https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butcher's_Crossing
(Off-topic, but Williams is best known for Stoner, a truly beautiful work that you should read immediately if you haven’t already.)
Regarding bison, it's likely that the final blow was not from overhunting, but from habitat encroachment that constrained their migratory patterns. This in turn started an epidemic of tick-borne disease, that resulted in a total collapse of their population within just 2 years (1881-1883).
There's a really nice overview article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019005281...
Good fiction asks its audience to accept things that don't require special knowledge. Bad (historical) fiction presents false things in such a way that the audience accepts them without realizing that is is part of the fictional narrative, because they lack the specialized knowledge to understand when artistic liberties have been taken.
Since the audience is already in a state of suspended disbelief, they aren't prepared to be skeptical of what is presented as real but is not.
I have a similar quibble with American Gods. Several times I've seen people parrot ideas from the story that sounded like one of many historical facts but were actually very wrong, such as the background of Easter.
Edit: I may have been overly harsh with the use of the word "Bad". They're good stories in their own rights, but this particular bone has been stuck in my craw for a long time.
The situation with bison in the US was deeply unnatural when you think about it. Bison are large herbivores, that can reproduce fairly quickly, and that don't have any consistent predators.
Nothing in the US can hunt them successfully and consistently. A wolf pack can take down a grown bison, but it's risky for them, and the wolf population was nowhere large enough to control the bison population numbers. Cougars and coyotes can prey on calves, but not on healthy grown bison.
Just guessing, but I would think there would have been a lot of cougars eating a lot of calves. That would also have some restraining impact on the population.
Only if you include Native Americans in the "natural" forces. They were responsible for the disappearance of the local megafauna.
> At the very least food availability would have limited their numbers in some way.
Or maybe periodic population collapses due to disease.
> It isn't dissimilar to the situation with bears.
Grizzly bears have one of the slowest reproduction rates, though. They simply won't have cubs if there isn't enough food. In Africa, it's a similar story with elephants, nothing can hunt them consistently, but they reproduce so slowly that they can't really overpopulate the area.
For Plains indigenous people, the buffalo were a massive part of their culture, spirituality and history. Hundreds of generations had lived alongside the buffalo herds and become a part of their life cycle. Their hunts, while truly massive, participated in the life cycle and ensured stable herds.
When european settlers came, they had absolutely no understanding of that life cycle so their hunts were in opposition. Then as they started importing european land ownership and putting up fences, the ecosystem collapsed. They hadn’t followed the herds for generations so really didn’t know how much land a herd actually needed to sustain itself.
It was really the wrong hunting even more so than over hunting. Early communities had names like “Pile of Bones” that were indicative of the scale of earlier hunts.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cc/Bison_sk...
The article suggests that the extermination of the bison went hand in hand with the destruction of aboriginal societies. The nomadic bison were also problematic for expansion, affecting both agriculture and the railway. This was not a case of, "oh, there's money to be made off of their hides. Whoops! Where did all of the bison go."
The reason why so many people take a stance against certain types of development goes well beyond unintentional consequences. It is because many of those consequences were intended to serve a particular agenda.
This actually was exactly the case. The bison population collapsed within just _two_ years (1881-1883). In 1883 hunters were waiting for the bison that never came.
As for railroads, the first trans-continental railroad was finished in 1869, and smaller railroads existed before that.
Here's a nice overview article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019005281...
There’s no delicate way to put it: exterminating buffalo was the safest, most cost-effective way to mitigate the American Indian threat against westward expansion. Since American Indian tribes weren’t agriculturally equipped to sustain themselves, especially through winters, reduction of buffalo along the overland expansion routes practically guaranteed the reduction of attacks against settlers and railroad workers.
Hiring people to shoot buffalo was orders of magnitude easier and cheaper (and safer) than hiring and maintaining an army to fight Indians.
Plus a Buffalo heards natural response to threat is either to run, or form a tight circle (you could say _that_ adaptation never counted on the invention of gunpowder).
All that is to say, extinction of the buffalo was not the consequence of insatiable bloodlust for killing animals, as much as it was an objective in order to achieve unencumbered expansion and sustain the economic machine that was fueling it.
Easy. Why would you settle there when a much better Eastern coast is available? The US non-Native population in 1800 was less than 6 million.
For comparison, the UK was 10 million according to the 1801 census.