Starvation as Strategy: The Buffalo Slaughter Campaign

 

In the decades following the Trail of Tears, the United States government refined its tactics. No longer content with just removing Indigenous populations from their land, the strategy shifted: destroy their means of survival.

This was not an accident of expansion or a byproduct of industrialization. The mass extermination of the buffalo was a calculated act of war—an ecological genocide engineered to starve, weaken, and force submission from the Plains tribes.

I. Numbers Don’t Lie—But They Do Terrify

Before white settlement swept westward, an estimated 30 to 60 million bison roamed the Great Plains.
By the mid-1880s, fewer than 1,000 remained.

This was not due to overhunting alone. It was a coordinated effort backed by federal policy, military strategy, and capitalist greed:

  • Railroad companies hired hunters to clear herds obstructing track routes

  • The U.S. Army distributed free ammunition to buffalo hunters

  • Skins were harvested for profit; carcasses left to rot

It was a scorched-earth campaign, done without fire.

II. Military Intent, Market Cover

General Philip Sheridan, a key figure in the Indian Wars, understood the implications of buffalo extermination:

"Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated... the plains can be covered with cattle and occupied by the white man."

Privately encouraged, publicly denied—this was a joint venture between state and settler to ensure that Indigenous resistance would be logistically impossible.

Without the buffalo:

  • No food

  • No clothing

  • No tools

  • No shelter

This wasn’t just cultural devastation. It was a deliberate siege.

III. Echoes of the Trail of Tears—This Time With Bones

Where the Trail of Tears used forced marches and legal pretense, the buffalo campaign used economic cover and plausible deniability.

The effect was the same:

  • Massive displacement

  • Starvation

  • Cultural erasure

But this time, the crime was against both people and environment.
The buffalo weren’t collateral. They were the target.

IV. A Template for Environmental Warfare

The U.S. government’s use of ecological destruction as a population control strategy would not end here:

  • Later, it would show up in resource denial to reservation communities

  • Then, in water policy in the Southwest

  • Today, in pipeline development that poisons water and desecrates land

Buffalo extermination was a warning shot in a longer campaign to weaponize nature itself against those who depend on it.

V. Mass Death by Quiet Hands

Most Americans don’t know this story. Or if they do, it’s painted as a tragic, Wild West inevitability.

But the truth is simpler and darker:

They killed the buffalo to kill the people.

The herds didn’t vanish. They were erased—with intention, with method, and with malice.

This wasn’t progress. It was policy.
This wasn’t unfortunate. It was planned.
This wasn’t history. It’s precedent.

The bones still bleach in the sun. But the logic that piled them there? It’s still active—in budgets, in pipelines, in policy.

And if we don’t name it now, they’ll keep finding new herds to erase.

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