buffalo

1. 1. Any of several oxlike Old World mammals of the family Bovidae, such as the water buffalo and African buffalo.
   2. The North American bison, Bison bison.
2. The buffalo fish.

1. To intimidate, as by a display of confidence or authority: “The board couldn't buffalo the federal courts as it had the Comptroller” (American Banker).
2. To deceive; hoodwink: “Too often . . . job seekers have buffaloed lenders as to their competency and training” (H. Jane Lehman).
3. To confuse; bewilder.

[Italian bufalo or Portuguese or Spanish búfalo, from Late Latin būfalus, from Latin būbalus, antelope, buffalo, from Greek boubalos, perhaps from bous, cow.]

WORD HISTORY   The buffalo is so closely associated with the Wild West that one might assume that its name comes from a Native American word, as is the case with the words moose and skunk. In fact, however, buffalo can probably be traced back by way of one or more of the Romance languages through Late and Classical Latin and ultimately to the Greek word boubalos, meaning “an antelope or a buffalo.” The buffalo referred to by the Greek and Latin words was of course not the American one but an Old World mammal, such as the water buffalo of southern Asia. Applied to the North American mammal, buffalo is a misnomer, bison being the preferred term. As far as everyday usage is concerned, however, buffalo, first recorded for the American mammal in 1635, is older than bison, first recorded in 1774.

The name for members of the family Bovidae in the mammalian order Artiodactyla. The buffalo is an Old World species and resembles the oxen in general appearance. The North American bison is often called a buffalo, but is not related to the true buffalo.

The Asiatic buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), known as the Indian or water buffalo and also as the carabao, is found as a domestic animal in the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Egypt. These buffalo exist in the wild state in southern Asia and Borneo, where they are considered to be ferocious and dangerous. Water buffalo are stocky, heavy-built animals. They have very short hair and short, splayed horns. Like all buffalo, they have a liking for marshes, where they wallow and become caked with mud that affords protection against insects.

Two other Asiatic species related to, but smaller than, the water buffalo are the tamarau (Anoa mindorensis), which is indigenous to the Philippines, and the still smaller anoa (A. depressicornis), or wild dwarf buffalo, found in the Celebes.

The African buffalo, classed in the genus Syncerus, was very numerous until the turn of the century, when the infectious disease rinderpest caused many deaths. They are still abundant though widely hunted. There are several varieties of African buffalo, and it is thought that all may be subspecies of S. caffer, the Cape buffalo. They live in the open country of central, eastern, and southern Africa. Except for its size, this animal is difficult to distinguish from the rare dwarf or forest buffalo (S. caffer nanus). It lives in marshy, forested areas of western Africa, where it is known as the bush cow. See also Artiodactyla; Bison.

The American buffalo, now being raised by approximately 2,000 producers in the United States, is really a bison-a shaggy, humped member of the cattle family. Buffalo meat is surprisingly tender and tastes somewhat like lean beef. It has no pronounced gamey flavor. Buffalo can be found on some restaurant menus and is available in some specialty meat markets. The cuts are similar to beef and can be substituted for beef in most recipes. However, because buffalo meat is so lean, it should be cooked slowly at a low heat. Buffalo is higher in iron than beef and lower in fat and cholesterol than most cuts of beef and chicken-as well as some fish.

By about 1633, English-speaking settlers on the mid-Atlantic coast had caught glimpses of one of North America's most awesome creatures. In thinking of a name for it, the settlers remembered buffalo, a word borrowed in the previous century, probably from the Portuguese, that referred to an exotic ox of the Far East. (It ultimately goes back to a similar word in Greek.) So we read in a description of Maryland, published in London in 1635, "In the upper parts of the countrey there are Bufeloes, Elkes, Lions, Beares, Wolves, and Deare there are in great Store."

In later centuries, as settlement moved westward, buffalo (or buffaloes; there are two ways to form the plural) loomed ever larger in the American landscape and vocabulary. They loomed largest in the open spaces of the Great Plains, in herds by the millions. Buffalo gave their name to Buffalo, New York, and to more than twenty other towns and cities, as well as to countless buffalo trails and roads, fords and crossings, creeks and ridges, springs and wallows. There are buffalo birds, fish, beetles; even buffalo gnats. Plants have been named buffalo bean, berry, burr, clover, grass, pea, and weed. Plains Indians not only subsisted on buffalo but invoked their spirits with a buffalo dance. After the Civil War, regiments of black soldiers stationed on the plains were termed buffalo soldiers by the Indians in tribute to their looks and determination, and the name buffalo soldier honorably referred to military African Americans in the twentieth century as well.

Even as the buffalo dwindled in number to fewer than one thousand at the end of the nineteenth century, they expanded their range in the American vocabulary with the verb to buffalo, meaning "to intimidate, outsmart, confuse." Its image appeared by the millions on the buffalo nickel, coined from 1913 to 1938. And the buffalo buffaloed extinction to the point where they now number in the hundreds of thousands.

(click to enlarge)
Cape, or African, buffalo (Syncerus caffer). (credit: Mark Boulton — The National Audubon Society Collection/Photo Researchers)

Any member of several bovid species, including the massive water buffalo and Cape buffalo. The name is often applied to the American bison. The anoa (Anoa depressicornis) is a tiny, dark-brown buffalo of the dense, mature forests of Sulawesi. A shy animal, it stands 2.5 – 3 ft (0.75 – 1 m) at the shoulder and has straight, sharp-tipped horns. It is hunted for food, hides, and horns. A slightly larger species, the tamarau (A. mindorensis), inhabits the Philippine island of Mindoro. Exceedingly shy and wild, its numbers have been greatly reduced.

For more information on buffalo, visit Britannica.com.

Until the end of the last Ice Age, bison were a minor species in North America. As a warming climate destroyed much of the forage upon which Ice Age megafauna such as mammoths and mastodons relied, and as human hunters destroyed those megafauna who remained, bison emerged as the dominant species of the Great Plains. The grasslands may have supported as many as 30 million bison, but changing ecological factors such as drought, blizzards, wolf predation, and the competition of other grazing animals probably caused the bison population to fluctuate considerably.

For thousands of years, Native Americans hunted bison from foot. They surrounded herds, setting fire to the grasses to enclose the animals for the kill. In other instances, they drove herds into corrals or over cliffs. Such techniques demanded the cooperation of large communities. Success was unpredictable, however, and most pedestrian bison hunters combined their pursuit of the herds with other subsistence strategies such as planting or gathering.

The arrival of horses to the plains transformed the relationship between hunters and the bison. Spanish colonists introduced horses to North America in the sixteenth century; the animals diffused into the Great Plains in the early eighteenth century. By the end of the century, several Native American groups, among them the Sioux, Cheyennes, and Crows, had abandoned their former resource strategies and reinvented themselves as nomadic, equestrian bison hunters. That strategy sustained the nomads until the 1830s, when steamboats began to ascend the Missouri River, inaugurating a trade in bison robes that lasted until the late 1860s. Nomadic hunters supplied Euro-American traders with tens of thousands of robes annually, significantly depleting the bison population in the Great Plains.

In the 1870s, Euro-American hunters, in combination with drought and the arrival of millions of domestic livestock to the grasslands, nearly exterminated the remaining bison. While the United States government neither organized nor prosecuted the destruction of the bison, certain of its representatives endorsed it. Congressional efforts to put a stop to the slaughter in the mid-1870s were stymied by Interior Department officials who anticipated that the destruction of the bison would force the Sioux, Cheyennes, and other Native American groups to submit to the reservation system. The species was reduced to a few thousand by 1883.

In the early twentieth century, the American Bison Society, an organization made up largely of wealthy and influential easterners, managed to install a small number of bison on federal preserves as part of a nostalgic and nationalist project of frontier and wilderness preservation. A larger number of bison survived on ranches that raised them as profitable novelties. By the end of the twentieth century there were roughly 250,000 bison in North America descended from the few survivors of the nineteenth century, and bison meat had gained favor as an alternative to beef.

Bibliography

Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison: An Environ-mental History, 1750–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

—Andrew C. Isenberg

1. water buffalo—see bubalus bubalis. Called also carabao, Indian buffalo, arna, European domestic buffalo.
2. Dwarf or Asiatic buffalo—see anoa.
3. South African buffalo—syncerus caffer.
4. American buffalo; is really a bison—see bison bison.

Dansk (Danish)
n. - bøffel
v. tr. - gøre konfus, narre

Nederlands (Dutch)
buffel, bizon, karbouw

Français (French)
n. - buffle, (US) bison
v. tr. - chasser le buffle, intimider

Deutsch (German)
n. - Büffel
v. - irreführen

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - αγριοβούβαλος, αμερικανικός βίσονας

Italiano (Italian)
bufalo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - búfalo (m) (Zool.)

Русский (Russian)
буйвол

Español (Spanish)
n. - búfalo
v. tr. - confundir, intimidar, impresionar

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - buffel, bisonoxe

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
水牛, 恐吓, 愚弄, 使困惑

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 水牛
v. tr. - 恐嚇, 愚弄, 使困惑

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 물소, 수륙 양용 탱크, 북미산의 잉어 비슷한 큰 민물고기
v. tr. - ~을 난처하게 만들다, ~에게 겁을 주다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - スイギュウ, バッファロー, 水牛

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) جاموس,‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮שור-הבר, תאו, בופלו‬
v. tr. - ‮הטיל מורא, הוציא מהדעת‬

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