The Destruction of the Bison, first published in 2000, explains the decline of the North American bison population from an estimated 30 million in 1800 to fewer than a thousand a century later. In this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary study, Andrew C. Isenberg argues that the cultural and ecological encounter between Native Americans and Euroamericans in the Great Plains was the central cause of the near-extinction of the bison. Cultural and ecological interactions created new types of bison hunters on both sides of the encounter: mounted Indian nomads and Euroamerican industrial hidemen. Together with environmental pressures these hunters nearly extinguished the bison. In the early twentieth century, nostalgia about the very cultural strife which first threatened the bison became, ironically, an important impetus to its preservation.

‘This case study of extinction and the preservation of a species will have a wide appeal.’

Source: Library Journal

‘Andrew Isenberg’s The Destruction of the Bison … a fascinating tale not least that of the bison’s last-minute preservation.’

Source: New Scientist

‘To be filed in this month’s don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-title category … [Isenberg’s] impassioned first book is much more than an ecological history of American wildlife.’

Source: Publisher’s Weekly

‘The Destruction of the Bison is one of those very rare books that manage to be the definite work on a subject and simultaneously profoundly change how we understand that subject. No one can write about the destruction of America’s national mammal - and the peoples who exploited and cared for it - without engaging with Andrew Isenberg’s bold masterwork.’

Pekka Hämäläinen - University of Oxford

‘In the nineteenth century, in the short span of a few decades, the great bison herds that defined the Plains for thousands of years almost disappeared. No book illuminates the causes and consequences of that fateful development so eloquently or concisely as Drew Isenberg's essential, classic study, The Destruction of the Bison.'

Louis S. Warren - University of California, Davis