  The central plains environment perhaps would have rebounded from the pioneer invasion had not another mass migration to this very same place been occurring at roughly the same time. While gold seekers were rushing across the plains, Indians, led by the Cheyennes, headed there to capitalize on the large herds of bison and to assume a role as middlemen in a trading network that spanned from New Mexico into Canada. Despite being battered by European diseases, the Native American population grew significantly to perhaps as many as 20,000 people by the 1850s.12

  The Cheyennes counted on their horses—animals acquired from the Spanish—to track and hunt the mobile buffalo herds. Large numbers of horses, perhaps as many as 5 to 13 for each person, required lots of forage. Forage was especially scarce on the plains in the winter when rainfall tapered off and grama and buffalo grass became less nutritious. That forced the Indians to retreat to river locations where protection from the weather and moister conditions kept grass alive. Indeed, their very survival on the plains depended on finding adequate forage, fuel, water, and protection from the elements during severe winters. River bottoms such as the Big Timbers, a large stretch of cottonwoods along the Arkansas River in present-day Colorado, served well for a time. But then the pioneers showed up with their horses and oxen in the summer months to exploit this same locale. When white emigrants approached the Big Timbers in the latter part of the 1850s, they found it scalped, prompting the wife of one pioneer to write: “cattle were nearly starved for grass.”13

  A climatic change made matters worse. The central plains experienced uncharacteristically wet weather between 1825 and 1849. A lush, inviting environment resulted, precisely in time to greet both the Indians and whites who passed through the area. But then drought struck, descending across the Arkansas valley in 1849. A more extensive dry spell wracked the central plains in 1855, followed by two even worse droughts in the early 1860s. The Indians turned even more to river locations for water and forage, putting additional pressure on an environment already stretched to its limits.14

  By the 1850s, the central plains were in ecological turmoil, with more people and animals dependent on a shrinking supply of natural capital. The drought only intensified the suffering, driving Indians to beg whites for food as they passed west. Some Native Americans even stole in order to eat. In 1855, a group of Arapahos made off with more than 2,000 sheep. The following year, Indians reportedly demanded food in return for safe passage along the Santa Fe road.15

  Then, in 1858, gold was discovered in what became Denver, Colorado, prompting twice as many people to pick up and cross the continent as had done so in 1849. Wagon traffic on the Santa Fe Trail boomed. By the mid-1860s, Denver alone depended on the shipment of tens of thousands of tons of supplies each year from back east. The bottomlands continued their steady ecological descent. The summer of 1859 became known as the “timber clearing sun dance,” a name bestowed by the Kiowas who showed up for their yearly ritual on the Smoky Hill River expecting to see a forested grove; instead they found stumps. Whites had normally avoided the area, but now the search for forage and timber to support their overland trek forced them further from the main trail west, bringing them into conflict with Indians.16

  The number of such conflicts rose and so, in response, did the U.S. military presence. As had happened during the Civil War, the army worried about feeding its horses. It sought out locations at precisely those wintertime haunts so cherished by Indians. Military posts sprouted at the Big Timbers of the Arkansas (Fort Wise) and at other such sheltered sites rich in wood and grass, further undermining the ability of Native Americans to survive.17

  It would be wrong, of course, to blame the Indians’ plight on the quest for gold alone. Indians also contributed to their own demise by keeping far more horses—tens of thousands—than the land could support. Nor did the gold seekers cause the drought.

  To move from gold mining to Indians, to horses and mules, and then to drought, forage, and timber seems like helter-skelter history. But this seemingly disconnected chain of topics reminds us of the interdependency of the various aspects of the natural world. This one change in human behavior—the rush to mine gold—had consequences that ramified throughout the continent, in ecosystems far removed from the site of the gold itself.

  Plants and animals are not merely a backdrop for history. They are living things that have needs, that make demands on the land. Sometimes the land lives up to the task, and sometimes, because of a variety of factors both human and nonhuman, those needs outstrip the ability of the environment to provide. Such was the anatomy of tragedy on the plains.18

  LAST OF THE BISON

  If few people are aware of the ecological crisis that gripped the Great Plains, virtually everyone knows about the decline of the buffalo, one of the most studied blunders in the nation’s environmental past. When the buffalo vanished, so did the hopes and dreams of the Plains Indians, who for more than 150 years had organized their culture around the animal. Sitting Bull put it this way: “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell—a death-wind for my people.”19

  BISON

  The West’s most famous animal species, bison survived on the region’s shortgrass, which had just the combination of protein and carbohydrates they needed to thrive. (Colorado Historical Society)

  As improbable as it may seem, herds of bison could be found in the eastern part of the United States as late as the 1830s. From then on, the buffalo population retreated to the grasslands of the plains. That had been its primary home since the end of the Ice Age, when climatic change spurred the shift from trees to grass in this vast region. Unlike such large animals as mammoths and mastodons, the bison—a prolific reproducer, quick on its feet, and able to subsist on less forage than other megafauna—survived the Pleistocene extinctions. With its other competitors now out of the way, the bison multiplied, gobbling up the aptly named buffalo grass, while fertilizing the soil with its dung, and thus helping to sustain its habitat.

  How many bison existed out on the plains has been the subject of much debate. But whatever the actual number it was high, at least before the
late nineteenth century. George Catlin in the 1830s found bison so thick that they “literally blacken the prairies for miles together.” As late as 1871, one observer witnessed a herd of buffalo in Kansas that reportedly took five full days to venture past. One Indian, asked in the late nineteenth century to recall the glory days of the bison, was blunt about it, signing the words, “The country was one robe.”20

  Estimates of the total bison population have ranged as high as 75 million, but historians and ecologists have recently scaled down that figure considerably, and for good reason. The bison depended on grass to survive; as went the grass, so went the bison. By taking into account the carrying capacity of the grassland, it seems reasonable to assume that the Great Plains supported a population of about 27 million such creatures. Significant threats, however, ranging from drought, perhaps the most important, to predation by wolves (1.5 million may have roamed the plains in the early nineteenth century), affected the buffalo’s numbers. The more such threats—and the bison faced many—the more volatile the animal population. Like their human counterparts, the bison also had to face the facts of life in this unforgiving land.21

  Before the eighteenth century, Native American groups ventured to the plains to hunt buffalo, but the animal remained just one part of their effort to survive in this land. The Indians who came to dominate life on the plains also gathered a variety of plants—roots and berries—and, in some cases, turned to agriculture as well. Like southern yeoman farmers in the years before the Civil War, Native Americans opted for a safety-first strategy, engaging in a diverse set of practices for feeding themselves. And like the South’s small farmers, the Plains Indians were eventually driven to specialize—in this case, not in cotton but in buffalo. More than anything else, perhaps, this specialization sealed their fate and set the stage for the decline of both the bison and the cultures that depended on them.

  Nothing did more to encourage the Indians to throw their fortunes in with the bison and engage in hunting it all throughout the year than the arrival of the horse. The Spanish brought horses to America in the early sixteenth century, but it took well over 100 years for the Plains Indians to adopt them. Horses greatly expanded the Indians’ ability to hunt buffalo, freeing them from the dreary task of chasing after them by foot. Horses were also a huge improvement over the dogs the Indians had formerly depended on for transport. Dogs are carnivores, and during the winter Indians found it difficult to find enough meat to feed them. The horse, however, eats grass, of which there was plenty on the plains. When the Indians discovered the horse they found the key for unlocking the grassland’s huge storehouse of energy. The energy allowed the Indians to fortify their mounts and set off to hunt buffalo, to the exclusion of other subsistence activities, save the gathering of berries and roots.22

  By the eighteenth century, the bison had assumed a place at the center of Plains Indian culture. The Indians roasted and boiled it for food, consuming nearly the entire animal right down to its testicles and marrow. They made bedding, clothing, and rope from it. They used the intestines as containers, the penis for making glue, and the horns for cups. The bison served so many different dietary and cultural needs that one scholar referred to the animal as a “tribal department store.”23

  What impact did the Indians have on the bison population? According to one estimate, Plains Indians killed only about half a million buffalo every year, a sustainable figure in light of the bison’s reproductive habits. Indians may have even looked down on those who wasted bison. “Don’t kill more meat than you think you can skin and your horse can pack home,” one Kiowa told another in 1861 on the occasion of his first buffalo hunt. Other evidence, however, indicates that the Indians’ belief system may have encouraged them to overhunt the species. When buffalo disappeared for the year, the Plains Indians believed, they went to underground prairies, reemerging in the spring “like bees from a hive,” as one white put it. If they failed to appear in adequate numbers one could still hunt with abandon, safe in knowing that other buffalo were grazing happily in the land down below.24

  None of this is meant to imply that the Indians engaged in the wanton destruction of the animals. But it would be wrong to assume that a group so deeply dependent on bison was incapable of putting a dent in their numbers. Well before commercial shooters descended in droves on the plains, Indian hunting took its toll. At one time, contested grounds—areas where no single Indian group dominated—sheltered the bison from attack. Indians, fearing for their lives, tended to shy away from those areas. But in 1840, a number of Native American groups on the western plains agreed to peace. No longer looking over their shoulders, Indians waged war against the bison. As a result, by the 1850s the bison began vanishing from the Denver area.25

  A mere 30 years later, the buffalo would be virtually annihilated. Nothing the Indians did rivaled in importance the role of the market in the animal’s demise. Plains Indians had long traded with other Native American groups, often exchanging buffalo for corn. But by the 1830s, the demand for buffalo skins began to rise sharply as European Americans used them to keep warm. In the past, Indians had valued the entirety of the animal. To them, it had use-value, a unique ability to serve a variety of different needs, ranging from food and clothing to much more. The rise of the robe market, however, put a price on the bison, driving the Indians to kill them for their skins alone, leaving the rest of the carcass for wolves to devour. In the 1850s, commercial bison hunting combined with drought—which dried up creeks and stunted the growth of grass—to make life difficult for the buffalo. “The buffalo is becoming scarce and it is more difficult from year to year for the Indians to kill a sufficient number to supply them with food and clothing,” one observer along the Platte River reported in 1855.26

  The real damage to the bison, however, came at the hands of the white market hunters. Beginning in the 1870s, they flooded into the plains to meet the burgeoning demand for leather in industrial America. The growth of industry called for leather belting to power machinery, outstripping the domestic supply of hides. Tanners, hard pressed for skins, were driven to import them from as far away as Latin America. Then in 1870, tanners in Philadelphia discovered a method for turning bison skin into leather. The production of industrial leather required green, unprepared buffalo hides. In the past, Indian women had fleshed the hides, transforming them into buffalo robes for markets in the East. This was a time-consuming process and bottlenecks occurred, a factor that may have inadvertently protected the buffalo against overhunting. Green skins removed the threat of such slowdowns, but there was one hitch: They weighed about five times as much as a robe, possibly as much as 50 pounds each. It would take something far more powerful than the back of a horse to transport the heavy hides to market in the numbers required to satisfy American industry.27

  That something turned out to be the railroad. The roads pushed through the plains in the years following 1867; the buffalo declined everywhere the trains went. Scarcely a generation later, the bison would be all but gone. At the very minimum, the Santa Fe, Kansas Pacific, and Union Pacific railroads shipped over a million hides in just two years (1872–1874). The bison, recall, had few predators and thus little experience with being attacked. Worse still, from the standpoint of the species, was the animal’s tendency to stampede or stand pat when faced with an aggressor. The gun-toting market hunter could not have asked for more cooperative prey. Hunters commonly bagged 2,000 to 3,000 hides in any one season. In 1876, one hunter killed nearly 6,000 bison in just two months, firing his .50-caliber rifle so many times that he went deaf.28

  Aiding the market hunters was the U.S. Army. It was no secret that military leaders believed that the best way to subjugate the Plains Indians was through the elimination of the buffalo. Lt. Gen. John M. Schofield, in charge of the Department of Missouri from 1869 to 1870, put it this way: “I wanted no other occupation in life than to ward off the savage and kill off his food until there should no longer be an Indian frontier in our beautiful country.” Gen
. William Tecumseh Sherman, of Civil War fame, wrote in 1868 that “as long as Buffalo are up on the Republican [River] the Indians will go there. I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a Grand Buffalo hunt.” Sherman’s comrade in arms, Gen. Phil Sheridan, pointed out that market hunters had done more “to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary…. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” The army even went so far as to distribute free ammunition to the hide hunters.29

  With the bison gone from the southern plains by 1878, the hunters moved north. In that locale, the fate of the buffalo rested less on the market hunters and more on the combined forces of ranching and drought. The huge number of cattle imported into the region (Wyoming’s cattle population increased from 90,000 to more than 500,000 between 1874 and 1880) competed with the bison for grass, closing off areas where the animal retreated for food and water. When dry spells struck beginning in the 1870s, the bison had nowhere left to turn. In 1882, hunters took the remaining 5,000 survivors present on the northern plains.30

  BISON BONES

  In the late nineteenth century, Indians and poor whites collected the remains of dead bison for sale to fertilizer companies. Bones pictured here were at the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit. (Detroit Public Library)