This is a heap of…

• • women’s hats
• • bison skulls
• • banana bunches
• • teddy bears

The bison must have seemed an inexhaustible resource when it grazed the prairie in herds that stretched to the horizon in every direction. Its massive forequarters, too, gave it an air of solidity that only human ingenuity could defeat. Indian hunters lanced the bison, shot it with arrows, drove it over cliffs. European colonists were even more efficient at killing the bison. Industrial hunting crews shot hundreds at a time and used teams of horses to pull off their hides. In the course of the nineteenth century, a bison population of tens of millions was reduced to a few thousand. Today, there are perhaps ten or twenty thousand pure bison, and several hundred thousand bison-cattle hybrids.