In so doing, they forced the Indians into a sedentary lifestyle more in line with the prevailing European notions of private property and "civilization. Secretary of Interior Columbus Delano made the following remarks in , a year after Yellowstone National Park was established:. I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians, regarding it as a means of hastening their sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors".
Not only did the European settlers of the new world view the survival of buffalo as a means of perpetuating the ways of Native American life, they saw the buffalo as being incompatible with their dream of a Great Plains cattle culture. It was a simple matter of competition; as long as buffalo remained wild, they would out-compete the cattle for grazing lands and stand as a living reminder to the uncivilized nature of a pre-settlement West.
These undercurrents come to the surface in the following speech against a bill which would have made it illegal for whites to kill buffalo. The argument, made by U. Representative Conger, was delivered in There is no law which human hands can write, there is no law which a Congress of men can enact, that will stay the disappearance of these wild animals before civilization.
They eat the grass. They trample upon the plains upon which our settlers desire to herd their cattle and their sheep. They range over the very pastures where the settlers keep their herds of cattle. The killing of bison increased when Indians acquired horses and guns from Europeans, but it was not until the arrival of white settlers that the slaughter truly began.
The Western artist George Catlin estimated in that two to three million bison had been slaughtered for their hides -- sent to Eastern markets -- in the first 30 years of the 19th century alone.
The bison was ruthlessly hunted by hunters, or "runners," as they called themselves, who were interested only in the valuable hides and who left the meat to rot on the plains. The coming of the Transcontinental Railroad, which linked the country in , also helped sound the death knell of the bison population. The railroads began to advertise what they called "hunting by rail. In the next decade, the hide hunters exterminated nearly every buffalo. The air was foul with a sickening stench, and the vast plain which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary desert.
The wasteland was so scattered with the bones of dead animals and buffalos that all the prairie felt like a graveyard risen. During a hard drought, with no buffalo left, settlers and Native Americans hunted their bones, selling them for fertilizer.
We were never able to control the savages until their supply of meat was cut off. Some men saw the future. And even before the buffalo runners had wiped out almost every animal and the U. It did not sit well with Sheridan. Congress passed the bill to protect buffalo in , but President Grant refused to sign it. Without buffalo, the U. When the Oglala Lakota in the north mounted horses and killed the cows in ritual as they had the buffalo on their prairie hunts, the government stopped sending live cows and instead shipped meat from a nearby slaughterhouse.
The Oglala Lakota burned the slaughterhouse down. But that was all some time away. Army and the men from New York stood on the grassy hill, in that unusually warm September in , above the Platte River in Nebraska. Cody and the men had circled their horses around the herd until they were downwind. A buffalo can weigh 2, pounds, run 35 mph, and quickly pivot to fight with horns that can rip flesh like obsidian.
When the men were close enough, Cody gave the signal to charge. He and the men from New York thundered toward the six buffalo, hoping to win the silver trophy, excited to kill. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years. For in its wake, the lives of countless Native Americans were destroyed, and tens of millions of buffalo, which had roamed freely upon the Great Plains since the last ice age 10, years ago, were nearly driven to extinction in a massive slaughter made possible by the railroad.
Following the Civil War, after deadly European diseases and hundreds of wars with the white man had already wiped out untold numbers of Native Americans, the U. But as the Gold Rush, the pressures of Manifest Destiny , and land grants for railroad construction led to greater expansion in the West, the majority of these treaties were broken.
In , he wrote to Gen. Ulysses S. On the ground in the West, Gen. The consequence was that every engagement was a forlorn hope. As the railways expanded, they allowed the rapid transport of troops and supplies to areas where battles were being waged.
Sheridan was soon able to mount the kind of offensive he desired. Custer later reported more than Indian deaths, including that of Chief Black Kettle and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, shot in the back as they attempted to ride away on a pony.
Philip Sheridan photographed by Matthew Brady. Photo: Library of Congress.
0コメント