Native Americans and North American History – Part 2
Buffalo, deer, and beaver.
When I was young, my parents took me on a trip out West through the National Parks, which included a visit to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, where I saw a large painting that always stuck with me. It was W.R. Leigh’s “Buffalo Drive,” which depicted Native Americans steering stampeding buffalo over a cliff.
In his book The Ecological Indian: Myth and History, Shepard Krech III writes of the importance of buffalo parts to Native Americans, and the lengths to which Native Americans would go to kill large numbers of buffalo:
Unquestionably, the buffalo was the mainstay of Plains Indians, who killed them in large numbers both for domestic use and for trade with other Indians who supplied corn in exchange … Given the buffalo’s importance, it should come as no surprise that Plains Indians developed highly efficient hunting techniques … Communal methods [of killing buffalo] involved running bison onto soft ice or into deep snow, a ravine, a box canyon, or an enclosure (also called a pound) and, as the Crow Indians termed it, “driving buffalo over embankments.” … The [Indian] “chaser” or “runner” … trolled buffaloes toward their demise, funneling them inward into a narrowing V-shaped lane whose lines were defined by stacked bison chips, stone piles, or implanted trees. Men and women crouched behind these brakes, ready to jump up, wave robes, and yell and startle the animals into a panicked run toward the trap or cliff edge … After buffalo tumbled off a precipice or ran into a pound, men and women alike set about killing them.
These were not finely tuned, selective killings. They were blunderbuss affairs:
The artist Paul Kane spoke of killings “more painful than pleasing”; John Adams Audubon, of “poor” buffaloes destroyed; and other, of “maimed” or “mangled” carcasses … Buffaloes driven over grassy bluffs seventy feet high, as many were, would be stunned if not killed in the fall, and likely to break their legs or backs. They and others driven into enclosures that were still alive were shot with bows and arrows (and later, with guns), stabbed with lances, or smacked on the heads with stone mauls … Communal hunts sometimes produced fantastic quantities of meat. The Blackfeet called the enclosure at the base of a cliff “piskun,” which has been translated as “deep blood kettle.” Hunts surrounded or drove not merely dozens but hundreds of animals, 30, 60, 100, and even 600, 800, 1,000, and 1,400 buffaloes were reported killed … In 1804, Meriwether Lewis saw “the remains of a vast many mangled carcasses of Buffalow which had been driven over a precipice of 120 feet by the Indians and perished; the water appeared to have washed away a part of this immense pile of slaughter and still there remained the fragments of at least a hundred carcasses.” The following year, the Mandan killed “whole droves” of buffaloes and took only “the best parts of the meat,” leaving the rest “to rot in the field.” … In July 1857, Henry Hind first came across the remains of bison, each of which “had been deprived of its tongue and hump only,” and then described the Cree building a new pound because they had “literally filled the present one with buffalo” but then abandoned it “on account of the stench which arose from the putrefying bodies.” … To conserve a resource, in its most widespread definition, means not to waste it. Indians who ate only the buffalo’s tongue, only the fetus, or only the hump, or who abandoned bulls because they preferred cows, were not by definition conservationists – unless the definition is altered.
The manner in which communal buffalo hunts were conducted guaranteed large amounts of waste:
[By the 1850’s] the trade in [buffalo] robes was well oiled, and waste was taking place in an exchange context not just in the American West but father north, where, in one chase, Metis hunters killed 2,500 bison but took the meat of only 750, and in other parts of the West, where Indians killed large numbers of buffaloes for tongues exchanged for whiskey. Yet the body of evidence suggests that Indians also wasted animals killed at communal hunting sites … well before the mature commercialization of the buffalo trade … The archaeological record provides abundant evidence for the antiquity of communal hunting … Luring or driving bison into shifting sand dunes or bogs, against arroyo cutbanks, into rivers, or over cliffs is an ancient technique used to kill buffaloes for well over eleven thousand years … Waste is ancient.
This waste occurred not because of any ill will, but because it was considered better than the alternative in which Native Americans went without adequate food supplies:
In days when people drove buffaloes into enclosures and over jumps, obtaining and preserving edible meat (as culturally defined) was far more important, as a practical matter, than avoiding wasting what one killed. A first priority of Plains Indian people was to ensure that they had an adequate supply of the animal on which they were totally dependent. With tens (or hundreds) of thousands of buffaloes within sight each year, there may have been no compelling reason to curb waste. Moreover, while efficient, the communal hunt in general, and the numbers of buffaloes killed at a jump in particular, could not easily be controlled …
European technology was so far superior to what was available among Native Americans that they were willing to trade huge quantities of deer and beaver as well in exchange. As Krech writes:
Native people needed little convincing that metal tools, guns, ammunition, and textiles improved their lives, and were only too eager to supply in exchange what they could readily gain access to: deerskins, which Europeans craved … As for Indians, all seemed to have participated in the trade. Some, like the Creek, put almost all other activities aside in order to take part with gusto. All showed an intense desire for guns, not just to hunt deer but because they enhanced success in war and the capture of enemy men and women for the slave trade … Indians played traders against each other to maximize their own return and avoided paying debts to particular traders … Some Creeks were so interested in the market that they killed not the twenty-five to one hundred deer required for a family’s annual domestic needs in goods each year, but two hundred to four hundred to meet their expanding needs.
And it wasn’t just tools Native Americans traded for. Liquor was a prime driver of the hunt for deer and beaver to trade for:
In no area did needs change as significantly as in the escalating spirits trade during the eighteenth century … [F]ueled by West Indian rum and an influx of small traders, the trade in alcohol itself developed, reaching fiercely destructive proportions among the Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and others in the 1760s and 1770s. All eagerly sought rum … For rum, the Creek would even part with their horses. As Charles Stuart, an Indian Affairs agent, remarked in 1770, “it is certain there is nothing the Indians like better, and nothing the traders had rather give [than rum].” … Near the end of the [eighteenth] century, four-fifths of the trade to the Choctaw might have consisted of liquor … Too many Choctaws were too willing to do what they had to in order to obtain rum, and there is no doubt that demand for spirits heightened the pressure on deer populations. In the end, rum chained hunters to traders, ensuring an endless supply of deerskins.
The effect on the deer population was devastating:
The ultimate numbers are of course incompletely known, but when the [deer] trade was at its height in the eighteenth century, Indians were conceivably killing, as Kathryn Holland Braund, a historian of the trade, suggested, up to one million deer annually to supply both domestic and exchange needs … The pressure on herds mounted steadily. To stem the decline, colonial governments passed statutes prohibiting killing fawns, does in season when they gave birth, and bucks during the rut – except for subsistence purposes. But in the middle decades of the century, Indians “destroyed” white tails, Mark Catesby, the naturalist, thought, “chiefly for the Sake of their Skins,” and Creek and other hunters stripped the skins from the animals they killed in order to obtain rum, leaving the rest behind.
While the communal buffalo hunts almost inevitably killed more buffalo than necessary, some Native Americans justified their excessive killing of deer and other animals through a particular belief in animal reincarnation. As Krech writes:
Some Cherokees thought that the reanimations [of animals] following death totaled either four or; their “supremely sacrosanct numeral,” seven. In work addressing Cherokee beliefs about reincarnation and other matters – and confirming … earlier suggestions – two anthropologists, Frank G. Speck and Leonard Broom, and a Cherokee collaborator named Will West Long noted the belief that “animals called out and killed by hunters who employ the formulistic magic come back to life again,” and that there was therefore “no diminution in the supply of game through hunting.” One killing begat potentially at least three and as many as six additional lives, and set the stage for three to six future killings. This belief in reincarnation or reanimation provides speculative ground for why conservation would have been foreign to the Cherokee, even senseless, as a check on killing deer to satisfy evolving consumer needs … By 1900, deer were extremely scarce in the South and two decades later few were left.
Beavers were especially sought:
[T]he beaver pelt was arguably the most famous commodity in North America … Beavers were scarce in the greater Northeast by [the 1620s] … Over the next four decades, the five tribes that formed the Iroquois Confederacy killed most beavers nearby, “absolutely exhaust[ing]” their lands, and in trapping parties of hundreds of men, trespassed aggressively and successfully on the territories of their neighbors. As in the South, politics and warfare often affected both animals and the trade. In general, when hostilities raged, hunters left beavers alone and then peace reigned, they made war on beavers.
As Krech sums up:
Native people clearly possessed vast knowledge of their environment. They understood relationships among living things in the environment, and to this extent their knowledge was “ecological.” But knowledge is cultural, and each group in its own way made the environment and its relationships cultural. Their ecologies were premised on theories of animal behavior and animal population dynamics unfamiliar to Western science, beginning, for some, with the belief in reincarnation … Their actions, while perfectly reasonable in light of their beliefs and larger goals, were not necessarily rational according to the premises of Western ecological conservation.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore how Native Americans lost their land.
Complete list of essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10.