1800s Bison Herd

A big bull out front, and a line of bison strung out behind him, walking through tall grass and their own dust.

For most of the 1800s this was an ordinary sight on the Great Plains. Bison numbered in the tens of millions and moved across the grasslands in nomadic herds, and the Plains nations built their lives around them.

It ended fast. For about a decade after 1873, several hundred commercial hide-hunting outfits worked the herds, and the railroads carried the hides east. By 1883 the northern herds were largely gone. By 1889 only a few hundred wild plains bison remained, scattered across the Texas Panhandle, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and the western Dakotas. From the early 1880s into the early 1890s, settlers gathered the bones left on the prairie and sold them for fertilizer.

The picture is toned in sepia like a photograph from the period, with soft grain and a sky of broken cloud. The nearest bull fills the left side, head low, beard heavy, horns curving up. Behind him half a dozen more file to the right across the grass, growing fainter in the dust toward a low ridge on the horizon. It hangs well in a hallway or above a long sideboard, where the procession can run left to right.