Full of lots of interesting and sometimes nonintuitive things – but perhaps lacks rigor. Author Andrew Isenberg is a history professor at Princeton; the book is more of a history than an ecological study.

Isenberg starts with a discussion of the shortgrass prairie environment. Bison could, and did, live in other environments but were more efficient than any of their competitors on shortgrass prairie. Isenberg sometimes refers to the extant Bison bison as “dwarf” bison; this appellation may seem incorrect if you’ve ever been up close to one, but his point is Bison bison is smaller, and thus better adapted to shortgrass prairie, than the extinct Bison priscus, Bison antiquus, and Bison latifrons. Isenberg also makes the point that Bison bison was the last survivor (with the minor exception of pronghorns) of a host of Pleistocene North American grazing animals. He may not go quite far enough here; Bison bison seems to have evolved from its ancestor Bison antiquus within the last 10ky or so and the shortgrass prairie is also a post-glacial ecosystem; thus there were people in North American before either The Great Plains or the modern bison.


Isenberg then discusses the genesis of the Plains Indians. The tribal groups later thought of as the “buffalo hunters” – Arapaho, Assiniboine, Atsina, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux – all originally lived somewhere else and were all originally at least semisedentary – growing maize and other crops in the river valleys and venturing on to the plains seasonally to hunt. Hunting was on foot, and the usual method was to stampede a bison herd off a cliff or into a dead-end canyon; this depended on finding a bison herd that was close enough to village that the hunters could reach it in a reasonable time, small enough to surround and force toward the trap, and having a trap available at all.


This all changed with the arrival of the horse. Mounted hunters could follow the bison, rather than waiting for bison to come to them, could enter a herd and kill animals with less danger to themselves, and could pack out much larger quantities of meat. The tribes acquired horses between about 1730 and 1830; for the Sioux, for example, the first record of horses in datable pictographs is from 1781. About the same time, European diseases began showing up in native populations, with smallpox as the big killer. The diseases devastated sedentary or semisedentary native populations, such as the Mandan, Pawnee, and Hidatsa; population decline is estimated at around 80% between 1780-1880. The nomadic groups were affected too, of course, but avoided some of the devastation by not being concentrated in villages. The Sioux, for example, only declined by about 9% in the same period.


The point of all this is the standard environmental litany is that the Native Americans had been “living in harmony with Nature” since time immemorial, until the whites showed up and ruined everything. In fact, the shortgrass prairie/bison ecosystem was geologically recent, and the nomadic bison hunters were more recent still, evolving within historic times; there’s no evidence bison or a bison-hunting lifestyle were “sustainable”. Isenberg does note that hunting for meat alone seems to have been sustainable; the Native American take was about 9%/year, while the natural rate of increase for bison was about 20%.


However, when Euro-American trade goods became available, the natives stopped hunting just for sustenance and began hunting for hides. While it’s a popular “given” that it was American “buffalo” hunters that drove the animal to near extinction, the natives started the process. Beginning around 1830 or so, Indians began bringing an average of 100000 buffalo robes per year to trading posts. This would have put the annual take right around 20% - or just about the maximum yield. Isenberg points out that the trade in robes had a dramatic effect on Native social structure. Preparing buffalo robes was “woman’s work” in all the tribes; thus a man who wanted wealth from the robe trade had to have many women. What anthropological evidence exists from before the robe trade took off suggests polygyny was relatively rare, but it increased dramatically afterward; as a result the pattern of intertribal warfare also changed, with raids made for women rather than horses.


That being said, it was clearly commercial hunting by American riflemen in the 1870s that doomed the bison. The Santa Fe Railroad shipped 1.3M hides between 1872 and 1874; that’s one railroad out of the many that crossed the plains. What’s more, it seems that one hide was spoiled for each one successfully removed. In 1889, a survey counted 25 bison in the Texas Panhandle; 20 in Colorado; 36 in Montana, and 200 in Yellowstone National Park.


Isenberg is less overtly critical of the “environmental litany” than I am, but he does discuss it in his concluding chapter, comparing it to Christian teleology: there was an Earthly paradise but humans were expelled from it by sin; we can regain it by repentance. In the environmental version, North American was the Earthly Paradise with Noble Savages living in perpetual harmony with Nature until 1492. Isenberg doesn’t hammer it in as hard as I would, but it’s pretty clear that there was no “harmony with Nature”.


This is a compact, scholarly work. As mentioned above, my main concern is where Isenberg’s numbers of coming from; most of what he cites are anecdotes (of course, it could easily be for the time under consideration, anecdotes are all the data available; “anecdotal evidence” is still evidence). Some things strike me as a little strange, though; for example, Isenberg’s data for aboriginal population in the 19th century come from a Smithsonian work published in 1928. Is that really the most current work on the topic? I gather from cursory reading that Native American population figures are highly political; maybe these are the most current numbers before it became such a charged issue. Illustrations are from various contemporary sources; there are a lot of footnotes but no bibliography; instead all references are given in the footnotes. ( )