Destruction of bison in America. Destruction of bison in America Destruction of bison

The main source of food for the Indians was bison, countless herds of which inhabited the endless prairies created by the great Gitchie Manito. The Indians never killed bison (or game in general) for fun - only to get food. If there was any meat left, they made a kind of canned food: “pemmican” - “buffalo meat” cured in a special way.

The “fathers of the American nation” themselves testify to the genocide of the Indians with undisguised cynicism. American General Philip Sheridan wrote: “The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let them kill , skin the hides and sell them until they have exterminated all the buffalo!"

Sheridan in the US Congress proposed establishing a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of exterminating bison. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said: "The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians."

This massacre reached a particular scale in the 60s during the construction railway. Not only that, the entire huge army of workers was fed with bison meat, and the skins were sold. The so-called “hunting” reached the point of absurdity, when only tongues were taken from animals, and the carcasses were left to rot.

The widespread extermination of bison reached its peak in the 60s of the 19th century, when construction of the transcontinental railroad began. Bison meat was used to feed a huge army of road workers, and the skins were sold. Specially organized groups of hunters pursued bison everywhere, and soon the number of animals killed was approximately 2.5 million per year. Railway advertisements promised passengers bloody entertainment: shooting at bison directly from the windows of the cars. The hunters sat on the roofs and platforms of the train and fired in vain at the grazing animals. No one picked up the carcasses of the killed animals, and they were left to rot on the prairies. Passing through huge herds, the train left behind hundreds of dying or maimed animals.

As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison by the beginning of the 20th century decreased from several tens of millions to several hundred. French biologist Jean Dorst noted that initially the total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885 the stories of hunters in the North of the United States spoke of hunting the “last” bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million buffalo were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote about the decline in bison numbers from 30 million in 1800 to fewer than a thousand by the end of the century.

Bison were also killed for entertainment: American railroad companies advertised that passengers could shoot the bison from their train windows. In 1887, the English naturalist William Mushroom, who traveled across the prairies, noted: Buffalo trails were visible everywhere, but there were no living bison. Only the skulls and bones of these noble animals turned white in the sun.

The winters of 1880-1887 became hungry for the Indian tribes, and there was a high mortality rate among them.
The hunter Buffalo Bill, hired by the administration of the Kansas Pacific Railways, gained great fame, killing several thousand bison. Subsequently, he selected several dozen people from the starving Indians and staged “performances”: the Indians acted out scenes of attacking settlers in front of the audience, shouting, etc., then Buffalo Bill himself “saved” the colonists.

The settlers, whose history Hollywood never tires of glorifying, simply destroyed the bison and the Indians died of hunger. US national hero William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, single-handedly killed 4,280 (!) bison in eighteen months (1867-1868). The glorification of Buffalo Bill, for example, on Wikipedia, reaches the point of ridiculousness - he is presented as a caring supplier - he allegedly provided food for the workers who built the Trans-American railroad. Descriptions of the atrocities of such Codys, who destroyed bison for fun, or to cut out their tongues (the carcasses of the killed giants were simply left to rot), are carefully blurred by stories about the heroic pages of the “battle for the country.” But these were ordinary villains, killers, no different from the “bloodthirsty redskin” cliche. The same Cody, already a hero of cheap novels since 1870, in 1876 personally scalped the leader of the Shaen tribe Yellow Hand (according to other sources - Yellow Hair).

In the huge Cherokee tribe, whose leader was once the outstanding scientist, politician and cultural scientist Sequoyah (his name is immortalized in the name of the most big trees on Earth), every fourth died.

The Cherokees had an amazing culture, their own written language (which is still preserved. In accordance with the US Indian Removal Act, in 1830 Oklahoma received the status of "Indian Territory".

40,000 buffalo hides in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878

Bison Skull Wall

Mountains of bison skulls

Steppe bison feed on grass, while forest bison also use leaves, shoots and branches of bushes and trees for food. These powerful animals are capable of feeding in snow cover up to 1 m deep: first they scatter the snow with their hooves, and then dig a hole with rotational movements of their head and muzzle. Once a day, bison go to water, and when severe frosts set in and water sources are covered with ice, they eat snow. They usually graze around the clock. Of the sense organs, bison have the best developed sense of smell: bison sense danger at a distance of up to 2 km, and they sense water even further - 7-8 km away. Their hearing and vision are somewhat weaker, but they cannot be called bad.

Bison are very curious, especially calves: every new or unfamiliar object can attract their close attention. Bison vocalize frequently: when the herd moves, grunting sounds of different tones are constantly heard. During the rut, bulls emit a booming roar that can be heard for many kilometers in calm weather. Such a roar sounds especially impressive when several bulls participate in the “concert.” Despite their powerful build - old bulls can weigh a ton - bison are exceptionally fast and agile.

They easily reach speeds of up to 50 km/h. The bison cannot be called aggressive, but when driven into a dead end or wounded, it easily switches from flight to attack. Perhaps only wolves can be classified as natural enemies of the bison; other predators are not scary for it. Huge herds of bison made regular migrations. Surely it was a breathtaking sight when millions of animals set off at the same time, strictly following the direction. Animals always moved along the same routes and, as a result, trampled wide, straight paths.

Of course, bison have been hunted for a long time. For many Indian tribes, these animals were a real breadbasket, carefully “supplying” meat for food and skins for clothing and wigwams. The Indians roamed along with giant herds, and neither one nor the other experienced any inconvenience from this. True, it cannot be said that the indigenous people of America and the pale-faced hunters who appeared later treated the preservation of the bison population with special trepidation. Abundance breeds wastefulness, and the history of the Wild West describes many cases of the senseless extermination of huge numbers of bison by the same Indians.

Nomadic white traders and hunter-tapers witnessed, and often took part in, a cruel and unprofitable, as they would say now, hunt: Indian beaters set fire to the grass in front of the herd and, with shouts and noise, drove some of the bison that strayed from the herd into a deep ravine. Then the hunters ran up to the wounded animals and finished them off with spears and arrows. For food, the Indians took the meat of young females, but did not even look at the dead males. Sometimes only the tongues of animals were cut out as a delicacy. Along the way, a countless number of animals could have died from the fire, but the tribe did not care much about this. Heritage of the Stone Age Archaeological excavations show that this method of obtaining food has been used by people since ancient times. In many places where Stone Age man hunted, scientists find huge piles of bones. The ancestors of the Indians did the same.

Archaeologists conducting excavations in the southern United States, in Colorado, discovered about two hundred bison skeletons in one of the canyons. A herd of wild bulls camped here eight thousand years ago. The ancient Indians used some of the prey, but, as the study showed, they did not even touch several dozen carcasses. Many historians believe that the hunter, armed with stones and a spear, was directly to blame for the extinction of ancient large animals. With the help of his primitive weapons, he could kill several small animals, but fire and the earth's landscape helped him destroy large animals by the hundreds. Such hunting methods, coupled with periodic epidemics among animals and frequent droughts, would sooner or later lead bison to extinction. But the white aliens managed to speed up this terrible process many times over.

We can safely say that the Americans came to their senses literally at the last moment, when there were only 835 animals in the entire New World. In December 1905, the American Bison Rescue Society was formed. First in Oklahoma, then in Montana, Nebraska and the Dakotas, special reserves arose where bison could feel safe. By 1910, the number of bison had doubled, and 10 years later there were about 9,000 of them. A movement to save the bison also developed in Canada.

In 1907, the government bought a herd of 709 head from private hands and moved it to Wayne Wright (Alberta), and in 1915, a herd of 709 animals was established for the few surviving wood bison. National Park Wood Buffalo, between Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca. There are now 30,000-50,000 bison in the United States and Canada. True, various subspecies have not survived due to extermination by people and interbreeding.

Elena Alexandrova

I continue to introduce Highway readers to exterminated and endangered species of animals. In my previous articles, I wrote about sea cows and American passenger pigeons, which were barbarically exterminated by humans in a very short period of time.

In my Black Book of Human Records, sea cows "lead" in the category of fastest killed, and the following two species: American passenger pigeons and bison are among the most numerous and mercilessly slaughtered. If we never see passenger pigeons again, we can still watch bison in nature reserves and national parks.

European colonists can easily be called the most cruel people towards nature. It is worth saying only that after the development by representatives of the Old World African continent, only 10% of the biodiversity that was there before remains. The Dutch were the first to distinguish themselves. Their first victim was zebras. Moreover, they were exterminated so intensively that the colonists did not even have enough balls: they cut them out from the bodies of killed animals, loaded their guns with them and continued killing. But this was not enough for them.

As always, brilliant ideas come to the mind of Homo sapiens in terms of killing either their own kind or other living beings. The “genius” of the idea lay in the economy and effectiveness of the new method of killing zebras. They were surrounded, driven to the abyss, and the animals fell from a height of many meters and were broken to death. In this way, the Dutch saved gunpowder and lead and could kill many more animals.

The cruelty of Europeans led to the fact that now there are very few herds of zebras in Africa, and one of the most interesting ones, the quagga zebra, was completely exterminated.

However, this article is not about the zebra and the Dutch colonists, but about animals that lived on another continent, in another hemisphere.

American colonists, no less than African ones, harmed animals and flora. Vivid examples relationships between conquerors North America and the natural environment became large-scale and terrible extermination of passenger pigeons and bison.

Therefore, let's talk about the American bison (Bison bison Linnaeus). With the beginning of the development of North America at the beginning of the 18th century. over a vast territory, from Lakes Erie and Great Slave in the north to Texas, Mexico and Louisiana in the south, from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the coast Atlantic Ocean in the east, lived more than 75 million bison.

The first travelers were amazed by the sight of the millions of buffalo herds that grazed on the plains. Each of these bison weighed more than 1350 kg, and they had no natural enemies, with the exception of coyotes, which attacked young individuals on occasion. Also among the enemies are wolves, but they attack either small calves or old bison.

And very quickly an enemy appeared in these large animals. And not alone...

It turns out that what a person is passionate about soon becomes destroyed. Indeed, at first people admired bison, and very soon the barbaric extermination of these animals began. One American scientist said that the colonists "killed, being possessed by some devilish force that makes them kill everything and everyone" ...

The extermination of bison can be divided into two periods.

First period (1730-1840) At this time, there was a gradual transformation of untouched territory into cultivated lands, an increasing number of settlers from Europe moved to the New World, so the need and need for food and leather grew. The presence of huge herds of large animals, which were also constantly moving, could not be desirable in areas occupied by crops, but then it was only a question of reducing the number of bison and the effective exploitation of their population. It should be noted that the existence of the indigenous inhabitants of America - the Indians - their customs and entire way of life were closely connected with bison. However, Indian hunting had virtually no effect on the number of bison, and the first white settlers in the first period did not fundamentally change the state of affairs, killing animals only to satisfy basic needs or fencing their crops.

AND second period, which began around the 1830s, was of a different nature, since its goal was the wholesale extermination of buffalo. In the northern regions of the bison's habitat, it was destroyed in order to doom the Indian tribes, against whom the colonists fought a merciless struggle, to starvation. But the matter did not stop there.

The massacre reached a particular scale in the 1860s, when construction of the transcontinental railroad began. A huge army of road workers was fed with bison meat, and the skins were sold. Often the “hunt” reached the point of absurdity: only the tongue was taken from the bison, leaving countless carcasses to rot. Railway advertisements promised passengers an amazing attraction: shooting bison directly from the train windows. The train, which passed through herds of buffalo, left behind hundreds of dying or maimed animals. During one hunting season of 1872-73, at least 200 thousand bison were killed in the state of Kansas alone. Special detachments of riflemen pursued bison everywhere, and in the 70s of the 19th century. the number of animals that were killed annually was about 2,500,000. Just one fact: the “legendary” William Cody, nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who supplied meat to railroad workers, killed 4,280 bison in 1.5 years, i.e. he actually killed one buffalo every three hours!

Over time, hundreds of tons of buffalo bones were collected and used to make fertilizer and black paint. Special companies were created to collect and transport bones to the railways. The scale of the massacre can be judged from archival materials: in the piles of bones prepared for loading into freight cars, there were up to 20 thousand skeletons. The famous Santa Fe Railroad carried nearly 5,000 tons of bison bones from 1872 to 1874. Not surprisingly, the bison virtually disappeared from the southwestern United States sometime around 1868. Of course, some herds of bison still roamed here and there, but their numbers were so small that the disappointed hunters abandoned further hunting. Bison herds also decreased in the North of the United States, and in 1880, Indian tribes, specially armed for this purpose, launched a final assault on them. During the hunting season (from November to February), one hunter killed from one to two thousand bison. Soon these animals became so rare that the stories of hunters of the period 1880-1885 mention the hunt for the “last” bison in the area, and this indicates not only an extreme reduction in the number of bison, but also a repeated disruption of its range.

The bison were not only shot: they were destroyed in the most barbaric and painful ways. Along the path of herds of bison, around lakes and along river banks, fires were lit so that the exhausted and thirsty animals could not get closer to the water. The bison went to other reservoirs, but everywhere they were met by a wall of fire. Many of them could not withstand this torture and died. Others were killed by being allowed near the water.

The almost complete extermination of the bison was undoubtedly a tragic episode in the entire history of man's relationship with nature and, unfortunately, not the only one: other mammals also experienced serious losses. Their populations sometimes decreased to alarming proportions, and their ranges narrowed.

By 1889 it was all over. In a vast area where herds of millions grazed, only 835 bison remain, including a herd of 200 that escaped to Yellowstone National Park. And yet it was not too late.

In parallel with the extermination of bison, another significant destruction took place, which I have already mentioned - the destruction of passenger pigeons. And if it was not possible to save the birds, then in the case of the bison, people still managed to come to their senses.

In 1905, the American Bison Rescue Society was founded. Literally in the last days, in the last hours of the bison’s existence, society managed to turn the wheel of history. First in Oklahoma, then in other states, special reserves were established where bison were safe. After only 4 years, the number of bison doubled, and after another 10 years there were about 9,000.

A movement to save the bison has also developed in Canada. In 1907, a herd of 709 bison was purchased from private hands and transported to Wayne Wright (Alberta), and in 1915, Wood Buffalo National Park was established for some of the surviving wood bison, between Great Slave Lake and Lake Athabasca. Unfortunately, more than 6,000 steppe bison were brought there in 1925-1928, which introduced tuberculosis, and most importantly, freely interbreeding with the wood bison, threatened to “absorb” it as an independent subspecies.

It was only in 1957 that a herd of about 200 purebred wood bison was discovered in the remote and inaccessible northwestern section of the park. From here, in 1963, 18 bison were caught and transported to a special reserve across the Mackenzie River, where in 1969 there were about 30 of them. Another 43 wood bison were moved to Elk Island National Park, east of Edmonton.

Now in the national parks and reserves of Canada there are more than 30 thousand bison, of which about 400 are forest bison; in the USA - more than 10 thousand individuals. Of course, their number today cannot be compared with what it was some 300 years ago. Yes, for us people, 300 years is a long time, but for the planet it is only one moment.

As in the case of the stray pigeon, the Americans were shocked by the destruction of the bison and also began to come up with ridiculous theories about their disappearance. Recently, American scientists put forward an “ingenious” theory of the disappearance of tens of millions of bison on the American continent.

In particular, they now seriously believe that climate change, not barbaric extermination, has caused the disappearance of bison and other large mammals from the American prairies.

Their new research showed that bison began to disappear about 37,000 years ago, 20,000 years before large communities of people began to settle in the areas. At the same time, bison managed to survive the period of melting glaciers - about 10,000 years ago, when other mammals of that era, for example, saber-toothed tigers, died. For scientists, “it came as a big surprise” to find out that the extinction of bison began with the mass migration of people. “Humans may have wiped out the last remaining individuals of this group, but climate change is to blame for turning large mammals into walking victims,” said Oxford University professor Alan Cooper.

Researchers have found that bison DNA found in individuals who lived 50 thousand years ago is strikingly different from those living today. Modern North American bison are descended from a single female who lived about 15,000 to 22,000 years ago, a study shows.

It is interesting that, in general, such a difference can be explained by ordinary evolution according to Darwin’s theory, but today’s scientists interpret information in a way that is beneficial to them at the moment. And today it is very fashionable to say that climate change and bad ecology. Although, at the same time, it is silent who spoiled this ecology and became an indicator of the Earth’s climate change, which is impressive in its pace.

The history of the destruction of the American bison is instructive. Despite the catastrophic scale of extermination, these large animals were saved. And even if there are tens of thousands of times fewer of them today than there were before (although only a naive person can hope that animal populations will decrease, because due to the growth of the human population, animals, unfortunately, are declining, or even completely disappearing), but never It's too late to stop and think again. Therefore, today Americans and tourists can observe beautiful and kind animals that survived real genocide in the 19th century.

The destruction of bison in the United States since the 1830s, sanctioned by the local authorities, was intended to undermine the economic way of life of Indian tribes and doom them to starvation. The Indians, in general, never engaged in farming and lived by hunting (the only exception was, perhaps, the Cherokees - they led a sedentary lifestyle, cultivated cereal crops, and preferred permanent houses to wigwams). The main source of food for the Indians was bison, countless herds of which inhabited the endless prairies created by the great Gitchie Manito. The Indians never killed bison (or game in general) for fun - only to get food. If there was any meat left, they made a kind of canned food: “pemmican” - “buffalo meat” cured in a special way.

Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Bison hunting

William Frederick Cody (aka Buffalo Bill)

The settlers, whose history Hollywood never tires of glorifying, simply destroyed the bison and the Indians died of hunger. US national hero William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, single-handedly killed 4,280 (!) bison in eighteen months (1867-1868). The glorification of Buffalo Bill, for example, on Wikipedia, reaches the point of ridiculousness - he is presented as a caring supplier - he allegedly provided food for the workers who built the Trans-American railroad. Descriptions of the atrocities of such Codys, who destroyed bison for fun, or to cut out their tongues (the carcasses of the killed giants were simply left to rot), are carefully blurred by stories about the heroic pages of the “battle for the country.” But these were ordinary villains, killers, no different from the “bloodthirsty redskin” stamp. The same Cody, already a hero of cheap novels since 1870, in 1876 personally scalped the leader of the Shaen tribe Yellow Hand (according to other sources - Yellow Hair).

Poster: Buffalo Bill show

Subsequently, Cody hired Indians who were dying of hunger and organized, as they would say now, a reality show - “reconstructions” of the heroic conquest of the West by settlers. When the Americans (let’s call them that) realized that there were still too many Indians left, they simply began to drive them en masse from all over the country along the notorious “Trail of Tears” in concentration camps(reservations).

In the huge Cherokee tribe, whose leader was once the outstanding scientist, politician and cultural scientist Sequoia (his name is immortalized in the name of the largest trees on Earth), every fourth died. By the way, the same statistics are in Belarus - during the war, the Nazis destroyed a quarter of the population there... I remember the heart-tugging monument - three birch trees, instead of the fourth - Eternal flame... The Cherokees had an amazing culture, their own written language (which they still preserve) ... Most of the British and French who arrived from Europe were completely illiterate, homeless bandits. In accordance with the US Indian Removal Act in 1830, Oklahoma, where Native Americans were driven like cattle, received the status of “Indian Territory.”

A mountain of bison skulls exterminated by enlightened Americans

The “fathers of the American nation” themselves testify to the genocide of the Indians with undisguised cynicism. Here, for example, is a quote from Wikipedia:

"... General Philip Sheridan: “The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let they have to kill ... until they exterminate all the bison! " Sheridan in the US Congress proposed establishing a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of exterminating the bison.

Colonel Richard Dodge: "The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians." As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison by the beginning of the 20th century decreased from several tens of millions to several hundred. French biologist Jean Dorst noted that initially the total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885, the stories of hunters in the North of the United States spoke of hunting the “last” bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million buffalo were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote about the decline in bison numbers from 30 million in 1800 to less than a thousand by the end of the century..."

Bison Skull Wall

Shooting bison from a train

Heaps of bison skins

The Nazis, who in the 20th century organized the extermination of entire peoples in the ovens of Buchenwald, Treblinka, Salaspils, had someone to learn from - from 1620 to 1900, the number of Indians in the territory of the modern United States decreased through the efforts of the “enlightenment” from 15 million to 237 thousand people. That is, the grandparents of modern white Americans destroyed... 14 million 763 thousand Indians! (For those who love statistics, let me remind you that during the years of the so-called Stalinist repressions in the USSR, about 780 thousand people died). You can find out from which animals in the very recent past these modern lovers of reading morality to humanity originated from the same Wikipedia (so as not to engage in lengthy scientific research):

The Yellow Creek Massacre near present-day Wellsville, Ohio. A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by... Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 people from the Mingo tribe, including Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister and cousin. Logan's murdered daughter, Tunai, was on last date pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was removed from both her and the fetus that was cut out of her. Other Mingos were also scalped...

There are thousands of such examples. But the most interesting thing is that all this was done completely officially, in full accordance, if not with the letter, then with the spirit of the law. Thus, in 1825, the US Supreme Court formulated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” according to which the rights to “open” lands belonged to those who “discovered” them, and the indigenous population retained the right to live on them, without having ownership of the land. Based on this doctrine, already in 1830 the United States adopted the Indian Removal Act, the victims of which are already millions of people, as noted earlier, who had a highly developed culture.

When there were very few Indians left, and the Americans began to show the world their exclusivity, claiming the role of a world guru with an atomic club, a defender of “democratic ideals”, reinforcing them with the policy of “battleship pacification”, and building the foundations of today’s tolerance, the Redskins were remembered. They apologized to them (remember the joke about the doctor asking relatives whether the patient sweated before he died). They gave out bonuses - here was free education at US universities, and the opportunity to “protect” the gambling business, and they began to give land! And the Council Oak in Tulsa was fenced off with a lattice... A wonderful Italian word - comedy!

Destruction of bison in America.

The settlers, whose history Hollywood never tires of glorifying, simply destroyed the bison and the Indians died of hunger. US national hero William Frederick Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, single-handedly killed 4,280 (!) bison in eighteen months (1867-1868). The glorification of Buffalo Bill, for example, on Wikipedia, reaches the point of ridiculousness - he is presented as a caring supplier - he allegedly provided food for the workers who built the Trans-American railroad. Descriptions of the atrocities of such Codys, who destroyed bison for fun, or to cut out their tongues (the carcasses of the killed giants were simply left to rot), are carefully blurred by stories about the heroic pages of the “battle for the country.” But these were ordinary villains, killers, no different from the “bloodthirsty redskin” stamp. The same Cody, already a hero of cheap novels since 1870, in 1876 personally scalped the leader of the Shaen tribe Yellow Hand (according to other sources - Yellow Hair).

In the huge Cherokee tribe, whose leader was once the outstanding scientist, politician and cultural scientist Sequoia (his name is immortalized in the name of the largest trees on Earth), every fourth died. By the way, the same statistics in Belarus - during the war, the Nazis destroyed a quarter of the population there... I remember a heart-tugging monument - three birch trees, instead of the fourth - the Eternal Flame... The Cherokees had an amazing culture, their own written language (which they still keep)... The majority The British and French who arrived from Europe were completely illiterate, homeless bandits. In accordance with the US Indian Removal Act in 1830, Oklahoma, where Native Americans were driven like cattle, received the status of “Indian Territory.”

The “fathers of the American nation” themselves testify to the genocide of the Indians with undisguised cynicism. Here, for example, is a quote from Wikipedia:
"... General Philip Sheridan: “The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the acute problem of the Indians than the entire regular army in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you like, and let they have to kill ... until they exterminate all the bison! " Sheridan in the US Congress proposed establishing a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of exterminating the bison.

The Yellow Creek Massacre near present-day Wellsville, Ohio. A group of Virginia frontier settlers, led by... Daniel Greathouse, killed 21 people from the Mingo tribe, including Logan's mother, daughter, brother, nephew, sister and cousin. Logan's murdered daughter, Tunai, was in her final stage of pregnancy. She was tortured and gutted while she was alive. The scalp was removed from both her and the fetus that was cut out of her. Other Mingos were also scalped...

The destruction of bison in the United States is a mass extermination of bison since the 1830s, sanctioned by the US authorities, with the goal of undermining the economic way of life of Indian tribes and dooming them to starvation. The Indians traditionally hunted bison only to satisfy their vital needs: for food, as well as for making clothing, housing, tools and utensils.

American General Philip Sheridan wrote:
The buffalo hunters have done more in the last two years to solve the Indian problem than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years. They are destroying the material base of the Indians. Send them gunpowder and lead, if you please, and let them kill, skin and sell until they have destroyed all the buffalo!
Sheridan in the US Congress proposed establishing a special medal for hunters, emphasizing the importance of exterminating bison. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said: The death of every buffalo is the disappearance of the Indians."
As a result of predatory extermination, the number of bison by the beginning of the 20th century decreased from several tens of millions to several hundred. French biologist Jean Dorst noted that initially the total number of bison was approximately 75 million, but already in 1880-1885 the stories of hunters in the North of the United States spoke of hunting the “last” bison. Between 1870 and 1875, approximately 2.5 million buffalo were killed annually. Historian Andrew Eisenberg wrote about the decline in bison numbers from 30 million in 1800 to fewer than a thousand by the end of the century.
Bison were also killed for entertainment: American railroad companies advertised that passengers could shoot the bison from their train windows. In 1887, the English naturalist William Mushroom, who traveled across the prairies, noted: Buffalo trails were visible everywhere, but there were no living bison. Only the skulls and bones of these noble animals turned white in the sun.
The winters of 1880-1887 became hungry for the Indian tribes, and there was a high mortality rate among them. The hunter Buffalo Bill, hired by the administration of the Kansas Pacific Railways, gained great fame, killing several thousand bison. Subsequently, he selected several dozen people from the starving Indians and staged “performances”: the Indians acted out scenes of attacking settlers in front of the audience, shouting, etc., then Buffalo Bill himself “saved” the colonists.
Map of American bison extirpation by 1889, showing initial range boundaries

40,000 buffalo hides in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878.

"Pyramid of Buffalo Skulls, 1870s"