Sixty million bison fell to five hundred forty-one
American bison once ruled a grassland belt across North America. By eighteen eighty-nine commercial slaughter and cattle disease had cut tens of millions to five hundred forty-one animals. Ranchers and tribes rebuilt stocks; today hundreds of thousands live mostly in commercial herds, while about fifteen thousand still roam freer ranges.
Bison bison shares the genus only with European bison. Plains bison are smaller with rounded humps; wood bison are larger with square humps. Late-eighteenth-century estimates put roughly sixty million on the continent before the nineteenth-century collapse, a campaign that also targeted Indigenous food systems of the Great Plains. The species is now the national mammal of the United States. English speakers have used buffalo since Champlain's seventeen-century buffles, while bison entered in the sixteen nineties from Latin via French.
Asian bison appear in the Early Pleistocene about two point six million years ago; North American arrivals from Siberian steppe bison date roughly one hundred ninety-five thousand to one hundred thirty-five thousand years ago via Beringia. Wild bulls of plains bison have tipped the scales at one thousand two hundred seventy kilograms, with estimates to one thousand four hundred. Head-rump lengths reach about three point five metres in big males. Winter coats are long and dark; summer coats lighten.
After the bottleneck, ranchers crossed some survivors with cattle, complicating genetics. Two thousand ten estimates ran four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand animals, with about twenty thousand five hundred in sixty-two conservation herds and the rest across roughly six thousand four hundred commercial herds. The Nature Conservancy has restored herds to more than a dozen preserves, including an Indiana site in twenty sixteen. In twenty fourteen U.S. Tribes and Canadian First Nations signed a restoration treaty—the first between those nations in about one hundred fifty years. Recovery is real; wildness remains scarce.
Source: American bison
