Throughout the 1800's the North American Bison were hunted to such an extreme that their numbers declined from tens of millions to under less than one thousand. I know the Bison were essential to the survival of the Indians indigenous to the prairie, but what historical events and political situations stood behind the Americans' hunting the animal?
Additionally, what part did disease play into this near-extinction?
The Bison played a very important part in the American Indian's lifestyle, as you are of course well aware. They used every part of the bison. What is often glossed over is that the testicles were dried out, and crushed up into a fine powder which could be smoked or ingested, and was used to give medicine men a trance and cause prophetic visions of the future.^1
It was a well kept secret in the years before the Civil War, and only a few white men who had lived closely with the native population were even aware, and even fewer had even tried the powder, known as "pratum" But after the Civil War, returning veterans suffered from what we now would label as PTSD^2, and medicine at that time, not to mention mental health facilities, simply couldn't handle the influx. We aren't sure who (Although some point to a trapper/veteran named Arnie Hofmann^3), but by 1867, pratum was fully accepted by the medical establishment as the best way to treat the PTSD. Administered in careful doses, it almost totally alleviated the symptoms that the vets were experiencing, and they were able to lead productive lives. But as with any pharmaceutical, abuse happened, and the secondary market for pratum, or "oysters" as it jokingly came to be called, was huge. As it wasn't illegal, soon every corner drugstore was selling it, and no one could keep the shelves stocked.
Demand kept growing and growing, and of course, hunters out west did their best to keep up. Massive bison hunts were organized, where they would be slaughtered by the thousand. Young boys - mostly eldest sons of young, now war widowed mothers who couldn't care for their family - were recruited to follow the hunting party and deball the bison^4. The rest of the corpse was left to rot, as the testicles were worth far more than the rest combined. The craze for pratum really knew no bounds, and soon, the bison had been hunted to near extinction. In 1897, the US government had no choice but to declare the drug illegal except for medical purposes^5, but the damage was far to gone to correct by that point, and the cost of pratum made its use as a medical treatment impractical. Quite fortunately though, Bayer had brought heroin to market two years prior -mainly to compete with pratum - and this was implemented as an acceptable alternative for PTSD treatment.
This wasn't much consolation to the bison though, as it took nearly a century for their number to recover.
^1 Prophets and Pratum: American Indians Vision Seekers, Vol. 2 (1800-1860), C.R. Alder Wright 1963
^2 Mentally Seceded: The Mental Health Crisis of the Post-Civil War, Robert Simpson Sherman, Jr., The American Journal of Civil War Medicine, November 1988
^3 A History of Drug Use in America, by Imenz Hoden, 2003
^4 Memoirs of an Oyster Farmer, by J.S. Mosby, 1893
^5 It remains on the books, one of the earliest drug bans in America. 93 U.S. Code ยง 3720 (a)(7)
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