What was the importance of the buffalo?

Answer 1

The buffalo gave people everything they needed to survive and was considered a Spirit Being. Buffalo meat provided food, the pelt clothing and the bones tools. The buffalo is central to the traditional religon of the Lakota and neighboring tribes. Tutsi Wai BigBee, a Comanche, talks about the importace of a buffalo.

The buffalo were their food source - so they followed the buffalo heards when they migrated. They also used their skins for clothing, their bones for tools.

Buffalo were important for the natives because they gave them meat,bones,skin.

The buffalo is like the Native's lifeline. Without them the Natives cannot survive. They used the buffalo for all kinds of things.

Meat: Roasted and boiled for food.

Hides: Used for clothing and other accessories.

Muscles: thread, bowstrings

Bones: weapons and tools

Horns: Utensils and toys

Hair: rope

Beard: decoration

Tail: whips

Brain: Used for soften the skin.

Hoofs: Boiled for glue.

Fat: candles and soap

Dung: fuel.

Teeth: necklaces

Stomach and Bladders: containers

Skull: ceremony masks.

In the 19th century the bison could be found in many parts of North America but especially thrived on the Great Plains. An early English naturalist described them as buffalo and that became their established name though the term is more correctly applied to other types of wild oxen found in Asia and Africa.

The buffalo is covered with long, dark brown woolly hair. It has a massive head, short neck, and high humped shoulders, with tufted tail. Hips and hindquarters are much smaller and without long hair thus forming a distinct slope from hump to tail. Fully grown a buffalo are five to six feet high at the shoulders and can weigh as much as a ton. Like other members of the cattle family, the buffalo eats grasses.

The buffalo played an important role in the life of Native Americans. Before the arrival of Europeans the buffalo were hunted on foot. Every part of the buffalo was used. They provided them with food (meat), shelter (buffalo skin tipi covers), clothing (hide robes), fuel (dried buffalo dung), tools (horn spoons and bone hide scrapers), weapons (buffalo hide shields and bow strings) and equipment (rawhide envelope for storing food). They also used hoofs to make glue, they turned bones into ornaments and buffalo tails became a fly swish.

In 1849 Francis Parkman wrote: "The buffalo supplies the Indians with the necessities of life; with habitations, food, clothing, beds and fuel, strings for their bows, glue, thread, cordage, trail ropes for their horses, covering for their saddles, vessels to hold water, boats to cross streams, and the means of purchasing all they want from the traders. When the buffalo are extinct, they too must dwindle away."

In the second-half of the 19th century European buffalo hunters, armed with powerful, long-range rifles, began killing the animal in large numbers. Individual hunters could kill 250 buffalo a day. By the 1880s over 5,000 hunters and skinners were involved in this trade. It is claimed that the killing of buffalo was supported by the U.S. military in order to undermine the survival of the Plains Indians.

In 1800 there were around 60 million buffalo in North America. By 1890 this number had fallen to 750. The Plains Indians (Arapaho, Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Kiowa, Sioux, Arikara, Mandan, Osage and Pawnee) had now no means of independent sustenance and had to accept the government policy of living on Indian Reservations.

In the 20th century the buffalo became a protected species and now number about 80,000.

The buffalo was the mainstay for the Plains tribes, not just Sioux. The buffalo provided most of the People's meat, which was dried to keep over winter. They provided hides for shelter and for robes. The buffalo horns made utensils. Basically every part of the buffalo was used in one form or anoth