When did the American buffalo disappear and become bison?

[cthulu2016]

3. The buffalo got all politically correct.

Last edited Sat Jun 2, 2012, 01:45 PM - Edit history (1)

When the Indians pointed out they had never even been to India the bison were emboldened to point out that there were in no way buffalo either.

Seriously, though, I think the Bison was also called the American Buffalo, and then the American got left off. Buffalo was never correct, but American Buffalo isn't so bad. They are as close to Buffalo as we've got.

A fascinating fact: When the white man reached the plains there were buffalo... sorry, bison as far as the eye could see, and they were probably grazing everything into desert. It is said the herds went from horizon to horizon.

That was not the normal state of bison. A big meaty animal that crazy-numerous will lead to predators evolved to eat them.

Sometimes we see this where people kill all the predators that eat their farm animals and then deer or bison population goes wild.

In the case of the bison, Europeans had killed off the bison's biggest predator, but without meaning to or even realizing it.

Smallpox ran ahead of the European settlers, sweeping across the continent a couple of centuries before any European settlers got to the heartland. When the Europeans got there the bison were out of control because so many native Americans had died off that the bison were not being hunted as much as before.

(I do not know whether native Americans kept down the population of wolves or cougars or whatever might threaten bison because of the competition for bison. Either way, it is safe to assume that circa 1500 the native American was the bison's greatest natural enemy.)

The Europeans met the nomadic plains Indians and marveled at their horsemanship, not realizing that horses were not native to America and were as new to the native Americans as the smallpox had been. Like disease, the horses had wandered far ahead of the white settlers and a culture developed around them.

Most evidence of some native American civilizations laid low by European disease had been reclaimed by nature before Europeans ever saw them. (Lots of Indian earthworks were assumed to be natural formations until the last century because it didn't really register until you saw them from the air.)