"Estimates made in the 1850s suggest that Indians harvested about 450,000 animals a year, and some think the figure was far higher than that. After stripping the best meat and some useful parts, the Indians left the remainder to rot. The stench permeated the prairie for miles, and many a pioneer came across acres of bones from buffalo killed by the Indians before they moved on. Isenberg, for one, doubts whether Indian slaughter alone would have made the buffalo extinct, but when combined with natural factors-wolf predation, fire, and drought-the Indians’ annual harvest probably exceeded the ability of the herds to maintain themselves. More important, as Isenberg points out, "Even had they recognized a decline, the inherent instability of the nomadic societies made it difficult always to enforce the mandates against waste."3 Equally important, many Indian religions held that nature provided an inexhaustible supply, and thus it was impossible to "overhunt." Put another way, without private property rights, the bison were already doomed before the white man arrived...western ranchers such as Charles Goodnight, who captured buffalo calves in 1878, determined that there might be great value in private bison herds. As a result, "many of the bison that eventually populated government preserves descended from the herd of two Montana ranchers" http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/buffaloed-the-myth-and-reality-of-bison-in-america/
Thanks for the assist.