160 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
In 1886 the Smithsonian Institution sent its chief
taxidermist to Montana to bring back specimens of
the American bison. William Temple Hornaday was
well suited to the task, for he had traveled to the ends
of the earth to find exotic animals for his popular
dioramas. But this assignment left him outraged
and saddened, since in Montana he discovered
a species that was nearly extinct. In his ensuing
report, Hornaday documented this decline, but it
was the small map tucked into its endpapers that
packed the greatest punch. With the help of skilled
geographer Henry Gannett and zoologist Joel Allen,
Hornaday visualized the devastation of an animal
that had once ranged across North America. His map
shocked a public that had come to see the bison
as the quintessential creature of the West and the
embodiment of the frontier.
On the map, red numbers indicate the date by
which the bison could no longer be found in any
given geography. This starkly reminded the public
that these herds once ranged from Mexico to the
Mississippi Delta, and from east of the Allegheny
Mountains to the northern reaches of Idaho. The
contraction of bison herds can be traced to the
Spanish introduction of horses to the Great Plains
around 1700. Tribes that adopted the horse were able
to roam across a much wider geographical area, but
ironically that mobility made them more dependent
upon the buffalo for survival. By the early nineteenth
century, a growing demand for fur and hides led
to more aggressive hunting practices. At the same
time, settlers moving into the trans-Mississippi West
further encroached upon bison rangelands. Even as
buffalo became fixtures in the American vision of the
West, more advanced firearms enabled scouts and
hunters to kill entire herds at once.
Immediately after the Civil War, smaller herds of
buffalo could still be seen roaming across the Great
Plains. But the advent of the transcontinental lines
divided the bison into a northern and a southern
herd and sharply curtailed the grasslands on which
TO THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION
W. T. Hornaday and Henry Gannett,
“Map Illustrating the Extermination of
the American Bison,” 1889
they fed. Two years later, the construction of the
Kansas branch of the Union Pacific Railroad reduced
the southern herd even further. The climax of that
slaughter occurred between 1870 and 1873, and
Hornaday marked the pathetic remains of that
southern herd with a blue caterpillar line.
To the north, the bison ranged across a much
wider expanse, but there too were devasted after the
Civil War. At mid-century, the Sioux were the largest
and most powerful tribal culture of the northern
plains, with a domain that extended from the Rocky
Mountains in the West to Minnesota in the East,
and from the Platte River north to the Yellowstone
River. Within that vast region, they were sustained
by millions of buffalo. But the contraction of bison
herds correspondingly weakened the Sioux. To be
sure, Sioux Indians seeking robes and hides were
responsible for some of the decline of the buffalo.
But far more consequential was the building of
the Northern Pacific Railway in the 1880s. With
green circles, Hornaday highlighted the few small
bands that remained by 1889. The largest of these
was a herd of 200, which was protected within the
boundaries of the country’s first national park
at Yellowstone.
Hornaday’s report exposed Americans to the
dark side of western development, and sparked a
discussion around conservation that flourished under
Theodore Roosevelt and other influential leaders. The
decline of the bison also had a far more immediate
and profound effect upon the equestrian tribes of
the plains. Some federal Indian agents even saw this
destruction of the bison as a means to force natives
onto the new reservation system. Just as Hornaday
published his report, the federal government seized
the remains of the Sioux territory and divided it
into five smaller units. This was the final stage in a
transformation of Sioux life, punctuated by violence
on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota at the
end of 1890. The Wounded Knee Massacre was the
last major fight between the tribe and federal troops,
concluding decades of armed conflict and forced
relocation to reservations throughout the West. In
1910, Congress opened large areas of the Pine Ridge
Reservation to non-Indian homesteaders. In this
respect, Hornaday’s map documents not only the
decline of the bison but also the parallel confinement
and destruction of the Plains tribes.