Economist blames Europe for decimation of American Bison

North Americans have always taken the heat for killing off millions of American bison during the early 1800s. A new study, however, pins the blame on Europeans.

Europe's advanced tanning expertise drove the large, iconic mammal to near extinction in the United States, according to a a review of international trade records, diaries and other historical documents conducted by University of Calgary environmental economist M. Scott Taylor.

"The story of the buffalo slaughter is surprisingly not, at bottom, an American one," Taylor said.

Taylor says the guilty party sat on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The swift bison extermination was a result of an expertise in tanning heavy hides into leather developed in Europe, he wrote in a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research earlier this year. The innovation, not practiced in the United States at the time, sustained European's high demand for bison hides.

"These market forces overwhelmed the ability of a young and still expanding nation, just out of a bloody civil war, to carefully steward its natural resources," Taylor said.

About 6 million bison hides were exported from 1871 to 1883, Taylor wrote. This represents almost 9 million dead bison.