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For teachers: five documents on the buffalo and the ration

Five printed pages from the time, each with what it says, a few lines of context and questions to start a discussion. They follow the story told on The buffalo and the ration: the herds destroyed, then food used to take land. Print this page and each document comes out on a sheet of its own. Everything here is free to copy for teaching.

These documents describe hunger and the taking of land, in the words of officials who often did not respect the people they wrote about. Read them before the class does.

Document 1 · 1889

Where the buffalo went

Hornaday’s 1889 map of North America: a red line around the buffalo’s original range with the years it disappeared from each part, blue outlines for the two great herds of 1870, and green outlines and figures for what remained in 1880 and 1889.
William Hornaday, Map illustrating the extermination of the American bison, 1889 (detail). Red: the original range, with the year the buffalo 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.

Context

In 1870 the peoples of the Plains fed, clothed and sheltered themselves from the buffalo. By 1883 the herds were gone. On 1 January 1889 there were 85 wild buffalo left in the United States. Hornaday published this map in 1889, with his count of the wild buffalo still alive.

Questions

  1. Find the place nearest to where you live, or to a place you know. What year does the map give for the end of the buffalo there?
  2. Compare the blue outlines of 1870 with the green ones of 1880. What changed in ten years?
  3. The red dates are spread over 150 years, but most of the destruction on the Plains came in a few. How does the map show that?

Sources: Hornaday 1889; public domain. Play the map year by year at wovoka.org/buffalo.

Document 2 · 1867

A right that lasts as long as the buffalo

Two strips of printed law: Article XI of the treaty with the Kiowas and Comanches of 21 October 1867, and of the treaty with the Cheyenne of 28 October 1867, each with the margin note “Right to hunt reserved”.
Article XI of the Medicine Lodge treaties, October 1867. Statutes at Large, vol. 15, pp. 584, 596. Public domain.

What it says

The tribes keep 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.

Context

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. 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.

Questions

  1. What right did the tribes keep? What would bring that right to an end?
  2. Satanta’s words and the treaty’s words both talk about land and buffalo. How are they different?
  3. Read Document 1 again. How long did this right last?

Sources: The Medicine Lodge treaties, Statutes at Large, vol. 15, pp. 581, 584, 593, 596 · Mooney 1898, pp. 207–208. More at wovoka.org/buffalo.

Document 3 · 1873

The Secretary of the Interior on the buffalo

What it says

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.

We quote the report rather than show its page: the only scan of it we have found was made by Google, and we do not reprint Google’s scans. The library entry links to it.

Context

Delano wanted the white hunters who went onto the reservations to kill buffalo kept out. A year later Congress debated a bill to protect the buffalo, and the Secretary’s words were thrown back at him. Representative Fort closed the debate: 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.

Questions

  1. What did Delano say he would not seriously regret, and why?
  2. What did he want stopped? Do the two parts of his sentence pull in the same direction?
  3. How did Fort turn Delano’s view against itself?

Sources: Secretary of the Interior 1873, p. 6 · Congressional Record, 1874 · Hornaday 1889, pp. 515–519. More at wovoka.org/buffalo.

Document 4 · 1877

The ration, written into law

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. Statutes at Large, vol. 19, p. 256. Library of Congress; public domain.

What it says

A daily ration of a pound and a half of beef, half a pound of flour and half a pound of corn, until the Indians are able to support themselves; but 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.

Context

This agreement took the Black Hills from the Lakota. The chiefs 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. A century later the Supreme Court found that the Hills had been taken, not bought, and had to be paid for.

Questions

  1. What food did the law promise, and how much a day?
  2. What two conditions did it put on the food? Who would decide whether they were met?
  3. Running Antelope called the ration a return for the land. Does the law read like a payment or like something else?

Sources: Statutes at Large, vol. 19, pp. 192, 256 · United States v. Sioux Nation, 1980. More at wovoka.org/buffalo.

Document 5 · 1884

A hungry winter in Montana

The first page of a pamphlet, “The Action of Congress in regard to the Piegan Indians of Montana”, and below it the Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ statement.
The Commissioner of Indian Affairs’ report for 1884, as reprinted by the Indian Rights Association, 1885, p. 1. Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1884. Public domain.

What it says

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.

Context

The buffalo were gone from the northern Plains by 1883, and these peoples now depended on government food. The money for that food, the Commissioner wrote, had been voted three months late, and it was less than his office had asked for.

Questions

  1. What two reasons does the Commissioner give for the shortage?
  2. What did people do to stay alive?
  3. This is the government’s own report about its own failure. How does that change the way you read it?

Sources: Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1884, pp. iv–v, as reprinted by the Indian Rights Association, 1885, p. 1. More at wovoka.org/buffalo.

All five documents are public domain. Every source has an entry under Read more, most of them free to read online. Corrections, and notes on how these worked in a class, are welcome at lee@wovoka.org. Last updated 20 October 2026.