New Studies Put Plains Indians
In Forefront Of Buffalo Demise

MISSOULA, Mont. — A new buffalo war is shaping up on the Great Plains.

For decades, historians with a romantic view of the West blamed greedy white hunters for the near extinction of that noble beast, the American bison. Now revisionist historians are shifting at least some of the blame to drouth and the plains Indians.

The New York Times reports that new studies suggest a centuries-long cold snap, known as the Little Ice Age, ended in the mid-19th century, bringing a drouth to the Great Plains. At the same time, new researchers claim, the buffalo was forced to compete for grass with some two millions horses, descendants of animals brought to the New World by Spanish explorers, that were roaming the range.

Against this setting, steamboats began plying the Missouri River into buffalo country in the 1840s. Indian tribes such as the Kiowa, Blackfeet, and Sioux expanded their hunting in an effort to increase trade for firearms, powder and whiskey.

Dr. Dan Flores, the A.B. Hammond professor of Western history at the University of Montana, and other revisionist scholars now argue that Indians used the buffalo as their principal entree into the market economy in the 1840s. Armed with guns and mounted on horses, Indians embarked on the destruction of the vast herds to supply the growing demand for buffalo robes back on the East Coast.

Before 1840, researchers say, some 60,000 plains Indians killed about half a million bison a year for sustenance. In 1840, that number grew to more than 600,000 a year. The new scholars also claim that the Indians concentrated on cows, decimating the herds' capacity to reproduce. The meat from the cows, researchers say, was more tender and the hides were easier to treat.

Flores and Dr. Drew Isenburg, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, will each have books out next year explaining their theories.

But Dr. Vine Deloria Jr., a professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a member of the Standing Rock Sioux, says such theories are preposterous.

Dr. Valerius Geist, an ecologist and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada, who has also authored a book on the subject, also criticizes Flores.

"Flores is an historian playing ecologist," Geist says.

"The Indians did not make any appreciable dent in buffalo numbers in the Northern Plains," says Deloria. "It's anti-Indian stuff."

"It's romantic to imagine Indians as always living in harmony with nature," Isenburg counters. "But they are people who did many things right and who also made mistakes. If you want to see them as real people and not a romantic notion, then you have to look with a clear eye at these kinds of things. None of us have any animus toward Indians."