A portion of the buffalo hide yard in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. This yard held 40,000 bison skins at
A portion of the buffalo hide yard in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. This yard held 40,000 bison skins at any given time. Bison, who had been hunted for millennia in the great plains, nearly went extinct in the late 1800s because of unsustainable hunting. First, the U.S. government encouraged the slaughter of bison herds as a way to upset the lifestyle of Plains tribes that depended on bison hunting. Around the same time, railroads allowed hunters to kill bison all day, every day and send their meat and hides back east for sale. By the 1880s, perhaps a few hundred of the 25 million bison were left.{WHF} {HTE} {Medium} -- source link
#history#kansas#bison#extinction#environmental history