My Hunting Mentors...
The "Great Buffalo Hunt" is one of my favorite topics. It might not be politically correct but I can honestly say I wish I could have "been there and done that."
Unfortunatly we were left with relatively few first-hand written accounts of this facinating part of our history. Far and away Frank Mayer's book "The Buffalo Harvest" is the most cited of them all. The trouble is we have no way of knowing for sure if these stories are accurate records of what happend or if they are just good yarns. Also, most of the accounts were written years after the events took place. They tell exciting tales of life on the plains but are often short on technical details. (Jim White kept a book recording his kills and where they occured. Few other hunters did this.) So the best we can do is play "Monday morning quaterback" and reconstruct the events.
I'll accept the figure of 60,000,000 bison. As for the number of hunters, estimates are that somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 men were engaged in this line of work from 1871 - 1883. In my opinion there were only a handful of hunters in the Jim White, Vic Smith, Tom Nixon, Cator & Mooar brothers "league." Buffalo hunting was a business requiring a big initial investment to get started in and a lot of hard work to be successful at. Most of those who tried their hand at buffalo hunting were probably young adventurers and drifters looking for quick, easy money. They either gave it up and went into something else - or died - having killed only a few buffalo each before doing so.
Buffalo are prolific animals that ranged over a huge territory. Of course just a handful of skilled and motivated hunters might be able to devastate a local population of shggies. But the numbers just don't come out for laying the blame of near extermination on the hands of the hide hunters and their Sharps, Rollers and Trapdoors. Too many buffalo to start with, too big of a country, too few hunters and too short of a time for it all to happen. Combine a 'lead-induced' population drop with a newly introduced cattle-borne disease. Now throw in other conditions such as weather and you have a formula for near disaster. Take any one of those situations out of the picture and the results would have been very different. We all heard the story of the passenger pigeon. The extinction of this bird has been blamed on market hunters. More recent investigation indicates that it was probably an avaian virus that wiped them out. The birds numbered in the billions and quickly disappeared. Humans may have played only a small part. Mind you, I'm not saying the buffalo hunters weren't a major factor in the near extermination of the species. All I'm saying is they weren't the ONLY factor.
Nowadays more than 10 million deer hunters take to the field killing untold millions of deer each year. Yet the deer population keeps increasing in many parts of the country.