The Extermination of the American Bison

In 1889, when William T. Hornaday published this account, fewer than 300 bison remained alive on Earth. A species that had once numbered in the tens of millions, roaming the Great Plains in herds so vast they darkened the horizon for miles, had been hunted to the edge of oblivion in barely two decades. Hornaday, a Smithsonian zoologist, spent two years documenting what he called 'the most striking single fact in the history of American zoology': the complete dismantling of a keystone species by industrial-scale hunting. The book presents exhaustive evidence of the bison's former abundance, the mechanics of their destruction, and a desperate argument for protecting the remnant herd in Yellowstone before it was too late. Part natural history, part autopsy, part call to arms, Extermination reads like an elegy written in wartime. It remains the foundational document of the American conservation movement, a book that asks whether Americans would rather have a continent of grass or a continent of money.