by Jay Peck

The demise of the bison is a well known story, usually presented piecemeal, isolated from the total picture of the destruction of the entire ecosystem of the Plains.  It is rarely depicted as systematic and intended, but rather as an unfortunate result of westward American expansion.  The bison existed as an element in an immense natural structure of which their Native American hunters were but one functional component, along with the climate, geology, pedology, and four other livings kingdoms existing symbiotically on the North American Plains.  Entering this ecological matrix from outside, the white man might as well have been coming from Mars, with a technology and ideology that were completely alien and out of proportion to an ecological scenario that had been building its specific identity for 25 million years.  It took only 50 years to destroy this system and the contest was an incredible mismatch.  What happened to this ecosystem in the 19th century is a clear analogue of what is happening to the overall ecology of the earth today.  The yearly sacrifice of numbers of ecosystems around the earth to the bulldozer strains and restructures the next larger systems in which those ecosystems participated, ultimately affecting the entire planet.

Leveraging control over a huge, natural ecosystem like the Plains required fracturing the organic identity of the prairie and "unplugging" several major components of the community, which mutated the entire system. The socio-political imperative of manifest destiny dictated the removal of the Native Americans, which, on the Plains, necessitated elimination of their bison-centered subsistence system. Later, bisecting the open prairie with transportation and communication systems and mincing it into fenced sections of private property, the new occupants fragmented the organic community into a series of isolated plots resembling potted plants, which were then pushed for maximum production of cash crops. Fifty years later, the ecological crash of the "Dust Bowl" conjoined with the Great Depression of the 1930s as systemically related disasters of maximization. This short period contrasts starkly with the long, complex history of Plains emergence.

Twenty-five million years ago the Laramide orogeny uplifted the Rocky Mountains, which then intercepted the rains of the prevailing westerlies and dried out the lower lying forests to the east. The forest edge retreated, leaving in its wake the vast open savanna which became the North American Plains. The organic constituents of the decomposing forest and the influx of fine colluvial sediment from the mountains together conditioned the new prairie soil. Much later, during the glaciations and oceanic recessions of the Pleistocene, the rise of the Panamanian land bridge unified the previously separate biotic histories of North and South America. Up until this time the grassland regimes of both continents were utterly different.  The first grasses of North America are thought to have come from central Asia by way of the Bering land bridge while South American grasses were in place earlier on well developed Eocene savannas and probably came from Africa.

The North American Prairie has in the recent past been a "striped" environment consisting of three north-south trending zones. Known, from east to west, as the tall, mid, and shortgrass prairies, these zones degrade gradually westward as they trend into the Rocky Mountain rain shadow. North-south temperature gradients crosscut the east-west rainfall pattern, and together, they control the effective moisture, which in turn directs the dominant photosynthetic pathway of grasses (C3, cool-season, moisture loving; C4, warm season, drought-tolerant; and CAM, utilizing both pathways) present in any region. Specific variations of relative moisture and temperature affect localized micro-environments and are basic to complex phenological patterns which intergrade. The C3/C4 pattern, dependent on climate, and particularly the normal July minimum temperature, is the core of regional grassland variation. North American grassland regimes reflect the temperature/moisture pattern with arid-tolerant shortgrasses dominating the drier west. The Southern Plains are home to both C3 and C4 photosythesizing grasses with C4 grasses dominating the total grasslands.  The reverse pattern is seen in the northeast.

Prior to the development of the grasslands, the native ungulates of the americas were browsers. The evolution of North American stipoid grasses parallels that of the grazers (horses and antelopes) and the cross-relationships are seen in the high crowned herbivore teeth developed as an adaptive response to the high phytolith content of grasses and the emergence of long, thin legs terminating in one or two enlarged toes, well adapted to running on the prairie. Early North American Prairie grasses of the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs included cool-season Stipa sp., Panicum sp., and Setaria sp. Warm-season grasses of the south, however, respond well to mild drought and heavy grazing with increased fresh growth and tillering and under these conditions warm-season grasses tend to succeed the cool-season grasses. By the end of the Pleistocene a more modern prairie had evolved and many present day species of grass were present. The early stipoid grasses had been replaced largely by the bluestems, the grammas, and buffalo grass, all warm-season grasses originating on the mountain plateaus of Central America.

Bison ancestors came from Asia but today's Bison bison bison evolved in North America. Suspected bison progenitor Leptobos was present in central Asia during the early Pliocene but was never represented in the americas. In North America, late in the Pliocene, the presence of Bison latifrons and Bison antiguus is attributed to development out of the intermediate species Bison sivalensis, which was widespread in east Asia and whose genes were carried across Beringia by some unknown mediating form. B. latifrons lived a woodland adaption, solitary or small herd forming, highly sexually dimorphic, and apparently not hunted by humans. Its long legs and high head orientation indicates adaptation as a browser. Latifrons' primary mode of defense was probably the use of its enormous horns in this time of high inter-specific aggression. The animal's individualism was adapted to its open forest habitat and its diet was moisture-loving, cool-season plants.

B. antiguus was adapted to the late Pleistocene savanna and somewhat more herd oriented than latifrons. Probably the only bison in mid-latitude North America and northern Mexico during the period 20-11,000 B.P., its morphology and adaptation were quite different from latifrons. B. antiquus' moderately downward head orientation, reduced body and horn size, short legs, and increased facial hair suggests a browser/grazer organized into herds. Its defense modes tended more to visual display and flight with herd dominance dependent on head clashing, as attested to by by the development of domed frontals and lowered, broadened nasals. This individualistic animal probably only formed small, single-bull herds.

During the late Pleistocene a great climate-driven event took place throughout the world. Climate on earth is largely controlled by the sun and great climatic cycles result from periodic modulations in the distance and angular variations embedded in this relationship. Specific periodicities of approximately 100,000 (variation in orbital shape), 40,000 (variation in axial tilt), 26,000 (precession of the equinoxes), and 22 (sunspot cycle) years represent cosmic-level events, the results of which are complexified further by the more stochastic causes of change initiated by vulcanism and meteor strikes on the earth's surface. Cosmologists believe that between fifteen and nine thousand years ago the combined effects of a decreased earth to sun distance and an increased axial tilt affected the earth's climate by increasing seasonality in the Northern Hemisphere and decreasing seasonality in the Southern Hemisphere. Higher insolation values had the effect of reducing the ice sheets and changing precipitation, wind, and temperature patterns across North America.

Conditions of less seasonality in North America roughly 18,000 years ago manifested in diverse, "mosaic" environments, highly differentiated niches, which supported a broad array of fauna in any given region and high diversity of species, but low populations among individual species. The climate-driven shift from the Pleistocene environmental organization to the "striped" zonation of Holocene plant and animal communities consisted in reduced niche differentiation, heightened competition between herbivores, and the extinction of those forms which could not adapt. This was not the first mass extinction of fauna in North America. Over the last ten million years there have been six such events. Some bison survived in North America, while in Eurasia higher human population densities and overhunting probably account for an even greater catastrophe, possibly effecting the decline into domestication of the Neolithic earlier in western Asia than in other parts of the world.

Later, during the early Holocene, B. antiguus antiguus was displaced from the Southern Plains by B. antiguus occidentalis, a form which carried the grassland synthesis further through an adaptation of smaller body size, a total grazing subsistence strategy, more complex herd organization, and a more flight or display oriented response to aggression. The slow, continued warming into the mid-Holocene resulted in a number of responses in the inter-related plant and animal populations of the prairie. The warmer, drier conditions resulted in drought in some areas--causing a general northward movement of bison populations, probably to escape the extreme dessication in the Southern Plains and finding better graze to the north. Later, the spread of C4 (arid-tolerant, warm season) grasses in the south may have attracted the return of large bison herds by about 6,000 B.P. By this time, B. a. occidentalis had evolved into Bison bison bison. Decreased bison horn core size, averaging a 32 mm decrease per thousand years over the last 10,000 years with some punctuation during the mid-Holocene, indicates the gradual nature of the evolution of the smaller body size of the later variety, B. b. bison.

B. b. bison is the product of evolution toward smaller, herd organized animals with shorter lives and maturation periods and greater overall numbers with densities being maintained below carrying capacity. Their greater numbers probably resulted in overgrazing of certain areas and may have contributed to the further development of the graded grasslands in the continuum of the North American Prairie. Overgrazing results in the replacement of C3 (moisture-tolerant, cool season) grasses by C4 grasses.  In the south, such replacement increased the presence of the dominant grasses, whereas in the north--where climate selects against C4 grasses--the effect of overgrazing reduced all graze. Great increases in the numbers of B. b. bison in the south during the period 5-4,000 B.P. are probably a systemic result of its herd organization, grazing subsistence strategy, and the expansion of the southern grasslands.

By about 6,000 B.P., the coevolving prairie components had become the huge, interdependent system that was the community later seen by whites during the Coronado expedition. The early "individualism" of the evolving bison forms had shifted toward a massive community of mutual dependence.  The bison herd represented one of the major elements in the maintanence of the health and identity of the prairie. Large, specialized herds of grazers, adapted specifically to the prairie, and surviving on a basically monocultural diet, maintained the grasslands through moderate to heavy levels of grazing. This induced fresh growth and tillering, resulting in a thick, tough "grazing lawn" that inhibited the growth of trees and kept the prairie open. The high volume of manure produced by the herd supported incredibly complex underground communities that processed and fed on this material, and in turn fed the dense "A" soil horizon from which grew the grasses that supported the bison.

Complex phenology, the availability of drinking water, and general open access of grasslands, all conditioned patterns of high and low visability of bison throughout the prehistoric and historic record on the Plains. It has been demonstrated that bison prefer to eat highly nutritional, fresh-growth grasses, the presence of which is determined by factors whose inter-relationships and variation are highly complex. Essentially, bison require an abundant and specifically balanced diet of the proteins and carbohydrates found ideally in fresh-growth grass. Geography and environmental conditions determined where this balance, and the bison, were to be found at any particular time.

To the individual bison, living in herds offers some advantages and some definite disadvantages. Large numbers afford protection, however, there is danger inherent in group behavior stemming from its patterned nature.  Bison in large herds exhibit behaviors that are more predictable than the behavior of any single bison and a number of different hunting scenerios might be devised based on the knowledge of these tendencies. Bison movement could be monitored through previously acquired knowledge of signs that large herds deposited on the landscape in the obvious forms of highly fertilized areas, overgrazed areas, wallows, licks, trails, tree-rubs, and the breakdown of streambanks.

Absent from this scenerio so far is documented human presence. Well dated evidence of Paleoindian (Clovis culture) in North America begins about 14,000 B.P. The mass bison kill sites associated with the Paleoindian are famous, but the impression given by these few archeological treasure-troves is skewed. Compared to the volume of Paleoindian single-kill or small multiple kill sites strewn across North America, the mass kill sites represent unique events, clearly not the standard method of obtaining bison products in prehistoric times. Such mass kill sites represent Paleoindian's mobility more than his wastefulness. In the late Pleistocene environments it was necessary to follow the herd closely or risk losing it, leaving little time for extensive processing of more than a few animals. Except for a few well-known exceptions, the osteological contents of most later Plains bison processing sites indicate that the bison were almost totally utilized by the hunters; the splintered bone common in many sites is indicative of bone-grease processing, which added fat and carbohydrates to the diet of the bison hunters. Carbohydrates and fats were necessary complements for their protein sparing effect in a diet that was otherwise very heavy in protein.

Trade represents another complement to this specialization. The exchange relationship between protohistoric Plains bison hunters and Plains-marginal sedentary horticulturalists is a well-documented practice, which helped augment and balance diets for both parties. Archeologically established evidence of earlier trade patterns on the Plains portray a down-the-line, or redundant system more focused perhaps on intergroup bonding than on complementary subsistence needs. The later, differential trade system became more mutualistic. Bison products were brought to the Pueblos and Plains hunters received corn, cotton products, and archeologically tracable finished ceramic products either directly in trade or indirectly as containers.

The next shift in trade patterns, which took place about A.D. 1450, signals a major change in levels of human organization on the Plains. In the later arrangement, the eastern pueblos, most notably Pecos, became large scale middle-men commercing in bison products either directly off the Plains or from secondary collection centers. Primarily hides, the fruits of Plains trade found their way to Tenochtitlan and beyond. A similar kind of intensification affected the eastern Plains periphery, also under Mexican influence. The Greater Southwest documents a long history of patronage from the south. Ceramic technology, agriculture and irrigation were imported about 2000 years B.P. and slowly evolved locally. Complex and monumental architecture, ballcourts, and apparent centralized authority appear suddenly about A.D. 900 in cultures previously subsisting along the hunter/gatherer-horticulturalist continuum. These introductions propelled the development of Puebloan culture in the Greater Southwest.

The Plains bison hunters were part of the "Chichimeca Sea" surrounding these expanding cultures and they were colonized into the trade system through their hunting specialization. They became a terminal node in the dendritic trade pattern centered in Mexico, and herein lies a question for cybernetic experts. Did this geographic extension of one portion of the system overextend the demand on the ecology of the Plains to the breaking point or was the system resilient enough to expand with the pressure? The Plains bison population of the 1500s has been variously estimated in the numerous millions and it is hard to imagine that these huge numbers could be reduced to below breeding levels with the means available at the time. Spanish guns and horses affected the volume of the kill during historic times, but it was still a hunting scenerio, and as such, qualitatively as well as quantitatively utterly different from what came after.

Europeans and their technology, coupled with the evangelical destruction inherent in their Judeo-Christian mandate, drove the bison to near-extinction in a very short period of time. The anglo arrival in force following the American Civil War severely affected all natural and cultural processes in the region, to say the least. Honed in the fratricidal firestorm of the early 1860s, its parent population numbed by single-battle, five-digit body counts, the American military brought not colonization and conversion to the plains and southwest, as had the Spanish, but instead demonstrated the pure economic efficiency of devastation through scorched earth and holocaust. In the later years of the war, Sherman had learned that it was more efficient to deny an enemy his essential resources than to meet him in bloody battle.  This policy, openly extended to the Plains and its inhabitants, ended the story of the American bison herds by the late 1880s. The destruction of these herds, seen only in isolation as the Indian subsistence base, was justified in the numbers game as economical.  The Indians were, after all, the enemy. Soon, most members of the various human tribes shared the bison's fate.

The Dust Bowl, occurring only 50 years after the pacification of the Plains, was the obvious and unobscurable result of a philosophy of domination and unconstrained utilization. The Plains bison hunters had lived as part of an ecosystem in egalitarian societies that were acephalous and self-organized. Territorial affiliations and inter-group rights were respected but private property did not exist. These were highly adapted cultures, and successful adaptation seems to include the myth-embedded reminder to not destroy the environment you need to live, and ecologically suicidal folk-cultures do not exist.  This image contrasts with that of the predator invaders and the present condition of the geographic area known as the Plains. This evolutionarily significant meeting on the Plains represents the clash of two utterly different world-views, one existing in nature and the other attempting to live outside.

In contrast to the millions of years required for the development and growth of natural ecologies, pacification and control took place very quickly. The western hemisphere has witnessed a series of major human and ecological disasters during the last 500 years, which occurred simultaneously and continuously, representing to the locals the expected closing of the World Age. European Conquest brought mass death by disease and intent to millions of native inhabitants with concomitant environmental destruction. The Industrial Revolution multiplied the extent to which crimes against the planet could be perpetrated by expanding the needs of the masters and the capacities of the tools of devastation. It is not accident or ignorance that powers our present drive to extinction. Today, the same hegemonic style of ecocide and ethnocide that won the west is imperiously applied primarily by transnational corporations, threatening the existence of the remaining folk populations and intact ecologies, and thus, all populations and the total ecology of earth. There are no longer any limits to man's physical power over nature and greed is utterly unbounded. The same all-devouring monster that destroyed the Plains roams the planet, largely unimpeded and unchallenged.

This essay, along with many others has been published in "Ecotropic Works," edited by John Campion, Ecotropic Works (pub), 1999. Available at: Ecotropic Works, PO Box 12336, Berkeley, CA 94709