Photograph of an American Bison, taken circa 1905.
The native Americans suffered from the railroad, but one population suffered much, much more. They
were reduced from untold millions to just a few hundred. What population? The great American bison. The
transcontinental railroad should be considered one of the causes of their decline
The various ways the railroad helped bring about the death of these animals are sometimes shocking. People
would shoot out the windows of train cars just to kill the buffalo. This wastefulness was described by William Webb
in 1872 after a western trip:
"Let this slaughter continue for ten years, and the bison of the American continent will become extinct. The number of valuable
robes and pounds of meat which would thus be lost to us and posterity, will run too far into the millions to be easily calculated. All
over the plains, lying in disgusting masses of putrefaction along valley and hill, are strewn immense carcasses of wantonly slain
buffalo. They line the Kansas Pacific Railroad for two hundred miles."
Although not speaking necessarily of the original transcontinental railroad, Webb shows exactly how bad
the slaughter was. It's estimated that numbers went from 30,000,000 to a few hundred in a couple hundred
years. Much of this was due to the railroads, which were only major players in the slaughter for the last
several decades, but were used to help people nearly take bison to the brink of extinction. In the 1870s,
10,000,000 bison were killed by hunters, many of whom were transported to and from hunting grounds by
the railroad.
