The Symbolism of the Bison

Along with the grizzly bear and perhaps the wolf, the bison is the iconic animal of the American West. The symbolism of the bison seems a key aspect of Western history.  Its numbers were legendary.  There were so many bison roaming the West 200 years ago that estimates were almost pointless.  In his journal entry for September 17, 1804, Meriwether Lewis wrote, in his peculiar spelling, “I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3,000.” Even in the twentieth century, estimates of their population ranged as high as 100 million creatures. Recent investigations, however, based on the carrying capacity of bison habitat, place the number nearer 25-30 million. In any case, it is fair to say this creature serves as a totem of the prolific abundance of the American West in the nineteenth century, a perceived land of freedom, independence, and boundless optimism.

Sadly, however, the bison is a flawed symbol. In 1800, there were far more of them than at any time in recent North American history. They ranged from the mountain valleys of Montana to the forests of the Southeast to western New York State. Typically, we do not consider New York or Georgia to be exemplary bison habitat. Yet historic observers (and the name of a city in New York that holds a National Football League franchise) tell us that they were there 200 years ago. How did they get there?

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American Bison

Reasons for the Symbolism of the Bison

The answer is that the people who used to hunt them, the American Indians, experienced such grave population decline in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most of the people who used to hunt bison were no longer around to do the hunting. Their numbers in decline, usually from contagious diseases spread by Europeans and Americans for which they had little or no immunity, Native Americans in the early 1800s were a mere shadow of their former presence in North America.

This is part of the reason why many Americans, inaccurately, hold the stereotype of Native Americans as largely nomadic people who floated over the landscape of North America, leaving little or no lasting impact on the land.  The numbers of American Indians were so drastically reduced by disease (with warfare and loss of land also contributing) that many people simply cannot envision a North America with a large number of native people in it, farming corn, hunting, living in towns, and carrying on their daily lives in sundry ways.

Bison skulls were ground to fertilizer in the 1870s.

More Consequences of the Symbolism of the Bison

Another reason that the symbolism of the bison as a symbol of Western abundance is flawed is that it led to unsustainable economic practices.  Although there was some hunting of the creatures for their fur before the Civil War by both whites and American Indians, and this put a minor dent in bison numbers, the twenty years after 1865 saw a widespread and severe decline in the animal’s numbers throughout the continent. Market hunters, armed with powerful rifles and shipping the hides to market via railroad, descended onto the Great Plains and, like a biblical plague of locust, stripped the land bare.

By the mid-1880s, there were so few wild bison left to hunt that the profession disappeared.  Their hides used for leather belts in the machinery of the nation’s new industrial economy and their bones ground up for fertilizer, the 25-30 million bison of the century’s early years now numbered, at most, a few thousand.  The culprit was the avarice of people in a market economy that commoditized nature and operated without regard for the limits of the environment.  That is, more accurately, the true value of the bison as an American symbol.

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