User:Softlavender/Buffalo and the Native American

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[edit] Buffalo and the Native American

The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic History states,

The slaughter of the vast buffalo herds that had once roamed the plains and prairies began in the 1840s. During most years of the 1870s, a million buffalo a year were killed by non-Indian hunters on the Northern Plains. The railroads ran special excursions along their newly opened tracks from which self-styled sportsmen shot buffalo from the comfort of their seats.

General Phil Sheridan, one of the foremost Indian fighters in the U.S. Army, viewed the slaughter of the buffalo as a weapon in the Army's arsenal against the last remaining in dependent Native Americans: "I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies, in its effect upon the Indians [...]," Sheridan said. At one point, Sheridan suggested that buffalo poachers be given medals with a dead Buffalo engraved on one side and a discouraged-looking Indian on the other. Sheridan, never a man to mince words, remarked that buffalo hunters had done more to defeat the Indians than the entire regular Army.

[...]

By the early 1880s, the U.S. Army's version of total war against the Plains Indians had reached its goal: the buffalo were nearly extinct. Ten years earlier, some of the Plains Indians still had an ample supply of food; by the early 1880s, they were reduced, as General Sheridan had intended, to the conditions of paupers, without food, shelter, clothing, or any of those necessities of life that came from the buffalo.^[1]

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and, in the case of the Plains Indians, systematic slaughter of the buffalo.^{[2] [3]}

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Johansen, Bruce E., ed. The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic History. 1999, Greenwood Publishing Group. pp 36, 37. [3] ISBN 0313306230