Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What killed the buffalo?

I've preached it for years.
Whitey gets blamed for everything.

Embrace it. We are good at everything, even the bad stuff.

It sure wasn't the Cowboys!

I've had almost all beef. I still prefer wild game like moose or dall sheep or bison by far. it may be an acclimated taste but its there. beef has a weird taste to me. And wagyu may be my least favorite so far of beef.

that said any wild game or likely beef, can taste bad depending on factors.

Trump was the reason the bison almost were extinct.
yet if they had listened and taken the covid shots it would have all been fine.

You poor man. You have my sympathy. I don't think I could go on if I thought wild game was the best tasting meat. What would be the point of living?

I guess you guys didn't read the link provided by 10glocks, don't bother filling up your heads with historical facts.

Fire didn't destroy anything, it enriched the earth enabling the Buffalo to flourish with the higher nutrient food provided.
In the largest populations of Buffalo hunters, there isn't any evidence of massive die off from disease, at least not in any of the northern herds from the northern US states-North.

There are so many theories and postulates on what happened to the buffalo. Numbers are thrown around with wild abandon and all sources cited are only as reliable as the source that those writers used to determine their ideas.

The facts are simply that buffalo lived on the North American continent for thousands of years and numbered in the 10’s of millions. There weren’t that many Indians roaming around to impact the buffalo herds to any measurable degree.

Market hunting was certainly an issue and how many buffalo were killed during that time, seems to be the least recorded contribution to the demise of those vast herds of buffalo.

There is one undeniable fact in all of this; buffalo that numbered in the millions were decimated to hundreds by the end of the 19th century and I don’t believe that hunting them is the sole reason for that ratio..

...message deflave for a pic...

The historical sources cited are primary sources, otherwise known as evidence. In many cases it was their job to record the fauna&flora were skilled at that.
Anything other than primary source of information is speculation and hearsay, or...secondary sources.

If hunting accounted for 95% of the herds demise, and 2% to drowning, and 3% to choking on twigs, hunting them into extinction wasn't the cause of their demise.

Does anyone know what is stopping the Whitetail, Mule deer, Elk, Moose pops from being wiped off the face of the Earth?

Management. Check the population of those animals around the turn of the 20th century and they were far less than what we have now…

We saw something like what you describe in northern South Dakota. I pheasant hunted on private land there for years, with my cousins and we always got our limit and saw many birds. There were still plenty of fence rows and potholes that held water with cattails all around them. In about 3 years those fence rows were gone and the farmers filled in those low areas and are now farming them. You rarely see a pheasant now. It won't come back in my lifetime either. Without habitat wild game can't make it.

Lol, for some reason I just don't think you're going to get one.

I can account for a few…

Management yes, but the turn of the Century was also a bad time for pops, and one may have to go back to the short window of post contact and the recorded information we have.

I am going to say........people are going to have to come to terms with the fact that their is only a short period of time where unbiased evidence is available, that is in the journals of Fur traders, explorers etc....it was their job to collect info, good and bad.

Provided is primary evidence it wasn't whiteman who was solely responsible for the demise of the Buffalo, Native hunting was perhaps equally to blame, the ratio of who done more/less has nothing to do with it, there is no way to break that down, but here it is........no one species of people can point to the other as to sole blame.

Been waiting for these.

Thanks for posting.

The truth of the matter is that there weren't milions of people involved with hunting, trapping and explorers. Keeping track by those people was limited at best, few cared about the limitless resource they were killing. Conservation wasn't on the radar until the late 19th century and people like TR saw what was happening and realized that something had to be done.

Management is what saved the big game in America and the inability to manage buffalo made 2 dynamics that we are left with to day. We have big game in sustainable numbers and buffalo are only a few animals to let us look to the past and wish things were different...

100% agree, with you, with one exception..........The Fur traders and Buffalo hunters kept impeccable records on their activity, marrages, baptisms, whereabouts by the HBC and the NWC, they are all available for viewing.

Previously they were only available if you went into the archives with white gloves and physically handled the documents, not anymore, they are available online for free, I think there may be a small fee to access some of them, but I am not sure.

I have a lifetime of study on the issue's at hand and have offered assistance to anyone who reaches out for guidence as to where it can be found.
I have also qualified as an expert witness on issue's integrated to the subject at hand.

The questionable part of record keeping is made of of 2 essential components. How many were engaged in this activity and then what % actually kept those kind of records. I will bet both those numbers are quite low. I would guess in the 100's, maybe thousands, but not 10's of thousands...