In 1876, more than two million buffalo had blanketed the river valleys of Wyoming and Montana. Six years later, a rancher traveling across the northern plains said he was “never out of sight of a dead buffalo and never in sight of a live one.” In the bison’s place came cattle by the hundreds of thousands. By the mid-1880s, at the peak of the beef bonanza, there were more open-range cattle in the Lakota country than there had ever been buffalo.
