Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The North American Bison

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

For thousands of years, one animal shaped the ecology, culture, and history of an entire continent.  In vast herds that once numbered in the tens of millions, the North American bison dominated the Great Plains, sustaining Indigenous societies and transforming the landscape itself.  Yet within a single human lifetime, they were driven to the brink of extinction. Their story is one of abundance, destruction, and survival against extraordinary odds.  Learn more about the North American bison on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! Mint Mobile Save 50% on Unlimited premium wireless plans starting at $15/month at MintMobile.com/EED Audible Listen to Project Hail Mary Audible.com/hailmary Fast Growing Trees Get 20% off your first purchase when using the code DAILY at checkout at fastgrowingtrees.com/daily Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Austin Oetken & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Discord Server: https://discord.gg/Ds7Rx7jvPJ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Disce aliquid novi cotidie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For thousands of years, one animal shaped the ecology, culture, and history of an entire continent. In vast herds that once numbered in the tens of millions, the North American bison dominated the Great Plains, sustaining indigenous societies, and transforming the very landscape itself. Yet, within a single human lifetime, they were driven to the brink of extinction. Their story is one of abundance, destruction, and survival against extraordinary odds. Learn more about the North American bison on this episode of Everything Everything, Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? Thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly

why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where well, nothing much happens. No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to nothing much happens wherever you get your podcasts. Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. The North American bison is in the genus bison and the species bison, giving it the scientific name, Bison Bison.

And there are two subspecies, the wood bison known as Bison-Bison-Athabascai, which lives in western Canada and parts of Alaska. The other better-known subspecies is the Plains Bison, whose scientific name is Bison-Bison. The North American bison is often incorrectly called a buffalo. True buffalo are different species that live in Africa and Asia, such as the African buffalo and the water buffalo. Early European explorers in North America use the familiar word buffalo for the animal they encountered on the plains, and the name stuck in common usage. Bison first migrated to the Americas

from Asia during the Pleistocene period. Pressures by apex predators, such as the Siberian cave lion and competition of grazers like the woolly mammoth and wild horses, forced bison to migrate eastward. Bison migrated to the Americas nearly 200,000 years ago via the Bering land bridge, after sea levels dropped about 300 feet or 91 meters during the ice age. In the Americas, bison found ecosystems well suited to their needs, with fewer apex predators and less competition for grasslands. The bison that arrived in the Americas belonged to a different species from those present today. Modern bison descended from much larger ancestors. The largest bison, bison latrophons, had a horn span of nearly nine feet or 2.7 meters and weighed up to 4,000 pounds or 1,800 kilograms.

As the climate warmed in the late place to scene, the landscape began to change. The region became more forested and saw the expansion of the American lion and the infamous short-faced bear, the largest carnivore in the Americas. The impressive horn span of the bison offered protection from apex predators, but posed challenges in North America's more densely forested environment. The modern bison emerged as a subspecies with a smaller horn span and a smaller, more nimble form. Early clovis hunters, dating back 20,000 years, hunted a relative of the modern bison, the bison antiquists. The ancient bison were moving closer in size to the modern bison with a much smaller body and a diminished horn span of about four feet or 1.2 meters. The bison we see today show the adaptations they made from their ancestors to survive in the gray plains.

They're much smaller than their Pleistocene counterparts and possess greater agility, enabling them to undertake long migrations. People are often surprised to see a bison go from a slow walk to a full sprint, reaching speeds of up to 35 miles per hour or 55 kilometers per hour. The North American Plains Bison had a profound impact on the environment of the Great Plains. The bison's used their head as plows in deep snow. They moved their heads side to side to forge a path for themselves and for other animals that couldn't move through it. The sharp hoof of a bison provides a natural aeration of the prairie grass.

Their dense undercoat captures a greater diversity of wildflower seeds, which are then spread throughout their migrations. Bison often plant these seeds through one of their most important behaviors. The wallow. In an effort to take a dust bath, shed their winter coats, or simply roll around to scratch and itch, bison will create wallows, which are shallow depressions in the soil. Bison wallows are about 10 to 15 feet across or about 3.5 meters and about 1 foot in depth. These enormous holes can fill with rainwater becoming vital micro-ecosystems. The water that gathers in a bison wallow allows wildflower seeds to germinate and spread. Wallows also serve a social function as as bison often gather out wallows and roll together and establish dominance for the upcoming mating season.

Unlike cows which feed on grass to the roots, bison are more selective. Bison do not eat grass to the root. They act as a natural lawnmower, cutting grass down to several inches and then moving on, all the while ignoring flowers. Their selective grazing habits creates a quilt pattern on the Great Plains, an unmistakable sign of a herd's presence. This quilt pattern has other profound effects on the ecosystem as well. According to the National Park Service, quote,

photosynthesis also increases when bison selectively graze, because with many different kinds of plants, there is increased light availability and reduced competition for water and nutrients. Through their migratory grazing practices, bison do not overextend the ecosystem's capacity to provide nourishment because they return to a site only every few months, and their migration offers ample time for the grass to recover. The efficiency of bison did not go on,

noticed by early travelers on the Great Plains, as the path that they cut through would often be the path of least resistance for wagon travel. Bison dung is also critically important for the environmental health of the Great Plains. Again, according to the National Park Service, quote, bison feces in urine when deposited are important sources of nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, sulfur, and magnesium for microbes, plant, and other animals. End quote. A single bison dung patty can be home to as many as 300 different types of insects, and the insects living on bison dung make a feast for bird life.

A typical bison's daily output of 10 quarts of dung and 12 gallons of urine, when multiplied by an estimated 60 million bison at their height on the Great Plains, illustrates just how much they were chemically altering the landscape. The bison of North America left relatives in Eurasia. There, the Wiescent flourished and ranged across the continent. The Wiescent shared more than appearance with the North American bison as it faced many of the same challenges. Overhunting, forced to extermination due to urbanization and declining habitat, led to the Wiesin's approach to extinction by the 20th century. Through conservation efforts, the population of the Eurasian Wiescent, once reduced to only 12 individuals, has been carefully rebuilt and is now approaching 10,000.

thousand. Like the Wicent, the American bison was nearly wiped out in the 19th century. The North American tribes who lived on the Great Plains had traditionally lived alongside bison and treated them as sacred. Bison were hunted only as needed, and they recognized the value and importance of the animal as almost everything they needed in life came from them. North American Indians used every part of the bison that they hunted. The bison was the basis of diet for the peoples of the Great Plains. The hides were used as bison. blankets, clothing, shoes, shields, and teepee covers. Hooves were boiled down into a powerful adhesive,

bladders were dried as water vessels, and bones were used for weapons and tools. Bison, or Tatanka in the Lakota language, meant everything to Native peoples. They depended upon them for daily survival and venerated them as parts of their religious cosmology. According to Native American author, N. Scott Mamaday, quote,

the buffalo was iconic and sacred and became so deeply ingrained in the life of the tribe that they could not imagine existence without the buffalo. End quote. Given the sacred nature of the bison, it must have been extraordinarily difficult for the plains people to watch the extermination of the animal that unfolded in the wake of westward expansion. The 1880s were a time of crisis for the bison, a population that numbered in the tens of

millions was reduced to fewer than 1,000 teetering on the brink of extinction in small herds. The Indian policies of the post-Civil War period, the demand for the demand for leather and the expansion of the railroad nearly extinguished the bison. Hunters often strip the bison of their hides and left their carcasses to rot in the sun. The destruction of the bison was connected to the nation's Indian policy in the 19th century. The strategy was based on forcing Native Americans onto smaller and smaller plots of reservation land, and one of the fastest ways to make that happen was to take the essence of indigenous nomadic life away from them. The bison. The expansion of American railroads were arguably the greatest engine of bison destruction. Railroads fed their workers

through the rapid slaughter of animals that yielded up to a thousand pounds of meat. Hunters making $80 a day, an extraordinary amount of money at that time, hunted the animals in incredible numbers, some hunters boasting kill totals of as many as 4,000 per year. The bison threatened the very nature of rail travel as they tended to block tracks, and their massive girth could derail fast-moving trains. The effort to restore the bison population fell to a diverse group that included President Theodore Roosevelt, sympathetic ranchers, a taxidermist at the Smithsonian Institute, and Charles Goodnight, a former bison hunter who tried to breed them with cows to create something called a Cattleau. While Goodnight's Cattleau experiment ended in failure, it preserved key populations

that would eventually merge with the core restoration population in Yellowstone National Park. Theodore Roosevelt joined forces with the Smithsonian's taxidermist William Hornaday to seek protection for the animal under the American Bison Society. They protected a small group of animals at zoos including the Bronx Zoo and eventually realized that in order to thrive, they needed to be reintroduced to their native habitats. While tracking a bison to kill for a museum exhibit, Hornaday saw what he called ghastly monuments of slaughter and for two weeks saw very few bison. He shot one bowl but realized that the fur wasn't useful as it had been shed in the spring. Hornaday eventually brought one calf back alive to the Smithsonian where it became a sensation before dying in captivity. Returning in the winter, he successfully located and killed 20 bison to secure the necessary specimens.

This endeavor culminated in a remarkable display for the Smithsonian, which was the museum's largest exhibit in 70 years. Hornaday's intention was for the exhibit to inspire appreciation for the animal and Galilee. Alvinized support for their preservation. Hornaday made the preservation of the bison his life's work, and Roosevelt's political connection proved invaluable. By the time Hornaday conducted his census in 1905, he found only 85 free-range bison on the entire Great Plains. Roosevelt and Hornaday successfully advocated for state-level protection laws. Furthermore, Roosevelt secured federal protection for the National Bison Range in Montana, which became instrumental

in the bison's recovery. starting in Yellowstone National Park. The bison of Yellowstone, which numbered only 25 in 1901, were the last remnants of biologically pure bison that were exempt from all attempts at crossbreeding on private farms. Hornaday's expertise and Roosevelt's passion for the great outdoors and reverence for a species he had shot in 1883 helped change political attitudes towards protecting the bison.

The U.S. Army, at Roosevelt's insistence, patrolled the region where the bison lived in Yellowstone to guarantee their safety. The Bison of Yellowstone began to be treated as a national treasure. Roosevelt and the American Bison Society encouraged the development of a national ethos surrounding bison by securing their image on the famous 1913 Buffalo Nickel. The coin inspired curiosity and hope nationwide for the bison's survival. The nation's wish was granted as the Yellowstone 25 grew into a stable population,

serving as a nursery as the herd population stabilized and grew. Tribal reservations and other national parks across the country welcomed Yellowstone Bison in hopes of extending the comeback. The resurgence of the American bison population represents one of the great stories of the conservation movement. Today there are roughly 4 to 500,000 North American bison in total. However, there are only about 20 to 30,000 that live in truly wild conservation herds. The vast majority are found on private ranches and are managed as livestock.

In recent decades, conservation conservation groups. groups, Native American tribes, and government agencies have worked to restore bison to parts of their historic range and rebuild prairie ecosystems. Programs such as the American Prairie Project in Montana aim to create large connected grassland reserves where bison can roam freely again. These efforts seek not only to restore the bison, but also the broader prairie ecosystem that evolved alongside them. The American bison is central to the narrative of North America. Its history encompasses ice age migration, physical evolution, crucial dependence by Native people's near total destruction, and a remarkable comeback.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode is provided by Joel Hermanson. Today's one-star review comes from listener Boston Strange who writes, Finally. I discovered this podcast about two and a half years ago and have finally joined the completionist club in Montana. started in Texas and then Colorado and retirement in Montana has allowed me to knock out the missing episodes.

Great podcast, the first listen every day on The Walk With My Dog. Thank you, Gary, for all the knowledge and versatility. Well, thank you, Boston Strange, and I think you're either a masochist, or you accidentally hit the wrong number of stars when you left your review. Both hypotheses fit the facts. Remember, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you two can have it read on the show.