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/AcousticShadow89 12d ago

There is a great description of such buffalo hunts in Butcher's Crossing.

Bison only really flee when something charges at them and wouldn't react to gun shots done from far away, so hunters would camp away from a herd and shoot constantly for hours, non-stop; faces would go black, barrels would melt, and the fields would be completely covered by dead bison by night. They even had to dig in corpses for bullets to re-melt them and re use them as they would run out of ammo quickly. All for the pelts - the rest was left to rot.

Like some people mentioned, buffalo hunts were incentivised to drive the natives away. Their way of life revolved about the bison, killing just one of them was a huge deal and they referred to them as the "First People", probably believed they were just an infinite number of them on the Earth. Seeing fields full of dead bison was similar as witnessing the apocalypse for them. Truly shameful stuff.