It’s the 250th birthday of the Unites States of America. However, the history of our country goes back well beyond that. About 500 years before Columbus, Leif Erikson landed in what is today Canada. Following Columbus was John Cabot in 1497 and Ponce de Leon in 1513. The city of St. Augustine was established in 1565, and Jamestown was founded in 1607, followed by the Mayflower, which landed in 1620. All of them found people already living here. Call them “Indigenous Peoples”, “First Peoples”, “Native Americans”, Columbus called them “Indians”, whatever, but they were already here.

Proof that people were here for a long, long time exists in the form of human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico that date back 23,000 years. People were everywhere from the tundra to the tip of South America. Millions and millions of people.

As the European newcomers and the people already here, came into contact, the “Columbian Exchange” went into action. Basically, that means that the Europeans contracted diseases in the New World that weren’t in the Old World and the “Indigenous Peoples” contracted diseases common in the Old World but not found in the New World.

Most famous is smallpox. One estimate is that over 50 million “Native Americans” succumbed to the illness. It was the removal of all those people that opened the New World up to colonization by Europe.

It did something else. Many of those peoples were “farmers”, and when they died their cultivated agricultural fields were reclaimed by “nature”. So many trees and other woody plants grew that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were drastically reduced leading to what is known as “The Little Ice Age” of the 1600’s.

Estimates are that in 1492, in what is now the United States, there were from three to 10 million Native Americans. By 1776 that number was down to about one million. By 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, there were about 250,000 Native Americans living in roughly 30 different tribes on the Great Plains. By 1830 that number was less than 100,000 as smallpox, which had already devastated most of South America, Central America, and North America east of the Missouri, made its way across the Plains. About that time the demise of the American Bison…AKA…Buffalo also began.

It is estimated that up to 60 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains when Lewis and Clark made their way up the Missouri. Thirty years later the buffalo were still quite numerous, but the hide hunting business began. The buffalo were slaughtered. Also, for the first time, the government of the U.S. looked at the Great Plains as more than just somewhere that needed to be crossed to get to the west coast. It needed to be developed. However, in the way of the development of those grasslands were the different Plains tribes.

How to get rid of them? At first, armed conflict didn’t work, as the tribes were far better at warfare than the whites. Treaties were made. Treaties were broken and armed conflict started back up. By this time the U.S. had learned the value of the buffalo to the tribes.

One famous quote by Richard Irving Dodge, namesake of Dodge City, Kansas, is “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone”.

So, the army set about eliminating the buffalo…and the Native Americans. By 1899, the Native American population was at its lowest level as were the buffalo with only about 300 buffalo left in the wild and captive herds. One herd of 26 was located at the Bronx Zoo. That herd saved the buffalo. From that herd, buffalo were returned to the wild in South Dakota and Nebraska where they have thrived. The buffalo, along with the American Bald Eagle are our national animals. Buffalo in the U.S. now number about 500,000.

The same rebound has occurred in Native Americans whose populations fell to 50,000 on the Great Plains in 1899, to almost 300,000 today.