Linda Pocknell, age 9, of St. Catharinos, Ont., for her question;
How many bison were living 1000 years also?
A thousand years ago, nobody bothered to count the bison that roamc:rA the plains and the prairies of North America. The Indians may have counted the few they took from the vast herds. Leif Ericson, who visited our shor"c:s at about that time, did not travel westward into the: bison country. So we cannot be certain of the number of bison that lived then, but naturalists have been able to make a guess and estimate the size of the original herd, It is believed that the huge herd of bison a t one time numbered fifty to sixty million. Perhaps this many, or even more of the dark, shaggy animals roamed the plains and prairies a thousand years ago.
Tragedy seems to have struck hardest at the vast herd in the past 200 years. By 1850, the original numbers had dwindled to about 20 million. Almost 15 million perished in the next 20 years and by 1900 less than a thousand of them remained. Since that time, we have done our best to prevent our native wild ox from disappearing altogether. Vile cannot give him back his native grazing lands. But small herds of the wild, hunchback cattle are carefully tended in parks and sanctuaries.
Was it mankind who slaughtered those billions of bison? Not all together. Though man the farmer was in competition with the bison for the rich lands of the plains and buffalo hunters took more than their share of the big fellows. Other enemies, more relentless than man, helped reduce the vast herds to a pitiful few. Nature, it seems, got tired of the shaggy, brown oxen. A few rough seasons of blizzards, floods and prairie fires did more to destroy the bison than a thousand Buffalo Bills and all the Indians in America could have done.
The tragic slaughter is reported by naturalists and travelers of the last century. Ernest Thompson Seton, the gentle American naturalist, reports that a vast herd of bison migrated north around 1801 and never came south again. The whole herd must have perished in the bitter blizzards of 1802. There are records of thousands more of the heavy beasts 'being trapped in quicksands, Far more perished as they tried to cross the treacherous ice of spring rivers. There are travelers' reports of thousands upon thousands of their drowned bodies along the rivers, tricked by ice and trapped by flood waters. Thousands, perhaps millions moreof the bison were roasted by prairie fires. And this weeding of the big herd went on season after season.
Add these tragedies to the loss of the grazing areas and we can see how the vast herd of bison dwindled and almost disappeared. For countless ages the bison had had a very easy life in North America.. There was safety in numbers and the few taken by the Indians did not seriously thrE:aten the herd. The climate was suitable and food plentiful. But the big, shaggy hunchback was never very smart.A few bad seasons, plus man‑the‑hunter and man‑the‑farmer were too much for him, Now he lives comfortably as a pet of the human beings who helped to oust him from his home, His grazing lands are now the property of our domestic cattle,