Buffalo June 25, 2010

North American buffalo once numbered 60 million. In mere decades after settlers, adventurers, explorers and commercial hunters appeared on the plains, the buffalo herds were reduced to a few million. By the 1880s, the federal government mounted a concerted effort to exterminate the remaining buffalo in order to drive the Indians who depended on them onto reservations, opening the West for non-Native settlement. Many artists publicized the slaughter and the devastating impact the demise of the buffalo had on Indian culture. Artists of the 1800s and 1900s memorialized the hunt and the departed buffalo; today artists forecast their return.