Analysis: The Extermination of the American Bison

Date: 1889

Author: William T. Hornady

Genre: article; report

Summary Overview

William Hornady was the director of the newly established National Zoological Gardens in Washington when this article was published. As a staff member of what is now the Smithsonian Institution, Hornady was assigned the task of making certain it had enough buffalo specimens. Having ascertained that there were not enough, he traveled to the western United States to secure more. There, he discovered that the tens of millions of wild buffalo had been reduced to about one thousand. The following report is an impassioned plea for the conservation of the species. In this document, the author briefly outlines parts of the known history of the buffalo, the cause of the decrease in numbers, and some initial plans for keeping the species from going extinct. This is the first formal plea for saving the North American Bison, and it was instrumental in their preservation.

Defining Moment

The wilderness of the American West had been rapidly disappearing since the end of the Civil War. The movement of people seeking new opportunities through mining, faming, or ranching; the completion of the transcontinental railroad; and the push to force the Native Americans to adopt a new way of life, all meant that much of the wilderness was being transformed to meet the needs of people in the East. While the first national park had preserved one unique location almost two decades prior to the publishing of Hornady's call to action, most of the land had been open to development. Where there were expanses of grass, people saw the opportunity for cattle to graze as well as the possibility of tilling the soil. The buffalo that roamed there were a nuisance for travelers and could be killed for their meat and hides. Thus, just as trees had been cleared for fields when people settled east of the Mississippi River, most non-Native Americans believed the buffalo needed to be cleared from the Great Plains in order that the land could be used. A second benefit, as perceived by the American government, was that the Native Americans would lose their traditional source of food and hides, forcing them to move to the reservations and follow a more “civilized” way of life.

Thus, while the decrease in the number of North American bison had begun when the first people arrived with guns, it had rapidly declined during the 1830s and then at a much faster rate in the two decades since the Civil War. When Hornady researched the situation, he was astounded and appalled. His resulting work was the first major effort in North America, and probably the world, to save what had become a highly endangered species. Unlike some who have become interested in an environmental cause, Hornady had the position and resources to make a substantial contribution to saving the buffalo. He was able to raise public awareness regarding the issue, and he was able to use zoological resources for a captive breeding program, to help the species survive. The reprinting for the general public of what had originally been part of a much longer internal government report, meant that people were made aware that their vision of the past, with millions of buffalo roaming the plains, was not an accurate picture of the world in 1889. Although there are other more famous conservationists from this era, for the North American bison, Hornady was the person who should be credited with the survival of the species.

Author Biography

Dr. William Temple Hornady (1854–1937) was born to William Hornady, Sr. and Martha Varner Hornady in Indiana. However, his education in zoology was obtained at two schools in Iowa. He became a taxidermist, creating scientific displays for Wards National Science Foundation. After visiting Florida and the Caribbean, and then South and Southeast Asia, collecting museum specimens, he became the head taxidermist at the United States National Museum, a part of the Smithsonian Institution. It was during this time that he traveled through the territory previously inhabited by buffalo and then wrote this document as part of the museum report. He then helped to create, within the National Museum section of the Smithsonian, what became the National Zoological Park. He was its first director in 1888, but resigned in 1890 in a dispute with his superiors. In 1896, he became the director of the Bronx Zoo, for the New York Zoological Society, where he stayed until retiring in 1926. During that time he helped form the American Bison Society and served as its president.

Document Analysis

Originally written as part of the 1886–87 Annual Report of the United States National Museum, the full 178-page document was encyclopedic in its description of the history, social and economic value, extermination, and present state of the North American bison. The historical document in this article was extracted from several sections of this extensive report, and contained key facts regarding the then current status of the buffalo and proposals for public policy that would keep the species alive. Hornady's ability to have this section of the annual report made it much more widely available to the general public resulted in his ideas having a greatly increased impact. Although he understood that history could not be undone, Hornady did believe that the poor policy choices of the past should be pointed out and that better ones (for the buffalo) should be adopted for the future.

As can be seen from the various subtitles in the document, Hornady discusses the interaction between people and buffalo from the time the first European observed one in 1521. As a zoologist, he then discusses the biological aspects of the animal. Moving on to the extermination of the great herds, he writes not only about the economic reasons, but also the social. People's desire to kill hundreds of thousands of buffalo each year made Americans, in his view, no more advanced than “cave-dwellers” whose “function was to slay and eat.” Obviously, as Hornady points out, the introduction of the rifle made this a much more efficient proposition. Secondarily, he blames the local and national governments for not protecting at least part of the herds. Hornady points to the facts that people's greed, in conjunction with the buffalo's lack of fear, meant that, with modern weapons, they were easy to kill.

While Hornady was aware of the desire by the American government and the western settlers to move the Native Americans onto reservations, and to transform them into copies of white Americans, he also knew the tremendous cost of this effort. In the section of the document reprinted here, Hornady mentions the millions of dollars that would be needed to support those who had previously lived off hunting buffalo. He had done a survey of the number of Native Americans living on reservations, but hailing from tribes that had once extensively hunted buffalo, to come up with the exact number of 54,758. While the conservation movement was growing at that time, yet not totally accepted, Hornady focuses on the economic costs of having almost wiped out the buffalo, rather than appealing to people's social conscience.

Toward the end of the report, Hornady does put forward proposals to help secure a future for pure-bred buffalo. His proposal for the National Zoo to acquire a small number of buffalo was only a start. To prevent in-breeding, other zoos would have to acquire buffalo as well, in addition to whatever pure-bred animals might be found elsewhere. (In the full text, he estimates that 541 buffalo existed in the United States, with about the same number in Canada.) One of the missions of the National Zoo was to help preserve animals that were on the verge of extinction, so that his proposal was not out of line. Hornady was opinionated on a number of topics, as can be seen in his report, and one of them was that the North American bison should be saved from extinction.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Branch, E. Douglas, J. Frank Dobie (introduction), & Andrew C. Isenberg (introduction). The Hunting of the Buffalo. 1929. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. Print.

Czajka, Christopher W. “The Descent of Civilization: The Extermination of the American Buffalo.” Frontier House. PBS, 2014. Web. 13 Oct. 2014.

Hornaday, William T. The Extermination of the American Bison. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1889. Project Gutenberg, 2006. Web. 13 Oct. 2014.

Patent, Dorothy Hinshaw, & William Munoz. The Buffalo and the Indians: A Shared Destiny. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. Print.