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Official website: https://to.pbs.org/buffalo | #AmericanBuffaloPBS The American Buffalo, a new two-part, four-hour series, takes viewers on a journey through more than 10,000 years of North American history and across some of the continent’s most iconic landscapes, tracing the animal’s evolution, significance to the Great Plains, near demise, and relationship to the Indigenous People of North America. This program is made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station: https://www.pbs.org/donate Subscribe to the PBS channel for more clips: https://www.youtube.com/PBS/ Enjoy full episodes of your favorite PBS shows anytime, anywhere with the free PBS App: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR FOLLOW US: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PBS/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/PBS/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/PBS/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pbs Shop: https://shop.pbs.org/ #buffalo #kenburns #documentaries More about THE AMERICAN BUFFALO For thousands of generations, buffalo (species bison bison) have evolved alongside Indigenous people who relied on them for food and shelter, and, in exchange for killing them, revered the animal. The stories of Native people anchor the series, including the Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne of the Southern Plains; the Lakota, Salish, Kootenai, Mandan-Hidatsa, and Blackfeet from the Northern Plains; and others. Numbering an estimated 30 million in the early 1800s, the herds began declining for a variety of reasons, including the lucrative buffalo robe trade, the steady westward settlement of an expanding United States, diseases introduced by domestic cattle, and drought. But the arrival of the railroads in the early 1870s, and a new demand for buffalo hides to be used in the belts driving industrial machines back East, brought thousands of hide hunters to the Great Plains. In just over a decade the number of bison collapsed from 12-15 million to fewer than a thousand, representing one of the most dramatic examples of our ability to destroy the natural world. By 1900, the American buffalo teetered on the brink of disappearing forever, and Native people of the Plains entered one of the most traumatic moments of their existence.