Beef Moves to Nebraska
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The End of the Bison

"INDIANS CHASING BUFFALOES, SCOTTS BLUFFS"
Source: Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkley		 The change in the Nebraska landscape was dramatic. In just a few short years, cattle replaced the American bison as the dominant, cloven-hoofed, grass-eating mammal on the Great Plains. In 1850, millions of bison ranged the grasslands and were the principal natural resource for the region’s American Indians.


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Mag Me!"WANTON DESTRUCTION OF BUFFALO" Kansas, 1872.
Source: Nebraska State Historical Society
In 1868, the creation of the steel rails of the transcontinental railroad created a barrier that bison did not like to cross. That divided the great herd into northern and southern herds.

With the advent of the great trail drives, bison interacted with the cattle being driven from Texas.
"Buffaloes travel in a straight line. When they were moving and encountered a herd of Texas cattle they invariably bored right through the herd, turning neither to right nor left. It was just the same if but one or a dozen buffaloes were on the move — they walked straight through."
     –James H. Cook as told to Eli S. Ricker, May 23, 1907
The cattle infected the bison with new diseases: the dangerous brucellosis as well as Texas tick fever, which dramatically weakened the bison herds.

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Mag Me!Hide yard owned by Charles Rath and Robert Wright
Dodge City, Kansas
Note: Hide press in upper left corner
Source: Kansas State Historical Society

Then in 1870, a process emerged that allowed bison hides to be commercially tanned into soft, supple leather. This development coincided with a huge demand for leather to make the belts that powered machines in the Industrial Revolution, with huge markets in England, France, and Germany. Bison hunters poured onto the Great Plains. By 1880, the combination of disease, environmental stress, and hunting left the bison near extinction.

The destruction of the bison had two important consequences:
  • It left the vast grasslands open to the herds of cattle moving north from Texas. Now ranches, once a strictly southern phenomenon, multiplied in the north.

  • More importantly, though, it robbed the Plains Tribes of the one resource that allowed their mobile lifestyle.
Find out more about the devastating effects
on bison, and thus on Native Americans,
in the video, Cattle Replace Bison.
.