The American bison, often called the buffalo, was the keystone animal of the North American grasslands and the material foundation of Plains Indigenous life. Tens of millions once shaped the prairie itself and sustained whole nations who used nearly every part of the animal. Within roughly two decades in the late nineteenth century, the herds were slaughtered almost to extinction in a collapse that was partly commercial and partly a deliberate weapon against the Plains peoples who depended on them. Saved from extinction by a small conservation effort, the bison survives today mostly in managed herds and stands as a symbol of both loss and restoration.
In the early 1800s a traveler on the central plains could watch a single herd of bison take days to pass. Estimates of their peak number vary, but a figure around thirty million is common, and the animals shaped the grassland they grazed. By about 1890 the wild population had fallen to a few hundred. No disease did this, and no single hunter. The herds were destroyed in roughly two decades by a commercial hide trade and by an understanding, shared by U.S. military and government figures, that breaking the herds would break the Plains nations that lived on them. The bison is the animal whose fate became inseparable from the fate of many Plains peoples.