In 1967 the great regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton laid down on canvas perhaps the most poignant painting about the trajectory of the 19th century American West any western painter has ever produced. Benton based Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek on a 1805 account in the explorers’ journals, and in a further nod to reality, on an actual place: the painting dramatically captures the hues, lines, and rhythms of the White Cliffs in today’s Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. But what makes Benton’s canvas one of the West’s great paintings is not his use of explorer journals or his abstract rendering of a well-known western locale, but the story the painting tells. In Lewis and Clark at Eagle Creek, the West of the previous ten-thousand years still exists and it looms over the arriving Americans, who appear a minor blip in the timeline of a world impossibly ancient. That sense of a timelessness, carried by a sensuous river and the forms and colors of immense space, dwarf any foreboding about the Old World having discovered this remote, interior piece of the continent.

Now let the mind leap a quarter-century ahead in time. When the decade of the 1830s dawns, a calm, confident American West has somehow contracted in both size and grand promise. The western world that had Lewis and Clark marveling, built by a hundred centuries of Native inhabitation and a magnificent diversity and abundance of wild animals, was yet intact when the explorers had passed Eagle Creek. But the 1830s is the decade when any resistance to high-speed change becomes forever futile for the West. Vastness and abundance are both shrinking. As the famed Maximilian-Bodmer expedition on the Missouri River documents so well, the bigger world is rushing in.

History does not remain in the past, so it is not a special insight to realize that no time exists apart from what went before, or after. Human-caused climate change hasn’t popped into existence in our 21st century with no advance warning, and what we do about it today, or don’t, will affect planetary life profoundly in years to come. Still, there are decades in the human story – the 1960s, for instance, when civil rights, women’s rights, ecological concerns, and a growing mistrust of wars changed America – that do stand as exceptional. For North America west of the Mississippi River, and especially for the region’s environmental story, the “long 1830s decade” spanning years from the late 1820s through the early 1840s is one of those exceptional and memorable times. With its arrival, a West that had been relatively quiescent for thousands of years was rapidly morphing into something so new it shocked many who witnessed it.

Stories about the West have long dazzled the world. From Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West of more than a century ago to today’s Yellowstone, the West’s stories fascinate because they offer up an edenic world to human design. Despite our lingering romance for 1830s accounts of Mountain Men, or the Overlanders on the Oregon Trail, however, the West’s environmental stories have never made much of a dent in our historical memory of the region and its frontier. Nevertheless, much of what happened in the classic West in truth centered around an environmental exploitation that brought the West into reach of Old World templates. In reality, environmental stories are central to western history. There are a great many western environmental stories, and they reveal truths that Kit Carson or Narcissa Whitman romance always seems to obscure.

In roughly chronological order, then, consider how these stories about the western environment offer a different way to see the West a third of the way through the 19th century.

At the start of the 1830s decade the prevailing notion about the West was captured by another American exploring expedition, this one led by Stephen Long, which in 1819-1820 had crossed the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Intriguingly, Long’s party was convinced at the outset of the 1820s decade that the ancient, quiescent world they’d seen was still the best future for the West. The region they had explored was “almost wholly unfit for cultivation,” they claimed, so “of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture.” They found the country “peculiarly adapted as a range for buffaloes, wild goats, and other wild game” in “incalculable multitudes.”(1) Thus the West was best left as “a frontier,” a region to hold American expansion in check. Which by no means implied, however, that they thought the West should just be left to the Native people or Spanish settlers.

That was because the American idea of a frontier rested on the prior history of the Atlantic Seaboard, South, and Mississippi Valley. All those had initially functioned as wildlands exploited for their animal wealth. By Long’s time that stage for the West was already underway, especially on the Pacific Coast, where sea otters and fur seals were attracting a frenzied exploitation by the fur hunters of the U.S. and several European nations. And now, along interior rivers like the Missouri and Arkansas, beavers and many other species of furbearers were becoming the targets as agents of the American Fur Company, the Missouri Fur Company, and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company established trading posts and rendezvous fairs. The global market economy, voracious in its appetites for wealth from animals, offering native people a transformative technology for their participation in it, had arrived.

While the Long party offered a future for the Great Plains, elsewhere in the West Mexico’s successful revolution against Spain had also opened Texas, New Mexico, and California – for the first time – to outside trade for western animal wealth. Within a decade American fur hunters Mexico allowed into the Southwest so completely destroyed beaver populations in the New Mexico and Colorado mountains that by 1832 the fur men were scouring rivulets even on the arid High Plains for beavers and muskrats. In those same years, as American mountain men famously held their annual rendezvous fairs in future Wyoming’s Wind River country, the Hudson’s Bay Company in Canada came up with a draconian solution to block Americans from the Northwest when it decided to create a “fur desert” and “ruin the country” in the Northern Rocky Mountains. So between 1823 and 1841 British trappers destroyed 35,000 beavers and drained six-thousand beaver ponds from present-day Montana, Idaho, and Utah in an imperial game that altered the ecology of that part of the West for decades.(2)

Another animal actor was becoming a significant source of wealth elsewhere in the West. In a replication of the Pleistocene, horses escaped from Spanish settlements in Texas, New Mexico, and California were filling the long-vacant equine niche in North America. By the 1830s at least three million of them galloped the grasslands from South Texas to the Columbian Plateau to the yellow hills of California. Although live capture of wild horses could be brutal, the majority of the animals often dying in the process, South Texas and Great Plains horses had been commodity targets of mustanging expeditions since the 1790s. And you needed wild horses to be alive to make money from them. With beaver steadily vanishing as the 1830s wore on, former trappers needed a way to retrain. So by the 1840s Bill Williams, Jim Beckwourth, Solomon Sublette, and Joseph Walker were shifting their focus from beavers to horse acquisition in California, driving herds of thousands eastward to supply overland migrants, the military, and an advancing American frontier.

In other words, the formerly quiescent West had now become another American frontier that capitalism and geopolitics were ransacking.

Some of our best accounts of the remaining ecological diversity of the West in these years come not from otter or beaver or horse hunters but from those who traveled for science or art. In 1832 the self-taught Philadelphia painter George Catlin journeyed with fur traders up the Missouri River, and two years later traveled with a military expedition deep into the Southern Plains. Known today largely for his paintings of native people, Catlin also paid close attention to western ecology, leaving us imagery of scenes such as wolf packs attacking bison, and famously, the Southern Plains of today’s Oklahoma speckled with colorful bands of wild horse.

Exploring the Missouri the year after Catlin, Prince Maximillian of the German province of Wied-Neuwied performed a far more professional scientific study, one aided by the Swiss artist he had hired to document the journey, Karl Bodmer. Maximillian collected and stored specimens and confided ecological details in his journal, including descriptions of prairie fires the native people set to manage the grasslands as a vast pasturage for wild ungulates. Young Karl Bodmer left the future unforgettable pictures of both native people and western wildlife, executing natural history paintings that included exquisite portraits of iconic western animals: a coyote, a whooping crane, a pronghorn, a bighorn sheep, a full body rendering of a bull elk, and a gorgeous quartering portrait of a bison bull.

When these two Europeans saw the West, except for its dwindling furbearers, its wildlife diversity and abundance were still intact. Somewhere between 20 and 30 million bison yet grazed the plains. With a wider range, pronghorns probably numbered 15 million. Grizzlies and elk ranged from the plains to the Pacific Coast, the big bears then reaching at least 55,000 south of Canada. There were probably between two and three million western wolves in the 1830s, the greatest number of them on the plains, where (as plainsman Josiah Gregg put it) among animals “the sceptre of authority has been lodged with the large gray wolf.”(3)

Then there was the world-famous natural history artist John James Audubon, who made his only foray into the West up the Missouri River a decade after Maximilian. Preceded both by the German and Meriwether Lewis, Audubon made few discoveries beyond adding a dozen birds and the black-footed ferret to science. But in his journal he made many poignant comments about the state of the West. Gobsmacked by the abundance and diversity of western wildlife, he wrote that “it is impossible to describe or even conceive the vast multitudes of these animals that exist even now, and feed on these ocean-like prairies.” Wolves howled and buffalo roared “like the long continued roll of a hundred drums. . . . the roaring can be heard for miles.”(4)

Yet there was a depressive undercurrent as observers like Prince Maximilian and Audubon witnessed this diversity of ancient American life. All around them agents of the global market were murdering western wild animals of every kind. “Sport” had even arrived. With four trips he took from 1833 to 1843, the British nobleman William Drummond Stewart was setting a template for safari hunts in the West, which other well-heeled adventurers would embrace both there and in Africa. While elephants, lions, leopards, and wildebeests were the targets in Africa, America’s safari prizes were bison, grizzlies, pronghorns, elk, sheep, and wolves slaughtered in the name of “field sports.” It was a senseless obsession that produced (as one of Stewart’s companions said) “a tumbling ocean of buffalo blood.”(5) Audubon put it this way: “What a terrible destruction of life as if it were for nothing or next to it.”(6)

The 19th century revolution in transportation was another game-changer, and before there were railroads there was the steamboat. First employed on the Missouri River at the beginning of the 1830s, steamboats could easily haul trade goods up western rivers, and heavy skins like those of bison and elk down to markets. As soon as steamboats plied western rivers, 100,000 Indian-produced bison robes a year began arriving in St. Louis and New Orleans. But a facilitated transport wasn’t the only change affecting bison. As a consequence of U.S. policies re-locating 87,000 native people to the Southern prairies in Oklahoma, along with the fur trade’s rapid destruction of buffalo west of the Rockies, by the 1830s the bison’s ancient range resembled a lake drying from its perimeter shorelines inward. Even on the shortgrass plains where buffalo had long out-adapted their human pursuers, their ancient supremacy was crumbling. Overland emigrants on the Oregon Trail taking new settlers west in the 1830s routinely blazed away at every wild animal they saw, even while their oxen were introducing foreign bovine diseases – anthrax and bovine tuberculosis – to the wild herds. All the while, spreading herds of wild horses were now competing in western ecologies for grass and water, further reducing wildlife abundance.

This multiplicity of western environmental changes was ominous. They were even happening on a macro scale. By the 1840s the climatic phase now called the Little Ice Age was beginning to wind down in the West. Its several centuries of abundant moisture and cool temperatures had been a boon for western wildlife and the people who depended on them. As the Little Ice Age faded, a series of western droughts began to shrivel the West’s ecological carrying capacity. Among western Siouan groups, the Winter Counts they kept to record the most significant events of every year indicate that in the early 1840s what the tribes most remembered were ceremonies performed by their shamans to call buffalo, which for reasons they struggled to understand now seemed far less numerous than ever before.

I think of those Native Winter Counts as less a handwriting on the wall than a flashing neon sign. They were a clear signal, from people who knew the West more intimately than anyone else, that the long-quiessent ecological world the native tribes had shown to Lewis and Clark in 1805 was rapidly unraveling, already becoming something else. After 10,000 years of human life amidst an ancient bestiary of creatures, now rampant, often purposeless, destruction took hold as markets, geopolitics, and “sport” became a feature of almost every western region.

And it had not even taken four decades for it to happen.

Further Reading

Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns, Blood Memory: The Tragic Decline and Improbable Resurrection of the American Buffalo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).

Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016).

Dan Flores, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals and People in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2022).