William T. Hornaday, Map Illustrating the Extermination of the American Bison, (1889)

It is estimated that approximately thirty to fifty million bison lived in the Great Plains region of the United States in the early nineteenth century. Native Americans depended upon bison for survival, using nearly every part of the bison for food, clothing, tools, and weapons. However, as manufacturing and consumerism grew throughout the nineteenth century, and with it, the demand for jackets and leather made from bison hides, American bison were hunted to near extinction. This 1889 map by conservationist William T. Hornaday is a powerful illustration of the devastation wrought upon the bison population. The solid red line outlines the "Boundary of the area once inhabited by American bison," and the solid green outlines the areas they inhabited in 1880 and 1870. In red, Hornaday notes the year bison went extinct in a particular area. The red dotted line, separating areas A and B, is what Hornaday refers to as the "Approximate boundary between the area of desultory extirpation and that of systematic destruction for robes and hides."  "Desultory extirpation" refers to the haphazard or aimless elimination of the bison as opposed to fast and organized eradication that came later. The figures in green represent the number of bison recorded in existence as of January 1, 1889. By 1902, there were fewer than one hundred recorded bison in the Great Plains region.