Jumping Buffalo: After the Jumps
Updated: February 3, 2026
Spanish horses reached the Plains in the 1600s and spread widely by the 1700s, transforming how many Indigenous nations hunted bison, traded, and traveled. In much of the Plains, large communal buffalo jumps or pishkun declined in favor of horseback hunts, which allowed hunters to follow moving herds across wide areas instead of relying on specific cliff or pound locations and long, fixed hunting camps. Even so, some cliff and pound systems continued to be used alongside mounted hunting in places where terrain and tradition made them effective.
By the early 1800s, bison still numbered in the tens of millions, and newcomers to the region quickly depended on them. Members of the the Lewis and Clark Expedition described seeing immense herds and relied heavily on bison meat as they traveled through what is now Montana and the northern Plains in 1805-1806. In the following decades, fur traders, soldiers, settlers, and market hunters joined Indigenous communities in hunting bison for meat, robes, and hides, but the scale and purpose of Euro-American commercial hunting rapidly accelerated the kill. Tanning remained a skilled Indigenous craft for generations, yet technological advances in European and American tanneries during the mid?1800s turned bison hides into an industrial commodity, used for heavy leather such as belts for factory machinery and military equipment. As firms began ordering hides by the thousands, hide prices and rail access encouraged large hunting parties to target entire herds, marking the beginning of the most intense slaughter.
Recent historical and economic research confirms that in just a few peak years during the 1870s, millions of bison were killed for hides, meat, and bones, often with carcasses left to rot once the hides and tongues were taken. Contemporary reports and shipping records suggest that between roughly 1871 and 1875, at least several million bison were killed in the southern Plains alone to ship over a million and a half hides eastward, with some estimates placing the total number killed across the 19th century in the tens of millions. Bison have relatively poor eyesight but a strong sense of smell; massed herds and the thunder of guns from a distance often meant animals did not immediately recognize danger, allowing hunters to shoot many animals before the rest scattered. By the 1880s, observers like naturalist William Hornaday estimated that only a few hundred truly wild bison remained in the United States, with about two dozen animals in Yellowstone and the rest in scattered small groups. Although some members of Congress and conservationists called for federal protection in the 1870s, effective nationwide protection came slowly, and it was early 20th-century conservation laws and park protections that finally stabilized numbers.
Modern scholarship paints Walking Coyote and other Indigenous and settler conservationists as crucial but not solitary figures in saving the species. Accounts from the 1870s describe Samuel Walking Coyote, a Pend d'Oreille man, caring for several orphaned bison calves in what is now northern Montana and moving them west of the Continental Divide, helping to establish the Pablo-Allard herd on the Flathead Reservation. That privately owned yet free-ranging herd became one of the main sources of animals later sent to Canada and to U.S. parks, including a group of bison shipped from the Pablo-Allard herd to Yellowstone National Park in the early 1900s to bolster its tiny remnant population. At the same time, other small herds were maintained by ranchers and conservation-minded individuals in Texas and elsewhere, so today's bison descend from several different 19th'century refuge herds rather than from a single line of fewer than one hundred calves, though the genetic bottleneck was still severe.
In 1908 the federal government created the National Bison Range in western Montana as part of a broader early conservation effort to protect and breed bison using animals from the Pablo-Allard and other herds. For more than a century it was managed by the U.S. government; in 2020, Congress restored the Bison Range to federal trust ownership for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, whose ancestors had helped build up the herd in the first place. Yellowstone's bison, which once dwindled to only a few dozen animals, have since been supplemented by bison from Montana and Texas and protected under park management, and recent genetic research shows they now function as a single, interbreeding wild population that typically ranges from about 3,500 to 6,000 animals. Beyond Yellowstone, conservation herds on tribal lands, national wildlife refuges, state parks, and private ranches have brought the total North American bison population (most in managed or commercial herds) to several hundred thousand animals. In 2016 the bison was named the national mammal of the United States, and today the species is often cited as a powerful case study showing that, even after near-extinction caused by colonial expansion and industrial markets, determined collaborative conservation?especially when it centers Indigenous leadership?can help restore both an animal and part of a damaged grassland ecosystem.
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Updated: February 3, 2026