We All Know Why the Bison Almost Went Extinct, Right?

Maybe not.  I talked to someone recently whi had a friend who was researching their nesr-extinction event and she mentioned that Americans did not hunt them to extinction,  but a disease wiped them out.

So I went hunting and found this:

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"Reinterpreting the 1882 Bison Population Collapse" in Rangelands

Volume 40, Issue 4, August 2018, Pages 106-114.

"American bison nearly went extinct. On 1 January 1889, there were 456 known to exist (p. 464).³ They are believed to have descended from approximately 171 separate individuals (calculated from Hornaday³ and Stermitz Ricketts⁴).

What caused that near-extinction? Everyone knows: hunting. According to Ocean of Grass: A Conservation Assessment for the Northern Great Plains, by the World Wildlife Fund (p. 11–13),⁵ “[Bison] numbers... totaled some 30 million or more. Others have placed the number much higher, generally around 65 million. A recent estimate based on forage productivity estimated historic bison carrying capacity at between 21–88 million... By the mid-19th century… [t]he railroads brought... the means to transport the hundreds of thousands of hides taken annually... By the mid 1880s, the North American bison was virtually extinct.” What is wrong with this statement? There were tens of millions of bison. Every year hundreds of thousands were harvested. If they were fossils or statues and you took hundreds of thousands from 21 to 88 million every year, then in 21 to 440 years, you would get rid of them all. But what do tens of millions of bison have every year? They have millions of calves. And if not, they have problems that are much more serious than hundreds of thousands of bullets!...

"When considered critically, the numbers are clear. Bison were not exterminated, wantonly slaughtered, or overhunted. They were sustainably harvested. According to the United States Department of Agriculture,⁶ there were 92 million cattle in the United States in 2016 (which is approximately 1–3 times the common bison herd estimates) and in 2015, 28.8 million head were slaughtered (24 times the recorded bison slaughter over the 3 years it was at its peak). Cattle are in no danger of disappearing from the continent. According to VerCauteren,⁷ whitetail deer populations exceed 30 million (the low end of bison herd projections). The Quality Deer Management Association⁸ compiled records from 37 state wildlife agencies and came up with almost 5.6 million legally harvested whitetails in the 2014 to 2015 season (over four and a half times the highest annual bison harvest). The harvest was low that season, and the numbers do not include any animals poached, killed by vehicles, or killed in the 13 states that did not provide data. According to VerCauteren,⁷ whitetail numbers are increasing. Looked at from the other end, I started with the bison known to exist after near-extinction, then worked backward using the most extreme yearly slaughter estimates (calculated from Hornaday,³ Koucky,⁹ and Lepley and Lepley¹⁰) and a very conservative herd increase factor. I determined that for those slaughter rates to wipe out bison, the total bison herd of North America never, ever reached 7 million animals. I have never seen anyone claim that the North American bison herd was that small. If our ecological philosophy grants any value at all to predation, the slaughter of the North American bison was not harmful to the bison, it was helpful. So what happened?"

The rest of the article is an interesting examination of the role the Indians played in managing bison populations by their predation on the herds and how tick fever spreading through larger populations could have caused the high mortality,  much of it not of human cause, observed by many early explorers.  The decline of the Indian population increased numbers enough for tick fever to spread through larger herds, reducing their numbers dramatically before hunting became a factor.

At a minimum,  I will be teaching this differently in American History in the future.