Historical records of abundant Buffalo in Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem--where there was Buffalo, there were Wolves aplenty!!!!

ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES OF PARTICIPATING IN THIS BLOG IS DOING THE RESEARCH AND DELVING BACK INTO THE HISTORICAL RECORD TO GET AS VIVID A PICTURE AS POSSIBLE AS TO WHAT THE BASELINE POUPLATIONS OF OUR NATIVE PREDATOR AND PREY SUITE WAS AS EUROPEANS ENTERED THE SCENE STARTING IN THE EARLY 16TH CENTURY.

PAUL SCHULLERY AND LEE WHITTLESEY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE GIVE US A "TIME MACHINE" BIRDS-EYE VIEW OF THE ADVENT OF THE HORSE INTO THE PLAINS INDIAN CULTURE AND WHAT THE PROBABLE NEGATIVE IMPACT OF THAT WAS IN COMBINATION WITH WHITE BUFFALO HUNTERS OVER A 360 YEAR PERIOD 1500 THROUGH THE ADVENT OF THE INTERCONTINENTAL RAILROAD CIRCA MID 1860'S.

IN A FUTURE POST, I WILL PROVIDE YOU WITH THE DETAILED JOURNAL OF OSBORN RUSSELL, MOUNTAIN MAN WHO CHRONICLED THE 9 YEAR PERIOD OF HIS LIFE(1834-43) WHEN HE HOOKED UP WITH NATHANIEL WYETH'S EXPEDITION TO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS AND JIM BRIDGER'S BRIGADE OF OF OLD ROCKY MOUNTAIN FUR COMPANY MEN.......................HIS EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT OF THE BUFFALO, ELK, MOUNTAIN SHEEP AND WOLF POPULATIONS DOVETAIL VERY NICELY WITH SCHULLERY AND WHITTLESEY'S DESCRIPTIONS BELOW.........................A GOOD READ YOU WILL HAVE!

Greater Yellowstone Bison Distribution
and Abundance in the Early Historical Period

Paul Schullery
P.O. Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190 (307-344-2220, paul_schullery@nps.gov)
Lee Whittlesey
P.O. Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY 82190 (307-344-2261, lee_whittlesey@nps.gov)

Abstract
Bison management in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, as well as on other public and private lands in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE), has long been controversial. Both professional management and popular advocacy relating to bison are routinely based on presumptions about the historical distribution of the species in the region that have not yet been fully evaluated by ecological historians. In an exhaustive review of published and unpublished first-hand accounts of the GYE prior to the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, we compiled all observations, accounts, and references to bison, including tracks, hide, meat, and other parts and evidence. Based on this substantial body of information, we describe the presence of bison in the first decades of Euro-American contact with Greater Yellowstone. We also provide and analyze anecdotal evidence of the decline of bison numbers and the contraction of bison distribution in the period before the famous industrial slaughter of the mid-1870s. Bison were spectacularly abundant in lower river valleys and prairie habitats, and were all but exterminated from those areas by the close of the study period. Contrary to still-popular belief, bison and other large herbivores were not "driven into higher country" by settlement, but inhabited those higher regions as environmental conditions permitted prior to the arrival of Euro-Americans. Key historiographical issues relating to this body of evidence and its use include: conflicting and incomplete previous interpretations of American Indian influences on bison population and distribution; the formidable weight of western and regional folklore regarding bison presence/absence; and previous misunderstandings of the meaning or relevance of early historical accounts to modern management dialogues. We discuss other avenues of investigation and evidence


Distribution of bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Prehistoric bison distribution in the GYE can perhaps best be summarized simply by saying that bison appear to have been living everywhere in Greater Yellowstone where habitats were suitable. The notion that bison are not native to the area now known as Yellowstone National Park, though still apparently a popular opinion, has no basis in historical record.It is worth pointing out that we are not dependent solely upon the historical record for our knowledge of bison distribution in the park area. Archeological work, most of it within the past 20 years, has identified bison remains at park sites near Gardiner, Montana; in the Hellroaring drainage; near Tower Junction; in Lamar Valley; and on the Yellowstone Lake shore. These finds indicate bison presence in the park area for 8,000 years (Johnson 1997). Likewise, a recent survey of Greater Yellowstone archeological research has identified bison remains in 29 archeological and three paleontological sites (Cannon 2001).

Abundance of bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

The historical record of Greater Yellowstone provides some vivid and fascinating evidence relating to the abundance of bison. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, various writers reported vast herds of bison on the prairies along the edges of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, including the Yellowstone, Wind, and Snake River drainages. Smaller numbers of animals were reported here and there throughout the ecosystem, most often in the internal valleys.
In almost no case prior to 1880, however, does the written historical record provide the means of calculating any herd size for any locale. Nor does such a spotty and intermittent set of records allow us to assume that a sighting of a certain herd in a certain valley or meadow in a certain year meant that bison occupied that site similarly year after year.

This is a central point, and of special importance in the case of animals with complicated migratory habits. We can only make so much of this evidence because it consisted almost entirely of brief verbal snapshots of a certain day and condition. Virtually all early journalists in the Rocky Mountains were transient. Most traveled through the region in the warmer months of the year. Some of their accounts specifically remarked on the mobility of the bison herds, and the amazing swiftness with which a horizon-crowding herd of bison could apparently vanish. Such behavior on the part of enormous herds of grazers may seem intuitively sensible to us today, but it complicated life for early travelers even if they did understand it. Not all early travelers found bison in the same places, and some could not find them at all when they most desperately needed them for food.

However, the absence of bison from entire large drainages was apparently not always just a matter of the bison being somewhere else on the day a party came through. Sometimes the animals may have been either driven off or eliminated from a given range by native people. On July 14, 1806, some miles west of present Bozeman, Montana, Sacagawea told William Clark that bison had recently been abundant in the upper Gallatin Valley, but that Shoshone Indians had wiped them out (Thwaites 1905, 260–261).

According to this account, because of the superior military might of their neighbors, the Shoshones were unwilling to venture east into other bison ranges, and had hunted the local animals in the upper Gallatin Valley to extinction. As Clark's party moved across the Gallatin Valley and east into the Yellowstone drainage, he repeatedly said that they followed an "old buffalow road" (Thwaites 1905, 261). Proceeding eastward, on across the north side of Greater Yellowstone, they saw more bison after reaching the Yellowstone River, encountering them in large numbers from the site of present Big Timber, Montana, on downstream (Thwaites 1905, 266–269).

 In this instance, Greater Yellowstone provided potential evidence of ways in which native humans' political distribution on the landscape had the kinds of pronounced effects on western wildlife distribution and abundance hypothesized by Martin and Szuter (1999), who suggested that wildlife flourished in the "war zones" of less densely populated land contested by warring tribes, and were reduced in number in "game sinks" where large numbers of native humans were in regular residence.
Perhaps the largest herds that actually occupied what we now think of as Greater Yellowstone were in the south. In June 1833, trapper Warren Ferris was camped on the Green River not far from present Daniel, Wyoming. This one extended quotation from several such descriptions will help capture the mood of what Greater Yellowstone has lost:

Proceedings 137
Schullery and Whittlesey
"Few persons, even in these romantic regions, have ever witnessed so interesting a scene as was presented to our view from an eminence or high mound, on which we were fortunately situated, overlooking the plains to a great distance. Immense herds of bison were seen in every direction galloping over the prairie, like vast squadrons of cavalry performing their accustomed evolutions. Platoons in one part filing off, and in another returning to the main bodies; scattering bands moving in various courses, enveloped in clouds of dust, now lost, and now reappearing to view, in their rapid movements; detachments passing and repassing, from one point to another, at full speed; and now and then a solitary patriarch of the mountain herds, halting for a moment behind the dashing cohorts, to ascertain, if possible, the cause and extent of the danger and alarm; but soon again with instinctive impulse, hurrying to join his less fearless files; and all rushing on, till form and numbers disappear in the dust and distance, and nothing remains visible of the long black lines but dark clouds slowly sweeping over the distant plains. . . . (Ferris 1940, 168).

We also can rely on Ferris for a similar if more succinct account of abundant bison along the western edge of Greater Yellowstone. When his party reached Pierre's Hole, the large plains west of the Teton Range, in August 1832, Ferris wrote, "The plains were covered with buffalo, in all directions, far as we could discern them" (Ferris 1940, 128). It is these western herds that we must consider next.

Decline of bison in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

Our study of the decline of bison in Greater Yellowstone in the several decades before 1880 confirms recent portrayals of similar declines throughout the West. Though traditional accounts of the extermination of bison have tended to emphasize the great commercial slaughters of the 1870s and early 1880s, more recent scholarship has shown that the process was much more drawn out than that (Flores 1991; Benedict 1999; Isenberg 2000; Krech 2000). It certainly was in Greater Yellowstone.

The arrival of horses in the late 1700s, the arrival of whites with firearms soon after, and the arrival of increasing trade incentives through the early 1800s conspired to create a growing white and Indian hunting industry (Janetski 1987; Hoxie 1989; Fowler 1996). It was this complex set of changing conditions that led humans to make serious inroads on bison numbers in Greater Yellowstone at least three decades before Yellowstone National Park was created in 1872.

The most striking example is from the west side of the ecosystem, where bison had been abundant (though how abundant is still a matter of disagreement) at the time of the first white arrivals around 1800. By about 1840, increasingly effective human hunters, both white and Indian, had essentially eliminated bison from the Snake River Plain (Haines 1964; Daubenmire 1985; Janetski 1987; Van Vuren 1987; Urness 1989; Whittlesey 1994; Shaw 1995). Climatic factors, especially the severe winter of 1836, may have further reduced herds (Lupo 1996).

It was in good part because of this loss of bison on the west side of Greater Yellowstone that use of a network of Indian trails across northern Yellowstone, now collectively known as the Bannock Indian Trail, greatly increased (Haines 1964; Janetski 2002). By the early 1840s, mounted Indians began making annual pilgrimages across the Gallatin and Absaroka ranges to better hunting grounds to the east and north of the present park.

It seems most likely to us that as bison were eliminated from the Snake River Plain, hunters would necessarily have sought out whatever bison were available in the interior of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, starting along the western edge of Greater Yellowstone and working east. Thus, bison in Jackson Hole and other smaller habitats, such as the Firehole–Madison area or Hayden and Pelican valleys, would also have been hunted, presumably with similar effects as on the Snake River Plain. And thus, any bison lingering along the route of the Bannock Indian Trail in Gardner's Hole, the Mammoth–Gardner Basin, Blacktail Plateau, Pleasant Valley, or Lamar Valley, would have been subjected to heavier hunting pressure as well

.It is extremely important to recognize probable effects that industrial-scale bison hunting on the outer fringes of Greater Yellowstone had on interior populations. The increased mobility and improved technology of native hunters between 1800 and 1880 meant, among other things, that the first whites to make any attempt to estimate bison population size in the present park area were too late to get a clear picture of what the population must have been like before Euro-American influences reached the region. No one attempted to provide an actual count of bison in Yellowstone National Park until about 1880, after three or four decades of increased Indian hunting pressure were concluded by several years of industrial-scale commercial hide-hunting by whites.

Conclusion

Though the written historical record does establish the widespread distribution of bison throughout the GYE, that record was made too late to provide us with a full portrait of the relationships between native people and bison before those relationships were influenced by Euro-Americans. That written record was also made too late to portray anything necessarily resembling a so-called "pristine" state of ecological affairs in regional bison populations

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What the historical record does tell us is that bison were here, they were all over the place, they were abundant, and, if we may add a new and sadder meaning to Warren Ferris's words, "nothing remains visible of the long black lines but dark clouds slowly sweeping over the distant plains."

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