Why Is the Bison America’s National Mammal?

The American bison (Bison bison) is far more than a conservation success story. For Native nations of the Great Plains, the buffalo is a relative, a spiritual equal, and the foundation of the oldest sustained economy in North American history. When Congress named the bison the national mammal of the United States in 2016, it formally recognized a relationship that predates the United States by millennia — and that survived one of the largest slaughters of wildlife in modern history. This is the history of that bond, told through archaeology, ceremony, and tribal memory.

Origins: A Ten-Thousand-Year Relationship on the Great Plains

When the first Paleoindian hunters encountered bison between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, the Great Plains were populated by a menagerie of megafauna — native horses and camels, American mastodons, giant armadillos, saber-toothed cats, and dire wolves. Bison, which today weigh as much as 1,000 pounds and stand up to 6 feet at the shoulder, were then roughly one-third larger. Around 11,000 to 10,000 years ago, dozens of megafaunal species vanished in the Pleistocene extinction, triggered by rapid climate change combined with overhunting by ancient humans. Bison survived, in a smaller form, and with grazing competition removed they expanded dramatically across the grasslands.

Environmental historian Dan Flores calls this an “unprecedented ecological emergence”: bison supplanted earlier grazers and converted the Great Plains into what he describes as a gigantic bison belt. Wildlife historians once claimed as many as 100 million bison roamed the plains; Flores, basing his figure on the biological carrying capacity of the land, places the more accurate estimate at 20 million to 30 million.

Kinship, Ceremony, and Spiritual Equality

The ancestors of modern Native Americans depended on the bison hunt for food and clothing, but their relationship with the animal went well beyond subsistence. Many nations revered the bison as one of the first creatures created, possessing spiritual power equal to or greater than that of humans. Over millennia, Plains peoples developed elaborate ceremonies, rituals, and dances to renew “kinship pacts” with the bison that bound the fates of animal and human together.

Flores points to the spring and summer ceremonies of the Mandan — today part of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation — as a clear example: participants dressed in bison robes and horns, performing dances that affirmed humans and bison are the same people, and that humans are not superior to them. That framing of reciprocal obligation, rather than domination, is central to understanding Indigenous stewardship of the plains.

Communal Hunts and the Great Plains Kill Sites

Before horses and rifles, the bison hunt was a communal undertaking. Bison can run as fast as 35 mph and weigh as much as a small car, so ancient North Americans developed disciplined strategies to harvest them safely and in numbers — an early tradition of sustainable use of natural resources by Native peoples. At the Olsen-Chubbuck site in eastern Colorado, Paleoindians drove about 190 bison into a narrow arroyo — a steep-sided dry riverbed — with no means of escape. At Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in Alberta, Canada, evidence shows hundreds of bison could be taken in a single day by stampeding them over steep cliffs.

Horses, the Little Ice Age, and the Classic Buffalo Chase

Horses disappeared from North America roughly 11,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinction, but were reintroduced by Spanish colonists in the 16th century. Once Plains nations began riding domesticated horses, the hunt was fundamentally transformed. Historian Geoff Cunfer notes that compared with hunting on foot, the horseback chase was safer, faster, more efficient, and far more deadly for bison herds; ancient communal drives gradually gave way to mounted assaults. This shift reshaped tribal economies, warfare, and status systems across the plains, a transformation explored further in this account of the historical impact of horses on Plains Indian culture.

By chance, the adoption of the horse overlapped with the Little Ice Age, roughly 1500 to 1850, when cooler, wetter weather produced bumper crops of grass year after year. That supported bison numbers at the upper end of 30 million — enough that herds spilled out of the Great Plains into regions such as Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida. Competition for the best hunting grounds, in turn, fueled the rise of Plains “warrior societies” in which bravery and battlefield skill became supremely important.

The Collapse: Commerce, Not Conspiracy

The Little Ice Age began waning in the 1830s, bringing hotter, drier conditions just as hundreds of thousands of horses competed with bison for grazing land. Worse, white settlers crossing the plains shot bison indiscriminately, and the oxen pulling their wagons carried Old World bovine diseases such as anthrax and bovine tuberculosis into wild herds. Flores describes the result as a “perfect storm” that began drawing bison numbers down from the 1830s onward.

After the Civil War, railroads pushed to frontier outposts in Montana, Colorado, and New Mexico, where the last large wild herds persisted. Colonel Richard Dodge, walking the Santa Fe Trail in 1871, wrote that “the whole country appeared one mass of buffalo.” To commercial hunters, that abundance was a gold mine — and the most valuable part was not the meat but the hide, shipped east and converted into tough industrial leather used for wagon and stagecoach suspensions and factory belting. From 1871 to 1883, white hunters worked in coordinated teams of sharpshooters and skinners, turning the plains into what Flores calls an “open-air industrial slaughterhouse” — the largest destruction of animal life in modern history. The devastation compounded the pressures that also produced movements of spiritual resistance such as the Ghost Dance movement.

When the National Museum in Washington, D.C., sent an expedition to Montana in 1886, its members determined that no more than 30 bison remained in the state and only 1,073 survived across all of North America. A persistent myth holds that the U.S. Army conspired with hunters to eradicate the bison and force Native peoples onto reservations. Flores traced that claim to a hunter named John Cook, who deflected criticism of the slaughter by blaming a secret government plot. It was not true. What actually destroyed the buffalo, Flores argues, was a global capitalist market that saw the animals purely as profit.

From 1,073 Animals to a National Mammal

The federal government did not order the eradication — but it did nothing to stop it. The rescue came from a grassroots effort. Beginning in the 1880s, ranchers such as Charles Goodnight in Texas and Frederick Dupree in Montana captured wild calves and raised protected herds; some of those founding animals are ancestors of the roughly 50,000 wild bison alive today on federal and tribal lands. In the 1890s, anthropologist and journalist George Bird Grinnell used the magazine Forest & Stream to expose poaching of Yellowstone’s last wild herd, winning the support of Theodore Roosevelt, who lobbied Congress for steep fines and jail time — the first animal protection law in the United States.

In 2016, President Barack Obama signed legislation designating the bison the U.S. national mammal, distinguishing it from the bald eagle, the national bird, which first appeared on the national seal in 1782. The eagle’s own recovery came through the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Flores sees the bison’s new status as a platform: an “avatar species” whose near-extinction can speak for passenger pigeons, great auks, and Carolina parakeets — creatures lost or nearly lost.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• Deep time: The human–bison relationship in North America spans more than 10,000 years, making the bison hunt the oldest sustained economy on the continent.
• Kinship, not consumption: Ceremonies among nations such as the Mandan framed bison as relatives and spiritual equals, creating reciprocal obligations rather than extraction.
• Technology reshaped tradition: The reintroduced horse and the Little Ice Age together created the classic mounted buffalo chase between roughly 1500 and 1850.
• Cause of collapse: Market capitalism and the industrial hide trade — not a secret government plot — drove bison from tens of millions to barely more than 1,000 by the late 1880s.
• Preservation as continuity: Tribal herds and Indigenous cooperation remain central to bison restoration, with the national mammal designation of 2016 honoring that legacy.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Bison and Native American History

How many bison once roamed North America?

Older estimates of 100 million are now considered inflated. Dan Flores places the historical peak at 20 to 30 million, a figure based on the land’s biological carrying capacity. Numbers fluctuated with climate: dry periods supported roughly 20 million, while the cooler, wetter Little Ice Age pushed herds toward 30 million.

Did the U.S. government deliberately exterminate the bison?

No. The conspiracy claim originated with bison hunter John Cook, who used it to deflect blame for the slaughter. In reality, the primary driver was a commercial hide market that turned bison leather into industrial belting and wagon gear, while the federal government simply failed to intervene.

What was Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump?

A communal hunting site in Alberta, Canada, where Plains peoples stampeded bison over steep cliffs, sometimes harvesting hundreds in a single day. It is preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and remains one of the clearest archaeological records of pre-horse communal hunting.

Who manages the remaining wild bison today?

Roughly 50,000 wild bison live on federal and tribal lands. Tribal governments play a leading role through buffalo restoration programs, returning bison to reservations where they serve as food, cultural touchstones, and symbols of sovereignty. Yellowstone National Park protects one of the last continuously wild herds.

Cultural Legacy and Modern Preservation

The bison’s story is not a closed chapter. Native nations continue to rebuild herds on their own terms, treating restoration as an act of cultural revitalization as much as wildlife management. That continuity — kinship renewed across generations — is precisely what the 2016 designation acknowledged. The national mammal is not simply an American icon; it is a living testament to Indigenous knowledge that sustained the plains for ten millennia and that still shapes how the land is cared for today.