good day to you sir willymac! wow I'm blown away by the details of this post! That was some heavy research and the result is excellent. To learn how those hunts were encouraged, funded and organised is shocking and I didn't know about the shooting parties put together by the railroads for recreational killing from the moving cars!
It's sickening. Were people back then so calloused? Murder for sport, I just can't get my head around that. And murder of such a majestic animal.
Thanks for the mention, I wish this had been posted before mine and I could have directed people to it because this is a masterful research and education piece. And you say they don't teach any of this in schools?
thank you sir for your diligent and scholarly work!
Thank you also, sir, for your positive comments. Coming from a respected Texan, they mean a lot.
Researching the subject was very upsetting for me to begin to understand that people simply did not care about the bison as a living being and had no feelings at all about it being a non-aggressive, browsing animal. They felt nothing at all when shooting one as if they were shooting targets. No one expressed regrets at the time, or at least it was never popular to report in the papers. Besides, the ladies enjoyed shooting them with pistols as the trains passed. After all, they would be back in Boston before the animals died of their wounds.
People who were there at the time and wrote about them did not think they were especially aggressive or individually dangerous, but the more recent the writing, the more dangerous and fewer in number they become!
The history has been so sanitized and rewritten as to make it a non-event. PBS blamed it on the Indians getting horses and rifles and killing them (as if the Great Spirit gave them a special exemption to kill for fun); on a drought killing the prairie grass; on "some soldiers" killing bison to spite the Indians, and on sports shooters who "traveled west to shoot the animals by the dozens."
Dozens?
The PBS reported estimate was that 30 million were in the US when the Europeans arrived here. That took care of the other 70 million that would be harder to explain, so they just made them disappear from history by fiat!
The more recent the "research", the fewer bison there were and the more natural the causes were. They do the rewriting of history to clean up the image of our past. After all, no one would really do such a heinous thing.
But they did, dammit! They did it to kill the Indians' food supply and then they let the Indians starve.
I have to stop and hyperventilate now...
willymac! oh man, that is so shocking the way they are rewriting history so drastically to clean it up, I had no idea. And if they do it in this case, they may be doing it with many other things as well! oh my gosh, very alarming.
After reading a few hundred pages of reports from the late 1800's, you get to believe the things written by the people who were actually there at the time are accurate reports. Their view of the widespread outright murder of the bison is uniform throughout the Great Plains. The reports and letters were from people who did not know each other, but none disagree that the slaughter was as reported.
There is clear evidence that the most recent writings about the Great Killing all try to minimize its importance, to shrink the numbers, and to make it more the Indians' fault and by-products of nature than any intent by the invading white men.
Reading books from the early 1870's give a picture that is more realistic and vastly different from the new, sanitized versions. Yes, it is alarming, and yes, that revisionism is going on to see the past through our current moral and political filters.
I wonder how secure those archived books are? If they were "accidentally" deleted, out past will be forever changed.
oh my gosh sir willymac, that last sentence is chilling and totally possible isn't it? well, I hope most things aren't that important to them to want to go back and change them but who knows these days?
blame it on the Indians! that sounds about right. idiots and morons.
Yep, it's the Indians' fault, according to PBS. ""American Indian tribes acquired horses and guns and were able to kill bison in larger numbers than ever before."
The Great Spirit must have told them to ignore their spiritual beliefs and go out and kill every animal they could find.
That is so patently untrue! But, it is what kids will find when they go to a "reliable source" for their research.
ha! yes sir that is insane! wow you had to step away at times when you were researching this stuff didn't you?
Yep, I got a bit agitated at times. Human misbehavior gets to me more easily than most other irritants.
I still can't flush the image of the freezing Indian woman and her two starving children trying to grab slaughterhouse offal from the pigs through a fence.
We have much in our history to be ashamed of.
Some things just ain't right, my friend.
sir willymac! good to hear from you on this fine Tuesday! what image are you referring to about the Indian woman?
When you control the education and the money, you control the history...
The few that are left, are a magnificent site though. We would have been better off if instead of cattle, we were hearding and breeding bison. They were designed for this land and better suited for it.
Domesticating or cross-breading the bison would have been a better choice since the bison were tailored by nature for the grasslands.
However, they would have remained as the food supply for the Indians, and that would hinder the westward expansion and we probably would have ended up in the same place. Homo Sap always chooses the "correct nature's mistake"solution.
I agree, there is actually a farm down the road that has some "Beefalo" they are pretty wild looking animals, but pretty close to Buffalo. It's funny they have them in a field with llama, emu, peacocks, donkey, and horses. Quite a menagerie.
I have an Emu, had a donkey, chickens, and goats; always wanted a llama, and fancied getting a horse. I ended up with eight goats and then the donkey and the Emu. It has been a zoo around here!
I read that all the buffalo outside of Yellowstone have cattle mixed in their DNA. They look much more like majestic animals in the wild.
Traveling in northwestern New Mexico, I saw a beefalo in a 20 by 20 foot fenced area next to a cheap tourist trap. The poor thing had pure sand without a blade of grass to even pretend to graze on,and a water trough, but no shelter. I assume they fed it.
It broke my heart to see the poor herd animal totally alone in that pen.
Yes, being alone would suck. I was thinking I saw some along a few of the long stretches of highway in Kansas 10 or 12 years ago, but maybe they were not pure blooded. It was large open land and quite a few of them, it was a beautiful site.
There is something restful and pleasing about seeing a herd of grazing animals. That always causes me to slow down - and sometimes stop - just to enjoy. I saw a small herd of Highland cattle in Montana and stopped to "take a quick look" that lasted over an hour, and he same thing again in New Mexico in passing a group of two dozen llamas. I waited until they ambled over to me and I got my temporary fill of petting llamas. Not a soul in sight and not a vehicle passed in a full hour. Simple things, but ended up being the best parts of that long drive.
The simple things are usually the best part of life....
Hello sir @janton, How did I know you would show up on this post..... I had to scroll the comments just to check, and if not an intoduction would have been in order....
howdy sir coinsandchains this fine Thursday! did anyone ever tell you how important you are becoming to this platform? God bless you!
Well Thank You my friend. I doubt I'm really that important, I'm just enjoying myself. Other than the Church, I don't have any social outlets, so you guys have become my "water cooler" conversations... I appreciate the interaction, it keeps me from going stir crazy.
yes sir well we appreciate you taking the time from your crazy schedule and you ARE becoming more and more important, I wonder how things will look a year from now...look you're almost a 50 already! great job man!