The Perceptions of the Bison in the Chronicles of the Spanish Northern Frontier

Abstract

The American bison is a distant relative of ox-like animals known as the Indian water buffalo and the European bison, Bison bonasus (or wisent), for which some name it bison and others buffalo. Nevertheless, according to the taxonomic classification of this animal made by Carl Linnaeus, its official name is Bison bison, which has remained in modern English use (Weniger 1990, 2:9). The precise appearance of early bison in present North American territories is unknown, but the animals recorded in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic Era had bigger bodies, longer horns, and a more hairy coat than modern bison (Geist 1996, 19). Although these animals lived in various regions of present-day North America and northern Mexico, they were most abundant in the prairies and grasslands of the Great Plains. Historian and environmentalist Dan Flores theorizes that the extinction of different animal species during the Pleistocene epoch left dozens of grazing niches vacant on various parts of the American Great Plains where dwarf species of bison with a higher reproductive capability than any of its ancestors evolved to fill them (1991, 465). These were the mammals that the early Native Americans hunted for centuries and the ones that the Spanish explorers continually describe in their narratives. Yet, most of the literature that focuses on the bison underlines the AngloAmerican culture and those that hunted the animals to the point of extinction in the nineteenth century. Today, the hunting and near disappearance of the bison is the aspect that most interests the historical community. For many, the bison remain as a symbol, a representation of what popular culture refers to as the