The photo of two men standing on a mountain of bison skulls is well known as a symbol of hunting during the colonisation of the US. But there’s a more sinister story behind it – with a surprising modern message.

Two men in black suits and bowler hats pose with a gravity-defying mound of bison skulls. The 19th-Century image is disturbing – thousands upon thousands of skulls piled in neat rows, towering towards the sky. But beneath the macabre first impression, the photo holds a darker secret still. These skulls aren’t just the product of overzealous hunting in the US – and those men aren’t hunters, either.
The skulls, experts say, are the evidence of an organised, carefully calculated campaign to eradicate the bison, deprive Native Americans of a vital resource, and drive the few communities that survived onto small reservations where they could be controlled by the newly arrived white settlers.
“This image is an example of colonial celebration of destruction,” says Tasha Hubbard, a Cree filmmaker who is an associate professor at the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. Hubbard describes the extermination of the bison as a “strategic” part of colonial expansion. The eradication of the animal “was seen as the taming of the West, of domesticating this wild space that was needed in order for expansion of settlement”.
The colonial mass slaughter of bison dealt a lasting blow to tribes that relied on the animal for sustenance. In the aftermath, nations reliant on bison fared measurably, permanently worse than nations that were never bison-reliant, for example suffering from higher child mortality than those other nations, according to a comparative study. The study concludes that the loss set the bison nations on a fundamentally different trajectory that continues to this day.

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Contains some upsetting scenes.

The picture that tells a little-known chapter of America
Native Americans had hunted bison for centuries. For bison nations, it was part of their primarily nomadic culture and the animals provided them with vital sustenance – meat for food, hides for shelter and clothing, and bones for tools. (In common parlance and historical sources, the animals are often referred to as buffalo, as that’s what early settlers called them – though the two are in fact different.)
Indigenous peoples across North America relied on the animal, Hubbard says. “So to remove that keystone species was to weaponise starvation against indigenous peoples: to weaken us in order to control us and remove us from our territories.”
Despite the bisons’ usefulness, estimates put the Native American hunters’ take at less than 100,000 a year, hardly making a dent on the early 1800s population of between 30 and 60 million bison.
By 1 January 1889, there were just 456 pure-breed bison left in the US – and 256 of them were in captivity, protected in Yellowstone National Park and a handful of other sanctuaries.
This photo is not a bracing reminder of the harms of colonial pasts. It is an indictment on commercial consumption practices – Bethany Hughes
The reasons for the mass bison slaughter are numerous: they include the building of three railway lines through the most populous bison areas, which brought new demand for the animal’s hide and meat; modern rifles that made killing bison relatively easy; a lack of protective measures which could have curbed hunting. But there was also more sinister, targeted reason for the animals’ decline than just an increased demand for bison products – more on this later. And even the settlers’ seemingly practical need for bison meat and hide was ultimately intertwined with colonisation and conquest, historians say.
“A desire for wealth and power in the form of land ownership, chattel slavery, the drive for unending growth and profit, and the commodification of natural resources is the reason for the intense overhunting of bison and the political and physical attacks on indigenous nationhood and humanity over five centuries,” says Bethany Hughes, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s department of Native American studies.
When the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, it accelerated the decimation of the species. In 1871, a Pennsylvania tannery developed a method of converting bison hides into commercial leather. Swarms of hide hunters decimated central plains herds with a “shocking rapidity”, one study noted.
The infamous image of bison skulls was taken at the Michigan Carbon Works, a refinery that processed bones. There, the bison bones were processed into charcoal that the sugar industry used to filter and purify sugar – the bones were also used as glue and fertiliser.