OldLady
Diamond Member
- Nov 16, 2015
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"Many things contributed to the buffalos demise. One factor was the "Indian problem,"No, the purpose was to kill the bison so that the Plains Indian would be denied a food source. They just killed them en masse for no purpose.
I'm pretty sure it was the railroads that encouraged the wholesale slaughter of the bison. The bison were in the way of the railroads.
You can be sure of that... but it's simply not true.
'Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone'
Then again, a buffalo is a lumbering, hirsute cow, and the men were outfitted with some of the quickest horses and held the best guns owned by the U.S. Army, which was outfitting the hunting expedition. The Army wasn’t in the business of guiding hunting trips for soft-skinned Wall Streeters, but it was in the business of controlling the Native Americans in the area, and that meant killing buffalo. One colonel, four years earlier, had told a wealthy hunter who felt a shiver of guilt after he shot 30 bulls in one trip: "Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”
The reason for such extravagance was undoubtedly because the New Yorkers were well-connected, but also because Major-General Phillip Sheridan, the man with the task of forcing Native Americans off the Great Plains and onto reservations, had come along with them. This was a leisure hunt, but Sheridan also viewed the extermination of buffalo and his victory over the Native Americans as a single, inextricable mission––and in that sense, it could be argued that any buffalo hunt was Army business. After the men circled the herd, they charged down the hill, chasing after the six buffalo, eager for the first kill.
Many things contributed to the buffalos demise. One factor was that for a long time, the country’s highest generals, politicians, even then President Ulysses S. Grant saw the destruction of buffalo as solution to the country’s “Indian Problem.”
Before Sheridan joined Cody and the New Yorkers on the hunt, and before he oversaw the relocation of Native Americans on the plains, he was a major-general for the Union during the Civil War. It was there he learned the power of destroying enemy resources. He’d used the same scorched-earth strategy that William Tecumseh Sherman, then a major-general, used in his March to the Sea, tearing up railroad ties, toppling telegraph poles, and lighting nearly all of Atlanta and anything an infantryman could digest ablaze. After the war, President Grant asked Sherman and Sheridan to command armies in the Great Plains.
Maybe we're both right.