The near-extinction of American bison was caused by a combination of commercial hide hunters, deliberate U.S. military policy, and a federal government that refused to intervene. Before 1800, an estimated 30 to 100 million bison roamed the Great Plains. By the 1890s, fewer than 1,000 remained on the entire continent.
Commercial Hide Hunters Did the Bulk of the Killing
The single largest driver of bison destruction was the commercial hide trade that exploded in the early 1870s. Industrial tanning methods had created strong demand for bison leather in Eastern factories and European markets, and professional hunters flooded the plains to supply it. These weren’t sport hunters or settlers shooting for food. They were commercial operations, often working in teams with dedicated skinners, hauling thousands of hides to railroad depots for shipment east.
Records from J. & A. Boskowitz, a major hide buyer operating on the northern plains, show the scale of the trade. Between 1881 and 1883, the peak years of killing in the north, the firm purchased 63,934 hides at an average price of about $3.13 each. By 1884, commercial hunting had effectively ended because there were almost no bison left to kill. That year, only 529 hides were available for purchase. A hide worth roughly $3 might not sound like much, but a skilled hunter could kill dozens of animals in a single day, making it lucrative seasonal work. The math was simple: the more you killed, the more you earned, and nobody imposed a limit.
The U.S. Military Saw Extinction as Strategy
Commercial hunters weren’t acting entirely on their own initiative. The U.S. military recognized that destroying the bison herds was the fastest way to defeat the Plains Indian nations who depended on them for food, shelter, clothing, and trade. The logic was blunt: take away everything essential for a people’s survival, and they will surrender. As long as the buffalo roamed the plains, so did the Indigenous peoples who relied on them. The two were inseparable.
Generals William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan, both architects of scorched-earth tactics during the Civil War, applied the same philosophy to the West. They sent soldiers onto the plains with cavalry guns to kill bison and gave military commanders license to destroy as many as possible. Officers who participated saw themselves as doing their part to gain control of Native Americans. The slaughter of bison wasn’t a side effect of westward expansion. It was a deliberate weapon of war against Indigenous resistance.
Congress Tried to Act. The President Refused.
Some in Washington saw the catastrophe unfolding and tried to stop it. In 1874, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 921, a bill “to prevent the useless slaughter of buffaloes within the Territories of the United States.” Sponsored by Illinois Representative Greenbury Lafayette Fort, the legislation would have outlawed the killing of female bison and imposed steep fines on anyone who killed more males than needed for food. The bill specifically exempted American Indians who relied on the herds to feed their communities.
“The object of this bill is to prevent the early extermination of these noble herds from the plains,” Fort argued during debate. The bill passed the House with 132 votes in favor. It passed the Senate a few months later. But President Ulysses S. Grant never signed it. He used a pocket veto after Congress adjourned for the summer, letting the bill quietly die without ever having to publicly explain his reasoning. This was the moment the federal government had the clearest chance to intervene and chose not to.
Railroads, Settlers, and Disease
Several other forces compounded the slaughter. Railroads cut across traditional migration routes, fragmenting herds and making it easy for hunters to reach previously remote areas. Rail companies also promoted bison shooting as entertainment for passengers, who fired from train windows into herds along the tracks. Settlers arriving in growing numbers fenced land, converted grasslands to agriculture, and competed with bison for the same territory.
Disease played a role too, though it’s harder to quantify than the killing. Domestic cattle brought pathogens that bison had no immunity to. One example still relevant today is Mycoplasma bovis, a bacterial infection that spills over from cattle to bison and can cause mortality rates as high as 32 percent in affected herds. In the 19th century, as cattle ranching expanded across former bison range, shared grazing land meant shared diseases. Bison that shared a fence line with cattle were roughly five times more likely to experience outbreaks. Drought years further stressed herds already under pressure from every direction.
How Close Bison Came to Total Extinction
The collapse happened with shocking speed. The southern herds were largely gone by the late 1870s. The northern herds followed by the mid-1880s. In the span of a single human generation, a species that had numbered in the tens of millions was reduced to scattered remnants hiding in remote valleys and private ranches.
By the early 1900s, the situation in Yellowstone, one of the last places wild bison survived, was dire. In 1902, park managers purchased 21 bison from private owners and began raising them at the Lamar Buffalo Ranch in what became one of the earliest conservation breeding programs in American history. Those 21 animals, along with a tiny wild remnant already in the park, formed the nucleus of the Yellowstone herd that exists today.
No Single Villain, but Clear Choices
The destruction of the bison wasn’t an accident or a natural phenomenon. It was the result of identifiable decisions made by identifiable people. Hide hunters pulled the triggers. The U.S. military encouraged and facilitated the killing as policy. Railroad companies enabled access and created markets. And when Congress produced a bill that could have slowed the destruction, the president killed it instead. Each group had its own motive, whether profit, military strategy, or territorial expansion, but they all pointed in the same direction. The bison didn’t simply disappear. They were systematically removed from a landscape that had supported them for thousands of years.