Get The Destruction Of The Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 Fabricated By Andrew C. Isenberg Presented As Document

impressive and original environmental history that conveys the entire story of the American Great Plains through its most notable mammal.


First, Isenberg does a great job explaining the traits and habits of the bison, It alone among the American megafauna survived the great dieoff of,years ago caused both by the last ice age and the introduction of Indian hunters, because it could reproduce at almosta year and it could survive on the stubby shortgrass of the droughtafflicted Western plans.
Although it could gather in huge herds of up to,during the summer "rutting season," most of the year it divided up into small, separate herds of cows and bulls, who grazed apart during the less verdant fall and spring months.
In winter it would shelter itself along the forested river banks,

These habits also determined the habits of the Indians who hunted them, When the Comanches, Kiowa, and other tribes acquired the horse from Spanish colonizers in theth century, they moved from their fertile farms to the shortgrass plains and turned the bison hunt from an occasional foray into their prime occupation.
They traded many of their bison products hides and meat, for instance with Pueblo Indians and some Spanish settlers for corn and a few white iron products.


After the trade in beavers died down in thes, however, the bison robe trade replaced it, and caused many other Indian tribes, who had now been driven from their old farms because of a smallpox outbreak, to become skillful bison hunters as well.
Together these new and old nomadic tribes could slaughter up to,bison a year in exchange for white men's guns, horses, and iron goods.
They became became completely dependent on bison, to their eventual regret, Within twenty years the bison were driven away from most of the plains, In thes a new surge of white "hunter's camps," who used repeating rifles to get at bison's' hides, which were perfect for the leather belting needed in Eastern American factories, led to a fresh round of slaughter that drove the remaining bison almost to extinction.
Many whites, such as General Sherman, saw the new wave of killing as a beneficial process that would force the hungry Indians onto reservations.


I can't do justice to the subtleties and insights of this book, how it weaves everything together, from smallpox to wolves to climate change to grassland biomes, into a grand history of the region.
It does a better job than any book I've read of showing why and how environmental history should be made a part of all history.
Read for class. Feel largely ambivalent about this book, Its an interesting attempt to complicate the history of declining bison populations, but certainly its strange to read a book that discusses Indigenous peoples to the extent that it does without mentioning Indigenous scholars themselves or Indigenous historical perspectives directly, which maybe speaks to the state of environmental history two decades ago not to speak of the unsettling language used throughout.
Though this is probably still a persisting problem, I think the books focus on disabusing its reader of common static conceptions of both nature and Indigenous peoples was helpful e.
g. how the horse was native to the Americas, became extinct in the Americas, rearrived through Spanish colonialism and transformed Indigenous ways of hunting bison.
It was interesting to see how most of the various Indigenous nations that ended up hunting bison in theth century were displaced from other parts of the continent and came to concentrate in this area as a new means of survival.
The way capitalism interacted with a fairly arid grasslands region, that was not static or stable, yet did still manage to once sustain bison for long periods of time.
I was particularly interested in a comment that bison hides became a very important material for industrial belting, used in various industrial mills in theth century.
Being interested in watermills, I did not suspect I would encounter anything remotely related to watermills in this story, so to find out the voracious demand for buffalo hide belts that conveyed rotational energy from water or steam turbines to some other millstone or sawblade was one of the main drivers pushing the bison to extinction in the lateth century was extremely interesting and unsettling.
Another fascinating piece to this phenomenon was the deforestation of Eastern hemlock areas for hide tanning that had serious deleterious impacts on wildlife habitat destruction and the pollution of rivers.


The linking of the demise of the bison with Indigenous dispossession was very clear throughout the book.
There was a fascinating section on how Indigenous peoples saw the ever expanding presence of the honey bee as a proxy for the process of European conquest, both by its peoples and the flora and fauna it brought with them.


The last chapter is called “The Returns of the Bison” a pun I missed upon my first reading, and it didnt register until it was mentioned in class that it was about both the conservation movement that brought bison populations back up, but also the capitalist returns/profits involved in the way it was done.
I had a chance to visit Yellowstone many years ago, and so this would have been excellent companion reading back then.
Its a beautiful place, but to read about the weird bourgeois conservation efforts of urban elite women in the SPCA and masculinist imperialist men of conquest adds a whole layer of weird to the stagesetting for how bison become almost domesticated animals detached from the wideranging grasslands they once played a vital role in sustaining.
The information in this book is outdated at it was written a while ago, Students have already been feed the facts that resulted from this book, so some information seems redundant, but I did like the overarching concepts presented and how he put them together.
Lots of good detail. Yet, the first three chapters are not that well organized, but the last three are very interesting, Authoritative study on what happened to the bison, It's a sad story. You probably already know or suspect the worst of it,

The Indian tribes that hunted the bison are here too, Their story is a brief rise and fall: they adopt horses and guns to hunt the bison, which later allowed them to gain dominance over the farming Indians because European diseases hit the farming Indians a lot harder than the bison hunters.
But when the bison are destroyed partially from overhunting by the Indians, partially by Euroamericans, the hunting tribes are all but ruined as well.
The Destruction of the Bison explains the decline of the North American bison population from an estimatedmillion into fewer thana century later.
In this wideranging, interdisciplinary study, Andrew C, Isenberg argues that the cultural and ecological encounter between Native Americans and Euroamericans in the Great Plains was the central cause of the near extinction of the bison.
Drought and the incursion of domestic livestock and exotic species such as horses into the Great Plains all threatened the Western ecosystem, which was further destabilized as interactions between Native Americans and Euroamericans created new types of hunters in both cultures: mounted Indian nomads and white commercial hide hunters.
In the early twentieth century, nostalgia about the very cultural strife that first threatened the bison became, ironically, an important impetus to its preservation.
Isenberg's work is a fairly exhaustive analysis of what pressures and factors contributed to the sudden and sharp decline of bison populations from the tens of millions to less than a thousand individuals by.
I found his arguments pointing to overhunting by buffalo robe hunters to be very compelling and he backs it up with very good evidence.
However, I don't feel his analysis of primary documents related to Native Americans/First Nations to be very critical.
He seems to take many negative descriptions of them written by Europeans at the time at face value when he should be taking them with a bit more of a grain of salt.


I would still recommend reading this book for anybody interested in understanding one of the most disastrous extinction events in recent history.
Its an amazing book! Andrew Isenberg presents a solid, and increasingly uncommon argument, about the agency of culture, production, and ecology in environmental change.
He follows Arthur McEvoy's thesis and expands it, specifically focusing on the American West and its environmental history.
What destroyed the bison Isenberg burdens the natural world, the capitalist mode of production, and the culture of Euroamericans and American Indians.
In a field dominated by anthropocentrism see Crosby's "Changes In The Land", Isenberg's argument is fresh, but it ultimately lacks the determinism found in Cronon's text "Ecological Imperialism", and is therefore a bit too focused on humans as an agent of environmental change.
It is still a stellar story and history, a very interesting book about how the bison were killed to near extinction and then brought back through conservation efforts.
Author gets a bit distracted by talking about grass and his dubious theory that the change in gender roles is what caused the Native Americans to destroy their own food source.
Finally, a book that helps make sense of the rapid rise and fall of horseusing plains bisonhunting cultures both aboriginal and settler! For the last few years, I have been struggling to understand Manitoba Metis history and the relationships between Assiniboine, Anishinaabe, Sioux and Metis cultures in southern Manitoba.
I also couldn't figure out why or how Aboriginal Canadians fit into the story of the destruction of themillion bison that ranged across North America in the earlys.
This book helps to put everything into context, Read it with "Clearing the Plains" to understand how disease and the destruction of the bison led to First Nations accepting the numbered treaties and the reserve system that continues to haunt Canadian peoples today.
One in a series of studies of the environment and history, The Destruction of the Bison, by Andrew Isenberg, tells the story of how humans and the natural environment contributed to the nearextinction of the bison on the American Great Plains.
In his introduction, Isenberg describes how the destruction of the bison appears simple on the surface, Excessive commercial hunting by Plains Indians and American hunters caused the herds to decline to a mere shadow of the roughly thirty million bison that had roamed the Plains in.
However, by taking an environmental approach to the history of the bison, Isenberg clearly demonstrates the decisive impact of grassland ecology, horses, smallpox, the fur trade, and gender roles on the destruction of the bison.


Isenberg sets the stage by describing the situation in theth Century, when the various Indians tribes bordering the Great Plains first acquired horses.
Until the arrival of the horse, most Native Americans bordering the Plains lived in agricultural villages and raised crops.
Bison were hunted on foot, and the hunt was conducted seasonally to supplement agriculture, Over a period of thousands of years, Indians had become extraordinarily skilled at hunting bison on foot, However, “the bison, above all, was mobile, indeed, quite unpredictably so,”and this fact, more than any other, was the major limitation on how many bison could be killed.
The introduction of the horse removed this limitation, It multiplied the ability to follow the herds and kill bison by giving the hunter equal mobility, This allowed for a fundamental change of lifestyle, It was now possible to abandon agriculture and hunt bison exclusively,

Increased mobility was the most obvious benefit conferred by horses, But it was not the only benefit, Now, for the first time, Indians could tap into the most abundant natural resource of the Great Plains, the grass.
Two types dominated the High Plains, blue grama and buffalo grass, They were well suited to survive on the Plains because their root systems were shallow but dense, allowing them to capture most rainfall before it evaporated.
In addition, these grasses only grew to a height of about two inches, This protected them against the effects of drought because only a small surface area was exposed to heat and sunlight.
These grasses were important to the bison, Because of their ability to resist drought, blue grama and buffalo grass were dependable food sources when taller grasses withered and died in years of drought.
Horses could feed on these same grasses, however, and this greatly increased the range of the bison hunters.


The acquisition of horses was an important reason for the shift to full time mobile hunting societies, but it was not the only reason.
Isenberg cites disease as a second reason for this fundamental change, The deadly diseases, especially smallpox, brought by American and European traders were most devastating to village societies, Because diseases like smallpox are contagious, densely settled areas like villages are most susceptible to their effects, The nomadic tribes that hunted the bison full time were not hit nearly as badly as the village dwellers because the nomadic hunters were more dispersed.
This greatly increased the power of the mobile hunters over the agricultural villages, After being decimated by disease, village tribes lacked the manpower to defend themselves against the lightning raids of the mobile hunters on their villages and crops.
This fact gave the remaining villagers one more reason to abandon agriculture for a mobile way of life.


Trade provided yet another reason to change to nomadic bison hunting, Initially, the nomadic bison hunters would take the meat from their kills and trade with the village societies for crops to supplement the bison meat.
However, with the advent of the fur trade in the earlyth Century, trade began to take on a new role.
American and European fur traders wanted bison robes, and the nomadic hunters of the Plains, with their tremendous hunting skills, were the ideal source.
Unfortunately for the bison, this new form of trade quickly proved to be extremely exploitative, Before the fur trade, most Indian societies embraced the value of only killing enough bison to fill their needs.
But when offered access to European and American trade goods in exchange for bison robes, this quickly changed.
“With the onset of the robe trade, the plains nomads, like those Paleoindians who had helped to destroy the large herbivores of the Pleistocene epoch, turned to the destruction of the bison.
”

Isenberg sees gender as a contributing factor in the move to exploitative bison hunting to feed the bison robe trade.
Before the move to the Plains, when the Native Americans were settled in agricultural villages, women played the important economic role of raising crops.
However, once the tribes moved to full time nomadic bison hunting, women became unequal in terms of food procurement.
Their economic role was reduced to preparing bison robes for trade, This unequal economic arrangement helped lessen social restraints on exploitative trade,

Indian hunters were by no means the sole cause of the decline of the bison, Americans contributed in many ways, Settlers and miners moved over the Great Plains in large numbers beginning in thes, Cattle ranchers would follow in thes, Each of these groups possessed livestock that foraged on the grasses of the Plains, Settlers and ranchers naturally chose to settle the river valleys most endowed with natural resources, namely timber, grass, and water.
These were also the areas most favored by the bison, especially in the winter, As the bison lost access to these important areas, their chances of survival diminished, The bisons chance of survival reached its nadir with the appearance of American hide hunters in thes.
Hide hunters were men who indiscriminately killed bison using powerful rifles in order to ship the bison hide to Eastern manufacturers.
When faced with this new threat, the already declining bison herds had no chance,

This book is an important contribution to the story of the bison for several reasons, Isenberg effectively shows that the decline of the bison is not the simple story it appears to be.
He demonstrates the complexity of the destruction of the bison but does not allow that complexity to cloud the telling of this very important story.
The details provide key insights into the role of each environmental factor, but the story never gets lost in the details.
By integrating environmental and social factors with economic factors, Isenberg paints a convincing picture of the reasons for the bisons decline.
In this respect, The Destruction of the Bison is similar to Elliott Wests excellent book The Contested Plains.
West makes a similar case for the importance of environmental factors in the history of the Great Plains, and both arguments are very powerful.


That being said, Isenbergs arguments could have been even more convincing, The section concerning the importance of gender was not as clearly connected to the story as the descriptions of other factors in the decline of the bison.
There are details that describe the role of gender, but they do not drive home the point as clearly as in other sections.
More maps would have been helpful as well, There are only two, and they fail to show the location of some of the events Isenberg describes.
For an environmental study, not being able to locate certain areas in their environmental context lessened the effectiveness of the description.
This is a hindrance to readers not familiar with the geographical features of the Great Plains, .