George Rogers Clark built Fort Jefferson on the east side of the Mississippi five miles south of its confluence with the Ohio in 1779 to control access and consolidate his forces. Shortly thereafter about 1000 Chickasaw and Cherokee besieged the fort. The defenders ran low on food, so a group of men stole out at night, crossed the river, and went 12 miles to Matthews Prairie in present day New Madrid County, Missouri. The goal was hunting buffalo. The hunters killed what meat they could pack on their backs, carried it back across the river, and saved those in the fort.
Present-day Southeast Missourians often find it unbelievable that wild buffalo, or bison, occurred throughout our region. While bison never occurred in the vast numbers of the Great Plains, herds of dozens to hundreds were present at the time of European settlement. The range of bison once ended at about the Mississippi River. This was not because the area to the east was poor habitat for the animals but is thought to be because high populations of Indigenous people limited their numbers.
When the first settlers came ashore on the East Coast, however, they encountered buffalo. This is a result of the effect of introduced human diseases on native peoples. The earliest accounts, such as that of the DeSoto expedition, recount large populations of Indigenous people. The same expeditions brought diseases to which the natives had no resistance. Some authorities estimate as much as 95% mortality of the native people in the 1500s. So, by the early 1600s, 100 years later, bison spread readily because of lessened hunting.
This depopulation of humans had other effects on Southeast Missouri’s bison. The few surviving accounts suggest bison grazed on sand prairies (such as Matthews Prairie and others), but often spent the winter in or near stands of native bamboo, or cane. Cane foliage is green all year, nutritious, and relished by grazing animals. Cane also regenerates in open bottomland areas and covered vast areas of southeast Missouri by the late 1700s. Prior to that, the area supported large human populations. These people farmed in many areas. With their death from introduced diseases, their abandoned fields grew to cane, and provided vast new habitat for bison and other animals.
Unregulated hunting had greatly reduced Missouri buffalo by the time of statehood in 1821. Free-ranging Buffalo remained in parts of Missouri by the 1830s. Perhaps the most detailed account was that of the traveler George W. Featherstonhaugh from 1834. He and his son visited a Mr. Eppes in the area that is Butler County today. Eppes and his son had just returned from a successful elk hunt in the “Big Swamp” to the east. They had left some horses to graze in the extensive canebrakes along either the Black or St. Francis rivers. There, “they crossed a broad ‘sign’ or track of buffalo, where at least forty of them had recently passed. This they knew by their dung, the marks of their hoof, and the peculiar tracks these animals make when they travel.”
By the 1840s only a few buffalo remained in the southeastern and northwestern parts of the state, and the last Missouri report was during that decade in Camden County. Today farmed bison occur in some Missouri locations, and two confined free-ranging herds in Prairie State Park in Barton County and the Nature Conservancy’s Dunn Ranch Prairie in Harrison County. The latter one is a “pure” bison herd, since many of the remaining bison descend from animals crossbred with cattle.
