I've always felt that the lack of a "beast of burden" was a major reason pre-Columbian people did not advance.
Is there any sign that attempts were made to domesticate bison? It seems like someone would have had the idea to capture, raise, and breed calves.
There were pre-Columbian societies with beasts of burden- namely dogs in North America and llamas/alpacas in parts of South America.
However, referring to bison specifically, it's probably just because it wasn't worth it. For one, it's folly to compare the fact that we domesticated cows to that of bison. Indeed, cows have been domesticated multiple times over the millennia by many different cultures, but there isn't a single instance of large scale domesticated bison in the record. This may be due to a combination of danger and temperament: bison are larger, more aggressive, and more powerful than bovines. Thus, maintaining any sort of domestic herd is a more difficult task. Domesticating them was likely more trouble than simply hunting them. Basically, there was no meaningful pressure to go through all the trouble of doing so. They were plentiful, easy to track, these civilizations had figured out how to hunt them effectively, and provided a ton of resources, both meat and otherwise, just by hunting them. Invention is the child of necessity, and it wasn't necessary.
I've always felt that the lack of a "beast of burden" was a major reason pre-Columbian people did not advance.
Just an FYI, historians tend to avoid talking about history in terms of 'advancement' and 'barbarism', because it implies that human development is a continuum between 'hunter-gatherer' and 'urban European', which isn't really accurate. The idea that one culture is superior or more advanced than another can often lead people down very dark roads; history is full of examples of 'more advanced' cultures picking on 'less advanced' ones. Or perhaps the 'winners' get to decide what is advanced and what is not?
It's also not true to say that Native Americans did not advance; the story of Native American culture is not a story of millennia of stasis. The Commanche, for example, reacted adroitly to the introduction of the horse to the Americas, practically re-jigging their entire culture and way of war to revolve around it.
Hi, always more room for discussion on this one (although it might be worth x-posting to /r/AskScience or perhaps a sub specializing in animal husbandry?), but fyi you can get started on a few earlier posts