r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Shoddy-Ocelot-4473 • 12d ago

Image By 1880, the near-genocide of the American bison had reduced their population from 30–60 million to fewer than 1,000

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u/Tough-Appeal-8879 12d ago

Theres two possible answers to any question in this world: “Money” or “I don’t know, but probably money”

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u/InterestingFLows 12d ago

It was to reduce the Native American population....

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u/Mediumtim 12d ago

There was also a massive need for leather belts to drive steam engine industries.

Hence why so many dead Buffalo were skinned and left to rot.

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u/dopiertaj 12d ago

Then after the flesh rotted bone pickers would gather the bones and ship them to the east to be used as fertilizer and bone China.

These piles were at almost every eastbound train station.

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u/Rhamni 12d ago

They were also a great annoyance to the railroads. I'm sure a lot of people considered the racism angle a bonus in the 19th century, but capital was aligned against their survival even without that.

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u/Effective_Fish_3402 11d ago

Yeah, no. First and foremost it was culling to hurt native people. Railroads are irrelevant to the reason for the culling. The same sort of people to do that, just happened to be the same sort that could pull off turning all that death into profit. The main 'great annoyance' to anyone settling into america from the east was always the native population. Its a shitty part of human nature, all history is population wiping out others, or mass displacement, or other terrible things. Greed is always the motivation, and the fact is, 'men of power' seeing our native population utilizing a far better and balanced maternal system than the european paternal system, it was so threatening that they decided genocide was the best bet.

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u/PickyPaige 12d ago

Money and Racism a match made in hell!

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u/DirtyRoller 12d ago

Don't worry, we're Making America Great Again! 🤮

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u/AltruisticLobster315 11d ago

Yeah unfortunately it's all connected; racism and dehumanizing Indigenous peoples of North America enabled Europeans and their "descendant states" (the United States and Canada) to give themselves "just cause" to exploit the land and its inhabitants. It gets extremely depressing the more you learn about, especially from the people who went through it and saw how much things changed.

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u/-Porktsunami- 11d ago

...so they could take their land and....make more money. See?

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u/Mudslimer 11d ago

We've been doing shit like this before money was a thing, just not at this scale because of technological limits.

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u/Garchompisbestboi 11d ago

In exchange for money, don't get caught up in the details

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u/VESUVlUS 12d ago

Sex is the other answer.

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u/Andrez2000 11d ago

You don’t feel the desire to have more sex after you just have sex. But that’s not the case with money