*Originally published on September 23, 2020.

When Columbus bungled his way into America in 1492, there were some 60 million buffalo roaming North America. They travelled in herds of sometimes 10,000 to 20,000 animals spread across the prairies, for as far as the eye could see.

Buffalo were in a deep and intimate relationship with the land and Indigenous peoples who venerated the buffalo not only as a source of food and tools, but as a partner in maintaining balance in the natural world.

For thousands of years, Indigenous people hunted the buffalo — often using sophisticated mass killing strategies — but they understood the necessity of conserving the herds and not overhunting.

"The people of the plains used many landscape traps to hunt the buffalo. Probably the most efficient for large scale kills were buffalo jumps. The concept of the jump is deceptively simple. The herds were stampeded over a cliff face.Those who were not killed outright were finished off at the base of the cliff," said Michael Wilson, an archeologist.

"The buffalo did not go easily to their deaths. The art and the science of the hunt was sophisticated in ways that are still not fully understood."

But with the arrival of white settlers, the balance that had been meticulously ensured for thousands of years, was destroyed.

As explorers, hunters, settlers, and the railroad came west, so began a sustained mass killing of the buffalo that saw its numbers dwindle to a mere few hundred in the wild.

By 1872, buffalo hunting was at its peak and the animals were shot in the tens of thousands by buffalo runners on horseback and sport hunters who even fired from moving trains. Some diary accounts describe how the booming sound of gunfire rendered the seated hunters partially deaf.

Frank H. Mayer was a U.S. army colonel and a buffalo hunter from 1872 to 1878. In an account about his life he wrote,

"Buffalo running as a business got started around 1870; I got into it in 1872, when the rampage was at its height. The whole Western country went buffalo-wild. It was like a gold rush or a uranium rush. Men left jobs, businesses, wives and children, and future prospects to get into buffalo running. They sold whatever they had and put the money into outfits, wagons, camp equipment, rifles and ammunition.

"I needn't talk. I did it myself. And why not? There were uncounted millions of the beasts — hundreds of millions, we forced ourselves to believe. Their hides were worth $2 to $3 each, which was a lot of money in 1872. And all we had to do was take these hides from their wearers. It was a harvest. We were the harvesters.

"Most of us were Western men and, as I have suggested, veterans of the Civil War, at loose ends, wanting adventure, feeling the discomfort of claustrophobia at being cooped up in houses and towns after adventure in war. And most of us were young. I, for instance, was hardly more than a kid, but in those days on the frontier men matured early, and I felt myself very much of a man in 1872. Some of the runners were older men, some of them mountain men who had watched the beaver peter out but wanted to make a fast dollar wherever they could."

The buffalo was hunted by settlers not just for its hide or for sport or, sometimes, food. Often, the point was political as well.

In the days of the buffalo hunt frenzy, U.S. Army Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said, "kill every buffalo you can. Every Buffalo Dead is an Indian gone literally overnight."

The buffalo soon vanished from the prairies.

"Humans have hunted Buffalo in North America for 11, 000 years and more. Native societies tell their stories, hand down their technologies, pass on their cultural and spiritual beliefs through generations of time," narrator Thomas King explained.

"They leave signposts for those who are to follow. But the signposts are subtle. And those who followed the Plains Indians ignored or destroyed most of the signs of a civilization that was ancient in its ways before European humans ever emerged from caves."