The buffalo and the ration

A map of North America. A red line encloses the buffalo’s original range, from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from northern Canada into Mexico, marked with the years it disappeared from each part. Inside it, two blue outlines mark the northern and southern herds of 1870; smaller green outlines and figures mark what remained in 1880 and 1889. — Hornaday’s map of the extermination, 1889 (detail). Red: the buffalo’s original range, with the year it disappeared from each part. Blue: the two great herds in 1870. Green: the herds in 1880, and in green figures the wild buffalo still alive on 1 January 1889. Drawn from William Hornaday’s *Map illustrating the extermination of the American bison*, 1889, laid on a modern map. The range, the herds of 1870, 1875, 1880 and 1884 and the count of 1889 are traced from his map, and the red dates are his: the year he gives for the end of the buffalo in each place. Between his dated places the shading is ours: each part of the range takes the date of the nearest place he dated and fades out in that year. He gives no dates for the far north or for Mexico, so the shading there is only a guess. Hornaday 1889; public domain. His full map is at the Internet Archive.

1. The herds

A people who needed no one

For the Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Kiowa, the Comanche and their neighbours, the buffalo was food, house and clothing. William Hornaday, who wrote the Smithsonian's history of its destruction in 1889, listed what it gave: food, clothing, shelter, bedding, saddles, ropes, shields, and innumerable smaller articles of use and ornament.

A few buffalo in silhouette on a dark rise of prairie under a heavy, clouded sky, with low mountains on the horizon. — “Buffalo on the Plains.” Engraving in Dodge 1877, facing p. 119. Public domain; scan from the University of California Libraries via the Internet Archive.

The herds were still vast in the years after the Civil War. Crossing Kansas by train in the autumn of 1868, the Englishman William Blackmore rode for more than 120 miles through an almost unbroken herd of buffalo. The Plains were blackened with them, and more than once the train had to stop to allow unusually large herds to pass. Passengers shot into the herds from the trains for the fun of it. Hornaday, writing for the Smithsonian, called them what they were: those who shot them from the railway trains for sport were murderers.

An engraving of a steam locomotive halted in a stampeding herd of buffalo. Men in top hats and frock coats fire rifles from the cars and from beside the track; wounded buffalo lie in the foreground. — “Slaughter of buffalo on the Kansas Pacific Railroad.” Passengers shooting from the train, as the railroads crossed the herds’ range. Engraving from Dodge’s book, reprinted in Hornaday 1889, plate III. Public domain.

Millions of buffalo to furnish unlimited food supply, thousands of horses, and hundreds of miles of free range made the Sioux, up to the year 1868, the richest and most prosperous, the proudest, and withal, perhaps, the wildest of all the tribes of the plains.

James Mooney, The Ghost-Dance Religion, 1896

The Lakota and their Dakota relatives kept their own record of the years, the winter counts. Lone-Dog, a Yanktonai, said that with the advice of the old men of his tribe he chose one event to mark each year as it passed, and painted its sign upon a buffalo robe kept for the purpose. In his count, as the government ethnologist Garrick Mallery printed it in English in 1893, the winter of 1861–62 is the one when Buffalo were so plentiful that their tracks came close to the tipis. The count kept by Battiste Good, a Brulé, calls the winter of 1872–73 Issue-year winter. Its sign is a blanket, which, Mallery explained, is often used as the symbol for issue of goods by the United States Government.

In October 1867, on Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas, the government made treaties with the Kiowa and Comanche and with the Cheyenne and Arapaho. The tribes gave up all right to live permanently outside the reservations the treaties set out, but they kept the right to hunt on any lands south of the Arkansas so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase. At the council the Kiowa chief Satanta had answered the commissioners. As a New York Times correspondent took his words down: All the land south of the Arkansas belongs to the Kiowas and Comanches, and I don’t want to give away any of it. I love the land and the buffalo and will not part with it. The treaties tied the hunting right to the herds. It would last only as long as the buffalo did.

Sources: Hornaday 1889, pp. 487, 525 · William Blackmore's introduction to Dodge 1877, p. xvi · Mooney 1896, p. 824 · The Medicine Lodge treaties, Statutes at Large, vol. 15, pp. 581, 584, 593, 596 · Mooney 1898, pp. 207–208 · Mallery 1893, pp. 266, 285, 287, 327

2. 1872 to 1874

The hide hunters

What changed was a market. In 1872 some enemy of the buffalo race discovered that their hides were merchantable, and could be sold in the market for a goodly sum, wrote Richard Dodge, an army officer stationed that year at Fort Dodge, on the Arkansas River in Kansas. The railroads across the plains carried the hunters out and the hides back east. Most hunters took the skin and the tongue and left the rest. Dodge reckoned that early on one hide sent to market represented three, four, or even five dead buffalo.

The hunters did not chase the herd. A man crept close under cover and shot the nearest animal; the others, Dodge wrote, neither seeing nor smelling danger, stare in uneasy wonder, and he shot them one by one. Hunters called it getting a stand. I have myself counted 112 carcasses inside of a semicircle of 200 yards radius, Dodge wrote, all of which were killed by one man from the same spot, and in less than three-quarters of an hour. And the meat was left. The loin, the ribs, the hump, all the best and most savoury parts of the animal, are left to rot, or are eaten by wolves.

Dead buffalo lying on snow-covered prairie, some already skinned, with a rifle standing upright in the snow among them. — “Scene on the northern buffalo range,” after a photograph by L. A. Huffman. Hornaday 1889, plate X. Public domain.

Three million buffalo in two years

Buffalo killed by white hunters for their hides, by an army officer’s count. About 1.5 million a year in 1872 and 1873. In 1874 the count fell to 158,583, and by the end of 1875 the southern herd was gone.

Dodge’s count, built from the hides the railroads carried east and taking the lowest figures he could defend; for every hide shipped, more buffalo were killed and left. The Indians’ own hunting for robes, which he counted separately, is not included. Source: Dodge 1877, p. 142.

In the autumn of 1873 Dodge rode again over ground where he had hunted the year before.

Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.

Richard Irving Dodge, The Hunting Grounds of the Great West, 1877

A long, head-high stack of baled buffalo hides in a trader’s yard. Workmen, wagons, mules and a dog stand at the left; a man in a hat sits on top of the pile at the right. — “Rath & Wright’s buffalo hide yard in 1878, showing 40,000 buffalo hides, Dodge City, Kansas.” Photographer unknown. National Archives, 79-M-1B-3; no known restrictions.

A hunter in a broad hat lies flat behind rocks, his rifle on a rest, shooting into a herd grazing on a wide snowy plain. Several buffalo already lie dead among the living. — “Still-hunting buffaloes on the northern range.” From a painting by J. H. Moser, 1888, printed in Hornaday 1889, plate XIV. Smithsonian Libraries via the Internet Archive; public domain.

A dead buffalo bull lies on its side in the foreground of a bare plain. Two more carcasses and a saddled horse are behind it. — “Still-hunting buffaloes on the northern range.” From a painting by J. H. Moser, 1888, printed in Hornaday 1889, plate XIV. Smithsonian Libraries via the Internet Archive; public domain.

Hornaday's verdict, sixteen years later: It was, then, the hide-hunters, white and red, but especially white, who wiped out the great southern herd in four short years. By the close of the 1875 season it was gone. The northern herd, in Montana and Dakota, followed in 1882 and 1883.

Sources: Dodge 1877, pp. 131–133, 136–137, 142 · Hornaday 1889, pp. 498, 501, 511

3. Washington

Congress talked

Congress talked of interfering, but only talked, Dodge wrote. In March 1874 the House debated a bill brought by Fort of Illinois. It would have made it unlawful for anyone but an Indian to kill a female buffalo in the territories, or more males than could be used. One member read out a letter from General Hazen: I know a man who killed with his own hand ninety-nine buffaloes in one day, without taking a pound of the meat.

The government’s own view hung over the debate. A member who wanted the bill to cover Indians too reminded the House, as Hornaday reports it, that the Secretary of the Interior had already said to the House that the civilization of the Indian was impossible while the buffalo remained on the plains. The Secretary, Columbus Delano, had put it in his annual report of October 1873. He wanted the white hunters who went onto the reservations to kill buffalo kept out, and he wrote: While I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect on the Indians, regarding it rather as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors, yet these encroachments by the whites upon the reservations … is one prolific source of trouble.

Fort closed the debate by turning that view back on its holders: The only other argument that has been adduced against the bill is that the Secretary of the Interior thinks the buffalo should all be killed off, in order that he may civilize the Indians. Shoot the buffalo, starve the Indian to death, and thereby civilize him! He was mocking the argument, not making it. A shorter and more humane way, he went on, would be to shoot the Indians themselves. The House passed the bill that day.

In the Senate, on 23 June, a member moved to strike out the words that left Indians out of the law, so that it would stop their hunting too. Others objected. Senator Sargent said the change will deprive the Indians of their food, which ought not to be done. Senator Clayton spoke for the Committee on Territories: They regard the buffalo as the natural herd of the Indian. The Indians, he said, are careful and cautious about the destruction of the buffalo. It is the white man that destroys it. The amendment was withdrawn and the Senate passed the bill. It went to President Grant for his signature and, in Hornaday’s words, expired in his hands.

When the bill came back in 1876 a Texas member, Hornaday records, thought the bill an impolicy, and that the sooner the buffalo was exterminated the better. Fort answered that to exterminate the buffalo would be to starve innocent children of the red man. This time the House passed it, and it went to a Senate committee, from whence it never returned. It was, Hornaday wrote, the last move made in Congress in behalf of the buffalo.

Hornaday saw where it ended. While the herds lived, he wrote, the Plains peoples were then quite independent, because they could take the war-path at any time and live on buffalo indefinitely. Once they were gone, the total absence of the buffalo brings upon the nation the entire support of the Indian.

Sources: Dodge 1877, p. 132 · Congressional Record, 10 March 1874, pp. 2105–2106, 2108–2109, and 23 June 1874, pp. 5413–5414 · Secretary of the Interior 1873, p. 6 · Hornaday 1889, pp. 438, 515–519

A wide, empty valley under a flat-topped butte. Bleached buffalo skeletons, skulls and horns lie scattered through the grass in the foreground. — “Where the millions have gone.” From a painting by J. H. Moser, printed in Hornaday 1889, plate XIX. Public domain; scan from the Smithsonian Libraries via the Internet Archive.

4. The last hunts

Nothing left to hunt

The Lakota watched it happen. In September 1876, at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska, Little Wound told the government's commissioners: You have forbidden me to hunt the buffalo, and I have given up that right, although there are plenty of buffalo left yet. Seven years later there were none.

The last large herd in the north, about ten thousand animals between the Black Hills and Bismarck, was cut down to about a thousand by white hunters in the season of 1883. That October Sitting Bull's band came out from Standing Rock and killed the rest in two days. When we got through the hunt, one of the white hunters said, there was not a hoof left. Further west, Hornaday wrote, the Blackfeet and the Cree had been in a half-starved condition, through the disappearance of the buffalo, as early as 1879.

What was left was bones. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in 1885 about ranching on the northern plains, said that skeletons and dried carcasses were in sight from every hillock of the country he crossed. A ranchman who had just travelled a thousand miles across northern Montana, along the Milk River, told him that during the whole distance he was never out of sight of a dead buffalo, and never in sight of a live one.

A low heap of buffalo skulls, horns and bones on open grassland, with a rail fence and a flat horizon behind. — “Buffalo bones.” Photograph by the government’s Geological Survey of the Territories (the Hayden survey), 1870; one half of a stereo pair. National Archives, 57-HS-895; unrestricted.

A trader’s yard beside a railway. Hides are pegged out flat to dry, men load a wagon and work a press that bales the hides, and a great heap of bones rises behind them next to a waiting train. — “Buffalo bones.” Photograph by the government’s Geological Survey of the Territories (the Hayden survey), 1870; one half of a stereo pair. National Archives, 57-HS-895; unrestricted.

Sources: Manypenny commission 1876, p. 37 · Hornaday 1889, pp. 511–512 · Roosevelt 1885, pp. 243–244

5. 1875 and 1876

Sell or starve

The treaty of 1868 had promised the Lakota rations for four years. By 1875 those years were over, the buffalo were going, and the government wanted the Black Hills, where gold had been found. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Edward Smith, set out the position in his report that year: A failure to receive Government rations for a single season would reduce them to starvation. They cannot, therefore, demand to be left alone.

A commission sent that year to buy the Hills failed. It advised Congress to fix a price itself and tell the Lakota that refusing it will have the effect to arrest all appropriations for their subsistence in the future. In August 1876 Congress did just that: no more food until the Hills were given up. The next commission carried written instructions. The rations had been a matter not of obligation but of charity, and the Indians should be made to understand distinctly that they can hope for continued appropriations only by full submission to the authority and wishes of the Government.

A page of printed law, with notes in the margin: “Not to be paid while Indians are hostile”, “No appropriations until rights are relinquished”, “Right of way over reservation to be ceded”. — The law of 15 August 1876: “hereafter there shall be no appropriation made for the subsistence of said Indians, unless they shall first agree to relinquish” their hunting country and the part of their reservation west of the 103rd meridian, which held the Black Hills. Statutes at Large, vol. 19, p. 192. Library of Congress; public domain.

That is how it was put to them, agency by agency. At Cheyenne River in October the chairman said: Congress has decided that until you sign some paper relinquishing the Black Hills and that country no more rations shall be issued to you. Another commissioner added: If you refuse to accept it, death and starvation stare you in the face.

Whatever the white people say to us, wherever I go, we all say “Yes” to them—“Yes,” “Yes,” “Yes.” Whenever we don’t agree to anything that is said in council, they give the same reply—“You won’t get any food”; “You won’t get any food.”

Standing Elk, Lakota, to the commissioners, September 1876

Spotted Tail named the war going on that summer for what it was: this war was brought upon us by the children of the Great Father who came to take our land from us without price. We have here a store-house to hold our provisions the Great Father sends us, but he sends very little provision to put in our store-house. When our people become displeased with their provision and have gone north to hunt in order that they might live, the Great Father’s children are fighting them.

The chiefs signed. They understood the rations as the price of the land, not as charity. In return for this country, said Running Antelope at Standing Rock, I expect to have issued to me rations, that I and my children and my children’s children may live. The agreement, made law in February 1877, took the Black Hills. It promised a daily ration of beef, flour and corn until the Indians are able to support themselves, and it put two conditions on the food: no rations shall be issued for children between the ages of six and fourteen years … unless such children shall regularly attend school, and on farming land, rations shall be issued only to the persons and families of those persons who labor.

A page of printed law headed “Article 5”, with the margin note “Assistance, schools, rations, purchase of surplus, employment”. — Article 5 of the act of 28 February 1877: the ration set down in law (a pound and a half of beef, half a pound of flour and half a pound of corn a day), issued to the head of each family, withheld from children who did not attend school, and on farming land given only to those who worked. Statutes at Large, vol. 19, p. 256. Library of Congress; public domain.

A century later the Supreme Court found that the Hills had been taken, not bought, and had to be paid for. The vanishing map shows them cut out of the reservation.

Sources: Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1875, p. 8 · Allison commission 1875, p. 18 · Manypenny commission 1876, pp. 4, 21, 38–39, 42, 48, 55–56 · Statutes at Large, vol. 19, pp. 192, 256 · United States v. Sioux Nation, 1980

6. 1883 to 1890

The ration as a lever

The food was never enough, and it kept shrinking. In August 1883 Sitting Bull told a Senate committee at Standing Rock that our rations have been reduced to almost nothing, and many of the people have starved to death. He asked for cattle on the hoof, to kill as his people had once killed buffalo: I want to kill 300 head of cattle at a time. That is the way you live, and we want to live the same way. Senator John Logan answered him: You are fed by the Government, clothed by the Government … and all you have and are to-day is because of the Government.

That winter, in northern Montana, people died of hunger. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs said so in his report for 1884. The money for their food, he wrote, had been voted three months late, and it was less than his office had asked for. The Blackfeet, Blood and Piegan, and the people at the Fort Peck and Fort Belknap agencies, were driven to great straits to sustain life during the winter and spring of 1883 and 1884, being compelled to kill many of their horses and young stock cattle for food, and to resort to every possible expedient, such as eating bark, wild roots, &c., and there is little doubt that many deaths among them were the direct result of lack of food.

In 1889 the government came back for half of what was left of the Great Sioux Reservation. General Crook told the people at Rosebud that if your rations were taken away from you to-day you would have to starve or steal. Young Man Afraid of His Horses answered the threat before it was made: we don’t want you to get up and say we will starve to death if we don’t sign. Enough men signed. Then the beef was cut, a million pounds a year at Pine Ridge alone. The agent there wrote that if the cut had been known in time it would have prevented the commission from getting a single signature at this agency.

When we signed the treaty you struck us in the face … in taking the beef away from us.

American Horse, Oglala Lakota, to the Secretary of the Interior, Washington, December 1889

To make up the shortfall the people at Pine Ridge ate their own cattle, 700,000 pounds of them in a year: the herds that were meant to make them self-supporting. By the summer of 1890 their agent saw among them an entire loss of faith in the promises of the Government. On 19 December, with the army on the reservations, General Nelson Miles telegraphed Senator Dawes that the forcing process of attempting to make large bodies of Indians self-sustaining when the government was cutting down their rations and their crops almost a failure, is one cause of the difficulty.

Sources: Senate committee at Standing Rock 1883, pp. 79–81 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1884, pp. iv–v, as reprinted by the Indian Rights Association, 1885, p. 1 · Crook commission 1890, pp. 50, 81, 222 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1890, pp. 49–50 · Mooney 1896, p. 835

7. 1890

The buffalo coming back

When word came from Nevada of a holy man who said the dead would live again, the Lakota heard in it the return of the buffalo. George Sword, an Oglala who had been captain of the Indian police at Pine Ridge, set down in Lakota the story the delegates brought home. The messiah, they said, had told them: if you kill any buffalo cut the head, the tail, and the four feet and leave them, and that buffalo will come to live again. On the way back, they said, they had done it, and when we came a little ways from it there was the buffaloes come to life again and went off. In the same account the messiah told them to go to farming and send all your children to school.

The agent at Pine Ridge understood what the hope meant. A medicine man, he reported, had promised to restore the dead and the buffalo, which would make them entirely independent of aid from the whites. The dream was an end to the ration line.

In Nevada it was different. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ tables for 1884 give each agent’s estimate of where his people’s food came from. At Pine Ridge, 75 per cent came from government rations. For the Paiute of the Nevada agency it was 5 per cent from rations, 20 from hunting, fishing and gathering, and 75 from their own work. They had done, the agent wrote, a large amount of the farm labor in Mason Valley that season, and many get their living by working for the whites. Wovoka lived in Mason Valley. Mooney, who visited him there, wrote that he works regularly on a ranch.

Wovoka's own message, as an Arapaho student wrote it down in 1891, says nothing about buffalo. It tells people to dance, not to fight, and to keep working. The buffalo were what hungry people on the Plains heard in it. His story follows what happened next.

Sources: Mooney 1896, pp. 772, 780–782, 797 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1890, p. 49 · Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1884, pp. 126–127, 286–287, 294–295

About these sources

Whose words these are

Most of the Lakota words on this page were taken down by government interpreters and printed in the commissions' own reports, so they come to us in English and through the people who wanted the land. They are still the record of what was said across the table. The winter counts too reach us in English: their signs were explained through interpreters and printed by Mallery, and we quote his words rather than show the drawings. Dodge, Blackmore and Hornaday wrote as men of their time about people they did not always respect; we quote them for what they saw. All the sources here are public domain, and each has an entry under Read more.

One famous line is left out on purpose. A speech in which General Sheridan is said to have urged the Texas legislature to let the hunters kill the buffalo off first appears in a buffalo hunter’s memoir published in 1907, where John Cook tells it as so the story goes. We have found no record of it from the time.