Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

one of the Canadian cousins posted…

I ran across the following narrative by Grant MacEwan his book about the agricultural history of the Canadian western plains. Perhaps this recounting suggests one factor that contributes to the sense that the bison simply disappeared:
Grant MacEwan, “Between the Red and the Rockies”, University of Toronto Press, 1952:

The buffalo-bone business, mentioned earlier as the first cash crop of many settlers, spread with railways and settlement and was of benefit to both. Regina, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, Swift Current, and Calgary were among the important shipping points. Most of the bones went to the United States, where they were used for bleaching sugar, manufacturing fertilizer, and in some cases for making house-hold articles.

As new railways were built, new supplies of bones were obtainable. The area around Saskatoon provided a bountiful crop for the bone harvesters after the rails were laid in 1890, and the new town witnessed the departure of many carloads of the remains in the peak years of 1891 and 1892. The “bone trail” that entered the city from the southwest became a pioneer highway. Now and again freight cars ran short and the bones had to be piled along the tracks. Each pile was the size and shape of a box-car. Skulls formed the outside walls and the smaller bones were thrown into the centre. Old-timers recalled that the piles of bones waiting shipment at Saskatoon sometimes extended from 23rd Street to a point on the river close to the present railway bridge. Mrs. Grace Fletcher, James Leslie, and R. W. Dalmage, who operated stores in pioneer Saskatoon, handled most of the bones at that point. But others were in the business too. The diary of W. H. Duncan, who opened a store there in 1890, showed four carloads shipped on the 6th of September, 1890, seven cars on the 9th, four cars on the 10th, and six cars on the 17th of that month.

All went well until the financial panic in 1893, when the bone boom burst. By that time Leslie was handling nearly all the bone business at Saskatoon, shipping to the Northwestern Fertilizer Company in Chicago. The company got into deep water financially and wired Leslie to stop his shipments. But telegrams did not always reach their destination in those years and the bones kept coming. At one stage thirty-five carloads were being held in Chicago with no prospect of their disposal. However, after a costly delay, the market improved and Leslie sold his bones. . . .

It was the practice of some of the bone gatherers to set fire to the prairie grass in early spring or late summer, so that the white bones might be clearly exposed to view. “In the spring of 1888,” wrote James Leslie to me in 1936, “I went by trail to Moose Jaw. The country south of Beaver Creek had been burned and the buffalo bones showed white; the whole country looked like a very stony Ontario summerfallow.”

Another pioneer told of a homesteader working single-handed and gathering three carloads of bones in three weeks. It was his first harvest and a very good one. Basket racks, twelve or fourteen feet long and three feet high, were employed for gathering and the horses which hauled them were of the cayuse or Indian pony type, small and tough. A ton would be an average load. When picking was conducted some distance from a railroad, the pickers with their carts or wagons might travel as a caravan. Such a wagon train might extend, when in motion, for a mile or more on the trail, and the squealing of its wheels could be heard for several miles. Positions at or near the front of the procession were competed for. The better horses and better men won leading places while the slower horses and indifferent drivers sweated amid the dust at the rear.

At first picking was confined to the districts adjacent to the railroads but when these were cleared of bones, the gangs moved farther afield, perhaps fifty to a hundred miles. The district around the present Rosetown was especially productive and so was the Blackstrap Coulee, east and south of Dundurn. At least a hundred cars of bones were gathered up at Hanley. Pickers working in rough country farther south and west found coulees and cut-banks with accumulations of bones totalling up to forty or fifty tons at one place.
James Leslie alone sent 750 carloads of buffalo bones out of Saskatoon and estimated that the total shipment from that point was between 3,000 and 3,500 carloads. Loaded cars carried roughly twenty tons and contained about 250 skulls. If each carload contained the bones of 250 animals, the shipments from Saskatoon alone represented something over 750,000 buffalo. One can only speculate about the quantity of bones which went from all of Western Canada.

Bones delivered at the railroad netted a credit of six to eight dollars a ton for the pickers and more than one homesteader obtained his first plough or first barbed wire or first lumber with ‘bone money.” It is surprising and a little disappointing that some Saskatchewan or Alberta town didn’t take the meaningful name of “Buffalo Bones.” It would have been preferable to some of the imported and unwestern names which were adopted. Pp. 81-84

Photos of the bison bone mounds are impressive, but macbre and saddening.

From our recent trip to Paris – the catacombs were incredible