At first, this question about bison skulls perhaps seems axiomatic. Is there anything, besides a cowboy, a cactus, or a gunfight, perhaps, that seems obviously more Old West than a bison skull?

Well, just because something has become a symbol doesn’t mean it should be. Read my previous post about cowboys and the cowboy way, for instance. If you want the story of how low-paid ranch hands with the crudest of reputations became a cultural icon in the United States, that post will help. The transformation of wolves is another example. They’ve gone from hated (and hunted) predator to cultural symbol in recent decades. Unless one is a rancher. In that case, wolves remain as hated as ever.

However, I’d rather not argue about whether bison skulls are a proper symbol for the Old West. Instead, let’s explore some of the ways that they are.

The Bison Skulls Photo

Just look at the following famous (infamous?) 1892 photograph. Make an off-the-top-of-the-head estimate of the number of bison skulls it contains.

What on earth were all these bison skulls for? Was the photographer attempting to praise the hunting prowess of Americans? Or maybe spit in the face of conservationists?

I don’t know the photographer’s motivation. But these skulls are, according to the photograph, stacked outside of a fertilizer factory. The bones were ground up and used as fertilizer. Why?

Americans, always in search of greater economic productivity, wanted fertilizer for farmland. Bone meal helps in certain soil PHs. Why not just buy fertilizer from a factory, then, instead of bone powder? That wouldn’t require killing animals.

Synthetically manufactured fertilizer didn’t exist yet, at least in any quantity. The process for doing so, the Haber-Bosch Process, was perfected in the 1910s. Prior to that, fertilizer had to be more organic. Bone meal, manure, and guano (solidified bird waste) were all possibilities.

Because of this need, the US Congress even passed the Guano Islands Act in 1856. It allowed US citizens to seize islands with guano in the name of the US government! Granted, the islands couldn’t already belong to another nation. Still, it was a rather imperialist measure. It also shows how desperate people were for fertilizer, even in the 1850s.

Bison Skulls Pile Up

So, that is one reason people slaughtered bison. This made the bison a symbol of economic exploitation. Wait! What? The Old West is supposed to be about freedom, right? The open range, independence, individual initiative . . . that’s the Old West, isn’t it?

Save that thought. I’ll get back to it.

Another reason that Americans slaughtered bison in the second half of the 1800s was for their hides. Consider the following picture from Dodge City in 1878.

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What did people use the hides for?

The obvious answer would be clothing. If bison could survive on the Great Plains in the winter, their coats must be warm. Native Americans agreed. Bison robes were the winter coat of many Native American tribes, one might say. The US Army used them, too. Consider the following photograph of the Buffalo Soldiers from Fort Keogh, Montana, in the 1890s.

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But that wasn’t the greatest reason. The primary use of bison hides was for belts in machinery. Similar to the fertilizer story above, chemical processes to produce synthetic leather hadn’t reached fruition yet. At least not enough to produce in quantity. So, bison hides substituted. Once again, the bison became a symbol of economic exploitation in the Old West.

The Bison and Old West Abundance

This is what most people think of when they think about bison. Assuming they think about bison at all. Weren’t there 100,000,000 bison or thereabouts historically? Didn’t travelers like Lewis & Clark report bison herds as far as the eye could see?

Well, Lewis & Clark did. A couple times. The true bison population was probably in the 28-30,000,000 range. The following map gives an idea of where bison lived, historically.

But the map is deceiving. It’s a map of where Europeans and Americans saw bison historically. How had bison become spread over most of North America? After all, Pennsylvania and Georgia don’t seem like prime bison habitat. Neither does northern Mexico.

The answer, sadly, is that most of the Native Americans who formerly hunted bison were dead. Contagious diseases devastated the population of Native American tribes throughout the continent in the 1700s and 1800s. With their former hunters no longer around, the bison expanded their range. This led to the map you see above. (The numbers in black are the populations remaining as estimated by the mapmaker, William Hornaday. The dates are the date of extinction of the bison in that area.)

A False Symbol

So, then, the idea of unlimited herds of bison roaming free is a man-made idea in multiple ways. It was only possible because of the death of millions of Native American people from disease. It was not a natural event. But when early Americans and Europeans saw the bison, they didn’t know that. (Or maybe wouldn’t admit it to themselves?) It looked natural to them. They assumed, therefore, that things had always looked that way. So, the image of bison as limitless, like the potential of the American West, passed into common acceptance.

Only as the piles of bison skulls rose into the millions did Americans learn that bison populations were finite, after all.

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