Читать книгу Buffalo, Barrels, & Bourbon - F. Paul Pacult - Страница 12

In the pre-Columbian era, the robust North American buffalo population provided food from meat and vital organs, as well as shelter, clothing, weapons, tools, footwear, cord from hide and sinew, and fuel from dung for the native tribes that resided in the center of the continent. The nomadic Lakota, Pawnee, Kiowa, Osage, Blackfeet, Crow, Arapaho, Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, Comanche, and many more tribes that followed the migrating herds of buffalo had a seemingly endless supply of basic sustenance. The native communities of the plains were, by and large, thoughtful in their relationship with the herds of tatanka, as the Lakota called the buffalo. For millennia, the tribes were aware that their own welfare and generational perpetuation depended almost entirely on their stewardship of the buffalo.

Everything changed for the worse starting in the late 1600s with the arrival of French, Spanish, and English hunters in North America's hinterlands. As weaponry evolved, the hunters' use of long-range, high-caliber Sharps, as well as Springfield and Remington No. 1 rifles, indiscriminately slaughtered buffalo for their hides, tongues, and horns, which were coveted in the eastern colonies and throughout Europe. Beginning around 1800, a cold-blooded, systematic extermination of buffalo conducted both by private citizens (often from the distant safety of trains or wagons) and the U.S. military brought the number of buffalo tumbling from tens of millions to less than 100 by 1883. This senseless, cold-blooded action stands as the largest case of mass murder of mammals over the span of one century in world history. The December 27, 1899, edition of the Morning Post North Carolina best summed up the genocidal crimes, saying, “One of the most extraordinary events that has characterized the last half of the present century is the extermination, the wiping out of the American bison … bones and pictures alone tell the story of a mighty race swept from the face of the earth by civilized people of the 19th century.”

Most evil of all, the U.S. government backed this act of premeditated mass annihilation to punish and cripple the Native American tribal societies, instigating, along with the intentional spread of viral diseases like smallpox, the downfall of the indigenous communities that once thrived from southern Canada to northern Mexico on land they viewed as sacred. A century and a half later, the pain of the native population continues on the squalid, poverty-stricken reservations scattered around the continent that are often located far from ancestral sites.

Meanwhile, dispersed among several states, the current buffalo population ranges from 500,000 to 600,000 head in the United States. Through the tireless efforts primarily of conservationists (Wildlife Conservation Society, National Bison Association) and the Native American community (InterTribal Buffalo Council), the U.S. Congress passed a bill, the National Bison Legacy Act, proclaiming the buffalo as the national mammal. The bill was made into law with the signature of President Barack Obama on May 9, 2016. Certainly, this institutional act is to be applauded, if tepidly. In light of the despicable mass slaughter that bathed the American prairies in the blood of the nation's most celebrated four-legged mammal, it seems like cold comfort indeed.