The Great Bison Slaughter
In the late 19th century, the Great Plains of North America stretched endlessly beneath open skies, covered with vast herds of American bison — a powerful symbol of the wild frontier and the heart of life for Native American tribes such as the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Comanche.
Within just a few decades, those herds — once numbering in the tens of millions — were reduced to only a few hundred animals.
From Abundance to Annihilation
As railroad lines expanded across the Plains in the 1860s and 1870s, hunters, soldiers, and travelers began shooting bison from moving trains, often for nothing more than amusement.
Passengers would fire out of train windows, leaving hundreds of carcasses scattered across the grasslands.
But this destruction wasn’t only about “sport.” There was a political and economic motive behind it:
- Killing the bison was a deliberate strategy to starve and weaken Native American tribes, forcing them onto government-controlled reservations.
- Without the bison — their main source of food, clothing, and tools — Native communities could not sustain their traditional way of life.
The Trade in Bones and Skulls
By the 1880s, the Great Plains were littered with the remains of millions of slaughtered animals.
Traders soon began collecting the bones to sell them for profit.
The bones and skulls were ground into fertilizer, animal charcoal, and even used in various industrial processes.
Around 1892, a now-famous photograph was taken in Broken Bow (though some sources say it was in Michigan).
It shows a massive pile of over 50,000 bison skulls, stacked several meters high — a haunting monument to the devastation of an entire species.
Near Extinction
By 1889, fewer than 500 wild bison remained in all of North America.
The mighty animal that had once thundered across the plains for thousands of years was on the verge of extinction.
The Beginning of Recovery
In the early 20th century, conservationists such as President Theodore Roosevelt and William Hornaday launched efforts to save the remaining bison.
Wildlife refuges like Yellowstone National Park became sanctuaries where the species could slowly recover.
Thanks to decades of protection and breeding programs, today there are more than 500,000 bison across North America — most living on protected lands or private reserves.
A Symbol of Regret and Renewal
Today, the image of the bison skull mountain stands as one of the most haunting reminders of humanity’s reckless exploitation of nature.
It tells a story of greed, loss, and the fragile line between abundance and extinction — but also of redemption, as people learned to protect what they once destroyed.
