The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History

The North American environment contains rich natural resources that, over time, have supported a succession of modes of living on the land. A core topic in environmental history is how different peoples at different times have used, perceived, managed, and conserved their environments. Native Americans developed several forms of land use appropriate to the resources of different regions of the United States. This chapter compares three patterns of Native American subsistence and the processes by which European settlers colonized particular North American landscapes: southwestern horticulture; northeastern hunting and gathering; and the Great Plains buffalo and horse cultures.

The physical environment that constitutes the present United States can be characterized in terms of its area, location, climate, rainfall, and topography. Its total area is approximately 3.6 million square miles. The 48 contiguous states extend from the 24th parallel at the tip of Florida to the 49th parallel at their northern border with Canada, falling between 66 and 125 degrees west longitude. Alaska lies between 54 and 72 degrees north latitude and 130 degrees east longitude, with the westernmost point of the Aleutian Islands being in the Eastern Hemisphere at 172 degrees east longitude. The tropical Hawaiian Islands are situated between 19 and 25 north latitude and 155 and 176 west longitude.

The climate of the 48 mainland states is temperate, having cold winters and hot summers. The states east of the 100th meridian are characterized as humid, with 20–60 inches on average of annual rainfall distributed throughout the year; those west of the 100th meridian have an average between 5 and 20 inches, distributed mainly in the winter months. Topographically, the country extends westward from the Atlantic coastal plain at sea level upward to the Piedmont Plateau, between 500 and 1,000 feet in elevation, and the Appalachian Mountains, which rise to higher than 6,000 feet. Beyond the Mississippi River the elevation again rises gradually upward to about 4,000 feet, where the high plains approach the Rocky Mountains. The Rockies, Sierra Nevadas, and Cascades rise westward of the plains from around 4,000 to higher than 10,000 feet, interrupted by the intermontane Great Basin, between 4,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level. Westward of the Sierras, Cascades, and Coast Ranges, peaks in Alaska rise to 20,000 feet and in Hawaii to over 13,000 feet.

The country contains the rich natural resources required for agricultural and commercial systems. It has extensive forests in its eastern and western regions for fuel and building materials and extremely fertile soils along the eastern coastal plains, the Mississippi Valley, midwestern prairies, and Pacific coast valleys. Ample rainfall and water for agriculture are supplied from the snowmelts of the Appalachian Mountains to water the fertile soils of the eastern states. Snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains and Cascades fill the western river systems, while aquifers now supply water to the Great Plains, creating possibilities for irrigated agriculture in the arid regions of the West. The river systems and lowlands of the eastern coastal plains and Mississippi Valley make extended inland transportation and commerce feasible. The vast mineral treasury of the Appalachians and the western mountains, with their deposits of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal, supply the energy and minerals needed for thriving industries. These natural features, resources, and climate patterns were utilized first by Native Americans and then by colonists from other continents to create subsistence- and market-oriented societies.

Indians occupied almost all of North America on the eve of European colonization. Their primary mode of subsistence was hunting, gathering, and fishing, combined—in the Southwest, Mississippi Valley, and eastern woodlands—with horticulture. Indian ecological relations with the land and the transformation of those relations under European settlement can be illustrated by cases from the Southwest where horticulture predominated; the hunting cultures of the Northeast; and the buffalo cultures of the Great Plains. In each case the process of transformation varied, but several factors predominated: the introduction of pathogens and other biota; trading in furs and hides; and the addition of cultural factors such as Christian religion and alphanumeric literacy.

Estimates of the precolonial Indian population of North America have ranged from 1 to 18 million, depending on methods used to extrapolate backward from existing records of population densities and the devastation of diseases, with recent assessments in the range of 4 to 7 million. There is also considerable debate about the process of the peopling of the Americas. Indian origin stories tell of the continued presence of native peoples on the continent from time immemorial, of an original emergence of people out of the earth in distant times, or of arrival from other lands after a long journey. The theory accepted by most Westerners, including many Indians, however, has been that of arrival over the Bering land bridge, or the Beringia theory. Between 80,000 and 23,000 years ago sea levels dropped, opening up possibilities for people to migrate across ice-sheets, and were even lower 23,000 to 10,000 years ago, when a broad land mass some 1,000 miles wide appeared. The Beringia theory holds that people from Asia were able to migrate north into the area that is now Russia and then across the Bering land bridge, thus entering the Americas. These earliest bands, which arrived at least 13,000 years ago (and possibly, some believe, as early as 35,000 years ago), were able to survive on food resources found at latitudes above 60 degrees and to live in very cold temperatures. Much of that survival was the result of following migrating herds of game.

Between 13,000 and 11,000 years ago, the vast ice-sheets that covered present-day Canada and the Great Lakes receded, opening a corridor southward from Alaska through the Yukon and down along the slopes of the Canadian Rockies. A southward migration of people occurred through this Rocky Mountain Trench. Because of the relative scarcity of animal or plant life in that corridor, bands of people moved down it and then fanned out into the area that now constitutes the United States. A second theory holds that the migrations southward occurred primarily along the Pacific coast, where fish and wildlife were more abundant and sea levels were much lower than at present. Additionally, a third migration across the Bering land bridge into Alaska, between 11,000 and 8000 B.P., was made by Eskimo Aleut peoples.

People who migrated southward and eastward into the present-day United States also continued into Central and South America. Some recently discovered sites in Monte Verde, Chile, are perhaps 15,000 years old, although radiocarbon methods of dating the remains are subject to further verification, as is the question as to whether those sites were settled in the earliest Beringia migration or by migrations across the ocean. Other early sites, discovered in the eastern United States and in the Pacific Northwest, remain subject to additional verification as well.

The Beringia theory, however, supplies an additional explanation for later environmental transformations. The land bridge, or the Bering Strait itself, protected migrants from diseases associated with Europe and Asia because pathogens were unable to survive in the very cold temperatures. Although Amerindians did have a number of diseases (such as colds, intestinal parasites, and yaws), they lacked immunity to many diseases associated with domesticated animals and plants (such as smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, and scarlet fever) that the Europeans brought with them, and which rapidly decimated Indian populations. The timing and effects of epidemics varied according to type of disease, mode of transmission, rapidity of the spread of contagion, density of population, and types of contacts with Europeans. Debate centers on the validity of archaeological and historical records and the methods of counting and estimating population sizes in determining whether and when a disease reached a particular tribe. The vastly reduced populations gave European colonists an advantage over the weakened tribes. How did the early migrants from Asia to the Americas attain subsistence, and how did they transform the North American environment?

In the American Southwest, a long history of environmental adaptation by Amerindians preceded the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century A.D. Early peoples changed and evolved over time in relationship to changing environmental conditions. Paleo-Indians (meaning ancient or very ancient) lived in the Southwest from about 11,500 to 8,000 B.P. (before present) by hunting mammoth and bison. The Clovis culture derives its name from the long pointed arrowheads, found first in Clovis, New Mexico, that were attached to spears thrown by atlatls (long rods) and used to hunt mammoth. Stone knives were also developed for butchering the prey. Following the Clovis culture, the Folsom culture developed shorter spears and stone tools for killing the bison that survived both climate change and paleo-Indian hunters. Throughout the West, mammoth and buffalo jumps have been found, where animals, herded by people on foot, were stampeded over the edges of cliffs and eroded gullies, where the kill was then butchered.

In the Southwest, following the age of large mammal hunting, a second type of culture emerged—the archaic culture, meaning old or early. The archaic culture, which existed from about 8000 B.P. to 4000 B.P., consisted of groups of hunting-gathering peoples who hunted the smaller animals that remained after mammoths and bison declined or disappeared from the region—deer, mountain lion, antelope, and rabbits. These groups moved continuously in small bands of related individuals as they foraged for plants and small animals, traveling with the seasons. They may have had sites to which they returned each year, or they may have found new locales where game was more abundant and where they knew that the plants they needed for survival could more easily be found. They developed snares and nets, stone and bowl chipping tools, and scrapping and cutting tools to process the fibers, tubers, and seeds found in the arid environment.

Around 2,500 B.P., possibly owing to population pressure or the advent of crops and technologies diffusing northward from Mexico, people began to live in settled communities, growing maize—a unique new world crop—together with squash and, later, beans. The three foods became known as the “three sisters,” or the corn, beans, and squash complex. Melons and chili peppers were also added to the diet. People lived in settled communities, joining their labor together, women working with women and men with men.

In the area of the Southwest presently known as the Four Corners—where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico converge—a confluence of cultures existed. The Hohokam, who settled in southern Arizona, practiced irrigation-based horticulture, while the Anasazi dwelt in pueblos on the plateaus of the region and planted crops along rivers. These cultures reveal the development of sophisticated technologies for adapting to and manipulating the environment.

Knowledge of Hohokam irrigation systems is based on archaeological remains found in the area today, as well as on extrapolation from current cultures backward in time. Because the land was a desert, with rainfall amounts less than 10 inches a year, crops required catchment dams, irrigation canals, and water conservation. Environmental historian Donald Worster, in Rivers of Empire (1985), writes: “Water control relies on temporary structures and small-scale permanent works that interfere only minimally with the natural flow of streams.… [The users] are self-reliant, self-sufficient, and self-managing as individuals and as a community, though nature still sets in the main the terms on which their lives are lived.”¹

Between A.D. 300 and 900, the Hohokam people manipulated the arid environment by building large canals, some as wide as 30 feet across, 7 feet deep, and 8 miles long, with as many as 8,000 acres at a time being fertilized with water from the Salt and Gila river systems. Indians could grow crops and store them throughout the year, so as to have a continual supply of food. An environmental consequence of irrigated agriculture, however, is that water from the rivers leaches out salts, drawing them up from the subsoil and leaving salinated topsoils. Just as the Mesopotamian cultures of the Near East were abandoned owing to salinization, so—it is hypothesized—the Hohokam were forced to abandon their villages and move elsewhere or to remain, evolving and adapting to changed conditions. By the time the Spanish arrived, they met Piman-speaking, Akimel O’odham Indians, who were still practicing a form of irrigation, but not on the enormous scale developed by the Hohokam. Other explanations for the demise of the Hohokam include flooding, drought, earthquakes, and deforestation, some of these hypotheses influenced by environmental events occurring at the time the explanation itself was put forward.

A second group of southwestern peoples, the Anasazi (or “ancient ones”), likewise developed sophisticated technologies for transforming the environment. Between A.D. 900 and 1150, in northwestern New Mexico, they constructed large multistoried communal houses in villages, or pueblos, in the bottom of Chaco Canyon, along the edges of a river where they planted crops. The communities consisted of many small villages with larger central cities containing four-story apartments and ramrod-straight roads that linked Chaco Canyon with other communities in the Southwest.

Not only did the Chaco people build roads and pueblos, they also developed an agricultural calendar that enabled them to utilize the southwestern environment through an understanding of astronomy, a technology illustrated in films such as The Sun Dagger (1963). They attained the ability to predict the advent of growing and harvesting seasons based on arrival of the solstices and equinoxes—the solstices (or longest and shortest days) occurring around June 21 and December 21 and the equinoxes (equal days and nights) around March 21 and September 23. They did so by building an “observatory” on Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, a stone-slab structure assembled so that a sliver of sunlight entered through two stones and fell on an engraved spiral petroglyph. They were thus able to determine the best times to plant and harvest their crops, gaining a measure of control over the vicissitudes of an arid environment.

Mesa Verde (meaning “green table”), an Anasazi pueblo from the same period, likewise illustrates the sophistication developed by southwestern peoples in manipulating their environment. Situated on a vast green plain with a level top consisting of a juniper and piñon forest and located some 7,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level, Mesa Verde culture and agriculture developed gradually over time. The people of the earliest culture, from around A.D. 500 to 750, were basket makers who lived underground in pit houses. Around 750 to 1100, they added ceremonial circular kivas and began building houses above ground out of bricks. Between 1100 and 1300, they reached the peak of their complex culture, building ladders ascending to the cliff areas, as well as pathways descending to agricultural fields in the valleys. The vast agricultural network covered some eighty square miles of development, supporting numerous pueblos located about 1,800 to 2,000 feet above the river. Deforestation, social disruption, and the onset of an eleven-year drought around 1280 (as evidenced by the narrowness of tree-ring growth) were factors that may have caused abandonment of the pueblos.

A cooperative division of labor existed within these agricultural communities. Here, in contrast to the tribes along the eastern seaboard, men planted and tended the fields, while women and girls ground the corn into meal, an arduous and difficult task done on stone metates with handheld grinding stones, or manos, used for scraping across the corn and pulverizing it into meal. To keep the pace going and to inspire the women’s work, elders too old to labor in the fields played flute music. The horticulturists also hunted deer, antelope, buffalo, and rabbit and traded corn for meat and hides with hunting bands from nearby mountains. But despite the level of culture and agriculture developed in the Southwest, a major ecological and social transformation began with the Spanish expeditions into the area in the sixteenth century. An ecological complex of introduced animals, plants, pathogens, and people radically changed the region.

Into the Pueblo culture, which had evolved slowly over time to a very complex level, the Spaniards were suddenly injected. Their presence in the New World began in 1492 with the first of four voyages by Columbus. Earlier voyages by Vikings and Basques to Labrador, Newfoundland, and the Grand Banks along the eastern coast of Canada had taken place, but land-based explorations with lasting consequences stem from the post-1492 period. In the American Southwest, the first exploration was led by Marcos de Niza, who in 1539 traveled north from Mexico to the Zuni pueblos, where he reported on the riches he had viewed. He was followed by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in 1540, who spent two years in the region, traveling as far east as present-day Kansas.

After the initial explorations, two important additional expeditions occurred, the first by Francisco Sanchez Chamuscado in 1581 and the second by Don Antonio de Espejo in 1582, both of whom recorded their impressions in diaries. The Chamuscado-Rodriguez party explored the territory northward, to the Tiwa pueblos, where they left two friars, who were subsequently killed by Indians. Espejo followed two years later with fourteen soldiers and Franciscan priests. He explored many of the pueblos, including the Zuni, the Hopi, the Acoma, the Tiwa, and the Keres pueblos, and then returned by way of the Pecos River in New Mexico to avenge the death of the Franciscan friars.

The subsequent bloodshed was the beginning of a long series of problematic occupations by Spanish settlers. The first colonization of the area was by Don Juan de Oñate, who mounted an expedition northward from New Mexico to look for mines and to Christianize the Indians. He brought with him 400 colonists, 10 Franciscan missionaries, 7,000 head of cattle, sheep, and horses, and founded the first Spanish colony in New Mexico. Oñate treated the Indians brutally, setting up courts and cutting off the legs and arms of people who did not obey him. As a consequence, a Spanish court was convened to try him and to hear the complaints of his own soldiers.

The large animals, colonists, and missionaries changed the region forever. Environmental historian Alfred Crosby, in Ecological Imperialism (1986), has called the complex of European ecological introductions the “portmanteau biota, [a] collective name for the Europeans and all the organisms they brought with them.”² Along with the portmanteau biota, the use of guns and swords and the written language, as evidenced by Spanish accounts and court documents, represented the organized power of Europeans to control and dominate the Indians and their environment.

In When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away (1991), historian Ramón Gutiérrez details the brutality of the expeditions that changed Pueblo land and life and argues that the Franciscan missions that followed actually provided a measure of security for the devastated Indians. The Franciscans established churches, transforming the religion of the native peoples from the worship of corn mothers to the worship of the male Christian God and the Virgin Mary. “Christianization,” states Gutiérrez, “meant a reliable meat supply, iron implements of various sorts, and European foods.”³ The missionaries built churches and chapels, established workshops for weaving and smithing, and created irrigated gardens where they planted crops brought from the Old World. In introducing Christianity, the Franciscans sought to obliterate Indian animism and the fetishes of the Zuni and other peoples. They prohibited the masks and dances of the Pueblo tribes and substituted the Virgin Mary for the Corn Mother.

By the seventeenth century, the world of the southwestern Indians had been changed by a complex of ecological and social introductions: European diseases (which decimated Pueblo populations between 1638 and 1640), large domesticated animals, new techniques of warfare, the Christian religion, and alphanumeric literacy. But for the Spanish, as well as the Indians, the arid southwestern environment imposed constraints. Many colonists, along with their domesticated animals, died before irrigated fields with European grains and fruits were established and Indian rebellions contained. Throughout the process of colonization, however, Indian peoples retained much of their heritage, ritual practices, and sense of cultural identity.

A second case of ecological transformation in the New World is that of the hunting/gathering/fishing cultures of the Northeast, such as the Abenaki of northern Maine, the St. John’s River Malecite, and the Micmac of southeastern Canada, all of whom shared a common culture. The Micmac lived in the area known as the Gaspé peninsula, south of Newfoundland, Labrador, and the St. Lawrence River. Micmac hunting, like that of other cultures in the Northeast, was based primarily on large animals, such as moose, deer, elk, and caribou, sources of both meat and hides. In addition, smaller animals, such as mink, muskrat, and beaver, were trapped for their furs.

Indian spiritual relations with animals derived from intimate everyday encounters. Indian peoples took their tribal clan names from animals, such as bear or deer, and often identified with or assumed the personalities of those animals. Animals were thought to live in separate societies with leaders, as did human hunter-gatherers, with a pale or white animal often thought of as the leader of the animal community. In addition, the animals had spirits, called manitous by the French Jesuits. These animal spirits were believed to communicate not only with the animals themselves, but with their dead ancestors and also with shamans—the spiritual leaders of the Micmac—and other hunting tribes.

The Micmac, like other hunting groups, went through ritual preparations before embarking on the hunt. An animal might appear to them in a dream, or the shaman might determine the time to set out. Or they might see a herd of deer and decide that this was the moment when the deer had come to them as a gift. Sometimes divination techniques were used to determine the direction of the hunt, such as burning the shoulder or a leg bone of an animal and then reading a pathway on the lines revealed on the bone. This act often randomized the hunt, giving animals time to reproduce.

In hunting, Indians believed the animal gave itself up to be killed so the hunter could survive, a process the Jesuits called ordained killing. Deer, for example, were autonomous subjects, in the sense that they were equal or superior to human beings. When a human hunter looked into the eye of a deer, an exchange of understanding occurred, an agreement or contract that this was the moment the deer had chosen to give itself up as a gift to the hunter. In addition to ritual preparations, there was ritual disposal of the remains. Land animals were to be disposed of on land, for example, and water animals were returned to their own watery abode. Mink were to be hung on trees and gutted to show other mink that the fur and meat had actually been used and not wasted. If Indians failed to follow a range of tabooed behaviors—from avoiding menstruating women, to not placing animal skulls properly in trees, to laxity in ritual preparations—drastic consequences might ensue. A species might make itself scarce, a hunter’s luck could vanish, a sorcerer might inflict illness, or a family member might suffer an accident.

The fur trade that changed both Indian cultures and the ecology of much of Canada and the northern United States lasted from the 1580s to the late nineteenth century and was made possible by the fecundity of beaver. Naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946) estimated that, in 1600, there were upwards of 50 million beaver in North America. Beaver ponds varied in size from a small pond of several square feet to hundreds of acres surrounded by beaver dams. The resulting beaver ponds created habitats for many birds and animals, including muskrat, otter, and mink, also important in the fur trade. The peculiar fate of the beaver was to have a very soft coat underneath an outer coat of stiff guard hairs. The soft coat hairs had small barbs that would cling to a felt-hat base made from rabbit hair. Thus beaver fur was an ideal pelt from which to make the stylish beaver hats that were in demand in Europe and later in America.

The Micmac encouraged the trade, and as early as 1534 were reported as waving sticks with furs to attract Jacques Cartiér’s voyagers. They were shrewd bargainers, desiring metal tools in exchange for pelts, realizing the value of metal fishhooks, traps, and guns, along with needles for sewing and kettles for cooking. But since they lacked the technologies to manufacture metal goods for themselves, Indians had to trap more beaver. Under pressure from the trade, beaver—along with lynx, otter, fox, mink, and other fur-bearing animals—rapidly disappeared from the northeastern region. Concurrently, the organically based economy of the Indians, rooted in disposable clothing, shelters, and utensils, began to be superseded by an inorganically based economy, tied to iron implements and other goods imported from Europe.

The advent of European diseases introduced by sailors, fishermen, missionaries, and settlers not only decimated tribal numbers, but also broke down cohesiveness and community. Some environmental historians, such as Calvin Martin, believe that disease initiated the breakdown of Indian spiritual relations with nonhuman nature. Indians broke faith with the animals and engaged in the fur trade. Martin writes: “No longer was [the Micmac] the sensitive fellow-member of a symbolic world; under pressure from disease, European trade, and Christianity, he had apostatized—he had repudiated his role within the ecosystem.”⁴ But Bruce Trigger asserts that it was the desire for European goods that provided the incentive to hunt beaver. “To date,” he writes, “there is no hard evidence of major epidemics in the St. Lawrence Valley or southern Ontario during the sixteenth century.”⁵ Among the Micmac, smallpox epidemics began in 1639 and continued almost every decade throughout the seventeenth century. Measles occurred in 1633 and 1658. Historical and archaeological records show that these diseases appeared after the start of the fur trade. But when they did strike, they had an immediate and pronounced impact.

When disease decimated a hunting band, the relationships of trust, practice, and knowledge built up among its members over generations was broken down. As the survivors formed new groups, it was more difficult to hunt cohesively. The fur trade promoted individualism within the tribe and competition among tribes, as middleman tribes were created in the interior. As the trade expanded and dependencies on trade goods increased, some tribes became dominant and others declined in social status. Although Indians maintained a sense of integrity and retained tribal and oral traditions, the overall effect was to give Indian groups greater incentive to deplete animal populations.

The introduction of Christianity also transformed Indian life. The Jesuits were extremely shrewd in the methods they used to challenge native belief systems. Whenever a woman would pray with a priest for a child ill with smallpox or measles and that child survived, shamans would be ridiculed and their power undermined. If a man who was sick asked the priest for help, and was cured, the individual would then agree to convert to Christianity. When shamans themselves became ill, the priest would minister to them, asking them to join him in prayer. If a shaman survived, the priest made him agree to give up his drums, charms, and dances.

Baptism was substituted for Indian rituals, and those who took up the sacraments of baptism, confession, and the Mass were converted to Christianity and taught to read the Bible. In After Columbus (1988), historian James Axtell discusses “The Power of Print in the Eastern Woodlands”: “The ability to read and write was awe-inspiring to the Indians largely because it duplicated a spiritual feat that only the greatest shamans could perform, namely, that of reading the mind of a person at a distance.…” Indians often developed an extreme respect for the Bible, sent by a seemingly all-powerful God who prevented disease from falling on the priests, who in fact bore immunity.⁶

To Europeans, the power of writing over oral tradition reflected the supremacy of European culture. The Jesuits and colonists considered Indian stories as mere myths repeated over and over again. They believed alphanumeric literacy, used to record treaties and trading transactions, to be superior to the Indian oral traditions. Literacy allowed Europeans to engage in more powerful, centrally organized economic and political patterns with international ties than was possible among Indian cultures.

In comparing Indian and Western ways of relating to nature, Indians generally considered themselves to be just one among many entities in an animate world, living according to culturally defined canons of respect for other members, while nevertheless developing tools and technologies that allowed them to provide for their own subsistence. Seventeenth-century Europeans, on the other hand, emerging out of feudalism, were beginning to believe in the power of technology to control nature and advance an individual’s status in life. The introduction of Christianity, new technologies, and market trading, reinforced by the power of literacy, therefore resulted in a transformed natural environment and Indian culture.

A third case of Indian ecological modes of living and their transformation is that of the bison cultures of the Great Plains. Native Americans of the Great Plains centered their subsistence economy around the buffalo. But as Europeans moved onto the Plains, they developed policies toward Indians and buffalo that altered the region’s ecology and native cultures.

The Great Plains presented unique ecological challenges to both native inhabitants and European Americans seeking to expand westward. They are divided into the tall grass prairies in the east and the short grass prairies in the west, with a division between tall and short occurring roughly around the 100th meridian. Westward of that meridian, the rainfall is less than 20 inches and tapers off further toward the western deserts. The 100th meridian is generally thought of as the 20-inch rainfall line. Agriculture is fairly reliable east of that line, but westward it becomes increasingly problematic, hence the Plains Indians were primarily nomadic.

The Great Plains produced severe weather conditions for all inhabitants, Indian and European alike. The region is subject to very rapid and sometimes violent weather changes. Chinook winds are warm winds coming off the mountains that can, within a half a day, dry up all crops growing in its path. Blizzards from the Canadian North sweep down across the plains, where there are few physical or vegetative barriers. “Northers” produce extremely low wind-chill conditions. Perhaps most importantly, the Plains are subject to periodic droughts, a condition that affects all life on the Plains.

The animal that dominated the Plains from earliest times was the bison. A single herd of bison could contain as many as 12 million head and cover up to 50 square miles, with the average herd being about 4 million. Recent estimates put the bison population on the short-grass Plains at 30 million head. Herd sizes varied with drought, disease, and predation by wolves, coyotes, and Indians. The bison played a significant role in shaping the ecology of the soil, water, and grasslands and provided Native Americans with food, clothing, and tools, with hides also being used for pictographs that recorded tribal histories.

Indians achieved great sophistication in obtaining and using the buffalo as a primary source of protein. Folsom men, who inhabited the Plains 9,000 years ago, herded the buffalo, walking behind the often erratic and unpredictable herds. Buffalo, unlike cattle and sheep, could not be domesticated, but early Indians developed an understanding of herd psychology. Moving with them along level ground, they could herd the animals into an eroded cul-de-sac, where they could readily kill them with bows and arrows. Or they could cover themselves with mud in a wallow while they waited for the herd to come close enough to throw spears. Indians on foot also used the surround technique for capturing bison: hunters from several villages encircled a herd, set fire to the grass, and shot the trapped animals with spears or arrows.

The cliff drive, however, was the primary method Indians used to kill buffalo before the advent of the horse. They placed lines of stone along the ground, making a V-shaped path toward a cliff. These funnel-shaped pathways often extended outward a mile and a half from the cliff, over which the buffalo would be driven on foot or by setting fires. The fall over the cliff would either stun or kill the animals, after which they could be butchered and the meat dried. A herd of buffalo might provide a group of Indians with fresh meat for two to three weeks, with the rest being dried for future use. At one ancient site in Colorado (Olson-Chubbock), 193 carcasses were excavated, which could have supplied a band with 75,000 pounds of meat. A group could, therefore, live off one stampede for a month or more before moving on.

Hunters evolved ritual methods of killing the buffalo, and sacrificed the first buffalo of a hunt. They took the bone from the humps of bull buffaloes and used the fat around the hump for celebrations. They used buffalo skulls for rituals, filling the skulls with grass and setting them in places of worship. Buffalo bones were often used in Indians’ sacred bundles—complex and varied bundles of stones, bones, and other objects that held particular meaning for individual Indians.

The arrival of the horse on the Plains dramatically changed life for Indians and altered ecological conditions. Horses present in the New World had become extinct on the Plains after they migrated eastward over the Bering land bridge. They were domesticated in Asia and then adopted by Europeans thousands of years ago. They were reintroduced into Mexico by Hernando Cortes in 1519, and also came north with the explorations of Hernando DeSoto in the Southeast (1539–42) and Coronado (1540–42) and Oñate (1598) in the Southwest. Many escaped the expeditions and became feral. In 1680, the Pueblo Indians revolted against the Spanish, captured their horses, cattle, and sheep and, along with the Navajo, established a livestock trade with other tribes. By the 1690s the plains of Texas had horses, and by the 1780s horses had dispersed northward to the Columbia plateau. While there is debate over whether Indians obtained horses by taming feral horses or trading domesticated horses, or both, the introduction of the horse changed the ecology and economy of the Plains.

On the high, short-grass Plains, the horse gave rise to tribes of nomadic Indians. Before the advent of the horse, most tribes lived along the edges of the short-grass Plains, where they could hunt bison as well as game, gather plants, grow crops, or trade with the horticultural tribes of the Mississippi Valley. The horse-mounted nomads—Arapaho, Assiniboine, Atsina, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, and Sioux—now became skilled riders and efficient buffalo hunters, but, at the same time, more dependent on both the horse and fluctuations in the populations of bison. Mounted Indians could now efficiently drive buffalo into the same rock pounds that they had previously used on foot and could pursue animals while mounted. They could also construct bison pounds from lodgepoles—logs from mountain-grown lodgepole pines—dragged behind their horses. But with greater reliance on the bison, they were locked into the cycles of drought and disease that affected bison numbers, and became more dependent on trade.

The horse also changed Indian lifestyles. With the horse as transportation, they could use poles for teepees and for travois to pull their goods. They built temporary pounds and camps, to which they regularly returned. A family of two Indians needed five horses in order to travel—one horse for each of the two people to ride, a third to haul the teepee, a fourth to haul the travois loaded with gear, and often a fifth loaded with meat or other provisions. A family of seven or eight, therefore, might need ten or eleven horses. A village of 300 people could potentially have more than a thousand horses. This meant that Indians had to move continually in order to find grass for their horses. In the winter, when the Plains were covered with snow, they had to find winter forage. They, therefore, congregated in areas such as the valleys of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. The horse could, therefore, become a liability, limiting movement and campsite locations.

Horses, moreover, became signs of wealth and prestige. The more horses and other forms of property an individual had, the greater that person’s social status. If a chief had 300 horses, his tribe was admired more than that of a chief who had only 100 horses. Thus, greater social differentiation emerged as a result of the arrival of the horse.

If the horse gave the Plains Indians an advantage over the bison by the eighteenth century, Indian susceptibility to introduced diseases undercut that advantage by the nineteenth century. An epidemic of smallpox in the pueblos of New Mexico in 1780–81 was probably diffused by horse-mounted Indians to the Plains, where its consequences among the Arikara were noted in 1795 by French traders, an outbreak reported to have also killed many Mandan. Horse-mounted nomadic Indians, however, suffered fewer losses than those in sedentary villages. But a devastating smallpox epidemic swept the Plains in 1837, spread from an infected deckhand on a trading vessel to three Arikara women and thence to other Arikara, Sioux, Mandan, Gros Ventres, Pawnee, Blackfeet, Piegan, and Assiniboine Indians. As many as 17,000 people may have died. Then in the 1840s and 1850s, Indians equipped with horses, devastated by disease, and already engaged in the beaver and hide trades with Europeans, encountered waves of miners, ranchers, and farmers moving west. The encounter permanently changed the Plains environment and Indian ways of life.

A number of theories exist as to the historical process by which Europeans transformed the Plains and the Indian cultures that had evolved there. In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), Jared Diamond uses the “guns, germs, and steel” complex as a shorthand for the immediate causes responsible for Indians succumbing to Europeans. “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences in peoples’ environments, not because of any biological differences among peoples themselves.”⁷ Despite the apparent natural bounty of the American continent at the time of European contact, the Americas were severely disadvantaged in terms of candidate species for domestication. The Americas had only the llama and alpaca, and lacked horses and cattle until European explorers introduced them. Isolation from Old World diseases, especially diseases associated with domestic animals and plants (such as smallpox, measles, and bubonic plague), combined with the European American capacity for settled agriculture and ranching, spelled the downfall of Indians. Europeans had highly developed forms of political organization and superior military capabilities, as well as writing based on letters and numbers, all set in motion by the crop agriculture and animal domestication that evolved 10,000 years ago in the ancient Near East. The underlying, or ultimate, cause, therefore, of the different levels of development among European and American Indian cultures, according to Diamond, lay in environmental differences that gave rise to European domestication, settled agriculture, and complex sociopolitical organization.

Environmental historians Daniel Flores and Andrew Isenberg offer additional environmental and market-oriented explanations for the decline of the Plains Indians and the buffalo on which they depended. Flores argues that Plains buffalo populations were weakened by climate changes that diminished the grasses on which buffalo fed, by bison diseases such as brucellosis, and by Indian participation in the early hide trade, in which buffalo were killed in order to obtain food, clothing, blankets, gunpowder, pots, pans, and other staples. Flores writes: “a core [bison] population, significantly reduced by competition with horses and by drought [was] quite susceptible to human hunting pressure.”⁸ Fewer buffalo meant fewer resources on which Indians could depend for subsistence. Isenberg states: “[By] embracing the emerging Euroamerican market, the plains nomads bound their fate to the Euroamerican economic and ecological complex. In the nineteenth century, the dynamic grassland environment, commercial exploitation of the bison, and epidemic disease would bring an end to the nomads’ dominance of the western plains.”⁹

Walter Prescott Webb, in The Great Plains (1931), provides a technological explanation for the European impact on Plains Indian cultures and buffalo populations. The Europeans needed “a weapon more rapid than the Indian’s arrows, of longer reach than his spear, and, above all, one adapted to use on horseback.”¹⁰ The Colt six-shooter allowed them to pursue Indians while mounted and to discharge six shots in sequence. The rifle allowed buffalo hunters to kill bison by the hundreds.

Webb discussed the great encounter between two horse cultures—Indians and Europeans—on the Plains. Webb’s assessment was that the Indians were better horsemen than the Europeans. Indians shooting arrows on horseback, or firing spears from beneath a horse’s neck, had an initial advantage over Europeans. Early explorers noted that Indians, who carried a hundred arrows in a quiver case and were able to keep ten arrows in the air at once, were superior to a man with a rifle. The Indian, moreover, was able to drop down along the side of the horse, using the horse’s body for protection. Many Indians preferred bows and arrows, which they could make themselves, thus controlling their own technology, whereas they lacked the ability to manufacture guns or ammunition. Nevertheless, guns began to have an impact on Plains cultures. The eastern Plains Indians acquired rifles from whites, while the southwestern Indians and those living in the mountains lacked them because the Spanish refused to supply ammunition. Differentiation therefore occurred between those tribes who had guns and those who did not. Ultimately, Webb argues, Indians were subdued by introduced technologies, including not only guns but barbed wire, windmills, and railroads, which forever changed the Plains.

Environmental and technological factors were supplemented in the 1860s through 1870s by a U.S. government policy of ridding the Plains of both Indians and buffalo, dealing the coup de grâce to Indian cultures. In 1867, one member of the U.S. Army is said to have given orders to his troops to “kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.”¹¹ In 1875, General Phil Sheridan, the military commander in the Southwest, urged that medals—with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other side—be created for anyone who killed buffalo. He allegedly said, “Let them kill, skin, and sell, until the buffalo is exterminated. It is the only way to bring a lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.”¹² But Flores questions the statement, noting that, in 1879, Sheridan sent a telegram to Washington, D.C. stating, “I consider it important that this wholesale slaughter of the buffalo should be stopped.” Isenberg concurs: “The army was happy to see hide hunters, but they were not commanding them to kill bison.¹³

Nevertheless a massive slaughter of bison by white hunters heralded the demise of the Plains Indian cultures. Buffalo war parties went west by train, shooting buffalo from train windows; throughout the West, people killed buffalo. Records showed 120 buffalo killed in 40 minutes and 2,000 in a month. The average buffalo hunter killed one hundred a day. One hundred thousand buffalo were killed each year, until they were on the verge of extinction, removing the subsistence base from Indian cultures. Buffalo remains were used in the hide and bone trade. In 1876, some 3 to 4 million buffalo killed on the Plains supplied hides and bones for robes and fertilizers. Three thousand hides were loaded onto each boxcar and 350 boxcars went east. In a space of 10 to 15 years, buffalo were removed from the Plains and the remaining Plains tribes relocated to reservations. In conclusion, therefore, a combination of environmental and climatological factors, human and animal diseases, domesticated animals, technologies ranging from six-shooters to railroads, the buffalo trade, and government policies all contributed to the rapid reduction of the Plains Indian tribes by the 1870s.

Environmental historians have disagreed on the extent to which American Indians were ecologists and conservationists both before and after European contact. Some have called them “native conservationists,” the “first ecologists,” and peoples who “lived in harmony with the land,” contrasting them with European colonists who “exploited” the land, “wasted” resources, and degraded the environment. Native Americans—such as Lakota lawyer and author Vine Deloria, Jr., Anishinabe conservationist Winona LaDuke, and O’odham environmentalist Dennis Martinez—have defended the idea that Indians lived in accordance with ecological limits and limited the number of animals they hunted. LaDuke writes, “We have a code of ethics and a way of living on this land which is based on being accountable to [natural] law. That is the understanding of most indigenous peoples.”¹⁴

In assessing whether Indians can be called ecologists or conservationists, in the sense of “showing concern for the environment and acting out of that concern,” anthropologist Shepard Krech III writes:

The relationship of Indians to the land and the ways in which that relationship was altered by European colonization thus remains a topic of discussion and debate.

Several additional case studies would be required for a more comprehensive discussion of Native and European encounters and their ecological effects. These might include: the Eastern woodland horticultural tribes, the salmon-centered potlatch cultures of the Pacific Northwest; Tlingit encounters with Russian seal and otter hunters in the Alaskan Panhandle; Hawaiian Island cultures and the advent of New England whalers; the Seminole Indians of Florida and Spanish explorers; and the Ojibwa of the Upper Midwest. Nevertheless, many of the same environmental and cultural factors and causal connections discussed above would be pertinent. Also important are questions of Indian resilience and adaptation to altered circumstances and transformed environments and the ways in which their own cultural traditions were retained and reinforced.

Indians developed sophisticated cultures in different environments throughout North America, using hunting/gathering/fishing and horticultural techniques by the time of European exploration and settlement. These environments were radically transformed by introduced animals, plants, pathogens, and European peoples who migrated to and altered native cultures and ecosystems. In the Southwest, the Spanish overcame the Pueblo Indians, introducing settled agriculture around the missions and converting Indians to Catholicism. In the Northeast, the French engaged Indian hunters in the fur trade and used the devastation of introduced diseases to challenge their animistic religions and Christianize them. On the Great Plains, where Indians had domesticated feral European horses and used them to hunt buffalo—and where environmental conditions were less favorable to European agricultural methods—climatic changes, technological innovations, and government policies aided Euro-American settlement and hastened Indian decline. Between the mid-sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the North American continent had been changed from a environment inhabited by American Indians engaged in hunting, gathering, fishing, and horticulture to one occupied by vastly reduced numbers of Indians, along with European immigrants and their introduced animals, plants, diseases, and more complex agricultural, social, political, and cultural systems.