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- [00:00]
Dude Wipes Spokesperson
I'm a big fan of Dude Wipes. I carry them. I especially carry them on backpack hunting trips. And if you got little kids, and I used to have several little kids, you will be quick to realize the benefits of their little Dudes products. Little Dude Wipes because little butts make big messes. Alcohol and chemical free Little Dude Wipes are wet extra large flushable wipes and are the same size as the extra large dude wipes that you use. But you can wipe away the funk with Little Dude Wipes Bubble gum made with 100% plant based natural fibers. Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide.
- [00:41]
Narrator/Storyteller
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- [01:14]
Odoo Representative
Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder. With a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory. A separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all in one platform that replaces them all. CRM, Accounting, Inventory, E Commerce, hr. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you try Odoo for free at o d o o.com that's odoo.com.
- [01:45]
Dan Flores
For more than 100 centuries, native people in bison had been enjoined in an evolutionary economic and religious relationship in the west, only to witness something that appeared.
- [01:57]
Narrator/Storyteller
Timeless collapse completely by the 1880s.
- [02:02]
Dan Flores
I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American west, brought to you by Velvet Buck Wine, where the hunt meets the harvest.
- [02:11]
Narrator/Storyteller
A portion of each bottle goes to support backcountry hunters and anglers.
- [02:15]
Dan Flores
Limited supply available@veletbuckvineards.com Enjoy responsibly.
- [02:37]
Narrator/Storyteller
A dream of bison, part 1. In the fall of 1886, William T. Hornaday, taxidermist at the National Museum in Washington, stepped off a train in Miles.
- [02:52]
Dan Flores
City, Montana, on a truly historic mission.
- [02:56]
Narrator/Storyteller
The American bison, an animal whose charisma and staggering abundance had for three centuries stood as shorthand from North America to the world somehow was on the brink of extinction. Except in remote parts of Texas, Montana, and Alberta, where rumors hail, there might be two or three tiny herds of wildly spooky survivors. A creature whose range had once extended from northwestern Canada to Florida, whose herds sometimes took the better part of a week for mounted horsemen to Pass was tottering on the precipice of total disappearance. The bison hunt in America was an ancient economy going back multiple thousands of years. Now native people like the Blackfeet, who had often taken 20,000 bison a year in 1883 had killed all of six. This was why Hornaday was in Montana. Stunningly, bison were on the verge of becoming little more than a memory. And the national museum at least wanted a representative collection that might become a museum exhibit, since that was all future citizens might ever see of America's most iconic creature. The Hornaday party's goal was to obtain 20 to 30 specimens, which the scientists understood might represent as many as half of the wild bison left in the United States. He had narrowed his search to west central Montana, between the Yellowstone and the Missouri, using the Lu Barr Ranch as headquarters to hunt a rumored herd of 3035 in the area. The US army provided support, and two soldiers and two cowboys from the ranch accompanied Hornaday and his assistant, Harvey Brown on Calf Creek, a southern tributary of the Musselshell. In October, this party began to find buffalo. The stories about the survivor animals were true, though these buffalo were extraordinarily wild and perceiving themselves pursued, fled nearly 15 miles across the badlands of Montana territory. Nonetheless, as dusk was falling on October 16, two of Hornaday's hunters managed to down a huge bull. Because of the lateness of the hour, the party left their prize where it fell with a plan to return the following day. Here is how Harvey Brown described the scene when they arrived the next morning, Sunday, October 17th. To our great dismay, the noble red men had visited the bull which Boyd and McNannon had killed the day before. Astonishment evolved into a general confusion and then anger about what had taken place during the night. All that remained of the bull had, he wrote, was the head painted red on one side, yellow on the other, with a red and yellow rag tied to one horn and 11 notches cut in the other horn. All around were moccasin tracks. Hornaday's party went on to take 22 Buffalo out of this last remnant of animals, a tiny puddle that was almost all that was left of a once vast, now evaporated ocean of animals. As director of the New York Zoological park and a founding member of the American Bison Society, Hornaday would spend much of the next four decades of his life trying to save the bison from complete extinction. That fall of 1886, he believed that not more than 30 animals remained alive in Montana, where the last great bison hunts had taken place. He would eventually conclude that at the time of this hunt, the only 1073 wild bison were still drawing breath in North America. No one ever identified just who those native hunters were who had located Hornaday's downed bull, or exactly what ceremony they had performed around it during the night of October 16, 17, 1886. But from the evidence they left, they too understood that something truly profound was happening. A bison bull whose head was marked and decorated and painted red and yellow in the night may have signaled an ending of something large, something that defined the world. The end of bison was a historical change so traumatic that, as the Crow leader Pliny Coup would put it, after that, nothing happened. We now know that one of the long term consequences of The Pleistocene extinctions 10,000 years ago were a handful of animal survivors that benefited from the loss of competition in the American West. The primary benefactor was the new smaller bison, which underwent a massive population explosion when other grass eaters disappeared. Half the size of their Pleistocene ancestors, reaching reproductive maturity far faster, buffalo adapted perfectly to the grasslands of the interior of the continent. Their population was no doubt highly variable, but based on the number of livestock that replaced them, their numbers in their core range likely ranged between about 20 and 30 million. Great climate swings like the altithermal redistributed them and shrank or grew their numbers, but never pushed them towards extinction. Buffalo grew so numerous and were such a perfect fish fit to post Pleistocene conditions that no amount of predation, either from gray wolves or humans, seemed to diminish them. Biologists now believe modern bison in fact are a classic example of anthropogenic selection. Their size and rapid reproduction a natural increase of about 18% selected by human and gray wolf predation that made the modern bison one of the most perfectly adapted of all American species. The way to imagine these immense herds is by understanding their seasonal rounds. And the proper beginning is in the scorching heat of late summer, when bison cows become receptive to sex. Over the next chaotic few weeks, the rumbling bellows of 2,000 pound bulls created a den herd nowhere else on the planet. Audible for miles across the boundless plains, the oddly front weighted males jousted, headbutted and hooked at one another in dust shrouded battles for females half the size of the bulls. Cows didn't always honor the winners of these contests, often rejecting both strivers for a higher ranking bull elsewhere. Over the few weeks of rut, some bulls bred as many as 40 cows. Others completely struck out. Once the rut was over, bison would begin their general seasonal drift southward. The small grouping herds led by high ranking cows until they were eight years of age. Younger cows were subordinate to older females. Whether southward or somewhere more local. The destinations for these migrations were were forested river valleys where bison spent months of snow and cold, Protected from the winds that swept open country snow into drifts. As winter wound down in April, pregnant cows dropped their young. And while eagles waddled around among them, Picking at afterbirth, the cows urged their bright red calves to stand, Pop their tails over their backs and run. Gray wolves, knowing well when a bison herd was vulnerable, Were certain to be trotting by yellow eyes fixed red tongues lolling following the spring green up into open country. The herds then sorted themselves into gender groups. Through spring and early summer, bachelor bulls worked their way across the upland plains and all boy posses, While cow calf herds stayed separate and distant until the pheromones of late summer Began to drift through the hot air once again. Like many prey animals, Bison evolved to be highly social herd creatures. Numbers mean lots of eyes on predators and enhanced chances. You're not the target. The herds varied in size and makeup across the seasons. At the macro level, three massive groupings spread across the western landscapes of the continent. In timbered parts of Alberta, the Yukon and Alaska, There was a distinctive type we now call the wood bison. Out on the grassy sweeps east of the Rockies, A northern herd of plains bison ranged from Alberta to Nebraska. From there to the yellow expanses of Texas. Another mass worked across the southern plains in search of rains and greening grasses. These big aggregations of animals groupings really made up of thousands of smaller herds, Drifted southward in winter, Then reversed direction to shift northward in the summer. While human rituals that charmed and lured bison May have been under the sway of supernatural animal deities. All those bison hunters over all those thousands of years Understood from observation that the animals movements were predictable. They also understood that bison preferred green grasses from freshly burned country. Humans had been using fire to alter the world to their advantage for a million years. In the eastern woodlands, regular human firing produced patchy ecotones whose rebounding forest created browser white tailed deer. In the west, fires produced wildlife park savannas for bison pronghorns, elk and wolves. These fires actually pushed the aerial extent of the savannas and their animals Nearly to the Mississippi River. Wherever bison herds ranged, Archaeologists have mapped out a predatory human pattern that that mimicked the prey. In the fall, the hunters set fire to specific upland grasslands. They wanted to hunt in the spring, Knowing this would draw the herds. In winter, those same hunters moved into the forested river valleys to set up Their camps, aware that bison, elk and deer would congregate there, allowing local hunts to take place throughout the cold months. These hunters were pedestrians whose only beasts of burden were dogs, and preserving meat by air drying was a huge undertaking. Nonetheless, in suitable topography like Head Smashed Inn in Alberta and First Peoples and Madison buffalo jumps in Montana, under the supervision of hunt managers, they ran bison off cliffs, a strategy they learned by observing wolves. They also knew buffalo were entirely capable of exchanging cultural information. So at these jumps they attempted to kill every last animal to prevent buffalo survivors from passing on knowledge about the strategy. The great bison belt of the savannas east of the Rockies was the modern animals evolutionary home. But bison were not just of the interior. Archaeologists reconstructing past climates have mapped out a whole sequence of bison presence absence periods across ancient america. The altithermal a 3700 year heat wave thousands of years ago was one of the absence periods across much of that core Great Plains country. That huge drought and and another one only a thousand years ago that lasted for six centuries. Shriveled western grasslands. Bison numbers likely plunged as the herds sought out better watered refuges both east and west of the Great Plains, then trickled back in when weather improved. Then between 1500 and 1600, as Old Worlders were settling America, a climate change to wet and cool conditions grew bison into vast numbers, sending teeming herds in the west eastward beyond the Mississippi River. Again convincing Europeans they had found the Eden of the animals in America for some 10,000 years, a lengthy sequence of different human cultural groups. Archaeology has given them fanciful names like Municipality, Mummy Cave, Oxbow, McKean, Pelican Lake, Besant, Avonlea and old women's lived on bison, drove rivers of bison over cliffs, corralled and stalked bison and built their religions around them. This was the oldest sustained human economy in American history. Two thousand years ago, when Rome was transitioning from a republic to an empire and Besant and Avonlea hunters were undergoing a transition of their own. On America's bison plains, the Besant people still relied on at ATL technology invented by Folsom hunters 12,000 years ago. But the Avonle had the newest hunt technology, the bow, introduced to America by the ancestors of the Inuit. Even so, the bow hardly dented the enormous bison herds. In the early United States. Thinkers and policymakers tended to follow old world models for imagining human history. The emerging idea was that all humans shared a common origin. And if that was true, then all of us were on the same ladder of progress as it was known. Like Europeans, people who hunted would eventually become herders, then farmers who built cities, wrote constitutions and founded capitalist republics. It was no doubt comforting to think that everybody else in the world wanted nothing so much as to become just like you. Certainly no one was supposed to retreat back down the ladder. This was the organizing principle behind an Indian policy in America of converting tribes to agriculture, the ownership of private property and eventually assimilation. But for many Native people, the America of the 1600s through the 1800s offered a perfect opportunity to descend the ladder, not climb it. In those years, an unusual number of Native people, who in fact had long been farmers, reverted to full time hunting. This had been an old fear for Europeans about their own people. Would colonial Americans survive the enticements of wilderness that lure young men away from farms to hunt and trap? With a continental market economy focused on reducing wild animals to commodities, not just Europeans, but Native people across the country began to abandon their cornfields and village lives and move west to hunt again. What drove this for thousands of Native people wasn't just the market, but an animal revolution. Their acquisition of horses created a grand historical moment, one that has ever since captured the imagination of the world. For roughly 10 human generations, conditions were perfect for fashioning a legendary American scene. The horse mounted in Indian as hunter of buffalo and other Western animals. A kind of Edenic opportunity emerged around 1650 and lasted until the early 1880s. Out on the continent's great grasslands, buffalo numbers were soaring to as high as 30 million animals in good years. History, climate and soon enough, trade and the market would set the stage for for a legendary time for Native people to live large. Missing from western ecology for thousands of years, horses seem to appear almost magically from the southern end of the Rocky Mountains. Native people trained to herd Spanish stock in colonial New Mexico were riding off on horses by the 1650s. Then came the revolt of the Pueblo people against Spanish settlers in 1680. The rebels seizing thousands of horses along with goats, sheep and cattle. The cattle ended up eaten. The Navajos or Dene traded for most of the goats and sheep, but the horses attracted customers across the West. Pueblos and Navajos traded horses to the Utes, who traded them to the Shoshone's, who dispersed horses through throughout the Upper West. Some of those groups were in southern Canada, about as far north as desert. Adapted Spanish barbed horses could survive the winters. By 1730, peoples who had been on foot for 150 centuries were swinging onto horses and riding them into history. Horses carried big implications for buffalo about to enter a modern world that natural selection hadn't Prepared them for competing with buffalo for grass and water. Horses were restoring a measure of the Pleistocene. But for tribal bands learning from one another how to ride, care for horses, breed them, all manner of possibilities opened. Dozens of tribal groups, a common estimate is three dozen, dropped what they were doing and and rode off to hunt buffalo. Some of them the Comanches of the Great Basin. The Siouan speakers of the Great Lakes woodlands had never farmed. Propelled now by horses, they switched their focus from jackrabbits or whitetail deer to buffalo. Some groups from outside the plains did very well as buffalo hunters. The Comanches migrated towards the source of horses and and established a powerful empire on the southern plains. The Siouan speakers who rode westward out of Great Lakes forest did the same on the northern Plains. Others, the pueblos, the Utes, the Salish, Nez Perces west of the Buffalo Range, and the Caddos, Wichitas, Pawnees, Osages, Arikaras and Mandans to the east, remained in their villages but rode off to hunt bunch buffalo several times a year. The Pueblos were farmers, the Nez Perces deer hunters. But with horses. Both could now make big journeys to haul bison products home from hundreds of miles away.
- [22:52]
Odoo Representative
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you you are drowning in software. Instead of growing your business, this is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that handles everything. CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, HR and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus, it's easy to use, customizable and designed to streamline every process so you can focus on what really matters running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o dot com.
- [23:53]
Julian Edelman
This is Julian Edelman from Games With Names. Football is back. That means it's tailgate time. And this season the only meat going on the grill is Dietz and Watson. Some of my favorites are the Black Angus Dietz dogs, the Italian style chicken sausage and the Asiago spinach. Chicken sausage just to name a few. Oh and I love the jalapeno mustard. It's flavor packed and you could just tell Dietz and Watson uses the highest quality meats in every bite. Dietz and Watson was born in Philly in 1939 and and they've been doing it the right way ever since. Visit deetsonwatson.com the right way to learn more about the deets difference.
- [24:40]
Dude Wipes Spokesperson
Yeah, I'm not ashamed to tell you I'm a big Dude Wipes fan. I keep Dude Wipes in my backpack. I keep Dude Wipes at our fish shack. I keep Dude Whites in my truck, garage, wherever the hell. I just keep them around. And also, you know, one of the reasons I got kids, man, when you got kids you learn that you keep them around because little butts make big messes. When nature calls for your kid, answer with the pristine clean of Little Dude Wipes. They're gentle enough for little cheeks and strong enough for toddler streaks. So they can be the first generation that never has to suffer the agony of dry toilet paper. The next time your kid goes number two, show them their number one with Little Dude Wipes. Little Dude Wipes are wet, extra large flushable wipes, extra alcohol and chemical free. They're the same size as Extra Large Dude Wipes. Perfect for the big messes the little kids make. Kids are known to get a little stinky Wipe away the funk with Little Dude Wipes Bubble Gum. The bubble gum scented flushable wipe free Little Stinker. Also available in fragrance free, Little Dude Wipes are made with 100 plant based natural fibers so you can keep the planet healthy for your Little Dude. Available exclusively at Walmart nationwide. And remember, check out the bubble gum. You'll get a kick out of it.
- [25:55]
Narrator/Storyteller
The most surprising of the new buffalo hunters came from villages of farmers. Though classic buffalo hunters like the Crows, the Cheyennes, the Kiowas all came out of farming backgrounds. All the eastern Indians who went west to hunt were former farmers. Farmers too. There are class distinctions in most of the farming towns, and the evidence is that it was the lower classes who often mounted up to ride away to hunt buffalo. Elite families had political power to lose if they left. So did women who owned the crop fields in farm towns. So for women joining a group now counting wealth and status based on the number of horses you own owned that intended to live by hunting could be a sobering step. For one, it implied the backbreaking work of hide processing. Becoming one of several wives for a buffalo hunting man at least meant some Sharing of the work burden. But if the band participated in the market hunt, a woman didn't just become a plural wife. She joined a labor force for men traversing the plains, hunting bison, training and accumulating horses, and engaging in trade with the whites. Was life in a state of perfection for women. Well, Sioux and Speakers had a ribald story about ever conniving Coyote that helped put this new life in some perspective. It went this way. Coyote had spied a beautiful young chief's daughter. He badly wanted a bed, but as beautiful chief's daughters tend to do, she scarcely acknowledged him. But hearing that the whites coming into their country possessed many wonderful things, Coyote used magic to go among them and returned with four objects no Indian had ever seen. Coyote set up a lodge near the girl's teepee and over the next four nights began pounding and banging away as if he were a mad inventor. The first morning, he emerged with a choker of brightly colored glass beads. When the chief's daughter saw Coyote idling, holding the choker up to the sunlight, she boldly offered him a kiss if she could have it. The next day, Coyote produced an iron pot better for cooking than anything else in camp. To possess that, the chief's daughter let Coyote fondle her breasts. The third day, Coyote showed off a red wool blanket with stripes in several colors, and for that, she let Coyote feel her buttocks. Finally, on the fourth day, Coyote produced a beautiful mirror. After observing herself in it for several long moments, the chief's daughter let Coyote look between her legs. But Coyote's response to this favor was a frown. Too bad, he said, that you've been made upside down. That really should be fixed. The beautiful chief's daughter took her mirror home, but thought long and hard about what Coyote had said. If her sex truly did need remaking, who else should do it but the coyote who'd made so many magical new things? Go and fetch Coyote, she told her girlfriend, and. And do it quickly. To human observers, bison thronging the plains seemed like the stars in the night sky, a flow of animal life on a scale only the supernatural seemed capable of explaining. The elders of one of the historic bison hunting groups, the Lakotas, perceived a connecting energy flow in the constant air movements of the planes. Among Western creatures, these were connections Linnaean science, Darwinian evolution, or 21st century genetic science would never think to link together. What the Lakotas called umi or yum was whirlwind power, the unrestrained residue of the energy of the four winds. Whirlwind power was Much sought in part because possessing it made one difficult to attack in battle. But only a small number of special animals. Spiders, moths, dragonflies and bears. Elk and bison shared the whirlwind secret. Air movement in the form of seasonal winds also seemed part of the bison's special mystery, bringing them or taking them away. A south wind might produce herds that blanketed the landscape from horizon to horizon, but the animals could entirely disappear with a north wind. That inclination for bison to vanish led to a widespread belief in Native America that the animals had their origins underground and sometimes returned there. The precise regeneration places tended to move as people relocated as tribes migrated onto the Great plains. In the 1700s, among the Kiowas, the place where bison poured from the earth was the Wichita Mountains in southwestern Oklahoma. For the Comanches, bison regenerated in the canyons of a west Texas plateau, the Llano Estacado. The Lakotas believe this mysterious renewal happened in caves like Ludlow Cave in and near the Black Hills, which native people surrounded with petroglyphs of buffalo tracks and human vaginas enjoined symbols of fertility. Most buffalo hunting peoples believe the bison to have been present very early in creation. In this kind of cosmic origin. They were like the other great forces of the universe, the sun and moon, the sky overhead that would always exist, exist, much as we're all utterly convinced today that there's no force capable of erasing the night sky of its stars. For humans, who had been among bison for thousands of years, the animals were similarly beyond all time, all history. In the Plains, Indian creation accounts that undergirded this kind of understanding. The most important animals are there at the beginning, with the creators, before humans joined the world. And it was not just themselves as flesh that bison would offer up as gifts. Among the Cheyennes, buffalo and thunder gave fire to their culture hero, sweet medicine. For the mandana datsas, it was a buffalo bull who gave their culture hero lone man, tobacco. Somewhat in the same manner that the Greeks regarded their gods as partly mortal, most Plains tribes thought of buffalo in their worldly form in the same terms as humans. Buffalo had families and societies and opinions and memories. They were people. In other words, in some traditions, buffalo had the ability to renew themselves after death. The Crees told ethnographer James Mooney that if you left the head, tail and four feet of a buffalo at a place of its death, the animal would regenerate. Although bison might regenerate and the earth could disgorge a fresh body of them like a hive of bees. The hunting tribes Understood that animal masters controlled access to buffalo. That made access then fraught with taboos designed to convey proper respect for creatures willing to sacrifice themselves for the human good. Among the Cheyennes, their access to buffalo was the legacy of their several culture heroes, Coyote man and his daughter Yellow Haired Woman, who had first released the animals of the plains along with band specific heroes named Erect Horns and Sweet Medicine. Like most buffalo hunters, the Cheyennes had stories of about times when all the buffalo disappeared. In one instance, Erect Horns performed a particular ritual that persuaded them to return later. In the beginning time of creation and Cheyenne history, the people had forsaken the hero's Sweet medicine. And once again the buffalo and all the animals disappeared. An apology to Sweet Medicine led him to reaffirm that it was a ceremony that would call on the animals to reappear. This ceremony was called among the Cheyennes, the Messam. It was a great animal dance at Bear Butte that recreated Coyote Man's and Yellow Haired Woman's release of the animals. In mythic time. Two of the arrows in their sacred Arrow Boy bundle gave Cheyennes the power to kill as many buffalo as they wanted. And that buffalo was opened during the massam. Cheyennes performed the Massam well past 1850. Others of their bands set up a lone tepee at their summer sun dances representing the mountain from which the Su Thai band's hero Erectorns had once released buffalo from hiding and reanimated the earth.
- [35:27]
Dan Flores
In the end animal life of the plains.
- [35:30]
Narrator/Storyteller
The Blackfeet and the Grovants also had stories about what happened when buffalo disappeared. A calamity finally righted by their own cultural heroes. Noppy among the Blackfeet and Ne ought in the case of the Grovants who turned themselves into dogs, found the cave where the gods were holding the animals and drove them out. The Blackfeet called the entity that killed kept Buffalo away Buffalo stealer. When he was unhappy, he kept buffalo secreted away in a cave up Cutbank Canyon. The Mandans too had a traditional story about a time when all the buffalo disappeared. In this case it was because Hoyta, a speckled eagle who was the master of all the animals, had quarreled with Lone man, the first man to and as punishment decided to withhold all the animals inside Dog Den Butte. After involved negotiations, Lone man finally convinced Hoyta to release the animals to the people. Among the Mandans, the ceremonies that reenacted these negotiations were known as Snow Owl and Okipa. The primary animal access ceremony of the Hadassahs was known as Red Stick. How did the culture heroes perform these miracles? Generations of living alongside plains animals had fashioned among Indian people a body of cultural stories that credited the buffalo's willingness to render itself to hunters to the mythic kinship ties between the two species. The common thread was ritually re establishing the kinship tie between human beings and buffalo through ceremonies that got at the heart of the Native explanation of their world. Thanks to artists, George Catlin and Carl Bodmer were at least nominally conversant with the outer skins of some of them. What the artists portrayed were animal costume dancers, recreating the ancient stories with special lodges and altars that represented the mountains or caves where the animal masters hid buffalo and other creatures when they were displeased. Ceremonies like Snow Owl and Red Stick even featured symbolic sexuality to stimulate bison fertility. In the early 1800s, when descriptions of these parts of the ceremonies by observers like Lewis and Clark appeared in print, they were primly rendered in Latin. As bison began appreciably to diminish in numbers and the ancient ceremonies failed to restore them, some Native people seemed to adjust their thinking. We can't know what the Indians who danced around and painted William T. Hornaday's bull in 1880 thought about why bison had become so few. But in the 1860s, a US Peace Commission had asked tribal representatives why they believed bison were going away. By then, Plains Indians clearly were worried about the trend. The Kiowa calendars, an account Kiowa historians painted on buffalo robes by the 1840s, had had begun referring to such shortages of buffalo in the southern plains that it was impossible for their bands to assemble to hold sun dances anymore. Among the Western Siouan peoples, their version of tribal histories were called winter counts, and these showed that from 1842 to 1844, the most significant events were the extended buffalo calling ceremonies their shamans performed. The tribes the Peace Commission interviewed offered various explanations for what was happening to buffalo, most of which laid blame on either the whites on the Overland Trails or on Metis hunters from Canada. One Western Lakota opined that he thought bison were becoming so few because they simply couldn't abide the smell of white people. By this point, the Indian hunt for bison robes for trade was decades old, and another thought Indians themselves were killing too many for the trade. As the Nez Perce hunter Yellow Wolf later confessed, I killed yearlings. Mostly it was robes. We were after more than meat, he said. By the time of the peace Commission, there was growing inter tribal competition for every remaining pocket of buffalo. And in the less hunted zones between tribes pockets that got gobbled up one by one as expansionist Lakotas and Comanches displaced tribes with prime remaining buffalo pastures. We stole the hunting grounds of the Crows. One Cheyenne later boasted about the war. The Lakotas and Cheyennes prosecuted against the.
- [40:34]
Dan Flores
Crows because they were the best.
- [40:38]
Narrator/Storyteller
Then suddenly, it was all over. On the Southern plains, the Kiowas concluded that the bison had finally returned to the earth. For other groups, the ceremonies the culture heroes taught had somehow lost their power. A new Pan tribal ceremony, the Ghost Dance, now swept across the plains with a promise that buffalo would re emerge in the millions and overspread the world again. Even after Lakotas at Wounded Knee were mowed down for dancing the Ghost Dance, a Southern Cheyenne priest in western Oklahoma named Buffalo Coming out repeatedly performed ceremonies entreating the bison to re emerge from Hiding Mountain in the Wichita range. But by 1895, even he had given up. When the photographer Edward Curtis interviewed Lakota elders at pine ridge in 1905 and asked them what became of the buffalo, their answer was simple, confused and unsatisfying. So far as they could determine, they told Curtis the explanation was wakan a mystery.
- [42:03]
Odoo Representative
Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder? With a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. Before you know it, you are drowning in software. Instead of growing your business, this is where Odoo comes in. Odoo is the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all in one fully integrated platform that handles everything CRM, accounting, inventory, E commerce, HR and more. No more app overload, no more juggling logins. Just one seamless system that makes work easier. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. It's built to grow with your business whether you are just starting out or already scaling up. Plus it's easy to use, customizable and designed to streamline every process so you can focus on what really matters running your business. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free@odoo.com that's o d o o.com this.
- [43:05]
Julian Edelman
Is Julian Edelman from Games With Names. Football is back. That means it's tailgate time and this season the only meat going on the grill is Deets and Watson. Some of my favorites are the Black Angus Dietz dogs, the Italian style chicken sausage and the Asiago Spinach chicken sausage just to name a few. Oh, and I love the Jalapeno mustard. It's flavor packed and you could just tell Dietz and Watson uses the highest quality meats in every bite. Dietz and Watson was born in Philly in 1939 and they've been doing it the the right way ever since. Visit deetsonwatson.com the right way to learn more about the deets difference.
- [43:51]
Dude Wipes Spokesperson
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- [45:08]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
When we talk about bison and people in North America specifically. I mean, I've obviously taught a class on people and bison and horses in North America. And it's one of those animals where you have to understand its life history to really better understand its relationship with people. And I find that to be a really. That was one of the things that I think blew my mind when, when I was initially familiarizing myself with like serious scholarship on this subject. But the biology of the animal is, is, has this really formative influence on its relationship with people. And you kind of get into that in, in this, in this chapter.
- [45:49]
Dan Flores
Yeah, I do. I try to. You know, so the, the, the bison, I mean, you know, you have to start out by, by conceding that this was for many centuries of American history the kind of animal that around the world was most closely identified with America. And when people anywhere around the globe thought of America, they imagined vast herds of these animals that had been in place for who knew how long, and of course, those animals being hunted by native people on horseback. And what we know from, from the historical story is that particular image is actually one of a fairly limited range in terms of, of time. It only occurs for maybe 250 years at least, the horseback part. But people had been engaged with bison in North America for 20,000 years probably, and long enough, in fact, that large versions of the bison that had existed during the Pleistocene had become extinct. And we think that the animal that survived, the historic and modern bison that we all know today, was an animal that biologically was. Its evolution was in part anthropogenic. It was shaped by the presence of human and canid predators. And those pressures caused that animal to become smaller than the creatures of the, than its predecessors in the Pleistocene, to have a quicker generational turnover to, and probably to adapt almost perfectly to the grasslands of the middle of the continent. And so it's an animal that is kind of not just in a historic sense, one that the world knows about with respect to America, but it's one that has been in place for a very, very long time. And the human engagement with it is very old. I, I make the point in this particular episode that the oldest economy, sustained economy, we have for human beings in North America is the buffalo hunt. I mean, it's gone on for many, many, many thousands of years.
- [48:20]
Narrator/Storyteller
And so that made it a particular.
- [48:22]
Dan Flores
Shock for it to only 150 years ago to come to an end. That's part of the, I think, the psychic effect of losing that still. Maybe a lot of modern Americans don't think about that anymore or experience it, but those of us who pay attention to history certainly do.
- [48:45]
Narrator/Storyteller
Yeah.
- [48:46]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
And I, I mean, when we were just working on this most recent Hidehunters audiobook, Steve and I were trying to come up with even global analogs to the. Yeah, the duration of that human. I mean, I can't really think of any other example in world history. There's probably fishing villages that have caught some of the same fish for 12,000 years, but it doesn't, I mean, there's really nothing else that comes to mind that approximates the relationship between native people and bison in North America.
- [49:18]
Dan Flores
Yeah, not, not even globally. I think you're, you're right about that, you know, I mean, and you can, you can kind of argue in a biological or an ecological sense that, okay, so wildebeests in Africa kind of serve a similar role as a plains animal that migrates in very large herds back and forth across through East Africa. But the kind of close relationship between bison and native people, it just doesn't really. I mean, the caribou hunters of the far north maybe come as close as we can find. And, you know, and those people, I think as the people I've talked to in Alaska and the Brooks Range country, for example, the Gwich' in people, kind of think of themselves as caribou hunters. That, I mean, and they use this because I think they know that the rest of us and America can relate to the bison story they call themselves. Okay, so we're.
- [50:21]
Narrator/Storyteller
We're.
- [50:21]
Dan Flores
That's what we are. We hunt caribou the same way people hunted bison. But it's probably only a shadow, really, of what this. This bison story was.
- [50:32]
Narrator/Storyteller
So, yeah, it's.
- [50:33]
Dan Flores
It's something. If you can. If, you know, if listeners can wrap.
- [50:37]
Narrator/Storyteller
Their minds around it.
- [50:38]
Dan Flores
It's the sort of thing that has gone on here for. For multiple times longer than the United States has existed as a country. And you have to stretch your imagination out to comprehend vast reaches of time rather than doing what most of us do, which is, you know, you just focus on the immediate present of your. Your moment in time. I find it stimulating to stretch my imagination to try to look at a part of the world, like, say, eastern Montana, for example, or west Texas and say, wow, just 150 years ago, this.
- [51:19]
Narrator/Storyteller
Was a completely different place.
- [51:21]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
Yeah.
- [51:22]
Dan Flores
And it had been that kind of place for a long time.
- [51:25]
Narrator/Storyteller
Yeah.
- [51:25]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
And I think stemming from that long relationship there's between native people in buffalo, they have a highly specialized understanding of buffalo behavior and buffalo habits, and.
- [51:44]
Dan Flores
They.
- [51:44]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
Have this incredible knowledge of the animal and what it does sort of seasonally, but they explain it in ways that don't align with what the Western science tells us. And I always think this is like an interesting distinction to sort of wrap your mind around is that they explain these things in terms of obligations and reciprocity and there's certain moral. There's a moral relationship with the animal. And even though it doesn't explain things in the way that we would explain them today, it does explain these things in a way that makes sense and is sort of functionally, you know, useful knowledge. Right. Like, just the difference in understanding between Western science and sort of indigenous knowledge of these creatures is sort of fascinating.
- [52:35]
Dan Flores
Oh, man. Yeah, it's. It is really fascinating. And I think what stories, like particularly the ceremonies that. That I was describing in this. The Script for this episode. What they get us is an opportunity to really look back in time. I think probably farther back than just say the 1870s or the 17th or 18th century. I think these are probably really old ways that humans have thought about the animals that are around us. And it's, to be sure, very different from doing ecological studies or herd counts of the number of males and the number of females. And so this is the, the number that you can tell, take when you're harvesting them, or even modern genetic science, certainly Darwinian evolutionary science, Their take on.
- [53:34]
Narrator/Storyteller
It was completely different from all of those.
- [53:38]
Dan Flores
And yet it's somehow, I think when you, when you read it and understand what they were doing, what these ceremonies.
- [53:45]
Narrator/Storyteller
Were all about, it is truly, to me, understandable.
- [53:49]
Dan Flores
It's something that seems very, very human and probably very, very old. And it also, I think, probably had the effect of enabling a kind of a conservation preservation sentiment about the natural world around humanity to prevail. And so I really was excited about learning about those, those ceremonies in particular. I mean, one of the great lines about them is that whenever they were successfully performed, the animals came dancing. I mean, the idea is that the animals have disappeared and you have to engage in these reciprocal and kinship based ceremonies to cause them to return. And when you do so, they return joyously. The animals come dancing. And yeah, it's something that I think is sort of like learning about Far Eastern religions. I think it broadens your horizons to understand the human condition as seen by a completely different group of people.
- [54:59]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
And again, going back to this sort of long people and bison in North America, there are two huge changes, you know, after the arrival of Europeans that upend this, I don't want to call it an equilibrium, but this very long, seemingly sustainable relationship. And one you've already alluded to is the horse, which brings people onto the plains and fundamentally reshapes where people live and how they live. And then two is the market. And even though it's this invisible force that's probably in all likelihood the biggest turning point in this entire story is the beginning of the rogue trade.
- [55:43]
Dan Flores
Yeah, I think it is a critical part of the story. And what you have to recognize is that the global market was able, in a brilliant kind of way, to incorporate indigenous people producing their own particular local products that were valued by the market all over the globe. And so native people who participate, participated in the robe trade, who hunted bison for robes that they then traded to American and European traders. They were not doing something singular or a one off. It was something that Happened all around.
- [56:18]
Narrator/Storyteller
All around the world.
- [56:19]
Dan Flores
And one of the reasons it happened is because as a result of their particular circumstances in Eurasia, connected to the largest land mass of the world, so that you got old worlders, got the benefit of everything everybody invented, from China to India to Africa to Europe. What happened then for a group of people like native Americans who were isolated from all that, is that old worlders had gone through a metal revolution that enabled them to arrive in North America with a transformation, formative technology, iron and steel, iron products in particular, that, that basically put indigenous people, put native people into this kind of position. If we don't participate in this trade.
- [57:14]
Narrator/Storyteller
And someone down the river does, we.
- [57:17]
Dan Flores
Have disadvantaged ourselves to the point that we're not going to be able to compete or survive.
- [57:23]
Narrator/Storyteller
And so every, everybody, in order to.
- [57:25]
Dan Flores
Keep up with this new world and to of course, take on this transformative technology, is going to engage in the market. So native people get caught up in it, and the bison robe trade becomes a critical part of it in the West.
- [57:39]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
And I think one of the interesting parts of that is that native people had always produced some surplus amount of robes to trade with other native people on the periphery. And so it's not this. They don't have to do something. It's. It's within the, the historic sort of economy that they've always operated in.
- [58:00]
Dan Flores
Yeah.
- [58:01]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
Only now the, the market's ability to absorb robes is bottomless.
- [58:08]
Dan Flores
It's bottomless. And so the demand is enormous and the supply steadily dwindles. I mean, that's kind of what in effect happens with so many of the animals that become targets of the global market in North America is that the demand is insatiable and the supply is gradually diminishing over time to the, to the point where while you, when you get into the 1830s and 1840s and 1850s, Native people, through their, their own ceremonies, their winter counts, their calendars, their yearly calendars that they keep, are already noticing that bison numbers are dwindling. They're going down. I mean, the Kiowas are no longer able to have Sundances after the middle 1830s because they can't assemble all of their bands in one place, since there's not a sufficient number of bison to support them in one spot long enough to do the same Sundance. The winter counts among the, the Siouan speaking peoples on the northern plains by the 1840s are all about their shamans doing these ceremonies, trying to calm bison. So what in effect happens is that before the, the hide hunt takes place, in the post Civil War years as a result of a number of factors, and I go obviously into as many of them as we understand these days. The role of a changing climate, the role of competition for grass and water from horses, the role probably of accidentally introduced Old World bovine diseases like anthrax, for example. As a consequence of all of those plus the market, you began to get a drawdown of the. The supply of animals even by the 1840s and 1850s. And of course during this whole time, as I described in this episode, some three dozen native people who are peripheral to the Great Plains are going to mount up on horses and flock to the plains to participate in the hunt. And of course, there are all sorts of other influences taking place as well. The overland trails on the part of whites and the shrinking of the bison range on all sides as native. The removal policy puts nearly 90,000 Eastern and Midwestern Indians into Oklahoma and suddenly the bison are not able to migrate in that direction. And because the growth of the human population in places like Utah and New Mexico is also going up, bison can't go westward. So it's just a. It's a perfect storm of causes that by around 1850, 1860 or so are beginning to bring about a reduction in the number. And then after the Civil War, of course, as we can talk in the next about the next episode, comes the hide hunt.
- [61:16]
Steve (Co-narrator or Expert)
We'll get into that next time. Thanks, Dan.
- [61:18]
Dan Flores
You bet.
- [61:37]
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- [62:07]
Dude Wipes Spokesperson
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