8th Liberal Lie About American History
Lie #8 in a Series of 11
Lie #8 - Native Americans Were Great Environmentalists, While White Settlers Destroyed The Buffalo
The changes they produced in some areas were nearly as cataclysmic as those that occurred during the Ice Age. . . . Having killed off the giant herds, ranchers and farmers quickly shifted to cattle. . . . —John Mack Faragher ET AL., Out of Many
[There] is the assumption that Native Americans were either poor, primitive, starving savages whose numbers were too low to have any impact on the “pristine” vationists who were too wise to overuse their environment. —Charles E. Kay, “Aboriginal Overkill and Native Burning” (1995)
Leave it to Hollywood to come up with a classic image that stands history on its head. No one better illustrated the power of the visual image to send a (wrong) message that the “Crying Indian,” Iron Eyes Cody, who was featured in Keep America Beautiful 1979 public service ad, “People Start Pollution, People Can Stop It.” Although Earth Day, first observed on March 21, 1971, officially touched off the environmental or ecology movement in the United States, this famous ad firmly ensconced it. In the ad we see an Indian paddle his canoe up a polluted stream as smokestacks belch their black soot into the blue sky. Then he walks to the top of a hill where on expects to see a glorious western landscape, only to find a highway and — the coup de grace — a car sped by, whereupon the passengers throw a bag of trash out of the window that lands at the Indian’s feet. The camera pans to his face, at which point a single rear streams down his cheek.
The “Crying Indian” cemented in the minds of many Americans a long-held myth that the Native Americans were somehow superior to all other settlers, particularly Europeans. This myth began with the Thanksgiving story, where the English had to be saved by the Indians, then reached full bloom with the near-destruction of the massive bison herds on the western plains, supposedly all at the hands of a white man.
Buffalo herds were vast by almost any account: Thomas Furnham watched a single herd cross his line of sight for three days in 1839, while in 1871, Col Richard Dodge wrote that the “whole country appeared to be one mass of buffalo. Yet as Isenberg, Brown anthropologist Shepard Krech III, and Dan Flores, a historian at the University of Montana, all note, the Indians had hunted bison, although less effectively, before the horse, using techniques such as surrounding the herds, driving them off cliffs, and setting fire to entire prairie areas to wipe out a whole herd. The French word “Brule,” or “burnt,” referred to the Sicangu (“burnt Thigh”) Sioux division, whose survivors of hunting fires had burns on their legs. Charles McKenzie, traveling the plains in 1804, observed entire herds charred from Indian fires. The “buffalo jump” was more risky technique that required an Indian dressed in a buffalo skin to lure a herd to a cliff, where he leaped to a small ledge while the animals careened over the side to their deaths.
Nor were all Indians natural conservationists to the point that they used “all parts of the buffalo.” Many travelers reported herds of bison carcasses rotting in the sun, with only a hump or tail removed.
Father Pierre De Smet watched some 3,000 Assiniboine Indians surround a herd of 600, wiping out every one. Some estimates made in the 1850s suggest that Indians harvested about 450,000 animals a year, and some think the number was much higher. The stench permeated the prairie for miles, and many pioneers came across carcasses of buffalo killed by the Indians. But it was not just buffalo: Krech details the Indians’ destruction of the white-tailed deer herds, and ironically, the English government’s attempts to protect the herds as early as 1760. Charles Kay has demonstrated that the Indians not only overhunted, but by their actions they drove herds into “long-distance migrations. . . . [where they were] able to outdistance most of their human carnivorous predators.”
Some scholars have still sought to place the blame on the Europeans. Charles Kay , Andrew Isenberg, and Dan Flores all reject the view, as does Shepard Krech, who summarizes the leftist position nicely: the Indians “were seduced by new technology and alcohol. Corrupted, [they] were left at the mercy of the boundless greed of the European merchant-capitalist, stripped of free will and agency, transformed into a monolithic forest “proletariat. . . .” Of course, using the words “Indians” and “proletariat” in the same paragraph ought to immediately disqualify any professional historian from further publishing! (Krech does not subscribe to the leftist position.)
Let’s be clear: there is no doubt, from any quarter, that it was white hunters who polished off most of the buffalo herds — mainly because of their technological lead over the Indians. Armed with long-range, high-caliber hunting rifles, sharpshooters such as Buffalo Bill Cody could take down hundreds of animals in a single day. The commercialization of hides and buffalo meat placed further incentives on killing as many as possible. In the 1890s, the leather industry in the United States had grown to an $8.6 million business, with many of the hides coming from buffalo. Buffalo bones, used for fertilizer and pigments, filled five thousand boxcars annually. Tales of the deadly effectiveness of the plains hunters, such as Cody, are renowned. Working from a stand, in which the lead buffalo were shot at long range so as not to panic the herd, a good hunter could kill ten to fifty animals and skin them in a single morning’s work. One warehouse would hold sixty to eighty thousand hides, and the number of hides shipped on the Union Pacific alone exceeded 1.3 million between 1872 and 1874.
European concepts of economy than one made by John McDougall, who said of the Blackfeet in 1865, “Without the buffalo they would be helpless, and yet the whole [Blackfoot] nation did not own one.” Put another way, Isenberg argues, “Even had they recognized a decline, the inherent instability of the nomadic societies made it difficult always to enforce the mandates against waste.” Moreover, as Kay notes, the impact of Indian hunting, burning, and clear-cutting on the forests was significant: “the idea that North America was a ‘wilderness’ untouched by the hand of man prior to 1492 is a myth. . . .
Perhaps the most significant actions, however, came from Western ranchers such as Charles Goodnight, who captured buffalo calves in 1878 and developed his own private bison herd. In the early 1900s, Goodnight shipped almost seven hundred privately raised and protected buffalo to Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park. That herd grew to fourteen thousand by the mid-twentieth century. Ironically, many of the government herds were derived from animals purchased or donated from the private ranchers’ herds!
Private herds had powerful advantages over public/government parks. Whereas parks such as Yellowstone struggled to keep poachers out, private reserves enthusiastically welcomed hunters created such a demand for buffalo that it became a small industry, and finally public parks acceded to the demand for hunting, allowing shooters to pay $200 each for a buffalo. Yet the market also permitted people to engage in charity. Both the American Bison Society and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) ran important education programs to explain the need to the public to replenish the herds. Nevertheless, the buffalo’s chief attraction was not its noble beauty but its exotic-tasting meat: by the 1990s, more than 90 percent of the bison in North America were in private hands. Isenberg notes that were “preserved not for their iconic significance in the interest of biological diversity but simply raised to be slaughtered for their meat.” For an animal nearly extinct at one point, it was an amazing turnaround that by the year 2000, more animals were raised on private reserves strictly for their meat than even existed in all government parks and public zoos put together! When it comes to the bison, left-wing scholars have “buffaloed” American schoolchildren.
There’s plenty more of this debunked lie in the book — 48 Liberal Lies About American History… So check it out worth the read and educate your friends…