Why the US Army tried to exterminate the bison

And then took credit for “saving” them.

In 1894, a notorious poacher, Ed Howell, was caught in Yellowstone National Park slaughtering bison, which were on the brink of extinction. US Army soldiers patrolling the park brought him into custody, and the story led to the first US federal law protecting wildlife. The soldiers were thought of as heroes for stopping the killer. But it was the US Army who had been responsible for driving bison to near-extinction in the first place.

In the mid-1800s, a cultural belief known as “manifest destiny” dictated that white settlers were the rightful owners of the entire North American continent – even though Native Americans had inhabited the land for centuries. In order to clear that land for white settlers, the US Army engaged in violent scorched-earth tactics against the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. One big part of that campaign was to eliminate their crucial food source: the bison.

By the end of the 1800s, a combination of commercial and recreational hunting, plus the actions of the US Army, had depleted the bison population to under a thousand, down from tens of millions at the beginning of the century. Around the same time, the US government set aside some of the land once inhabited by the Plains Indians as a national park, and in 1872 Yellowstone was established.

A key mission of Yellowstone was to conserve the land and the animals that roamed there, including the bison. Today, the soldiers that once patrolled the park are celebrated for having “saved” the bison in Yellowstone, obscuring their own violent contribution to the animal’s near-extinction.

Sources and further reading:

"The extermination of the American bison," 1887 Smithsonian survey by William T. Hornaday:

"Poaching Pictures," by Alan Braddock:

"The frontier army and the destruction of the buffalo," by David T. Smits:

[DragonballBlack]

Everything in America has a dark nightmarish story as how it became so

[GTAVictor]

I've heard about the decimation of the American bison, but I always thought it was a result of commercial overpoaching.
I never realized it was systematically perpetuated by the US government to subjugate the natives.

[JMsoo]

The more I learn about the US history the darker it gets.

[axildesigns]

A nation that's just 245 years old, have a history this dark, its unbelievable.

[tallymcdonnells]

One thing nobody ever mentions about this is that the map of where the bison herds were in the 1800's directly parallels the dustbowl of the 1900's. I don't thing it's just correlation. In wiping out the bison they killed the manure spreader that kept the grasslands healthy, inadvertantly causing the dustbowl.

[FinancialShinanigan]

Attacking your enemy's food and cutural source, sounds about right.

[raggazo]

Why ? Easy !
Remember, Roosevelt said “fewer bisons represent fewer Native AMERICANS”
The war wasn’t against bisons, it was against native Americans

[tuckergary]

killing bison was part of the holoceust of native Americans in brief: "Custer had it coming"

[Sarahh]

Americans aren’t alone in this. The Canadian government had the same policy. Hate has no borders.

[moonbasebroadcasting]

manifest destiny is such a beautiful way to say genocide

[ThirdEyeScribe]

The same thing happened with the Grizzly Bear in California. When the Spanish arrived in Cali, there were so many Grizzlies they seemed to ride around in packs. By the time California became American territory, local politicians encouraged the hunting of these amazing animals to the point that in the early 1900’s sighting a Grizzly was considered extremely rare. William Randolph Hearst paid a professional tracker to find “the last California Grizzly” and he did so in Southern California. They put the poor bear, named Monarch, in a zoo until he died in 1911 and then to make it worse, they stuffed him and put him on display. The actual final Grizzly shot happened in Fresno in 1922. The last sighting of a Grizzly was in Sequioa National Park a few years later and by 1930 was declared 100% extinct.

[frybreadking]

The buffalo are a beautiful and amazing animal. I used to work at the buffalo pasture on my reservation, I loved it. Look after and care for something that was an instrumental part of my ancestors survival and way of life 💯🦬

[ashak.v]

They almost drew Bison to extinction, but they did completely drive the passenger pigeon to extinction

[ned]

Not the first or last time the US army has tried to exterminate something...

[PraveenKumar-gucu]

My heart goes out with the native people. This is heartbreaking 💔

[danielglassmeyer]

I've often wondered how much influence the local and state government had on the material used in the education system I went to public grade school in. How much was knowingly manipulated into a favorable perspective of Manifest Destiny and where the line was, knowingly again, drawn on teaching us about the brutal oppression of Native Americans and their wildlife resources. I was raised in rural northern Idaho.

[zavier]

"a sport that was peculiarly amarican"
Yup that checks out

[alek.c]

That skull mountain must be one of the most terrifying pictures I've ever seen.

[juggernautmjae]

Buffalo soldiers. Bob Marley sang about them

[darthashpie]

The same happend in India during the British Colonization, They hunted Tigers to almost extinction