The US railroad/ railway industry PAID to have the bison herds suppressed — ultimately eliminated.

You can’t have railroads and bison stampedes at the same time and place. This correlation was so strong that it’s been committed to film:”How the West Was Won.”

Additional references are found in “Dances With Wolves.”

$5 was paid for each dead bison, IIRC. That’s a week’s wages for an able bodied farmhand back then.

A single bison strike by a locomotive could destroy it — actually — both. At the time such machines ran between $10,000 and $20,000. The consequent boiler explosions normally would kill the fireman and engineer — with plenty of additional injuries among the following cars.

Not surprisingly, every effort was made to avoid such ‘biological impacts.’

The bulk of the bison were destroyed for the same reason that cockroaches are laid low: they’re a pest.

The fact that the plains natives followed the herds/ went missing when the bison weren’t around was just icing on the cake.

When the great culling began, no railroad man ever imagined that it was even possible to do more than just ‘control’ the herds. — A sentiment still seen with regard to insects.

It turned out that $5 really did the trick; that and Civil War weapons improvements: breach-loaders.

Bottom line: until the bison was suppressed America could not connect the land with railways. In Europe, the campaign against wild herds had long been won.

Not a quibble, clearly your historical knowledgeable in this area exceeds my own.

True, buffalo hunters sought the hides and that was systematic slaughter. It’s also true that tens of thousands of buffalo were slain by passengers on trains with only the tongue quickly removed and the entire carcass left to rot.

But whether for hides and/or tongue, the unsustainable harvesting of the buffalo was criminal.

I have only had beef tongue once in my life, prepared by my ex’s very aged grandmother (from the old country) the sight of it was off putting, it was unmistakably a giant tongue but as a guest I gave it the old college try. The texture of the organ was memorable.

I still shudder at that memory.

But I have a quibble about your bison remarks.
Bison were slaughtered for their hides and shipped back East to city-dwellers as lap robes for wagon journeys, sleigh-rides and for use around the home.
Back in the day, a hide was worth up to $3, a tongue 25 cents…and absent refrigeration and effective pickling, most tongues did not travel far.

The decimation of the bison-thousands of herds in the thousands- allowed farming, and wiped out the Plains Indians’ primary food source.

Bison sneer at regular cattle fencing. It is tough to keep them from going where they want to go.

Beef tongue is an absolute delicacy…at least for me. Good Jewish delis used to feature tongue sandwiches; “prime tongue” was cut from the lean tip.

One point of difference. It is not a case of the ‘superiority’ of the west’s culture versus other more ‘inferior’ cultures.

There was nothing superior about almost wiping out the N. American buffalo, mostly for its tongue, while leaving millions of carcasses to rot on the prairie.

There was nothing superior about dismissing even the possibility that other non-white cultures had anything of worth to contribute to mankind.

That’s simple arrogance, certainly not in historical short supply in Western cultures.

There are aspects of every culture that are deserving of respect and emulation and other aspects that would be far better abandoned.

That said, Western culture does arguably have more to offer and contribute toward mankind’s progress than any other culture yet developed.

The left, in order to advance its agenda has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In that we agree.

Disease has always killed far more in wars than have bullets and the Western left is a metastasizing cancer that has almost overcome the patient.

Quite right, Geoffrey. For a couple hundred years since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the West surged forward and the Muslim world became an increasingly irrelevant backwater, and little threat to us.

In those days the West had optimism in progress and a strong sense of the superiority of our culture. Since the rise of the Left we’ve been taught to denigrate our own culture, and give undeserved respect to inferior cultures.

Leftism is a much more dangerous enemy than Islam. Without leftism, Islam would be no match for the West.