June 9, 2025 • 37 mins
Most commonly when folks hear the word “bison” they think of the American West. It is rarely, if ever, recognized that there was once a population of bison in the East. In this episode of Understand The Wild we will take a deep dive into the history of bison East of the Mississippi River. We will learn about them as species, we will gain an understanding of their deep impacts on the country’s landscape, and ultimately, we will find out what led to their demise.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. Today, I want
to talk to you about one of the most iconic
species in all of North America, bison or buffalo. But
we're going to explore their history in a place that
(00:24):
is often forgotten, the Eastern United States. It's mid April
and the sound that you're hearing is me and my
friend Jeremy French from the Southeastern Graslands Institute, hiking down
a hill towards a large flowing creek. It's slightly overcast,
(00:46):
but besides that, it's a beautiful spring day and the
vegetation that we're walking through is showing it. Wildflowers starting
to bloom, trees along the creek beginning to leaf out.
We even heard two turkeys gobble on our journey down here.
As we make it down close enough to hear the
fast flowing water of the creek that will eventually dump
into the Red River, we see what we came for. Man,
(01:09):
what a cool place.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
It's cut through. Yeah, that's your bison trail.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Really, that's entirely open, not because anybody maintains it, not
because anybody's doing anything, but because it's a bison trail. Now,
as we get further down, you'll see where it gets
war in.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Now. I know what you may be thinking, bison trail. Okay,
he's in Yellowstone, he's in one of the Dakotas, or
he's out west somewhere. And to that, I say, not
so fast, because I'm in North Tennessee and now I'm
standing in a historic bison trail that has been here
for a long long time.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Told you you're gonna see anythink that someone busting a
bulldozer through it?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, so just straight up bison.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Trail, straight up bison trail.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
So how do they know? Like, how how did somebody
determine that this was a bison trail?
Speaker 3 (02:05):
So if we were looking at this one hundred years ago, right,
it would look different than it does today because we've
had more time of rain and less time of bison
a landscape. It looks more eroded and washed out. But
back in the day, these shoulders here would have been
much higher and more prominent. And then they mapped them all,
you know, they mapped all the bison trails of like
(02:27):
the Cumberland settlements, gotcha. And you know, just by the
surviving of those documents we haven't understanding. But also if
we looked with like lighter and stuff, we'd be able
to see much more like subtle topographal changes that we're
not seeing now because of our naked eye.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But this no equipment, you nothing.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
It almost looks like a boat ramp. And when the
water is shallower, so use the water's pretty high right now.
You can see these rocks that are just just submerge
where the bison would have walked across.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
And then feorded the river.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
But they picked this spot in the river for you know,
you've got food resources on both sides. They get funneled
in by this giant cliff. You know, they've got nowhere
else to go. They're probably going north or south, you know,
between Nashville and the giant big barns. And they used
it enough that we can see it on light aar
(03:19):
we can see it as we're standing here today.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
And then also it's in those historical Cumberland settlement books
and you can just see like the gentle slope, but
this would have been much more prominent, you know, probably
like your typical four feet knee deep. The challenging thing
is we're in a time of soil aggregation and soil degradation,
so as the water comes, it's pulling dirt off, it's
(03:43):
redepositing dirt elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
But no one put this here.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
That is crazy.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
Man.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
As I stand here, my feet physically placed in the
middle of this bison trail, I can't help but get
the feeling that I'm standing somewhere ancient. The fact that
a group of animals that were around hundreds of years
ago left such an impact that a trail of theirs
can still be picked up on the bare ground today
is nothing short of wild to me, and in some
(04:14):
ways that sentiment alone is a perfect illustration of what
I'm after in the first place. American buffalo unarguably one
of the most iconic wildlife species in our country's history,
and while so much is known about them, I feel
like there's still much unknown, especially when you hone in
on the topic of bison in the East these days.
(04:35):
If you bring up buffalo in most settings, people automatically
think of the Western United States, which is not inaccurate,
but it doesn't tell the whole story. Bison were here,
right where I'm standing, in Tennessee and all throughout the
eastern region, and I think they left a bigger impact
than most of us are even aware of. And that's
(04:56):
what I'm here to learn about. We'll return to the
Flowing Creek and buy trail later, but for now, I
really want to dig into the topic of bison in
the Eastern United States, where all they were, what type
of impacts they made on the landscape and early settlers,
why we lost them, and what the future of bison
in the East is, if there even is one. To
(05:18):
help us get to the bottom of this, I track
down two sure enough subject experts. The first is Jeremy French,
who y'all have already met down along the Creek. Jeremy
is the director of ecological Restoration and Stewardship for the
Southeastern Grasslands Institute. He's also a botanist and has spent
ample time studying bison and their effects on the landscape.
(05:40):
The second is Chris Widge. Chris is a distinguished paleontologist, ecologist,
and archaeologist known for his extensive research on bison. To
start us off, I want to ask Chris what the
actual historic range of bison is.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
That's a fun question, and then the follow up of
what's the range based on the fossils themselves.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
But to start with the historical.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Range, you know, we've got bison everywhere from northern Florida
to you know, eastern Washington and Oregon, northern California, so
east west they're continental scale, their continental range. Some of
the earliest settlers, our earliest Euro Americans that were getting
into Virginia, they noted these forest cattle. So you know,
(06:28):
we don't know that their bison. We can't say that
they were They weren't cattle, but there weren't a lot
of cattle around at that.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Time, and there's very few other things that they could be.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
And so we've got you know, pretty good historic ranges
east to west, coast to coast, and then from north
to south, probably talking northern Mexico to Alaska and and
and those places. So you know, we're North America writ large.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
There's some kind of ecological barriers when you get.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Into the northeast and into eastern Canada, but they're everywhere.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Almost Okay, So we now know that the American bison
covered virtually the entire continent. But now I want to
kick it back to Jeremy to focus in on the
eastern United States. When you think about bison, I don't
think people think about New York. I don't think people
think about the Carolinas. I don't think people think about Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida,
(07:25):
and not just those specific states. But I want to
learn about those bison, what those populations were like, where
they were, what they lived on, how they traveled, how
we lost them. I know I'm covering a lot there.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, So we've got records or evidence of bison spanning
anywhere from New York through the Carolinas to the Panhandle
of Florida, Georgia westward essentially, and then we have evidence
of a lot deeper history or longer term histories, and
not just bison, but multiple species and long time of
(07:57):
bison operating throughout the East.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Now that we know we have multiple records and evidence
of bison in the East, I want to dig into
that further. What exactly is this evidence that we have
and what do we know about timelines?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Understanding that the timeline and some of the evidence for
this is complex, right in that we can look at
cultural history or we can look at you know, true
scientific fact that we have like something to touch, right,
and if we go by like something to touch, it
would be about a thousand years ago at the mouth
of what is Dunbar Cave within Clarksville, Tennessee. Somehow bison
(08:36):
bones got deposited there, and then we were able to
discover those bison bones and then date back to roughly
when that would have been. So those bison bones dated
back a thousand years that would have been still our
modern bison.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
There's tons of evidence.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
In Tennessee and what we've called like the Upper mid
South for long kind of habitation of bison. We've got
extensive networks of historic bison trails that were mapped as
pioneers came west. There's plenty of evidence of Spanish and
French market hunters slaughtering bison in the Nashville Basin where
they discovered these essentially these licks or what they would
(09:13):
refer to as stamps, and they even talk about, you know,
there being so many bison in some of these, like
one refers to like Bletso or Manskerts lick, that they
would shoot these bison and they couldn't get off their
horse because they were so packed in shoulders shoulder, and
if they got off their horse, it would have gotten trampled.
So they have to like spend hours figuring out how
they're gonna get this bison that they shot without getting
(09:35):
off their horse or even like this is one of
my favorite factoids. What is now present day Nashville. Nashville
is a relatively new name for it. What it was
called was French's Lick and it was you know, discovered
by the French guy named Demambrian, and it was a
giant stamp what they called Bison Lick where these bison
and elk and deer would come to get minerals. Yeah,
(09:57):
they saw tons of bison there, they saw evidence of bison,
this animals. And then from that site they had this
spoken wheel kind of structure to the trails where out
from Nashville you have all these bison trails, and those
bison trails would have gone north to Clarksville where we're
sitting today, they would have gone south, they would have
gone to Manskers Lick and these these different areas with
(10:19):
grazing opportunities, and those exact trails became you know, wagon
trails and then eventually became.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Roads Yep, you heard that one correctly. Some of the
bison trails coming out of the Nashville Basin eventually became roads,
roads that are still in use today. How crazy is that,
particularly roads that became part of the Natchez trace. But
there's others And here's another twist. This isn't an isolated incident.
(10:45):
There's other states in the East with roads that can
be traced back to bison trails as well. I want
to kick it back to Jeremy to hear more about
bison evidence and timelines.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Many people hypothesize the idea that bison were only here
for a short period of time. And if we focus
south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi,
we have these gaps in data. We've got what we
had from Dunbar Cave from roughly a thousand years ago.
If we go further back for the east, about seven
thousand years ago, we have documentation essentially from a dig
(11:22):
site in South Carolina where they unearthed spear points and
they use this technique called crossover immuno electrophoresis, which can
identify essentially proteins, and then you can use those proteins
to identify what family they came from, and the family
that came from these proteins and spear points from seven
thousand years ago were bovid. The only native covid we
(11:43):
have to North America that would have been here seven
thousand years ago is our friend bison, wes and bison
or the buffalo. So there's a lot of hypothsis on
the fluctuation of bisons, right. But if we start looking
at other evidence or other information or what kind of
interests me the most. When early settlers settled the Nashville Basin, right,
(12:06):
there were many records of this plant species called running
buffalo clover or Trifolium stolenifrum.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
This clover that called the tile white clover was both
present in French's Lick and other licks in the area,
and this area would be named clover bottoms. Right, So
literal place names being named after this plant species. If
you understand the life cycle of this plant species, they're
very short, they require grazing lawns, they require really unique
habitats within grasslands that the bison were created. As we
(12:38):
pushed bison out of the Nashville Basin, poof that species
pretty much blinks out right gone. There's a few small
population of different trifoliums, but not where we're talking about
all over the place, right, and it was very common.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
And this is a clover, yeah, this is a clover species.
And there's multiple clover species that the.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Similar things happen to, so like Trifolium calcaragum, Trifolium kentuckyensis,
and some of these clever species are extinct in the wild, right,
So we had a bunch of them when we had
the bison here. The bison leave, boom, they're gone. There's
even more evidence and interest in the long term kind
of habitation of bison in the east, especially within the
(13:21):
Nashville basin. In this other group of plants called Paysonias
or bladder pods. So these blatder pods again very short,
short species. They need very short grasslands. The seeds of
many of these require that over winter the seed is
getting sunlight, so they need soil disturbance, and they need
to be right on top of the soil, and they
(13:42):
need grazing lawns. If they don't get those things, they
won't even germinate. If you drive up and down the
Nashville Pikes or the traces from Nashville to other places.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
The places that we can still see these species exist are.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Generally in mode roadsides well years ago, no one was
out there on their John Deere, right.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
How can you be sure?
Speaker 3 (14:07):
So you start questioning, like, okay, how did this plant
species that evolved and takes a long time for a
plant species to evolve, evolved to occupy this niche here
east of the Mississippi Nashville basin. And you start, you know,
kind of plugging things together, connecting things together, and you say, well,
(14:27):
we must have large grazers. What large grazers did we
have in North America? It's pretty much bison. Right after
the Plyceis scene, It's pretty much bison.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah, And that.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Then creates this the deeper understanding of the ecology of
not only systems within Nashville, but systems in the east
that would have been grazing had grazing and browsing interactions.
And we think about early pioneer accounts, right. And one
of the issues here is that there's like a timeline
(14:58):
mismatchup the Spanish. I'm into Florida about the fifteen hundreds,
and that's when DeSoto takes this whole trip through Florida,
Georgia in too, you know, Alabamasippi, and then eventually dies.
The De Soto expedition never sees a live bison, But
they're in Georgia and they're in the Panhandle, and they're
in these different parts interacting with tribes, and the tribes
(15:19):
are feeding them what they refer to as the beef
or lebouf, which is, you know, the beef or they
often refer to as the beef, and they're seeing, you know,
like DeSoto rights that in Georgia, in one of the communities,
these tribal communities, he sees basically a European amount of
a bison school, you know, this this white bison within
(15:40):
in these areas where they talk about sitting on bison
robes when they're.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Meeting with chiefs.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
But as these these kind of explorers and these pioneers
are pushing westward, there's a lot of interlaying interactions in
history which makes some.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Of these things challenging.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Keeps me open to this idea that that absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we don't
have a bone that's dated three thousand years ago, it
doesn't mean they weren't there.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That's an
interesting line of thinking Jeremy. Jeremy is using a combination
of bison bone records, historical records, and response from native
plant communities to hypothesize a timeline of bison on the
Eastern landscape. But I want to be sure to give
the paleontologists a chance to weigh in on this subject
(16:36):
as well, because, to my surprise, Jeremy's and Chris's views
on this did not exactly line up.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
I mean, the fact that we had bison around when
some of the first European explorers were moving out and
writing down notes that really tie into that bison record,
and I think it gives the impression that they are
well understood. However, that comes with the caveat that that
is the last two hundred.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
Two hundred and fifty years, three hundred years, last few centuries.
As we go.
Speaker 4 (17:07):
Further back in time, you get some really interesting patterns
in the bison record when you start zooming out to
kind of the thousand year time scale or the ten
thousand year timescale. That's where I've been very interested in bison,
and one of the things I found really early on
I mean, this was back when I was in graduate school.
I was approaching the archaeological record of bison in archaeological sites.
(17:30):
And I was approaching it because we had these very
good historic records, and I was thinking, I kind of
know how bison behave and that sort of thing. But
then we started getting into some methods and starting to
getting you know, whether it's ancient DNA. We're looking at
the chemistry of their bones and teeth as kind of
proxies for behavior, and all of a sudden, bison were
(17:50):
mysterious again because they were doing things that you just
didn't expect them to do based on that historic record,
and they were in places that you didn't expect to
see them. If I have a bison bone in a site,
I know there was a bison there. There's some other
angles that we're starting to get into, whether it's you know,
DNA in sediments or proteins in blood residue on.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Stone tools or something like that. There's some other angles
that you.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
Can get and one one of the really interesting things
that will pan out in the next couple of years
is that they don't all tell us the same thing, and.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
That that we see that we see this.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Kind of situation in science, not just with bison, we
see it. That's also one of the things that's going
on with like the end of the place to scene extinctions.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
You know, if you.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Look at data at one scale or in one place,
it tells you something completely different than in someplace else.
And the fun part the challenge is to figure out
how to make all of those stories right because they are,
you know, and that, you know, helps us limit the
number of possibilities a little bit too. So, you know,
a historic expansion of bison into the eastern US might
(18:59):
have just been flash in the pan. You know, they
might have just gotten out to Virginia and South Carolina
and in North Carolina just in time to kind of
get pushed back, to get hunted back. You know, we
might just be talking about a decade or two, really flashy.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, my mind goes to and I don't know if
this is even an answerable question. I keep going back
to that bison trail in Clarksville, Like how long and
how many bison have to go through that trail for
it to be for it to remain that long?
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Is there anything very many?
Speaker 4 (19:29):
To be honest, Yeah, I mean those they're such disruptive
animals and they're hurting animals, and it may not have
even been like a big herd. That's one of the
other kind of things about the Eastern bison that we
see is they don't seem to be present in the
giant herds that you see out west. It might be
(19:50):
a dozen, it might be two dozen, even in the
historic records. That's the general tendency is to kind of
have a smaller herd, but it wouldn't take them too long,
especially if they're hanging out in a more constrained area too.
So you know, they're going up and down between the
river and the upland the river and the upland they're
a grazing animal and herbivore that kind of moves where
(20:12):
it makes sense to move. So if there's a swale
or a less deep you know, entry in and out
of a valley or something like that, they're going to
prefer that. There's some landscape learning, you know that goes on,
and a bison heard too, so you know that, you know,
the older females are going to do what they learned,
(20:33):
a younger calves are going to learn it through the years,
and so there's some of those things going on to
the trail that you saw probably is just a few
hundred years old, but it's one of those things that
you know, if it's abandoned for very long, it goes
back to grass pretty quickly, at least on a palenthological timescale.
(20:54):
But Western Tennessee is also really interesting because we get
a fair amount of bison out there in the fossil record.
You know, it's not unusual to see them in the
in the creeks, in the streams and that sort of thing,
and we don't have a good handle on, you know,
the timeline of them, so we haven't done a lot
of radiocarbon dating on those bones, and to be honest,
(21:15):
not very many of them make it into museums. This
would be a call for more people to donate material
to museums because that's really, you know, the record, that's
the record that those of us that are thinking about
these things, we go to a museum. Otherwise we have
to go to like one hundred different people, and you know,
ninety of them are dead, you know. So the only
(21:37):
reason that we can begin to answer some of these
questions at the scale that we can is because we're
going into museum collections and dealing with basically one hundred
or two hundred years of people donating things for the
public good. So it's been really exciting to me as
an archaeologist and palaetologists to kind of chase down what
those differences are. You know, how are they different from
(21:58):
that iconic bulk at the top of the hill that's
that you know, watching the sun going down? And in
some places they are very different, and the Eastern US
is one of them.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
So we have two proposed ideas here. Number one, bison
were only in the Eastern US for a short time,
a flash in the pan, if you will, maybe a
decade or two I did. Number two, bison were in
the eastern United States for thousands of years longer than that.
Which one is correct. I'll leave that up for you
to decide. What both Jeremy and Chris did align on
(22:30):
is that bison were one hundred percent present in the
eastern United States, and I'm interested in learning what kind
of effects they had.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
One of my favorite things that is often talked about
by early settlers and pioneers coming you know, through the
Cumberland Gap and further east. They talked about these impenetrable
cane brakes, just like so bad that they'd have to,
you know, have their horse and wagon in the middle
of the creek to get through them.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Well, if you think about.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
The ecology of these breaks, there's some interesting early observation
from like Bloodsoe's Lick where they come and they have
bison there and it's this lush meadow, and then they
pretty much shoot the bison out very quickly, and then
after they shoot the bison up, it explodes into this
impenetrallable cambridge. So there's evidence of that throughout the South.
(23:19):
And I'm not here saying that like there are no
cane breaks throughout the South, but bison would have been
a maintaining factor to those cane breaks and making them
manageable and have interplay with beavers and meadows in those
wet kind of Ryperian habitats that as soon as we
remove them they blew up. We see similar things with
(23:40):
you know, we talked about savannah restoration or grassland restoration,
where a lot of our eastern systems would have had
some level of grazing browsing interactions that when we remove
those bison from those system and we take the disturbance
of wallowing or hoof marks or these other interactions. It
changes the system. So the evidence on the landscape is
(24:04):
kind of all around us at times.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
If you were to draw the east, how much of
the landscape today would even be inhabitable by bison.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Habitable by bison somewhere between fifty percent, you know, and
habitable is a debatable turn. You know, you can see
bison in forest at settings at times, but like the
true grazing lands that would have been utilized by bison,
somewhere between thirty and fifty percent in the east would
(24:34):
have been some type of open grassy ecosystem.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So like I often.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Hear, you know, bison experts talk about bison in the
east and they say, like, well, why would they be here.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
They're not going to be grazing in the forest.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
And they're coming at the bison in the east from
a bison standpoint. I come at bison in the east
from a different standpoint. I come from it from like
a botanical standpoint. I know, you know those systems and
my team knows those systems, and you say, okay, well
here here where they are, and it's like, well, that's
not a forested system. That would have been open woodland
(25:11):
or savannah that would have had elements McGregor eye and
all these grasses and the understory, and it would have
been great habitat for bison essentially, or these giant prairies
in the South. So a lot of the South could have,
you know, absolutely had enough you know, grass and open
grassy systems to support bison.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, and it's again, it's the story I feel like
to do the story of bison here in the East. Justice.
It's pertinent that you understand how different the landscape looked.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Oh, absolutely, yeah, And I think it's it's interesting because myself,
as you know, grassland colleges, I come from it from
looking at those grassland interactions and historic habitat, historic ecosystems
of the East. And one thing is very evident to me.
We had millions of acres of prairies, just prairies in
the East. We had millions of acres of savannahs and woodlands.
(26:04):
We have multiple, multiple different types of grasslands. Beyond that,
to like grassland balls which would have been maintained open
by plecesne megafauna. Surely those balls also at some point
were graced by bison. And these are on the top
of the mountains in Appalachia, We've got you know, glades
and barrens and fens, and we have this huge, you
(26:26):
know grouping of open grassy ecosystems, including meadows that surely
would have had bison over time at different rates and periods.
And understanding that animal populations, especially bison, they tend to
ebb and flow right. They pulse like a heart, so
they would have expanded and contracted and expanded and contracted.
But when you look at the evolution of the plant
(26:49):
species here, it kind of lends to this idea that
I would encourage the listeners to really examine for themselves
and really think about that. Plant species don't evolve overnight
to occupy niches. And when we removed bison very quickly
from the east, we saw many plant species just disappear.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
One thing that quickly became evident to me while speaking
to both Jeremy and Chris is that bison both have
tangible and obvious effects on a landscape. I heard bison
referred to as disruptive and ecological engineers, and that became
more and more obvious listening to Jeremy described the landscape
change when bison were no longer present. In fact, his
(27:31):
exact words were removed bison very quickly. And that's what
I want to learn about next. We know they were here,
we know they were impactful both historically and ecologically. So
how did we go about losing them? How did we
have an animal that was so impactful, that was in abundance,
How did we manage to pretty much push it all
(27:54):
the way out and forget about it?
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, so I would you know, I would say that
bison are functionally extinct the East. That's something that you know,
I hope SGI can somewhat remediate someday, and we've got
some exciting projects around that.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
But we think.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
About the the early you know, explorers to this region.
This is many many times before statehood for a lot
of areas, or so if we talk about Georgia, you know,
really early on in their statehood, they enacted a law
and it might have actually been shortly before their statehood.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
That killing bison became illegal.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
The reason I bring that up is because these early
like market for hunters, essentially market hunters came through and
they just slaughter. I mean, it's similar to the story
we see in the West where they were just killed
by the hundreds and thousand. They were very quickly killed
wherever they were in the east, so much so that
(28:54):
we often talk about like Daniel Boone referencing bison in
different places and his you know, travels. By the time
Daniel Boone got there, the French and the Spanish and
these other you know, English and had killed vast majority
of the bison, and like we're talking about, we're killing thousands,
you know, left and right, so that to see one
(29:16):
by that point became really rare. And as we kind
of came across the Cumelin Gap, I think as early
as seventeen fifty in Roanoke, Virginia modern day Renoke, Virginia,
this area is called Big Lick a seventeen fifty, we'd
killed all the bison out of there. Then we kept pushing, killing,
kept pushing killing, And I don't don't try and paint
(29:36):
the wrong picture, right because like this was was the wilderness.
But we absolutely killed out and pushed the bison further
further west and further west, and further west and further west.
Mostly before you know, a lot of these places fully
got settled out, you know, so people are coming and
there's kind of multiple lines of evidence for like president Bison,
(29:59):
President President.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
On the landscape.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
So we've got maps, right, That's kind of a common
thing where the French, you know, explorers and trappers would
map map areas and they'd be call like western Kentucky,
they called like the place where the tribes go to
hunt the beef, essentially referring to bison. So that's really common.
But the most common evidence that we have a bison
(30:22):
in the east of the most common like historical documentation
with people killing them, right, And like I was rereading
Ted Blues book recently, just like super excited to talk
about bison again, and part of the in there they
have like a record from the Spanish whereas like we
killed six bison today and the next day we killed two,
(30:42):
and the next day we killed five, and the next
day we killed six, and they're going through and they're
killing these animals. It doesn't take long if you're killing
that many a day to really negatively impact a population,
and eventually, you know what becomes like the maps and
then becomes killing them references. We start seeing more references
(31:06):
of dead bison or bison boned, or more references talking
about their trails and stuff like that, because we've already
extirpaid advice and from the east by you know, the
mid eighteen hundreds, early eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Most of the time, like if you if you're having
a species of animal that's having a rough time today, right,
like like a population of an animal, game animal, whatever is,
it's under some sort of dress. It's normally tied to
some habitat degradation, habitat loss. Sometimes you'll have like a
(31:41):
I don't know, like in white tails, you'll have like
a EHD outbreak or something. For a localized population. Uh,
you don't hear a lot anymore for it to be like, well,
why do we lose them? Well, we kill them.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
What's always interesting to me is that, like if you
ask me the poster child for us killing species out
the majority of the public or the inspiracial public, they're
instantly to think about the passenger o pinsion. But bison
aer right there, like we really there is some like
habitat changes that would have happened with with settlers, you know,
changing areas. But really the big thing is we just
(32:13):
killed them, and we killed them in the east sometimes
you know, for food and for fur, and then when
we push them further west, we kind of just killed
them to kill them at times, and you know, there
was always kind of this idea that like bison or
migratory and the lack of understanding of the ecology at
that time. You can't really fault people, but they thought
(32:36):
like the next herd would come come down from you know,
the north or something like that.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Even in the east.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
So there was like a fundamental misunderstanding the ecology advising
that they were thought to be migratory.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
And they're not there.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
They are roamers, right, So they may have a home
range of fifty miles or sixty miles, and they might
roam from grassland and grassland, but they're not truly migratory.
Like let's say a duck like a mallard that may
my migrate from Texas to Alaska, Canada. So you see
these fundamental misunderstandings of their ecology which may be contribute
(33:09):
to them thinking like, oh, we can just kill everything
that's here because the next migration is gonna come.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
We're gonna be good.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, it'll be fine. How many issues in wildlife or
habitat or any of that stuff comes from a lack
of understanding something all of it. How many wildlife conflicts
or issues with habitat loss can you think of that
can be simplified down to just a lack of understanding,
My guess would be quite a few. But I have
(33:36):
zero intentions of ending this episode on such a sad note.
If you called it earlier, Jeremy mentioned some exciting projects
around someday remediating the loss of bison in the East.
I want to hear Chris Whitgas thoughts on modern bison conservation.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
I remember when I turned in my dissertation.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
The first draft of my dissertation was all about bison
in Minnesota, in Iowa and South Dakota.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
This was two thousand.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
And six, and the first draft, you know, your professors
basically mark it up and write it up and everything.
Speaker 5 (34:12):
And I had a conclusion chapter and I had another.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
Chapter, and it was basically, you know, taking what we
know about, you know, some of these new ideas that
we're playing with, that we're exploring with bison in deep time,
What does that mean for modern bison conservation? What does
that mean for modern advice and management? I had an
entire chapter. I thought hard about this, and I had
(34:35):
a whole chapter on it, and my professor's basically exited
out and they said, don't get into this.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Don't don't get into modern conservation.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Go there. And the nice thing is, now we are
going there.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
You know, it's it's been ten, fifteen, twenty years, and
so now I'm getting people coming up to me or
emailing me and saying, you know, we're starting a bison
herd this place.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
Do you know what's going on with bison here historically
or prehistorically? You know, are we talking about big herds
that are one hundred animals.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Are we talking about small cowcafe herds or something like that.
Speaker 5 (35:13):
What are they eating?
Speaker 4 (35:15):
You know, do we need to think about, you know,
receding a prairie in certain species.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
Do we need to worry about lots of woody growth?
Speaker 1 (35:24):
You know?
Speaker 4 (35:24):
So some of these really kind of on the ground
landscape level questions. You know, we we can kind of
at least add have some suggestions and say this is
at least at the centennial to millennial scale, the scale
of hundreds to thousands of years. You know, this is
kind of the story that you have in your backyard.
And so if somebody wanted to, you know, talk about Florida.
(35:48):
You know, reintroduce bisonto a natural setting in Florida. You know,
we we probably have some data that we can throw
at that they are very adaptable animals and they're very happy.
Speaker 5 (35:58):
Doing things what they do. They just want to do
what they do wherever they are, and so I.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Think that that's kind of the next place is to
kind of bring it all together.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah. See, that's where you're talking about bringing those two
worlds together. That's where my head's at. As a hunting
and conservation community. We've taken several species that were on
the brink of being wiped out and managed to bring
them back. I don't know how alone or a minority
I am in this, but I'm like just saying, bison, Yeah,
they're gone. Like, I'm not good with stopping right there.
(36:31):
If there's a way to restore some of that, like
I'm in. So, is there a future for bison in
the Eastern United States? I would say it's possible. It's
definitely not a closed door. I want to thank all
of you for listening to Backwoods University, and I want
to give a big shout out to Onyx Hunt for
making this podcast possible. If you enjoyed this episode, be
(36:54):
sure to come back for the next one, coming out
on June twenty third, because, believe me, we're just getting started.
But for now, let's close this episode out as promised
by going back to the bison trail down by the creek.
I'm just trying to picture in my head. Man. That's cool.
I feel like I'm standing somewhere ancient. I wish I
(37:16):
could have seen it.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Me too, me too.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Maybe you will one day.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Huh, that's right.
Welcome to Backwoods University, a place where we focus on wildlife,
wild places and the people who dedicate their lives to
conserving both. I'm your host, Lake Pickle. Today, I want
to talk to you about one of the most iconic
species in all of North America, bison or buffalo. But
we're going to explore their history in a place that
(00:24):
is often forgotten, the Eastern United States. It's mid April
and the sound that you're hearing is me and my
friend Jeremy French from the Southeastern Graslands Institute, hiking down
a hill towards a large flowing creek. It's slightly overcast,
(00:46):
but besides that, it's a beautiful spring day and the
vegetation that we're walking through is showing it. Wildflowers starting
to bloom, trees along the creek beginning to leaf out.
We even heard two turkeys gobble on our journey down here.
As we make it down close enough to hear the
fast flowing water of the creek that will eventually dump
into the Red River, we see what we came for. Man,
(01:09):
what a cool place.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
It's cut through. Yeah, that's your bison trail.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Really, that's entirely open, not because anybody maintains it, not
because anybody's doing anything, but because it's a bison trail. Now,
as we get further down, you'll see where it gets
war in.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Now. I know what you may be thinking, bison trail. Okay,
he's in Yellowstone, he's in one of the Dakotas, or
he's out west somewhere. And to that, I say, not
so fast, because I'm in North Tennessee and now I'm
standing in a historic bison trail that has been here
for a long long time.
Speaker 3 (01:50):
Told you you're gonna see anythink that someone busting a
bulldozer through it?
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Yeah, so just straight up bison.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Trail, straight up bison trail.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
So how do they know? Like, how how did somebody
determine that this was a bison trail?
Speaker 3 (02:05):
So if we were looking at this one hundred years ago, right,
it would look different than it does today because we've
had more time of rain and less time of bison
a landscape. It looks more eroded and washed out. But
back in the day, these shoulders here would have been
much higher and more prominent. And then they mapped them all,
you know, they mapped all the bison trails of like
(02:27):
the Cumberland settlements, gotcha. And you know, just by the
surviving of those documents we haven't understanding. But also if
we looked with like lighter and stuff, we'd be able
to see much more like subtle topographal changes that we're
not seeing now because of our naked eye.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
But this no equipment, you nothing.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
It almost looks like a boat ramp. And when the
water is shallower, so use the water's pretty high right now.
You can see these rocks that are just just submerge
where the bison would have walked across.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
And then feorded the river.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
But they picked this spot in the river for you know,
you've got food resources on both sides. They get funneled
in by this giant cliff. You know, they've got nowhere
else to go. They're probably going north or south, you know,
between Nashville and the giant big barns. And they used
it enough that we can see it on light aar
(03:19):
we can see it as we're standing here today.
Speaker 1 (03:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
And then also it's in those historical Cumberland settlement books
and you can just see like the gentle slope, but
this would have been much more prominent, you know, probably
like your typical four feet knee deep. The challenging thing
is we're in a time of soil aggregation and soil degradation,
so as the water comes, it's pulling dirt off, it's
(03:43):
redepositing dirt elsewhere.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
But no one put this here.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
That is crazy.
Speaker 4 (03:50):
Man.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
As I stand here, my feet physically placed in the
middle of this bison trail, I can't help but get
the feeling that I'm standing somewhere ancient. The fact that
a group of animals that were around hundreds of years
ago left such an impact that a trail of theirs
can still be picked up on the bare ground today
is nothing short of wild to me, and in some
(04:14):
ways that sentiment alone is a perfect illustration of what
I'm after in the first place. American buffalo unarguably one
of the most iconic wildlife species in our country's history,
and while so much is known about them, I feel
like there's still much unknown, especially when you hone in
on the topic of bison in the East these days.
(04:35):
If you bring up buffalo in most settings, people automatically
think of the Western United States, which is not inaccurate,
but it doesn't tell the whole story. Bison were here,
right where I'm standing, in Tennessee and all throughout the
eastern region, and I think they left a bigger impact
than most of us are even aware of. And that's
(04:56):
what I'm here to learn about. We'll return to the
Flowing Creek and buy trail later, but for now, I
really want to dig into the topic of bison in
the Eastern United States, where all they were, what type
of impacts they made on the landscape and early settlers,
why we lost them, and what the future of bison
in the East is, if there even is one. To
(05:18):
help us get to the bottom of this, I track
down two sure enough subject experts. The first is Jeremy French,
who y'all have already met down along the Creek. Jeremy
is the director of ecological Restoration and Stewardship for the
Southeastern Grasslands Institute. He's also a botanist and has spent
ample time studying bison and their effects on the landscape.
(05:40):
The second is Chris Widge. Chris is a distinguished paleontologist, ecologist,
and archaeologist known for his extensive research on bison. To
start us off, I want to ask Chris what the
actual historic range of bison is.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
That's a fun question, and then the follow up of
what's the range based on the fossils themselves.
Speaker 5 (06:02):
But to start with the historical.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Range, you know, we've got bison everywhere from northern Florida
to you know, eastern Washington and Oregon, northern California, so
east west they're continental scale, their continental range. Some of
the earliest settlers, our earliest Euro Americans that were getting
into Virginia, they noted these forest cattle. So you know,
(06:28):
we don't know that their bison. We can't say that
they were They weren't cattle, but there weren't a lot
of cattle around at that.
Speaker 5 (06:34):
Time, and there's very few other things that they could be.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
And so we've got you know, pretty good historic ranges
east to west, coast to coast, and then from north
to south, probably talking northern Mexico to Alaska and and
and those places. So you know, we're North America writ large.
Speaker 5 (06:54):
There's some kind of ecological barriers when you get.
Speaker 4 (06:57):
Into the northeast and into eastern Canada, but they're everywhere.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Almost Okay, So we now know that the American bison
covered virtually the entire continent. But now I want to
kick it back to Jeremy to focus in on the
eastern United States. When you think about bison, I don't
think people think about New York. I don't think people
think about the Carolinas. I don't think people think about Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida,
(07:25):
and not just those specific states. But I want to
learn about those bison, what those populations were like, where
they were, what they lived on, how they traveled, how
we lost them. I know I'm covering a lot there.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Yeah, So we've got records or evidence of bison spanning
anywhere from New York through the Carolinas to the Panhandle
of Florida, Georgia westward essentially, and then we have evidence
of a lot deeper history or longer term histories, and
not just bison, but multiple species and long time of
(07:57):
bison operating throughout the East.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Now that we know we have multiple records and evidence
of bison in the East, I want to dig into
that further. What exactly is this evidence that we have
and what do we know about timelines?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
Understanding that the timeline and some of the evidence for
this is complex, right in that we can look at
cultural history or we can look at you know, true
scientific fact that we have like something to touch, right,
and if we go by like something to touch, it
would be about a thousand years ago at the mouth
of what is Dunbar Cave within Clarksville, Tennessee. Somehow bison
(08:36):
bones got deposited there, and then we were able to
discover those bison bones and then date back to roughly
when that would have been. So those bison bones dated
back a thousand years that would have been still our
modern bison.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
There's tons of evidence.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
In Tennessee and what we've called like the Upper mid
South for long kind of habitation of bison. We've got
extensive networks of historic bison trails that were mapped as
pioneers came west. There's plenty of evidence of Spanish and
French market hunters slaughtering bison in the Nashville Basin where
they discovered these essentially these licks or what they would
(09:13):
refer to as stamps, and they even talk about, you know,
there being so many bison in some of these, like
one refers to like Bletso or Manskerts lick, that they
would shoot these bison and they couldn't get off their
horse because they were so packed in shoulders shoulder, and
if they got off their horse, it would have gotten trampled.
So they have to like spend hours figuring out how
they're gonna get this bison that they shot without getting
(09:35):
off their horse or even like this is one of
my favorite factoids. What is now present day Nashville. Nashville
is a relatively new name for it. What it was
called was French's Lick and it was you know, discovered
by the French guy named Demambrian, and it was a
giant stamp what they called Bison Lick where these bison
and elk and deer would come to get minerals. Yeah,
(09:57):
they saw tons of bison there, they saw evidence of bison,
this animals. And then from that site they had this
spoken wheel kind of structure to the trails where out
from Nashville you have all these bison trails, and those
bison trails would have gone north to Clarksville where we're
sitting today, they would have gone south, they would have
gone to Manskers Lick and these these different areas with
(10:19):
grazing opportunities, and those exact trails became you know, wagon
trails and then eventually became.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Roads Yep, you heard that one correctly. Some of the
bison trails coming out of the Nashville Basin eventually became roads,
roads that are still in use today. How crazy is that,
particularly roads that became part of the Natchez trace. But
there's others And here's another twist. This isn't an isolated incident.
(10:45):
There's other states in the East with roads that can
be traced back to bison trails as well. I want
to kick it back to Jeremy to hear more about
bison evidence and timelines.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Many people hypothesize the idea that bison were only here
for a short period of time. And if we focus
south of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi,
we have these gaps in data. We've got what we
had from Dunbar Cave from roughly a thousand years ago.
If we go further back for the east, about seven
thousand years ago, we have documentation essentially from a dig
(11:22):
site in South Carolina where they unearthed spear points and
they use this technique called crossover immuno electrophoresis, which can
identify essentially proteins, and then you can use those proteins
to identify what family they came from, and the family
that came from these proteins and spear points from seven
thousand years ago were bovid. The only native covid we
(11:43):
have to North America that would have been here seven
thousand years ago is our friend bison, wes and bison
or the buffalo. So there's a lot of hypothsis on
the fluctuation of bisons, right. But if we start looking
at other evidence or other information or what kind of
interests me the most. When early settlers settled the Nashville Basin, right,
(12:06):
there were many records of this plant species called running
buffalo clover or Trifolium stolenifrum.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (12:15):
This clover that called the tile white clover was both
present in French's Lick and other licks in the area,
and this area would be named clover bottoms. Right, So
literal place names being named after this plant species. If
you understand the life cycle of this plant species, they're
very short, they require grazing lawns, they require really unique
habitats within grasslands that the bison were created. As we
(12:38):
pushed bison out of the Nashville Basin, poof that species
pretty much blinks out right gone. There's a few small
population of different trifoliums, but not where we're talking about
all over the place, right, and it was very common.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
And this is a clover, yeah, this is a clover species.
And there's multiple clover species that the.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Similar things happen to, so like Trifolium calcaragum, Trifolium kentuckyensis,
and some of these clever species are extinct in the wild, right,
So we had a bunch of them when we had
the bison here. The bison leave, boom, they're gone. There's
even more evidence and interest in the long term kind
of habitation of bison in the east, especially within the
(13:21):
Nashville basin. In this other group of plants called Paysonias
or bladder pods. So these blatder pods again very short,
short species. They need very short grasslands. The seeds of
many of these require that over winter the seed is
getting sunlight, so they need soil disturbance, and they need
to be right on top of the soil, and they
(13:42):
need grazing lawns. If they don't get those things, they
won't even germinate. If you drive up and down the
Nashville Pikes or the traces from Nashville to other places.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
The places that we can still see these species exist are.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Generally in mode roadsides well years ago, no one was
out there on their John Deere, right.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
How can you be sure?
Speaker 3 (14:07):
So you start questioning, like, okay, how did this plant
species that evolved and takes a long time for a
plant species to evolve, evolved to occupy this niche here
east of the Mississippi Nashville basin. And you start, you know,
kind of plugging things together, connecting things together, and you say, well,
(14:27):
we must have large grazers. What large grazers did we
have in North America? It's pretty much bison. Right after
the Plyceis scene, It's pretty much bison.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
Yeah, And that.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
Then creates this the deeper understanding of the ecology of
not only systems within Nashville, but systems in the east
that would have been grazing had grazing and browsing interactions.
And we think about early pioneer accounts, right. And one
of the issues here is that there's like a timeline
(14:58):
mismatchup the Spanish. I'm into Florida about the fifteen hundreds,
and that's when DeSoto takes this whole trip through Florida,
Georgia in too, you know, Alabamasippi, and then eventually dies.
The De Soto expedition never sees a live bison, But
they're in Georgia and they're in the Panhandle, and they're
in these different parts interacting with tribes, and the tribes
(15:19):
are feeding them what they refer to as the beef
or lebouf, which is, you know, the beef or they
often refer to as the beef, and they're seeing, you know,
like DeSoto rights that in Georgia, in one of the communities,
these tribal communities, he sees basically a European amount of
a bison school, you know, this this white bison within
(15:40):
in these areas where they talk about sitting on bison
robes when they're.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Meeting with chiefs.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
But as these these kind of explorers and these pioneers
are pushing westward, there's a lot of interlaying interactions in
history which makes some.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Of these things challenging.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
Keeps me open to this idea that that absence of
evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because we don't
have a bone that's dated three thousand years ago, it
doesn't mean they weren't there.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That's an
interesting line of thinking Jeremy. Jeremy is using a combination
of bison bone records, historical records, and response from native
plant communities to hypothesize a timeline of bison on the
Eastern landscape. But I want to be sure to give
the paleontologists a chance to weigh in on this subject
(16:36):
as well, because, to my surprise, Jeremy's and Chris's views
on this did not exactly line up.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
I mean, the fact that we had bison around when
some of the first European explorers were moving out and
writing down notes that really tie into that bison record,
and I think it gives the impression that they are
well understood. However, that comes with the caveat that that
is the last two hundred.
Speaker 5 (17:03):
Two hundred and fifty years, three hundred years, last few centuries.
As we go.
Speaker 4 (17:07):
Further back in time, you get some really interesting patterns
in the bison record when you start zooming out to
kind of the thousand year time scale or the ten
thousand year timescale. That's where I've been very interested in bison,
and one of the things I found really early on
I mean, this was back when I was in graduate school.
I was approaching the archaeological record of bison in archaeological sites.
(17:30):
And I was approaching it because we had these very
good historic records, and I was thinking, I kind of
know how bison behave and that sort of thing. But
then we started getting into some methods and starting to
getting you know, whether it's ancient DNA. We're looking at
the chemistry of their bones and teeth as kind of
proxies for behavior, and all of a sudden, bison were
(17:50):
mysterious again because they were doing things that you just
didn't expect them to do based on that historic record,
and they were in places that you didn't expect to
see them. If I have a bison bone in a site,
I know there was a bison there. There's some other
angles that we're starting to get into, whether it's you know,
DNA in sediments or proteins in blood residue on.
Speaker 5 (18:13):
Stone tools or something like that. There's some other angles
that you.
Speaker 4 (18:16):
Can get and one one of the really interesting things
that will pan out in the next couple of years
is that they don't all tell us the same thing, and.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
That that we see that we see this.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Kind of situation in science, not just with bison, we
see it. That's also one of the things that's going
on with like the end of the place to scene extinctions.
Speaker 5 (18:35):
You know, if you.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Look at data at one scale or in one place,
it tells you something completely different than in someplace else.
And the fun part the challenge is to figure out
how to make all of those stories right because they are,
you know, and that, you know, helps us limit the
number of possibilities a little bit too. So, you know,
a historic expansion of bison into the eastern US might
(18:59):
have just been flash in the pan. You know, they
might have just gotten out to Virginia and South Carolina
and in North Carolina just in time to kind of
get pushed back, to get hunted back. You know, we
might just be talking about a decade or two, really flashy.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Well, my mind goes to and I don't know if
this is even an answerable question. I keep going back
to that bison trail in Clarksville, Like how long and
how many bison have to go through that trail for
it to be for it to remain that long?
Speaker 5 (19:28):
Is there anything very many?
Speaker 4 (19:29):
To be honest, Yeah, I mean those they're such disruptive
animals and they're hurting animals, and it may not have
even been like a big herd. That's one of the
other kind of things about the Eastern bison that we
see is they don't seem to be present in the
giant herds that you see out west. It might be
(19:50):
a dozen, it might be two dozen, even in the
historic records. That's the general tendency is to kind of
have a smaller herd, but it wouldn't take them too long,
especially if they're hanging out in a more constrained area too.
So you know, they're going up and down between the
river and the upland the river and the upland they're
a grazing animal and herbivore that kind of moves where
(20:12):
it makes sense to move. So if there's a swale
or a less deep you know, entry in and out
of a valley or something like that, they're going to
prefer that. There's some landscape learning, you know that goes on,
and a bison heard too, so you know that, you know,
the older females are going to do what they learned,
(20:33):
a younger calves are going to learn it through the years,
and so there's some of those things going on to
the trail that you saw probably is just a few
hundred years old, but it's one of those things that
you know, if it's abandoned for very long, it goes
back to grass pretty quickly, at least on a palenthological timescale.
(20:54):
But Western Tennessee is also really interesting because we get
a fair amount of bison out there in the fossil record.
You know, it's not unusual to see them in the
in the creeks, in the streams and that sort of thing,
and we don't have a good handle on, you know,
the timeline of them, so we haven't done a lot
of radiocarbon dating on those bones, and to be honest,
(21:15):
not very many of them make it into museums. This
would be a call for more people to donate material
to museums because that's really, you know, the record, that's
the record that those of us that are thinking about
these things, we go to a museum. Otherwise we have
to go to like one hundred different people, and you know,
ninety of them are dead, you know. So the only
(21:37):
reason that we can begin to answer some of these
questions at the scale that we can is because we're
going into museum collections and dealing with basically one hundred
or two hundred years of people donating things for the
public good. So it's been really exciting to me as
an archaeologist and palaetologists to kind of chase down what
those differences are. You know, how are they different from
(21:58):
that iconic bulk at the top of the hill that's
that you know, watching the sun going down? And in
some places they are very different, and the Eastern US
is one of them.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
So we have two proposed ideas here. Number one, bison
were only in the Eastern US for a short time,
a flash in the pan, if you will, maybe a
decade or two I did. Number two, bison were in
the eastern United States for thousands of years longer than that.
Which one is correct. I'll leave that up for you
to decide. What both Jeremy and Chris did align on
(22:30):
is that bison were one hundred percent present in the
eastern United States, and I'm interested in learning what kind
of effects they had.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
One of my favorite things that is often talked about
by early settlers and pioneers coming you know, through the
Cumberland Gap and further east. They talked about these impenetrable
cane brakes, just like so bad that they'd have to,
you know, have their horse and wagon in the middle
of the creek to get through them.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
Well, if you think about.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
The ecology of these breaks, there's some interesting early observation
from like Bloodsoe's Lick where they come and they have
bison there and it's this lush meadow, and then they
pretty much shoot the bison out very quickly, and then
after they shoot the bison up, it explodes into this
impenetrallable cambridge. So there's evidence of that throughout the South.
(23:19):
And I'm not here saying that like there are no
cane breaks throughout the South, but bison would have been
a maintaining factor to those cane breaks and making them
manageable and have interplay with beavers and meadows in those
wet kind of Ryperian habitats that as soon as we
remove them they blew up. We see similar things with
(23:40):
you know, we talked about savannah restoration or grassland restoration,
where a lot of our eastern systems would have had
some level of grazing browsing interactions that when we remove
those bison from those system and we take the disturbance
of wallowing or hoof marks or these other interactions. It
changes the system. So the evidence on the landscape is
(24:04):
kind of all around us at times.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
If you were to draw the east, how much of
the landscape today would even be inhabitable by bison.
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Habitable by bison somewhere between fifty percent, you know, and
habitable is a debatable turn. You know, you can see
bison in forest at settings at times, but like the
true grazing lands that would have been utilized by bison,
somewhere between thirty and fifty percent in the east would
(24:34):
have been some type of open grassy ecosystem.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
So like I often.
Speaker 3 (24:38):
Hear, you know, bison experts talk about bison in the
east and they say, like, well, why would they be here.
Speaker 2 (24:43):
They're not going to be grazing in the forest.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
And they're coming at the bison in the east from
a bison standpoint. I come at bison in the east
from a different standpoint. I come from it from like
a botanical standpoint. I know, you know those systems and
my team knows those systems, and you say, okay, well
here here where they are, and it's like, well, that's
not a forested system. That would have been open woodland
(25:11):
or savannah that would have had elements McGregor eye and
all these grasses and the understory, and it would have
been great habitat for bison essentially, or these giant prairies
in the South. So a lot of the South could have,
you know, absolutely had enough you know, grass and open
grassy systems to support bison.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah, and it's again, it's the story I feel like
to do the story of bison here in the East. Justice.
It's pertinent that you understand how different the landscape looked.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
Oh, absolutely, yeah, And I think it's it's interesting because myself,
as you know, grassland colleges, I come from it from
looking at those grassland interactions and historic habitat, historic ecosystems
of the East. And one thing is very evident to me.
We had millions of acres of prairies, just prairies in
the East. We had millions of acres of savannahs and woodlands.
(26:04):
We have multiple, multiple different types of grasslands. Beyond that,
to like grassland balls which would have been maintained open
by plecesne megafauna. Surely those balls also at some point
were graced by bison. And these are on the top
of the mountains in Appalachia, We've got you know, glades
and barrens and fens, and we have this huge, you
(26:26):
know grouping of open grassy ecosystems, including meadows that surely
would have had bison over time at different rates and periods.
And understanding that animal populations, especially bison, they tend to
ebb and flow right. They pulse like a heart, so
they would have expanded and contracted and expanded and contracted.
But when you look at the evolution of the plant
(26:49):
species here, it kind of lends to this idea that
I would encourage the listeners to really examine for themselves
and really think about that. Plant species don't evolve overnight
to occupy niches. And when we removed bison very quickly
from the east, we saw many plant species just disappear.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
One thing that quickly became evident to me while speaking
to both Jeremy and Chris is that bison both have
tangible and obvious effects on a landscape. I heard bison
referred to as disruptive and ecological engineers, and that became
more and more obvious listening to Jeremy described the landscape
change when bison were no longer present. In fact, his
(27:31):
exact words were removed bison very quickly. And that's what
I want to learn about next. We know they were here,
we know they were impactful both historically and ecologically. So
how did we go about losing them? How did we
have an animal that was so impactful, that was in abundance,
How did we manage to pretty much push it all
(27:54):
the way out and forget about it?
Speaker 3 (27:56):
Yeah, so I would you know, I would say that
bison are functionally extinct the East. That's something that you know,
I hope SGI can somewhat remediate someday, and we've got
some exciting projects around that.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
But we think.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
About the the early you know, explorers to this region.
This is many many times before statehood for a lot
of areas, or so if we talk about Georgia, you know,
really early on in their statehood, they enacted a law
and it might have actually been shortly before their statehood.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
That killing bison became illegal.
Speaker 3 (28:31):
The reason I bring that up is because these early
like market for hunters, essentially market hunters came through and
they just slaughter. I mean, it's similar to the story
we see in the West where they were just killed
by the hundreds and thousand. They were very quickly killed
wherever they were in the east, so much so that
(28:54):
we often talk about like Daniel Boone referencing bison in
different places and his you know, travels. By the time
Daniel Boone got there, the French and the Spanish and
these other you know, English and had killed vast majority
of the bison, and like we're talking about, we're killing thousands,
you know, left and right, so that to see one
(29:16):
by that point became really rare. And as we kind
of came across the Cumelin Gap, I think as early
as seventeen fifty in Roanoke, Virginia modern day Renoke, Virginia,
this area is called Big Lick a seventeen fifty, we'd
killed all the bison out of there. Then we kept pushing, killing,
kept pushing killing, And I don't don't try and paint
(29:36):
the wrong picture, right because like this was was the wilderness.
But we absolutely killed out and pushed the bison further
further west and further west, and further west and further west.
Mostly before you know, a lot of these places fully
got settled out, you know, so people are coming and
there's kind of multiple lines of evidence for like president Bison,
(29:59):
President President.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
On the landscape.
Speaker 3 (30:01):
So we've got maps, right, That's kind of a common
thing where the French, you know, explorers and trappers would
map map areas and they'd be call like western Kentucky,
they called like the place where the tribes go to
hunt the beef, essentially referring to bison. So that's really common.
But the most common evidence that we have a bison
(30:22):
in the east of the most common like historical documentation
with people killing them, right, And like I was rereading
Ted Blues book recently, just like super excited to talk
about bison again, and part of the in there they
have like a record from the Spanish whereas like we
killed six bison today and the next day we killed two,
(30:42):
and the next day we killed five, and the next
day we killed six, and they're going through and they're
killing these animals. It doesn't take long if you're killing
that many a day to really negatively impact a population,
and eventually, you know what becomes like the maps and
then becomes killing them references. We start seeing more references
(31:06):
of dead bison or bison boned, or more references talking
about their trails and stuff like that, because we've already
extirpaid advice and from the east by you know, the
mid eighteen hundreds, early eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
Most of the time, like if you if you're having
a species of animal that's having a rough time today, right,
like like a population of an animal, game animal, whatever is,
it's under some sort of dress. It's normally tied to
some habitat degradation, habitat loss. Sometimes you'll have like a
(31:41):
I don't know, like in white tails, you'll have like
a EHD outbreak or something. For a localized population. Uh,
you don't hear a lot anymore for it to be like, well,
why do we lose them? Well, we kill them.
Speaker 5 (31:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
What's always interesting to me is that, like if you
ask me the poster child for us killing species out
the majority of the public or the inspiracial public, they're
instantly to think about the passenger o pinsion. But bison
aer right there, like we really there is some like
habitat changes that would have happened with with settlers, you know,
changing areas. But really the big thing is we just
(32:13):
killed them, and we killed them in the east sometimes
you know, for food and for fur, and then when
we push them further west, we kind of just killed
them to kill them at times, and you know, there
was always kind of this idea that like bison or
migratory and the lack of understanding of the ecology at
that time. You can't really fault people, but they thought
(32:36):
like the next herd would come come down from you know,
the north or something like that.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Even in the east.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
So there was like a fundamental misunderstanding the ecology advising
that they were thought to be migratory.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
And they're not there.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
They are roamers, right, So they may have a home
range of fifty miles or sixty miles, and they might
roam from grassland and grassland, but they're not truly migratory.
Like let's say a duck like a mallard that may
my migrate from Texas to Alaska, Canada. So you see
these fundamental misunderstandings of their ecology which may be contribute
(33:09):
to them thinking like, oh, we can just kill everything
that's here because the next migration is gonna come.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
We're gonna be good.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, it'll be fine. How many issues in wildlife or
habitat or any of that stuff comes from a lack
of understanding something all of it. How many wildlife conflicts
or issues with habitat loss can you think of that
can be simplified down to just a lack of understanding,
My guess would be quite a few. But I have
(33:36):
zero intentions of ending this episode on such a sad note.
If you called it earlier, Jeremy mentioned some exciting projects
around someday remediating the loss of bison in the East.
I want to hear Chris Whitgas thoughts on modern bison conservation.
Speaker 5 (33:54):
I remember when I turned in my dissertation.
Speaker 4 (33:56):
The first draft of my dissertation was all about bison
in Minnesota, in Iowa and South Dakota.
Speaker 5 (34:02):
This was two thousand.
Speaker 4 (34:04):
And six, and the first draft, you know, your professors
basically mark it up and write it up and everything.
Speaker 5 (34:12):
And I had a conclusion chapter and I had another.
Speaker 4 (34:14):
Chapter, and it was basically, you know, taking what we
know about, you know, some of these new ideas that
we're playing with, that we're exploring with bison in deep time,
What does that mean for modern bison conservation? What does
that mean for modern advice and management? I had an
entire chapter. I thought hard about this, and I had
(34:35):
a whole chapter on it, and my professor's basically exited
out and they said, don't get into this.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Don't don't get into modern conservation.
Speaker 5 (34:44):
Go there. And the nice thing is, now we are
going there.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
You know, it's it's been ten, fifteen, twenty years, and
so now I'm getting people coming up to me or
emailing me and saying, you know, we're starting a bison
herd this place.
Speaker 5 (35:01):
Do you know what's going on with bison here historically
or prehistorically? You know, are we talking about big herds
that are one hundred animals.
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Are we talking about small cowcafe herds or something like that.
Speaker 5 (35:13):
What are they eating?
Speaker 4 (35:15):
You know, do we need to think about, you know,
receding a prairie in certain species.
Speaker 5 (35:21):
Do we need to worry about lots of woody growth?
Speaker 1 (35:24):
You know?
Speaker 4 (35:24):
So some of these really kind of on the ground
landscape level questions. You know, we we can kind of
at least add have some suggestions and say this is
at least at the centennial to millennial scale, the scale
of hundreds to thousands of years. You know, this is
kind of the story that you have in your backyard.
And so if somebody wanted to, you know, talk about Florida.
(35:48):
You know, reintroduce bisonto a natural setting in Florida. You know,
we we probably have some data that we can throw
at that they are very adaptable animals and they're very happy.
Speaker 5 (35:58):
Doing things what they do. They just want to do
what they do wherever they are, and so I.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
Think that that's kind of the next place is to
kind of bring it all together.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Yeah. See, that's where you're talking about bringing those two
worlds together. That's where my head's at. As a hunting
and conservation community. We've taken several species that were on
the brink of being wiped out and managed to bring
them back. I don't know how alone or a minority
I am in this, but I'm like just saying, bison, Yeah,
they're gone. Like, I'm not good with stopping right there.
(36:31):
If there's a way to restore some of that, like
I'm in. So, is there a future for bison in
the Eastern United States? I would say it's possible. It's
definitely not a closed door. I want to thank all
of you for listening to Backwoods University, and I want
to give a big shout out to Onyx Hunt for
making this podcast possible. If you enjoyed this episode, be
(36:54):
sure to come back for the next one, coming out
on June twenty third, because, believe me, we're just getting started.
But for now, let's close this episode out as promised
by going back to the bison trail down by the creek.
I'm just trying to picture in my head. Man. That's cool.
I feel like I'm standing somewhere ancient. I wish I
(37:16):
could have seen it.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Me too, me too.
Speaker 1 (37:23):
Maybe you will one day.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Huh, that's right.
Host
Clay Newcomb
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