| Yellowstone Bison Slaughter
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Article 3/11/05 |
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| Bison
Letter to the Editor
Idaho State Journal, Pocatello, Idaho
3/11/05 |
Bison
The Corps of Discovery traversed the entire Lemhi Valley
and all the Salmon River Valley below the confluence of
the Lemhi in the late summer of 1805, and never sighted
a single bison.
Their journalists recorded that the natives of those valleys
(the Lemhi-Shoshones) were, by far, the poorest of all
the tribes they had met on their journey up to that point,
and were told by the Indians that the reason for their
poverty was the fact that their enemies, the Blackfeet
and the Crows, denied them access to the bison herds on
the plains to the east and north.
The plains tribes had firearms by virtue of their trade
with the Hudson Bay Co., fur trappers from Canada, and
every time the Shoshones ventured onto the plains in search
of buffalo, they were attacked and chased back into their
mountain hideouts, where there were no bison, no elk and
only a few deer.
Significantly, the main staple of the Corps on their trip
across Idaho was horse meat, not buffalo steak.
If the sources that Mr. Mead (Feb. 11 edition) cites are
accurate, and bison forsook their native plains and moved
into these same valleys a quarter of a century later,
we can only speculate as why.
Every acre of the places Mr. Mead claims bison were to
be found by the 1830s, is now private property.
If bison were to "expand their range" into Idaho
by wandering out of Yellowstone National Park, it would
not be to join the elk and deer in our mountains.
They would head straight for the valleys. Were they to
cross the divide to expand into Idaho, they would be greeted
with the same lack of hospitality which Montana affords
them.
- C.R. Stucki, Pocatello
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