Book Review

Whether one looks at a mid-nineteenth-century John Mix Stanley painting or a ledger book drawing by the Cheyenne artist Howling Wolf, it is clear that one of the most intimate human relationships with the American bison involved blood, horses, and death. Though often viewed as timeless or "classic" images of the Great Plains, those images stand in marked contrast to earlier and later depictions of the American bison. The 1816 state seal of Indiana, for instance, depicts a dramatic if nonviolent encounter that requires separation: a fleeing bison leaps westward as a woodsman clears a farm in the background. A century later the bison struck a very different pose when representing governmental authority, in isolated profile on the National Park Service insignia. Of course, the transformation from agrarian obstacle to protected icon resulted from a period of rapid destruction that reduced the bison population from an estimated 30 million to less than 1,000. As Andrew C. Isenberg demonstrates in his book The Destruction of the Bison, the near extinction of the bison was not a social or environmental aberration that somehow developed and then corrected itself over the course of the nineteenth century. Instead, the displacement, killing, and preservation of the bison were all part of the same "historical process—the interaction of economy, culture, and ecology—that produced them."

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