The American Buffalo | Blood Memory | Now Streaming

Announcer: Major funding for “The American Buffalo” was provided by the Better Angels Society and its members; the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation Fund at the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation; Diane and Hal Brierley; the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment; John and Catherine Debs; Kissick Family Foundation; Fred and Donna Seigel; by Jacqueline Mars, John and Leslie McQuown, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Tudor Jones.

Funding was also provided by the Volgenau Foundation and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪ Announcer: Stories hold the power to draw us together and shape our tomorrow.

If we’re courageous enough to look, lessons are written in our history.

♪ ♪ ♪ Narrator: In the spring of 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition reached what is now Montana, near where the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers meet, moving farther west than any white Americans had ever gone.

Along the way, they had encountered tribes of Native people who, for hundreds of generations, had called the bountiful land home.

Wildlife “seemed to be everywhere”– and “in astonishing numbers,” Meriwether Lewis wrote, particularly the buffalo.

Man as Meriwether Lewis: The whole face of the country was covered with herds of buffalo, elk, and antelopes.

The buffalo frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are, and in some instances pursue us a considerable distance apparently with that view.

Narrator: Less than a century later, in 1887, another expedition would explore the same region.

They hoped to find some buffaloes to kill and then preserve for an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

They searched for three months without seeing a single one.

[“Way of Life” by Lakota Thunder playing] [Man chanting in native language] ♪ Woman: “Everything the Kiowas had “came from the buffalo.

“Their tepees were made of buffalo hide, “so were their clothes and moccasins.

“They ate buffalo meat.

“Most of all, the buffalo was part of the Kiowa religion.

“The priests used parts of the buffalo “to make their prayers when they healed people “or when they sang to the powers above.

The buffalo were the life of the Kiowas.”

Old Lady Horse.

Narrator: They are the national mammal of the United States, the largest land animals in the Western Hemisphere– a species that scientists call “Bison bison.”

Nourished by one of the world’s greatest grasslands, they proliferated into herds of uncountable numbers and in turn, by their grazing, nurtured the prairie that sustained them.

♪ For more than 10,000 years, they evolved alongside Indigenous people, who relied on them for food and shelter and, in exchange for killing them, revered them.

Man: So much of my blood memory has to do with buffalo.

We have regard for each other.

And we are friends.

We are brothers.

We are related.

So, I, you know, think of them in a particular way.

And it’s always with reverence.

[Train whistle blowing] Narrator: Newcomers to the continent found them fascinating at first but in time, came to consider them a hindrance and then a source of profit for a growing nation.

In the space of only a decade, they were slaughtered by the millions for their hides, with their carcasses left to rot on the prairies; the species itself teetering on the brink of disappearing forever from the face of the earth.

♪ Woman: The story of American bison really is two different stories.

It really is a story of Indigenous people and their relationship with the bison for thousands of years.

And then enter not just the Europeans but the Americans.

And that’s a completely different story.

And that really is a story of utter destruction.

Man: It’s not just the story of this magnificent animal.

It takes us into all the different corners of our history and how we interact with one another as human beings.

It is a heartbreaking story of a collision of two different views of how human beings should interact with the natural world.

And there’s a tragedy at the very heart of that story.

At the same time, as you follow it a little bit farther down that trail, it can offer us hope.

♪ [Buffalo grunts] ♪ Man: They’re these big, slightly strange-looking but magnificent, magnificent animals.

And they’re ours.

Right?

They’re our animal.

Man: If you see one out grazing, it looks so slow.

It’s like a parked car sitting there.

But they can clear six-foot fences.

They can jump a horizontal jump of seven feet.

They can hit a speed, hit a speed of 35 miles an hour.

And you’re talking about something that can get going that speed that’s 1,800 pounds.

It’s like a souped-up hot rod of an animal hiding in a minivan shell.

Narrator: Fully grown, an American buffalo can weigh more than a ton, stand taller than six feet at the shoulder, and stretch more than ten feet long, not including the tail.

Huge as they are, they are small compared to some of the prehistoric animals that once roamed the continent: woolly mammoths, giant ground sloths, and camels, and other species of bison, one of which had horns that spanned 9 feet from tip to tip.

After humans arrived in North America more than 20,000 years ago, all of the biggest animals– along with nearly 50 other species– went extinct on the continent, from either hunting or changing climate or a combination of the two.

In their place, the modern buffalo evolved and multiplied, particularly on the grasslands of the Great Plains.

Bison and humans, in a real sense, co-evolved alongside one another over the last 10,000 years or so.

Sometimes the animals would ebb and flow, but they always rebounded.

And, so, there was this wonderful kind of dynamic equilibrium that lasted for more than 10,000 years.

Rosalyn Lapier: They have always lived with humans.

They’ve always been hunted by humans; they’ve always had predators, so their entire sort of evolution as an animal species has been as an animal that has been hunted.

And their primary defense mechanism is to run away.

And they have that skill at a very young age.

A newborn buffalo calf tries to stand for the first time at the age of two minutes.

And, at seven minutes, they’re able to run with the herd.

Narrator: Over the centuries, their grazing habits on the wide expanses of the Great Plains proved crucial to its ecology–the types of grasses that flourished there and the other species that thrived alongside the buffalo.

Even when they stopped and sometimes dug through the grass with their horns and then rolled in the dust, creating “buffalo wallows,” the bison’s habits helped support other forms of life on the Plains.

Lapier: It’s not just one wallow.

We’re talking about millions of bison, which means millions of wallows.

Woman: Those wallows could do a couple of things.

At its most simple and basic, it’s a “dirt bath.”

But then it also has an ecosystem function– water retention.

If it rained, these become shallow little ponds and pools.

And that, in turn, affected the landscape as well.

Lapier: Because it’s also a disturbed area, plants that flourish in disturbed areas will also then grow around a wallow.

So they became these really great areas, not only for wildlife to use but also for humans to use because of the plants that were there.

Woman: When the buffalo are here, the land is good.

When the land is good, the buffalo are healthy.

We have lived here for 600 generations.

We have been here, conservatively, 12,000 years.

So, if you think about that 12,000 years– imagine that on a timeline, and then take that 12,000 years and wrap that timeline around a 24-hour clock.

What that means is that Columbus arrived at about 11:28 p.m., and Lewis and Clark, at about 15 minutes before midnight.

Narrator: Native Americans seamlessly wove the animals into every aspect of their daily lives and religious beliefs.

N. Scott Momaday: The buffalo was iconic and sacred, and became so deeply ingrained in the life of the tribe that they could not imagine existence without the buffalo.

Narrator: In the ancient origin stories of many tribes, the bison were among the earliest animals created, often emerging before human beings from under ground in what became sacred sites, like Wind Cave in the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota or Oklahoma’s Wichita Mountains, whose most prominent peak is now called Mount Scott.

The Kiowas, in particular, believed that this was the mountain from which buffalo had originally emerged and that whenever they went away–and buffalo did go away in the remembered histories of tribal people– this is where, on the Southern Plains, the buffalo went.

Narrator: The Cheyenne and Lakota each have their own stories about a contest between people and bison to determine which one would have mastery over the other.

In a long and arduous race circling the Black Hills, some of the animals died and stained the soil red forever with their blood.

In the end, the people won.

Man: “The old buffalo bulls called “the young man to come to them.

“‘Well, you have won,’ they said.

“‘You are on top now.

“‘All we animals can do is supply the things that “‘you will use from us– our meat and skins and bones.

And we will teach you the Sun Dance.'”

John Stands in Timber.

♪ Narrator: Every tribe on the Plains held ceremonies related to the buffalo, who, it was said, had their own families and clans, their own societies and customs, and were capable of changing forms to communicate directly with humans.

The Mandan, in what is now North Dakota, had the White Buffalo Cow Society– respected older women, whose leader wrapped herself in the robe of a rare and sacred white buffalo as they danced all night to call the bison herds closer.

In a different ceremony, experienced hunters costumed themselves as buffalo bulls, whose power, called “medicine,” could be shared with others in the tribe.

Man: The first thing I was told about buffalo was not really the hunting part of it.

First thing I was told about them was the spirituality part of it, about how they were created by our Creator, how they were put on this earth to help us survive, not only with clothing, with warmth, with food, with tools, but with the essential, which was the spirit of the buffalo, and how the spirit was part of us and we were part of them.

Narrator: Each summer, the Lakota, like many tribes, gathered for a Sun Dance, their most important ceremony, which renewed their relationship with Wakan-Tanka, the great spirit of the universe that permeates everything.

Buffaloes were considered the animal with the most direct connection to that life force.

Over the course of many generations, the Kiowa had moved from the mountains near the headwaters of the Yellowstone River down to the northern Plains; then to the Black Hills; and eventually farther south to the Wichita Mountains in what is now Oklahoma.

Along the way, they learned their Sun Dance from the Crows.

Momaday: The Sun Dance was an indispensable part of the Kiowa life.

And the buffalo was the sacrificial victim of the Sun Dance.

Could not have a Sun Dance without killing a buffalo bull and displaying its head in the Sun Dance lodge.

What more valuable a sacrifice could you make than to kill a buffalo and offer it to the sun?

Woman: You don’t just go out and kill a buffalo.

You go to your ceremonies; you pray.

And you ask for the gift of a buffalo.

You ask that a buffalo will give itself to you.

[Native people chant to “Lakota Powwow”] And it’s a spiritual relationship.

You do everything in prayer, and you do everything with a pure heart.

Narrator: During the mass extinction of prehistoric mammals, the horse was one of the species that had disappeared from North America.

For hundreds of generations after that, Native people ventured onto the Plains by foot, relying on dogs to pull their belongings.

Hunting buffalo was difficult and dangerous.

To get close enough with a bow and arrow or a lance, some hunters covered themselves with buffalo hides or wolf skins and crept up within striking distance.

In winter, hunters wearing shoes webbed with buffalo sinew chased them into deep snow drifts.

The biggest hunts involved the entire village in an elaborate maneuver to stampede a herd over cliffs.

Lapier: There was a system of both kind of pushing the bison to where they were going, and pulling the bison to where they were going.

They’ll put on wolf skins and pretend that they’re wolves, so, they’re pushing, right, the bison towards where they want to go.

Then they would have somebody who was really good at imitating the cry of a bison calf in distress.

And, so, the cows are then leading the rest of the herd because they’re listening to this, you know, baby, um, calf crying.

And they’re just like, “Oh, calf in distress.

Let’s go save it.”

And here come these stampeding bison and your job, if you’re the decoy, is to do some quick, you know, head fake, and get out of the way or maybe jump into a crevice, and then the bison go over the edge.

[Bird calls] Man: Sometimes, you can go to buffalo jumps when the wind is just right and when people ain’t talking like a bunch of magpies.

You get a little quiet time.

You could almost hear the joy of the humans because, for a week, a month, six months into the winter, we’re going to eat.

And that makes people happy, knowing that they’re going to eat.

Narrator: Stripped of its hide, each carcass provided hundreds of pounds of meat, which could be roasted or boiled; cut into strips and dried on racks; or mixed with tallow and berries to make pemmican, a dehydrated concoction that was easier to transport, preserved the meat longer, and provided five times the food value per pound.

Narrator: From the moment a Plains Indian child was born and wrapped in a soft layer of buffalo hair and a tanned calf skin to the time his or her corpse was shrouded in a bison robe, every day of life was connected with the buffalo.

In winter, when the bison’s fur was the thickest, its hide would be tanned and turned into a warm robe.

In the summer, when the hides had less hair, they could be sewn together into coverings for tepees.

Stretched over a frame of curved willow branches, a hide was transformed into a bowl-like boat for crossing rivers.

A buffalo’s bladder became a water container; its shoulder blade a digging tool; its horn a spoon or a cup.

Buffalo teeth became ornaments.

Some women painted their faces with buffalo grease to protect their complexions from the sun and used the rough side of a buffalo tongue to brush their hair.

Tendons were turned into bow strings, and a sharpened horn fragment into an arrowhead.

Dried buffalo droppings made fuel for fires, an essential commodity on the nearly treeless Plains.

Gerard Baker: So nothing was wasted.

Even the waste wasn’t wasted.

Everything was used except for the grunting.

And, even then, they were used in some of the ceremonies, I’m sure, to imitate the buffalo.

So, even the sounds were used.

Momaday: It gives itself to the people as a sacrifice.

“Here I am; you can make use of me.

“I can help you.

We can be related on a spiritual plane.”

Narrator: Whenever the buffalo periodically disappeared, special ceremonies were required to call them back.

Momaday: So, when they did something wrong, the buffalo might well react and withhold their affection.

“No, I will not make myself available to you for hunting.

“I will hide.

You will have to find me, and it will not be easy.”

The stories almost always convey a sense that it’s been human hubris that’s caused the animals to withdraw, and the only way to get them back is to perform some kind of really profound ceremony, some act that convinces the animals and the animal masters who are in charge of them that humans are once again willing to be fellow travelers in the world.

Not exceptional, not standing apart, but part of the ecology of all living things.

Narrator: The Cheyenne had followed them so closely and for so many years, they had 27 different words for a buffalo, depending on its sex, age, or condition.

“As I now think upon those days,” a Cheyenne named Wooden Leg remembered, “it seems that no people in the world ever were any richer than we were.”

But the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had also given his people a warning.

Man as Sweet Medicine: There is a time coming.

Many things will change.

Strangers will appear among you.

Their skins are light-colored, and their ways are powerful.

These people do not follow the way of our great-grandfather.

They follow another way.

[Thunder] Narrator: In 1492, Christopher Columbus, seeking a western water route from Spain to the Indies, stumbled upon a world that Europeans had not known existed.

Nothing would ever be the same for people on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

For the Indigenous populations of the Americas, it would prove catastrophic.

In some tribes, nearly 90% would perish from diseases for which they had little immunity.

Wave after wave of epidemics swept across the hemisphere as European powers competed to exploit the bountiful resources and countless natural wonders that the continent seemed to offer for the taking.

One of the most fascinating wonders was the bison.

Wandering across what is now Texas in the 1530s, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and three other survivors of a Spanish shipwreck became the first Europeans to encounter American buffalo, when a tribe they met fed the starving strangers with the animal’s meat.

Less than a decade later, a conquistador named Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led his mounted soldiers onto the Great Plains, pursuing rumors of cities filled with silver and gold.

Instead, he found villages of Wichita Indians.

But he and his men were astonished by the landscape and the huge herds of buffalo roaming across it.

“There was not a day I lost sight of them,” an amazed Coronado wrote.

The only way to describe their numbers was to compare them to the fishes of the sea.

His army killed and ate 500 bison on their futile quest for gold and stacked piles of dung to mark their route for the return trip.

They then wrote the King of Spain that a fortune could be made in turning buffalo hides into leather.

They saw this animal in incredible profusion.

And they thought, “You know, what’s in it for us?

How can we profit from this?”

Narrator: Buffalo were nearly everywhere in North America.

No one knows exactly how many bison once existed on the continent, but it was in the many tens of millions.

Their range extended from west of the Rocky Mountains into Idaho, Oregon, and Washington; from northern Mexico into Canada; from Florida to Lake Erie.

Narrator: In 1613, sailing up the Potomac River, one of the early Jamestown colonists came across a herd near what is now Washington, D.C.

But as English colonies grew along the Atlantic Coast, the number of buffalo east of the Appalachian Mountains dwindled.

Worried that the animals were disappearing, in 1759, Georgia’s provincial legislature made it illegal to hunt them in some parts of the colony.

No one enforced the law.

When Daniel Boone opened the Wilderness Trail into Kentucky for settlers eager for new lands, the route he followed through the Cumberland Gap was called a “buffalo trace,” which the animals had been using for centuries.

West of the mountains, he wrote, “the buffaloes were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements.”

As a young surveyor and soldier, George Washington had once hunted buffalo near the Ohio River.

In 1775, just before he left for the Second Continental Congress, he hired a man to capture some calves so he could raise them on his Mount Vernon plantation.

♪ Narrator: By the early 1800s, nearly all the bison east of the Mississippi were gone.

But in the Great Plains, an estimated 30 million buffalo still roamed, along with 120,000 Native people.

Life there for the Indians and the buffalo had already been transformed by something else the Europeans had brought to North America.

Years before, the Cheyenne prophet Sweet Medicine had told his people about it, too.

Man as Sweet Medicine: There will be an animal you must learn to use.

It has a shaggy neck and a tail almost touching the ground.

Its hooves are round.

This animal will carry you on his back and help you in many ways.

Those far hills that seem only a blue vision in the distance take many days to reach now, but with this animal, you can get there in a short time, so fear it not.

Remember what I have said.

Narrator: Spanish conquistadors had used horses to great effect in battles with Native people, who had never seen such animals before.

But in 1680, the Pueblo tribes had risen up in revolt and drove the Spanish out of New Mexico.

Their horse herds remained and flourished.

In less than a century, the horse had spread from one tribe to another throughout the West.

Momaday: The coming of the horse brought about such a revolution.

Suddenly, it was magic and indispensable, and changed their lives completely.

♪ Narrator: A mounted hunter could now kill enough buffalo in one day to feed and clothe his family for months.

And with horses, not dogs, pulling a tepee and belongings on a travois, families could travel farther into the vastness of the Plains to pursue the herds.

Some tribes left their permanent villages and cultivated fields altogether to become semi-nomadic hunters and among the greatest equestrians in the world.

[Horse neighing] Flores: Between 1730 and 1830, as many as three dozen different tribes, living either on the margins of the Plains or, in some cases, even farther distant than that, mounted up on horses, abandoned their farming plots, and rode out on the Plains to hunt buffalo.

So that combination of those two great Pleistocene animals– the horse and the bison– became a revolution in American history that produced the classic Plains Indian buffalo hunter.

Woman: “The great herds of buffalo were constantly moving, “and of course, we moved when they did.

“All that was changed by the horse.

“Even the old people could ride.

“Ahh, I came into a happy world.

“There was always fat meat, glad singing, and much dancing “in our villages.

Our people’s hearts were then as light as breath-feathers.”

Pretty Shield.

♪ If you think of a human being on the back of a horse as a kind of a new species– a single animal, a single animal, a, “horse-man,” hyphen, not a horseman, but a “horse-man.”

This is an animal that has the strength and the power of a horse, drawn from the sunlight and those grasses, and the grace of a horse, but it has the intelligence and the imagination and the ambition and the arrogance of a human being.

That’s a new animal.

This was something that the bison had never faced before.

And that was trouble.

Narrator: Some 30 tribes converged on the Great Plains from every direction, each of them increasingly dependent on the bison for their sustenance and prosperity, and equally dependent on the horse for their hunting and their defense against their enemies.

Narrator: Meanwhile, European powers– the Spanish, French, Russians, and British– were locked in their own contest over the destiny of the American West.

Man: “This immense river “waters one of the fairest portions of the globe, “nor do I believe that there is in the universe “a similar extent of country.

“As we passed on, it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.”

Meriwether Lewis.

Narrator: In 1803, the young United States joined the competition.

President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase extended his nation’s western boundary from the Mississippi all the way to the Rocky Mountains.

Jefferson then dispatched the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri River to study the land’s terrain and potential.

Flores: They began to see a whole host of creatures that none of these people had ever seen.

They see their first mule deer, their first magpies, their first coyotes, their first prairie dogs, their first pronghorns.

One animal after another that no one had any inkling actually existed in North America is suddenly showing up in front of them.

And one of the things they began seeing, of course, are increasingly larger and larger herds of bison, stretching to those unfathomable distances across the horizon.

So, what they preserve for us in their journals is a glimpse into the America that had existed for 10,000 years before us.

Narrator: On their return trip from the Pacific Ocean, the explorers had to halt their dugout canoes for more than an hour on the Yellowstone as a herd swam across the river in front of them.

Man: And Clark says, as they’re coming down the Yellowstone, “I saw more buffalo than I’ve ever seen before today.”

And he tries to give some sense of the numbers.

Then, a few days later, he says, “Well, now, today, I saw more buffalo than I’ve ever seen before.”

Then, finally, he says, “I’m not going to write about it anymore because no one would believe it,” that the numbers are essentially infinite.

Man as Sweet Medicine: These strangers will be a people who do not get tired, but who will keep pushing forward, going, going all the time.

They will keep coming, coming.

Follow nothing that they do, but keep your own ways that I have taught you as long as you can.

Sweet Medicine.

Narrator: Native people had been exchanging animal pelts for European trade goods for more than two centuries.

When Lewis and Clark returned with reports of rivers teeming with beaver, fur companies responded by sending squadrons of trappers, called mountain men, into every corner of the West, all to feed the demand in New York, Paris, and London for fashionable hats made of beaver fur.

Elliott West: And this was really the first step in which Indian peoples of the Far West begin to become enmeshed and caught up in this global economy.

And so it made them vulnerable in ways that they could not possibly have anticipated.

Narrator: By the 1830s, the mountain man era had ended.

The fashion had changed to silk hats, and most of the beaver had been trapped out.

But there were still tens of millions of buffalo.

Consumers in the East had now developed a taste for salted buffalo tongues.

Thick buffalo robes became popular to keep people warm while riding in their carriages.

Along the Missouri River and its tributaries, the fur companies established dozens of trading posts, where tribes bartered buffalo robes and tongues for goods manufactured in Europe and the East: metal pots to make their lives easier; colorful glass beads and woven blankets; and guns for hunting or fighting their enemies.

Preparing a buffalo robe for market took time and hard work, from painstakingly scraping away the flesh and fat to softening the hide by patiently rubbing it with cooked bison brains.

The semi-nomadic tribes were already killing more buffalo than they needed for their own subsistence in order to trade with agricultural tribes for corn and squash and tobacco.

Now they killed even more to meet the demand of white people far away.

When large steamboats replaced smaller keelboats and canoes, the volume of trade exploded even further.

The first steamboat to ply the Missouri returned to St. Louis loaded down with stacks of buffalo robes and 10,000 pounds of tongues.

In one five-year period, New Orleans handled more than 750,000 robes bound for the East.

♪ Narrator: Many Plains tribes kept a pictorial calendar of each passing year: a painted image, often on a buffalo hide, depicting the event they remembered most vividly.

For some, it might be a battle with their enemies, a successful hunt, or the outbreak of a disease.

But one year, they all recorded the same thing.

They remembered it as “the year the stars fell.”

On November 13th, 1833, the largest meteor shower ever witnessed– an estimated 72,000 shooting stars per hour– burst over much of North America.

Townspeople on the East Coast were mesmerized by the display.

For people living in tepees on the open prairie, the spectacle was overwhelming.

Momaday: The Kiowas were camped in the Wichita Mountains.

The stars went crazy in the sky.

It seemed that the world was coming to an end.

They were awakened by the light of flashing stars.

They ran out into the– out into the false day and were terrified.

They think the year and the event as being an omen.

Bad things came after that.

Narrator: The United States was pushing westward.

Within 15 years, its boundary would stretch to the Pacific.

To get there, all of the overland trails had to cross the Great Plains, still controlled by the Native tribes who lived there.

Americans had different motives for their migrations, but the huge bison herds they encountered played a role in everyone’s journey.

Woman: “I never saw anything like buffalo meat “to satisfy hunger.

“So long as there is buffalo meat, I do not wish anything else.”

Narcissa Whitman.

Narrator: In 1836, Narcissa Whitman was headed to the Pacific Northwest to help her missionary husband convert Indigenous people to Christianity.

Other Americans were heading to Oregon to establish farms; to California to pan for gold; and to Santa Fe for commerce.

The Mormons went to Utah to find refuge from religious persecution.

On the way, their leaders used bleached buffalo skulls as signposts, leaving instructions to those following behind, indicating prime camping places.

Aristocrats from Europe were also showing up.

Sir William Drummond Stewart of Scotland attended mountain man rendezvous and brought along the painter Alfred Jacob Miller.

Prince Maximilian of Wied, a German ethnographer, went up the Missouri to study the Indians, and hired the Swiss artist Karl Bodmer to illustrate his detailed report.

But Sir St. George Gore of Ireland came merely to hunt.

His extravagant expedition cost him 1/4 of a million dollars.

Flores: He’s got 50 people with him, most of them servants and skinners.

He’s got six wagons and 21 carts and 112 hunting horses and 50 dogs.

What it’s all about, of course, is allowing Gore to kill as many animals as he possibly can.

Narrator: During his three years traversing the West, Gore killed 1,500 elk, 2,000 deer, more than a thousand antelope, 500 bears, and 4,000 bison, leaving their carcasses on the prairie, unless he considered part of the dead animal worthy of being shipped back home as a trophy.

His destruction of wildlife was so wanton, many of the frontiersmen he had hired were offended by it, and Indian tribes complained to the United States government.

Dayton Duncan: At the end of his three-year journey, he and his men decided they would head down to the Black Hills, which hadn’t been explored by white people, sacred ground for the Lakotas.

So they showed up there, and they were met by a couple hundred of Lakota warriors, who said, “You’ve got a choice.

“This is our sacred place.

You can’t be here.

“You either fight us or give us your guns, give us your supplies, and head the hell out of here.”

[Hoofbeats] [Arrow strikes target] West: The West is where the American identity is.

What are the things that stand distinctively for that West, and, therefore, stand distinctively for the American people, who we are?

What sets us apart from the Old World?

And they settle more than anything else upon these two images, these two characters of the Far West: the American Indian and the American bison, the American buffalo.

They became sort of the symbols of who the emerging Americans were.

Man: “It is a melancholy contemplation “for one who has traveled, as I have, through these realms “and have seen this noble animal in all its pride and glory, “to contemplate it so rapidly wasting from the world, “drawing the irresistible conclusion, “that its species is soon to be extinguished, “and with it the peace and happiness, “if not the actual existence, of the tribes of Indians “who are joint tenants with them in the occupancy of these vast plains.”

George Catlin.

Narrator: The artist George Catlin spent six years crisscrossing the West, painting portraits of Native people and their environment.

He thrilled at joining the Lakotas in a bison hunt, but Catlin still worried that both the animals and the Indians would soon be destroyed.

Then he had a vision.

Man as George Catlin: And what a splendid contemplation, too, when one imagines them as they might in future be seen by some great protecting policy of government preserved in their pristine beauty and wildness in a magnificent park, a nation’s park containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty.

Narrator: But on the Plains, the nation’s relentless movement westward was beginning to hem in the bison and the native people who relied on them.

George Horse Capture Jr.: With the westward expansion, everything had to get out of the way.

You’ve probably seen the old painting, “Manifest Destiny.”

They show everything fleeing in front of this horde of wagon trains and people on foot and horseback.

When the Europeans come in, everything that’s natural has to get out of the way.

It just, it’s just a matter of fact.

Duncan: There is a phrase that, as settlement moved West, they were “redeeming the land from wilderness by the hand of man.”

You’re “redeeming” the wilderness by plowing it, by cutting the trees down, by killing the wild animals and replacing them with domestic cattle or hogs.

That was the mind-set.

And that is the starkest way I can try to describe how different that was from the Native peoples’ view of it, to live with the land, that they were part of it; they weren’t superior to the rest of God’s creation.

We saw it differently.

And a lot of people and a lot of animals paid a price for it.

Narrator: More than a million cattle and sheep had accompanied the wagon trains to California, Oregon, and Santa Fe, devouring the grasses along the trails and spreading diseases like anthrax to the bison.

In what is now Wyoming, the overland trails crossed through the hunting grounds of the Shoshone.

Man: “Since the white man has made a road across our land “and has killed off our game, we are hungry, “and there is nothing for us to eat.

“Our women and children cry for food, and we have no food to give them.”

Washakie.

Narrator: New waves of epidemics from Europe had also devastated Plains tribes.

The Pawnee lost half of their population to smallpox; the Mandan, Assiniboine, and Blackfeet were hit even harder: only 1/10 of their people survived the disease.

Kiowa calendars noted one year as the Smallpox Winter.

The summer of 1849 was remembered as the “Cramp Sun Dance,” in which 50% of them died from cholera, while others died by suicide, in pain and despair.

Germaine White: Disease came in waves.

When one in the family got it, another and another and another, and it was devastating.

They had a continuous grave.

Narrator: At the same time, the government was forcibly removing tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands in the Midwest and Southeast, including the Sauk and the Fox and the Ottawa, the Seneca and Shawnee, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, transplanting them into a newly declared Indian Territory in Kansas and Oklahoma.

Some of them began hunting buffalo, too.

In the Southwest, New Mexican ciboleros– descendants of Spanish settlers– were also making annual forays onto the Great Plains to hunt buffalo.

And from Canada, the Métis– descendants of Europeans and Indigenous people– were expanding their buffalo hunts across the border into the Dakotas.

In 1846, a decade-long drought began, withering the grasslands.

The bison herds, already pressured by the buffalo robe trade, diminished even more.

[Man chanting in Native language] Narrator: A Lakota calendar commemorated a special ceremony meant to bring the buffalo back.

The Kiowas prepared for a great antelope drive, because the supply of bison meat was insufficient.

A Blackfeet band marked 1854 as “the year when we ate dogs.”

By the end of the 1850s, the bison had been driven from all but the interior portion of the Plains, where, by the mid-1860s, an estimated 12 million to 15 million of them still lived.

West: That’s a lot of bison, 12 million to 15 million animals.

There were still a lot of bison to hunt.

And there would remain to be a lot of bison there up until into the 1870s, when the real hammer fell.

Man: “We saw the first train of cars that any of us had seen.

“We looked at it from a high ridge.

“Far off it was very small, “but it kept coming and growing larger all the time, “puffing out smoke and steam.

“As it came on, we said to each other that it looked like a white man’s pipe when he was smoking.”

Porcupine.

[Train whistle blowing] Narrator: After the Civil War, Americans set out with renewed energy to unite the East and West, building railroads to span the continent, opening up vast areas beyond the Missouri River for homesteaders, creating easier access to distant metropolitan markets for crops and cattle, and servicing the demands of boom towns that had sprung up after gold discoveries in the mountains of Colorado and Montana.

Man: There are lots of technologies that move into the Great Plains in the 19th Century, and most of them have a negative impact on the bison.

But all of this pales in comparison to a sort of spasm of industrial expansion into the Great Plains after the Civil War.

Narrator: Native people called this newest arrival “the Iron Horse,” and the pace of change quickened as never before.

As the Union Pacific pushed west across Nebraska toward California, the Kansas Pacific aimed for Denver, piercing into the heart of the buffalo range of the Central Plains.

To feed the hungry crews laying track, the railroad company hired an ambitious and flamboyant 21-year-old Union veteran, paying him $500 a month to keep them supplied with the meat from twelve buffalo a day.

His name was William F. Cody.

Within a few years, he would be known by a different name.

Man as William F. Cody: During my engagement as a hunter for the Kansas Pacific, I killed 4,280 buffalo.

It was not long before I acquired a considerable reputation and the very appropriate name of “Buffalo Bill” was conferred upon me by the railroad hands.

It has stuck with me ever since, and I have never been ashamed of it.

[Horse neighing] Narrator: To publicize its progress across the Plains, the Kansas Pacific promoted excursion trips for passengers eager to have the chance to see– and shoot at–the buffalo they were sure to encounter.

A church group from Lawrence, Kansas, organized a two-day outing to raise money for the congregation.

300 people signed up.

On the second day, they came upon a herd.

[Gunshots] Man: “The buffalo kept pace with the train “for at least 1/4 of a mile, “while the boys blazed away at them without effect.

“Shots enough were fired to rout a regiment of men.

“The train stopped, and such a scrambling and screeching “was never before heard on the Plains, as we rushed forth “to see our first game lying in his gore.

“I had the pleasure of first putting hands “on the dark locks of the noble monster “who had fallen so bravely.

“Then came the ladies; a ring was formed; “the cornet band gathered around and played ‘Yankee Doodle.’

“I thought that ‘Hail to the Chief’ would have done more honor to the departed.”

Woman: “When the white men wanted to build railroads “or when they wanted to farm or raise cattle, “the buffalo protected the Kiowas.

“They tore up the railroad tracks and the gardens.

“They chased the cattle off the ranges.

“The buffalo loved their people as much as the Kiowas loved them.”

Old Lady Horse.

Narrator: For decades, Native tribes had resisted incursions onto their homelands, and the army had built forts in response.

Now more forts were established and more troops were dispatched to man them.

Indian warriors attacked survey crews and road gangs, sometimes even derailed trains.

The army’s retaliations were ineffective, and, in 1867, Congress decided to try a different approach.

Delegations were dispatched to pursue what some called “the hitherto untried policy of conquering with kindness.”

That October, more than 5,000 Kiowas, Comanches, Arapahoes, and Southern Cheyennes gathered at Medicine Lodge Creek in Kansas to hear a proposal from U.S. officials intended to end the violence on the Southern Plains.

Under the government’s plan, the United States would encourage white settlement north of the Arkansas River.

The Indians would move onto reservations in what is now Oklahoma, where they could receive food and supplies for 30 years, be provided schools for their children, and taught how to farm.

The Kiowa chief Satanta objected.

Man as Satanta: I want you to understand what I say.

Write it on paper.

I don’t want to settle.

I love to roam over the prairies.

There I feel free and happy, but when we settle down, we grow pale and die.

Narrator: “Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep,” Ten Bears of the Comanche added.

“Do not speak of it more.”

The peace commissioners promised that, south of the Arkansas, non-Indians would be prohibited from settlement, and the tribes could continue hunting there “so long,” the treaty said, “as the buffalo may range there in such numbers as justify the chase.”

Though not every band of each tribe was represented, the treaty was signed and sent to Congress.

The Kiowa calendar for that year showed an Indian and a white man shaking hands near a grove of trees.

West: The government comes away from that treaty thinking that it has set in motion this transformation of Indian peoples from hunting, gathering, semi-nomadic people to farmers.

The Comanches and Kiowas come away from that treaty thinking that they have now permission to continue doing what they have always done, and therefore achieving absolutely nothing.

Narrator: A year later, farther north, at Fort Laramie on the Platte, a similar treaty was signed by some of the Lakota Sioux.

In exchange for the government abandoning its Army forts in Wyoming’s Powder River country, a vast Sioux reservation was created, encompassing half of present-day South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills.

The treaty also contained a clause stating the Lakotas were free to hunt outside the reservation, so long as there were buffalo.

General William Tecumseh Sherman, now in command of the army in the West, reluctantly agreed to the hunting concession.

“This may lead to collisions,” Sherman wrote his brother, “but it will not be long before all the buffaloes are extinct near and between the railroads.”

[“Mandan Warriors Calling Song” by Keith Bear playing] Man: “We want to go on the buffalo hunt “so long as there are any buffaloes.

“We are afraid when we have no meat “to offer the Great Spirit, “he will be angry and punish us.

Those buffalo are mine.”

Pe-ta-na-sharo.

Narrator: In 1872, a hunt took place in southwestern Nebraska.

Under the government’s Peace Policy, the Pawnees had also been placed on a reservation, but were given permission to leave it in their annual search for bison herds, provided they were chaperoned by white men, whose job was to make sure there were no troubles with settlers now living on the Pawnees’ old homelands.

Joining the hunt was a 22-year-old son of a prominent Wall Street banker, George Bird Grinnell.

As a student at Yale, he had ventured west for the first time as part of a paleontology expedition that unearthed the bones of extinct animals, including a pterodactyl and a tiny eohippus, the world’s first known horse.

Michael Punke: He has this incredibly hands-on, tangible experience where they discover a hundred extinct species.

So, for somebody of that era, he understands, in a very unique way, that extinction is something that’s possible.

Narrator: Now the Pawnees introduced Grinnell to some of their sacred rituals before going after the bison.

“The success of the hunt,” he wrote, “was supposed “to depend largely upon the respect shown to the buffalo.”

[Galloping hoofbeats] He marveled at how disciplined the Pawnee hunters were, how skillfully they handled their horses, and how the whole tribe celebrated after the successful hunt.

[Men whooping] Punke: That night, when he’s sitting around the campfire with the Pawnee, he has this epiphany, and Grinnell was somebody who, throughout his life, could see what was coming before most other people.

Man as Grinnell: Their days are numbered, and unless some action on this subject is speedily taken, not only by the States and Territories, but by the National Government, these shaggy brown beasts, these cattle upon a thousand hills, will ere long be among the things of the past.

♪ [“Kills Tomorrow” by Bobby Horton playing] [Distant train whistle blows] Narrator: In the fall of 1872, tracks for a new railroad– the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe– reached a small settlement that had grown up around Fort Dodge, on the north shore of the Arkansas River.

Town builders had originally hoped to name it Buffalo City, but the postal service turned them down, since Kansas already had a town by that name.

[Horse whinnies] So they christened it Dodge City, in honor of the nearby fort.

The first construction train to arrive was delayed two hours, waiting for a bison herd three miles long to pass in front of it.

Buffalo often grazed so close to Dodge City, one merchant shot them from the fence of his corral for his hogs to feed on.

But news from the East was about to transform life on the Southern Plains yet again.

Commercial tanners in Europe, England, and Philadelphia had developed a way to efficiently process stiff buffalo hides into a supple but durable leather, as good as a cow’s hide, and especially suitable for the belts used to drive industrial machines.

Andrew Isenberg: There’s a shortage of leather.

Leather is the fifth-largest industry in the United States, and so one of the reasons why this industrial society reaches out into the Great Plains to consume bison hides is just to feed this appetite for leather.

Narrator: Dealers clamored for as many hides as they could get and offered more than $3.00 for each one.

A young Vermonter named J. Wright Mooar brought in 305 hides and made more than $1,000 in a month’s time– nearly twice what an average day worker back East made in a year.

Word that there was money to be made in hides spread quickly, and soon, more men flocked to Dodge City– 2,000 of them, according to one newspaper– each dreaming of striking it rich.

[“Shadows On The Marsh” by Al Petteway playing] Man: “The whole Western country went buffalo-wild.

“It was like a gold rush.

“Men left jobs, businesses, “wives and children.

“There were uncounted millions of the beasts.

“They didn’t belong to anybody.

“If you could kill them, what they brought was yours.

They were like walking gold pieces.”

Frank Mayer.

[Gunshot] Narrator: Frank Mayer from Pennsylvania sank everything he owned into a hunting outfit: wagons, mules, camp equipment, and firearms.

They called themselves “buffalo runners” because buffalo runner was kind of a romantic term that kind of suggested that there was some fair chase, uh, sort of fair fight going on.

The notion of galloping up on a trusty steed beside a charging buffalo and killing it was the romantic notion of how buffalo were killed.

That’s very different, of course, from how commercial hunting actually worked.

Narrator: For newcomers, Frank Mayer said, “Shooting from the back of a running horse was always uncertain.”

It meant too many wasted shots, too many wounded buffalo, too many carcasses of whatever bison he managed to kill scattered across greater distances.

And the rifles they used often required several shots to bring a buffalo down.

“I was a businessman,” Mayer said.

“I wanted efficiency.”

One hunter wrote a letter to the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company in Connecticut, asking for a better gun.

Sharps responded with a series of new models, as did other manufacturers.

The rifles weighed 12 to 16 pounds, had longer and wider barrels that could handle larger amounts of gunpowder to fire heavier slugs of lead with great accuracy over a distance of 400 yards, even reach targets more than a thousand yards away.

[Gunshot echoes] The most effective killing technique was called a “stand.”

A hunter carefully positioned himself about 200 to 300 yards downwind from the herd.

Then he picked out a lead buffalo, took careful aim, and fired, usually shooting for the lungs.

[Gunshot] Steven Rinella: They don’t shoot for the shoulder.

They shoot it through the lungs.

When you shoot their lungs, it would tend to not move far.

It would stand there, get woozy, fall over dead.

The other animals see the lead animal laying there, and they don’t want to move.

Now, if they started to drift, you’d shoot whoever is out in the lead of that drift… [Gunshot] anything you can do to not induce panic, and they would just whittle away at these things.

[Gunshot] Duncan: Bang!

Another one goes down.

They mill around and they’re still not spooked.

[Gunshots] This was short-circuiting 10,000 years… of defense mechanism that had evolved over time.

Narrator: Native people who saw the new buffalo guns in action said it “shoots today and kills tomorrow.”

[Gunshot] Duncan: Kills tomorrow?

That’s exactly what was happening.

It was killing tomorrow for the bison and for the people who relied on it.

[“Firesong” by Kevin MacLeod playing] Woman as Old Lady Horse: The white men hired hunters to do nothing but kill the buffalo.

Up and down the plains these men ranged, shooting sometimes as many as a hundred a day.

[Horse whinnies] Behind them came the skinners with their wagons.

They piled the hides into the wagons until they were full and then took their loads to the railroad stations.

Man as Frank Mayer: It was a harvest.

We were the harvesters.

We never killed all the buff we could, but only as many as our skinners could handle.

Narrator: The skinners went to work, stripping the hide off the carcasses from the neck down.

Some outfits also took some of the meat for sale.

Most just removed the tongues, worth 25 cents each, and left everything else– 600 to 800 pounds of meat, along with the hooves and the head and the horns– to rot.

Man: “Where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses.”

[Flies buzzing] “The air was foul “with a sickening stench, and the vast plain, “which only a short 12 months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”

Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.

Duncan: This is the Industrial Revolution arriving on the magnificent Great Plains.

They were turning it into a–a factory floor.

You know, they–instead of assembling something, though, they were disassembling something.

They were disassembling an animal and just taking a certain part of it and leaving the rest.

And then the conveyer belt was the railroads that would take the disassembled part back to run a machine on the East Coast.

It was a factory, and the– and the buffalo hunters, whatever we might want to think about them, they were, in essence, you know, they were factory workers.

[Continuing gunshots] It had this metronomic, industrial beat to it.

Relentless, relentless, relentless.

Narrator: More than a million hides made their way East from the southern Plains before the end of 1873.

[Dogs bark, cattle low] Even that number did not account for the actual damage to the bison.

If they shot the buffalo more than once, that could destroy the hide.

If the skinners were not good at their work, the skinners could destroy the hide.

If the hides were staked out and there was a rainstorm, the hides could rot.

Insects came along and chewed on the hides.

So, by one estimate, it– you had to kill about four buffalo to get one hide– hide to market, so not only was the carcass wasted, but even the hides were wasted in this industry.

[“The Shores of Ogygia” by Bobby Horton playing] Narrator: Uncounted numbers of wounded buffalo wandered off and died.

So did motherless calves.

[Calf crying] Man: It was a business proposition for them.

A hide’s a hide.

If you shoot the mother of a calf, what the hell?

But those calves, I would venture every one of them died.

They don’t survive if they don’t have their mother.

It was a ugly, ugly business.

[Continuing gunshots] Man as Mayer: “With 5,000 rifles a day leveled at him, “it wasn’t long till there was very little of him, or her, left to shoot.”

“Within a year, or a year and a half “after I got into the business, “we hit what I now know is called diminishing returns.

“We called it a scarcity of buffalo, “and my dreams of fortune– they grew dimmer and dimmer as the months went by.”

Frank Mayer.

Narrator: The hide yards at Dodge City now stood empty.

But south of the Arkansas River– in the area reserved by the Medicine Lodge Treaty solely for Native hunting– massive herds of buffalo still roamed.

The Vermonter J. Wright Mooar crossed over to investigate.

[Galloping hoofbeats] “For five days,” he said, “we rode through and camped in a mobile sea of living buffalo.”

Back at Fort Dodge, he and other hunters asked the commander what the army would do if they trespassed onto the treaty lands.

“If I were a buffalo hunter,” the officer replied, “I would hunt buffalo where the buffalo are.”

West: The military in the West certainly had a motive to do what they could to eliminate as many bison as they could because they understood the obvious, that the bison were key to the Native economy.

If you cut the legs from under that economy, then you’re not going to have much resistance from Native people.

The army was a facilitator in the destruction of the bison.

They didn’t do it themselves, but they certainly helped it and supported it.

I think it was a deliberate policy of the U.S. government for the bison to be destroyed.

It was not something that they wrote down and propagated through legislation.

But, I think, through all sorts of informal practices and lots of winking and nudging, the destruction of the buffalo is something that was– was very much encouraged.

Man: “The Arkansas was called the dead line, “south of which no hunter should go, “but as buffalo grew fewer in number, “we gazed longingly across the sandy wastes “that marked the course of that river.

“The oftener we looked, the more eager “we became to tempt fate.

“Even the sky looked more inviting in that direction.

So, we crossed over.”

Billy Dixon.

♪ [“Land of the Sky” by Al Petteway, Amy White playing] [Wind howling] Isenberg: There are a couple of army officers who write to people in the East, and they say, “Look, we’ve got to put a stop to this.

“You’re causing a lot of misery, “which may just create more violence “than solving the problem of violence in the Great Plains.”

Narrator: In early 1874, Congressman Greenbury Lafayette Fort of Illinois proposed legislation making it “unlawful “for any person who is not an Indian “to kill, wound, or in any way “destroy any female buffalo, of any age, “found at large within the boundaries of the Territories of the United States.”

Reformers like Representative Fort had been galvanized by reports of the slaughter underway on the southern Plains.

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was also campaigning for something to be done.

But the Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, had already made his position clear.

Man as Delano: I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from the 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.

White: When there was a desire to connect the East Coast and the West Coast, there were two great impediments.

One was bison, the other was Indigenous people, and they thought they could solve the second by eliminating the first.

It was kind of a “two-fer.”

Narrator: Arguing against the bill’s passage, Congressman James Garfield of Ohio said, “It may be possible that in our mercy to the buffalo, we may be cruel to the Indian.”

Eliminating the herds, he added, would “be the best thing which could happen for the betterment of our Indian question.”

To Congressman Fort, that argument was absurd.

“I am not in favor,” he said, “of civilizing the Indian by starving him to death.”

[Gavel pounds] In the end, the House passed the buffalo protection bill and sent it to the Senate, which also voted in favor of it.

Duncan: I’m actually surprised the bill passed, given the times, but it did.

And it went to Grant’s desk and, of course, Grant would be listening to his Secretary of the Interior and so he didn’t actually veto it, but Congress recessed, and so, with not signing it, he, in effect, killed the bill.

Narrator: It was clear the American government would not defend the American buffalo.

Duncan: It doesn’t really matter whether it was an official policy or a secret policy or no policy at all.

It had the same effect for the bison, who were eliminated, and for the people who, for thousands of years, had depended on those animals.

The U.S. government made treaties with the Indians when they wanted something and it was convenient.

And the second that the treaty was inconvenient and they wanted something else, they broke the treaty.

And that pattern permeates the history of the United States government with Indigenous peoples.

[“Northwest Territory” by Tony Ellis playing] Narrator: In 1874, things got worse.

Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills, an area considered sacred by the Lakota and reserved exclusively for them by treaty.

A prospector Custer brought along started searching for gold there.

Meanwhile, farther south, hide hunters continued to cross the Arkansas River into the buffalo range supposedly off-limits to whites and brazenly established outposts to keep themselves supplied with ammunition and whatever else they needed to continue their deadly business.

Man: “Your people make big talk “and sometimes make war if an Indian kills “a white man’s ox to keep his wife “and children from starving.

“What do you think my people ought to do “when they see their cattle– the buffalo– killed by your race when they are not hungry?”

Little Robe.

[Flash bulb pops] Man as Mayer: “The Indians sensed that we were “taking away their birthright “and that with every boom of a buffalo rifle, “their tenure on their homeland became weakened, “and that eventually, they would have “no homeland and no buffalo.

“So they did what you and I would do “if our existence were jeopardized: they fought.”

Frank Mayer.

Narrator: Incensed by the treaty violations in the southern and northern Plains, warriors from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Comanche struck back, raiding stagecoaches, wagon trains, and homesteads.

Among the Quahada band of Comanches was a tall 26-year-old, who was already rising in leadership, named Quanah.

He had been born near the sacred Wichita Mountains, the oldest son of a prominent chief and a white woman, Cynthia Ann Parker, who had been taken captive as a child and adopted into the Comanche tribe.

[Gunfire] In 1860, while Quanah and his father and most of the other warriors were gone, Texas Rangers overran their village, killed a number of people, and took his mother and baby sister into custody.

Man: It was a massacre, but it wasn’t a famous thing you read about in Texas history.

They eventually took her back to her–her people, but she didn’t want to go.

She never wanted to go back because she was Comanche.

Narrator: Cynthia tried several times to rejoin the Comanches without success.

She lost her young daughter to pneumonia.

Unable to live among her people, Cynthia died in despair.

Her son Quanah had already distinguished himself with his fearless courage, leading attacks on Texans, against whom he harbored an implacable hatred for kidnapping his mother and sister.

He had attended the Medicine Lodge Treaty negotiations, which the Quahadas had adamantly refused to sign.

For seven years, they had stayed away from the reservation, and Quanah took part in skirmishes with the soldiers sent to force them in.

Now, at the yearly Sun Dance, a war against the hide hunters was being planned.

Man: Quanah knew that they had to destroy the buffalo hunters.

It becomes a matter of defense, of defending your people, of defending your family, of defending the buffalo.

Narrator: A Comanche medicine man named Isatai announced that in a vision, he had been given special powers to help the tribes retake their homelands and restore the old ways.

Man: “Isatai was making big talk at that time.

“He says, ‘God told me “‘we are going to kill lots of white men.

“‘I will stop the bullets in their guns.

“‘Bullets will not pierce our shirts.

We will kill them all.'”

Quanah.

[Melody by Bobby Horton playing] Narrator: With Quanah and Isatai leading, more than 300 Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne set off for Adobe Walls, a trading post in the Texas Panhandle servicing the buffalo hunters who were trespassing.

[Galloping hoofbeats] Twenty-nine people were there when the Indians attacked at dawn on June 27, 1874.

Two white men were killed in the early moments, as hide hunters who had been sleeping under their wagons scrambled to defend themselves before taking shelter in the buildings.

Billy Dixon helped drive off the attack.

[Door slams] Man as Dixon: For the first half-hour, the Indians were reckless and daring enough to ride up and strike the doors with the butts of their guns.

[Gunfire] Finally, the buffalo hunters all got straightened out and were firing with deadly effect.

The Indians stood up against this for a while, but gradually began falling back, as we were emptying rawhide saddles entirely too fast for Indian safety.

Narrator: Seeing a group of Indians on a bluff more than 3/4 of a mile away, the hunters urged Dixon to take a shot with his big Sharps buffalo rifle.

“I took careful aim and pulled the trigger,” he said.

“We saw an Indian fall from his horse.”

The bullet had struck before the rider heard the sound of Dixon’s rifle.

[Galloping hoofbeats] Fifteen warriors had died in the initial attack.

Quanah was wounded, but kept fighting.

“All the Cheyennes were very mad at Isatai,” Quanah remembered.

They shouted, “What’s the matter with your medicine?”

One Cheyenne beat him with a riding whip.

[“Full Moon Insomnia” by Randy Granger playing] Narrator: After the battle of Adobe Walls, Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors regrouped and embarked on new raids across Texas, Colorado, and parts of New Mexico and Kansas that left 190 white people dead.

President Grant put the reservations under military control.

Any Indians who did not return were to be considered “hostile” and hunted down.

On the morning of September 28, 1874, Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie and 13 companies of cavalry and infantry reached the rim of Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle.

Peering down, he saw an array of encampments spread along the canyon floor.

He ordered his men down a narrow trail, and they began their charge.

[Men shouting] The villagers fled up the canyon walls, while warriors covered their retreat.

Duncan: Not many people died in the battle of Palo Duro Canyon, but what Mackenzie was able to do was they had left their tepees, their winter food supplies, and their horse herd, and he gathered up the food supplies and the tepees, set them on fire.

[Horses whinnying] Flores: Then, he takes this pony herd of 1,450 horses.

He lets his Indian auxiliaries have the pick of about 150 of those horses, and then he has his forces shoot down all the remaining animals.

It was kind of a scorched-earth strategy: “I’m not going to keep these horses.

We’re just gonna kill ’em.”

We have elders today who say that if you go to that site that you can still hear– you can still hear those horses and the destruction and the–and the crying that went forth, um, so long ago.

[“Comanche Riding Song,” by Randy Granger playing] Narrator: For the rest of the fall and into the winter, the army’s columns patrolled the Panhandle, ceaselessly pursuing any straggling bands who didn’t return to the reservation.

Many of them, reduced to eating roots and rodents to survive, began to starve.

In February of 1875, the last of the Kiowas came in to the reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, then the Cheyenne in March, followed by some Comanches.

By May, only Quanah and his 400 Quahadas– who still had some horses– remained free.

Tahmahkera: It’s said that Quanah went up on a hill and drew a buffalo robe over his head and was waiting for signs, for direction.

It’s said that a wolf came along and howled and took off in the direction of Fort Sill.

It’s said that an eagle flew overhead and began flying in the direction of Fort Sill.

Quanah took those as signs to finally go to Fort Sill with the other Quahadas.

[“Shady Grove/I Will Arise” by Bobby Horton playing] Narrator: With the Indians of the southern Plains confined to reservations, the hide hunters– 3,000 of them, by one estimate– went back to work.

They considered 1876 “a banner year for buffalo” in the Texas Panhandle.

John Cook, who had left Kansas to join the hunt, killed 88 buffalo in one stand, alternating between two rifles when one overheated.

Man as Cook: A slight feeling of remorse would come over me for the part I was taking in this greatest of all hunts to the death.

Narrator: “As I walked through where the carcasses lay the thickest,” he later recounted, “I could not help but think that I had done wrong to make such a slaughter for the hides alone.”

Man as Cook: Then I would justify myself and pictured a white schoolhouse on that knoll yonder, where a maid was teaching future generals and statesmen the necessity of becoming familiar with the three Rs.

Back on that plateau, I could see a courthouse of a thriving county seat.

Some of these days, we will hear the whistle and shriek of a locomotive as she comes through the gap.

And not long until we can hear the lowing of cattle and the bleating sheep and the morning crow of the barnyard rooster.

Narrator: Frank Mayer was less sentimental about it all.

Man as Mayer: Maybe we runners served our purpose in helping abolish the buffalo; maybe it was our ruthless harvesting of him which telescoped the control of the Indian by a decade or maybe more.

Or maybe I am just rationalizing.

[Knife slicing] Maybe we were just a greedy lot who wanted to get ours, and to hell with posterity, the buffalo, and anyone else, just so we kept our scalps on and our money pouches filled.

I think maybe that’s the way it was.

Narrator: By 1877– only three years after the fight at Adobe Walls– the immense herds south of the Arkansas had been reduced to a few scattered groups.

By 1878, even those were disappearing.

Ranches, homesteads, and small towns were starting to fill what had been the buffalo’s domain.

For every Indian in the West, there were now 40 whites.

The hide hunters’ trading posts in Texas began closing.

Dodge City was turning into a raucous cow town, where live cattle– not buffalo hides– were being loaded onto the railroad cars.

[Wolves howling] Man as Mayer: We had killed the golden goose.

Presently, all I saw was rotting red carcasses or bleaching white bones.

And the stench was so great that at a mile away from a stand, you could smell it and be forced to hold your nose.

Only the coyotes and wolves didn’t seem to mind.

[“Horse Stealing Song” by Joseph Fire Crow playing] Narrator: To bolster his reservation’s paltry food supply, Quanah got permission from the army to lead 300 Comanches and Kiowas on a buffalo hunt.

They moved south, across familiar territory that now seemed an alien landscape, littered with bison carcasses.

Tahmahkera: You know, it’s in such a short span of time where the buffalo are plentiful, where that way of life is going so strong.

And…

I can only imagine… the scenes of carnage… the rotting smells… while en route to search for buffalo… and so, on our lands are all these visual reminders of what others had done to us and to a way of life.

Momaday: Life was over, in a sense, you know, and to see such a thing is to see the death of a god.

Narrator: In disbelief, Quanah’s group pushed on to Palo Duro Canyon, which had always been a reliable refuge for the bison.

Instead of buffalo, they found a herd of cattle.

The rancher who owned them rode out to parley.

Charles Goodnight had fought against Indians as a Texas Ranger, and after the battle of Palo Duro Canyon, he established the first cattle ranch there.

Tahmahkera: Goodnight actually rode out to meet them when he saw them coming.

He knew that Comanches respected bravery.

They respected that kind of strength, and he rode out to meet them to, hopefully, avoid any certain violent conflict.

Duncan: He said, “I’m Charles Goodnight and I just moved my ranch down here from Colorado.”

He didn’t want to say he was a Texan because the Comanches and Texans were mortal enemies.

So Goodnight and Quanah start talking with each other, uh, and they eventually set up something of their own treaty.

Narrator: Goodnight told them there were no longer any buffalo in the canyon, but they could continue their hunt to see for themselves that it was true.

In the meantime, if they stayed peaceful, Goodnight said Quanah’s party could kill two of his cows every other day so they had something to eat.

Ron Parker: So Quanah went up to look for the buffalo and there was none, and–and then he realized that his way of life and, um, what they depended on, it was no more.

Narrator: Back on their reservation near the Wichita Mountains, the Kiowas recorded the summer of 1879 as the “horse-eating” time.

[“Coyote Dance” by Robbie Robertson playing] Woman as Old Lady Horse: “The buffalo saw “that their day was over.

They could protect their people no longer.”

“The Kiowas were camped on the north side “of Mount Scott.

“One young woman got up very early in the morning.

“The dawn mist was still rising from Medicine Creek, “and as she looked across the water, “peering through the haze, “she saw the last buffalo herd appear like a spirit dream.”

“Straight to Mount Scott the leader of the herd walked.

“Behind him came the cows and their calves, “and the few young males who had survived.

“As the woman watched, the face of the mountain opened.”

[Distant Native American women chanting] “Inside Mount Scott, “the world was green and fresh, “as it had been when she was a small girl.

“The rivers ran clear, “not red.

“Into this world of beauty “the buffalo walked, never to be seen again.”

Old Lady Horse.

[Distant Native American men chanting] Momaday: Old Lady Horse.

I want to cry when I think of her.

I see what she saw, a farewell of tragic significance.

[Distant chanting continues] It’s a shadow within a shadow.

It’s a dark, massive animal vitality moving inexorably away from existence.

And it has, for every Native American man, woman, and child– a significance that probably is ineffable.

[“Pehin Hanska Okicize Olowan” by Lakota Thunder playing] [Native American men vocalizing] Man: “I want to hunt in this place.

“I want you to turn back from here.

“If you don’t, I will fight you.

“I will remain what I am “until I die, a hunter, “and when there are no buffalo or other game, “I will send my children to hunt “and live on prairie mice, for where “an Indian is shut up in one place, his body becomes weak.”

Sitting Bull.

Narrator: On the northern Plains, where the railroad had not yet arrived, the buffalo were still plentiful.

Duncan: The worst sentence that can ever be written about Native people is, “And then gold was discovered on their land.”

It happened in California.

It happened in Georgia, with the Cherokee.

It happened in Montana.

It happened in the Black Hills.

Punke: The Custer expedition discovers gold, and the Gold Rush to the Black Hills is on.

The Lakota are enraged because, once again, this is a direct violation of an explicit treaty provision.

The U.S. government simply takes the Black Hills, orders the tribes onto a smaller reservation, and deems all of the tribes that are not compliant with that, uh, new edict to be enemies of the U.S. government.

Narrator: Large bands of the Lakota had refused to stay on their reservation and went to hunt in the rich buffalo ranges of Wyoming’s Powder River and the eastern plains of Montana.

They included the Hunkpapas, led by a chief whose name, Tatanka Iyotake, describes an intractable buffalo, resolute in the face of his enemies– Sitting Bull.

The Lakotas attacked the survey crews and military escorts working to extend the Northern Pacific Railway westward into the heart of their hunting grounds.

A military campaign to drive them back to the reservation had resulted in disaster, when George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 members of his 7th Cavalry were annihilated on the Little Bighorn by Sitting Bull and his allies in 1876.

[Dog barks] The army’s response was the same as it had been in the southern Plains: a relentless pursuit that within a year forced the surrender of one band after another.

But Sitting Bull and his people had escaped across the border into Canada, beyond the reach of American troops, where he intended to continue living off the buffalo.

By 1880, the Canadian herd was gone, too.

Sitting Bull’s people began to starve.

In 1881, he led his 167 followers south, across the border, and surrendered.

At the Standing Rock reservation, near the spot where he was born, Sitting Bull composed his own song.

“A warrior I have been,” he sang.

“Now it is all over.

A hard time I have.”

[Train whistle blowing] That same year, the Northern Pacific reached Miles City in Montana Territory.

Soon, 5,000 hide hunters and skinners were spilling over the plains, from the Yellowstone River to the Upper Missouri, where they set up what one army lieutenant called “a cordon of camps, blocking the great ranges “and rendering it impossible for scarcely a single bison to escape.”

[Gunshot] The killing commenced all over again.

[“Wagoner’s Lad” by Jacqueline Schwab playing] Narrator: Meanwhile, in New York, 31-year-old George Bird Grinnell had become editor of “Forest and Stream,” a publication for hunters and fishermen that he was prodding to take on issues of conservation with more urgency.

During the hide-hunting on the southern Plains, he had advocated for policies he called “just” and “honest” toward Native Americans that would, he wrote, “conscientiously aid “in the increase of the buffalo, instead of furthering its foolish and reckless slaughter.”

Now Grinnell turned his attention to what was unfolding in Montana.

Man as Grinnell: Up to within a few years ago, the valley of the Yellowstone River has been a magnificent hunting ground.

The progress of the Northern Pacific Railroad, however, has changed all this.

The buffalo will disappear unless steps are taken to protect it there.

[Buffalo grunts] Punke: This is the era of the myth of inexhaustibility, the belief that the West is so vast, that the resources are so vast that they can never be exhausted.

But it was so much in front of them, what was happening, that I think they began to figure it out.

It became more and more difficult to find buffalo, and there were ominous signs.

Weird things began to happen, like they would find herds that were comprised entirely of calves.

But there also was a capacity to deny and to believe that they had just gone over the next ridge line, gone into the next territory, and so all of that kind of mixes together.

Narrator: In Miles City, in the fall of 1883, the hide hunters prepared for another winter on the Plains, believing there must still be plenty of buffalo between the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers.

They came back in the spring with almost nothing to show for their efforts.

Steven Rinella: There are people in Miles City who had been hide hunters, and they’re simply lolling around, waiting for the return of the herds.

They still thought there has to be some somewhere.

When they had finished, they didn’t know they’d finished.

They felt that, well, it can’t be over…and it was over.

[Train chugging] Narrator: In 1884, the total number of hides brought to the Northern Pacific fit in a single boxcar.

[Train whistle blows] [“Juniper” by Kevin Hoetger, Kyle Crusham playing] Man as Mayer: “One by one, we runners “put up our buffalo rifles, “sold them, gave them away, “or kept them for other hunting, “and left the ranges.

“And there settled over them “a vast quiet.

The buffalo was gone.”

Frank Mayer.

There is no… no story anywhere in world history that involves as large a destruction of wild animals as happened in North America in the Western United States, in particular, between 1800 and about 1890.

I mean, it is the largest destruction of animal life discoverable in modern world history.

Lapier: Why Americans are so destructive, I think, is an important question to ask.

Why is that part of our story?

Why is that part of our history?

Narrator: When the hide hunters went broke, some turned to killing other animals for the market, like antelope, elk, and grizzly bears.

With wolf pelts worth $2.00 each in New York City, some hunters began lacing bison carcasses with strychnine, which poisoned not only wolves, but other scavengers: coyotes, foxes, bobcats, skunks, vultures, ravens, eagles.

[Eagle screeches] Other buffalo hunters left to pursue other work.

[“Two Rivers” by Larry Unger, Ginny Snowe playing] Native people had no choice.

They had to stay, and without buffalo meat to supplement their meager government rations, many starved.

On the Blackfeet reservation, an inspector checked on 23 lodges in one village.

He reported seeing a rabbit being cooked in one and a steer hoof in another.

The other 21 lodges had no food at all.

Six hundred Blackfeet– a quarter of the tribe– perished during that winter of famine.

Marcia Pablo: But that’s really what the government wanted, was for Indian people to have to turn to the government.

And they had to take away all of the resources for that to happen.

It was devastating, and it was heartbreaking.

We had the songs, but no buffalo to sing ’em to.

It’s like a spiritual trauma.

Woman as Pretty Shield: “Nobody believed, even then, “that the white man could kill all the buffalo, “even when he did not want the meat.

“Not believing their own eyes, “our hunters rode very far looking for buffalo, “so far away that even if they found a herd, we could not have reached it in half a moon.”

“‘Nothing, we found nothing,’ “they told us, and then, hungry, “they stared at the empty plains, as though dreaming.”

Pretty Shield.

♪ Narrator: “A cold wind blew across the prairie when the last buffalo fell,” Sitting Bull said.

“A death wind for my people.”

Baker: It was devastating for us.

That would have been the most heartbreaking thing.

I couldn’t imagine it.

I couldn’t imagine the people, what they were– what they went through, especially a father, saying, “I got to– “I got to take care of my children.

“I got to take care of my clan, I got to take care of my society, and I can’t do it.”

[“Kills Tomorrow” by Bobby Horton playing] Narrator: Now a new buffalo business sprang up.

Millions of buffalo skulls and bones were bleaching under the prairie sun, and it turned out there was money to be made from them, too.

Companies in the East offered an average of $8.00 a ton for bones they could grind into fertilizer or use in refining sugar.

Buffalo horns were turned into buttons, combs, and knife handles.

Hooves became glue.

Homesteaders in Nebraska and Kansas– desperate for cash because drought was withering their crops–turned to harvesting the skulls and skeletons still littering the Plains.

One entrepreneur in Texas stacked mounds of bones along the tracks of the Fort Worth and Denver Railroad and made $25,000.

“Buffalo bones,” a Kansas newspaper reported, “are now legal tender in Dodge City.”

A company in St. Louis processed more than one million tons of bison bones.

The Michigan Carbon Works became Detroit’s largest industry.

In the end, the bone trade would generate more profits– for the bone pickers, the railroads, and the industries– than the buffalo hides ever had.

Momaday: Even what remained of them was being taken away from their native ground.

It was–it was, like, uh, grave-robbing, in a way.

It just strikes me as–as, uh… a society trying to clean up, uh, you know, a crime scene.

This is the murder of buffalo, our brothers, and let’s get rid of that, let’s hide it.

Let’s get not only the buffalo out, let’s get the bones out, too.

Baker: So they took everything from us, and we understood that as a way of killing us off.

They’re taking away our grocery store, and that’s what they did; the buffalo was our grocery store.

They killed the spirit of the buffalo, in some cases, we thought.

But that’s why our prayers got stronger.

That’s why our people got stronger; they had to.

If they didn’t, we would have been killed off like the buffalo.

[“Land of Rest” by Bobby Horton playing] Narrator: By 1885, a species once numbering in the tens of millions had been reduced to fewer than a thousand– mostly small groups of a dozen or less, scattered in different corners across the West.

Even those survivors were under assault from any hunters who could find them, looking now for trophy heads to hang on someone’s wall.

The American buffalo was on the brink of extinction.

But in a handful of places, people had begun trying to rescue a few bison and start small, private herds.

In the Texas Panhandle, Charles Goodnight, at the urging of his wife Molly, had brought home two buffalo calves, which she was nurturing.

In northwestern Montana, a young Pend d’Oreille Indian named Latatí had herded six calves from the Great Plains over the Rocky Mountains to the Flathead reservation.

In South Dakota, Fred Dupuis and Good Elk Woman– a French-Canadian rancher and his Lakota wife– had saved five calves from slaughter, bringing them home in a buckboard.

And in a remote corner of the recently created Yellowstone National Park, the last free-roaming bison herd in the United States had found a semblance of sanctuary, though, even there, poachers were beginning to whittle their numbers down.

At the same time, George Bird Grinnell had begun a campaign to provide the park– and its buffalo– the protection they both needed for their survival.

Man as Grinnell: “We have seen the Indian and the game “retreat before the white man and the cattle “and beheld the tide of settlement move forward, “which threatens before long “to leave no portion of our vast territory “unbroken by the farmer’s plow “or untrodden by his flocks.

“There is one spot left, “a single rock “about which this tide will break, “and past which it will sweep, “leaving it undefiled “by the unsightly traces of civilization.

“Here, “in this Yellowstone Park, “the large game of the West may be preserved “from extermination in this, their last refuge.”

George Bird Grinnell.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Announcer: Next time on “The American Buffalo”… Man: You don’t get a lot of chances to correct history’s mistakes.

Announcer: Unlikely alliances are formed.

Woman: The early conservation movement is full of people who did the right thing for the wrong reason.

Announcer: But is it already too late?

This is the buffalo’s last chance.

Man: This is not just a story of tragedy.

This is a story of persevering and continuing on.

Announcer: Don’t miss the conclusion of “The American Buffalo,” next time.

Announcer: Visit pbs.org or scan this QR code with your smart device to explore more of the story of the American buffalo, including interviews with the filmmakers, essays, classroom materials, and more.

Announcer: To order “The American Buffalo” on DVD or Blu-Ray, or the companion book, visit ShopPBS or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

The CD is also available.

Also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ O0 C1 Announcer: Stories hold the power to draw us together and shape our tomorrow.

If we’re courageous enough to look, lessons are written in our history.

♪ ♪ Announcer: Major funding for “The American Buffalo” was provided by the Better Angels Society and its members; the Margaret A. Cargill Foundation Fund at the Saint Paul & Minnesota Foundation; Diane and Hal Brierley; the Keith Campbell Foundation for the Environment; John and Catherine Debs; Kissick Family Foundation; Fred and Donna Seigel; by Jacqueline Mars, John and Leslie McQuown, and Mr. and Mrs. Paul Tudor Jones.

Funding was also provided by the Volgenau Foundation and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.