This Eerie Photo of Bison Skulls Has an Even Darker Backstory

Detroit — Humans disrupt the natural world around us, and one of the most dramatic examples of this in American history is remembered through a single photograph.

The grisly photo shows two men standing on an almost unfathomably large mountain of bison skulls. It's the most famous photograph documenting the near-extinction of American bison that took place throughout the 1800s, and it was taken in none other than Rougeville, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, right where the Michigan Carbon Works used to be.

In those days, the plant was known as “Boneville.”

At the end of the 1700s, there were an estimated 30 to 60 million bison in North America. By the time this photo was taken, there were only 456 left.

This massive decline didn't happen for a single reason. It was the result of several things happening at once.

Native Americans had already been hunting bison for centuries. They relied on the animals for food, clothing, shelter and tools. But things started to change when white settlers began moving west throughout the early 1800s and realized that bison were actually worth a lot of money.

Almost every part of their bodies could be sold. Their hides, meat, even their bones were worth something. You could grind them down and use them to make things like fertilizer and bone charcoal.

At the same time, railroads were rapidly expanding across the Great Plains, making it much easier for commercial hunters to reach the enormous bison herds and ship to buyers all over the country.

By the 1870s, commercial bison hunting had absolutely exploded. New methods made it possible to turn their thick hides into commercial leather, and hunters were killing as many as 250 bison a day, leaving millions slaughtered by the end of the decade.

This was also all happening at the same time as the U.S. government was forcing Native American tribes off their traditional lands and onto reservations. Because many tribes throughout the Great Plains relied so heavily on bison for survival, some historians argue that the mass killing of bison should be understood in connection with the broader displacement and destruction of Native American communities.

Some U.S. military and government officials at the time openly supported the destruction of bison for this exact reason, believing that eliminating the animals these Native communities depended on would make it easier to force them onto reservations and under government control.

Within just a few decades, herds that once numbered in the millions had nearly disappeared.

What I think makes the famous Michigan photograph even more striking is that these thousands of skulls weren't the result of one giant hunt. The bones had been deliberately gathered from across the Great Plains and shipped east to Michigan as an entire second industry formed around the bison remains that had been left behind.

Bone hunters gathered old skeletons, sold them by weight, and shipped them by train to factories like Michigan Carbon Works, where they were processed into things like fertilizer, glue, and bone charcoal.

But what nobody realized at the time was that killing millions of bison at such an extreme rate was going to create problems on a much larger scale.

Bison are a keystone species, meaning they play such an important role in their environment that removing them can destroy an entire ecosystem.

Their grazing helped shape vegetation across the prairies. When they rolled around in the dirt, they created depressions called wallows that filled with rainwater and became habitats for frogs and tadpoles.

Even their poop mattered.

Hundreds of species of insects can live in bison dung, which then provides food for birds, turtles, bats… you've heard this story before. Remove one link from the chain, and the entire system collapses.

Not only did their disappearance disrupt the entire prairie ecosystem, but it also devastated Native American communities that had relied on bison for generations on everything from food and materials to important cultural traditions.

Luckily, despite all of this, bison didn't completely disappear. Thanks to the few hundred animals that survived and more than a century of conservation efforts, their populations slowly began to recover and today, tens of thousands of bison are living in conservation herds across North America.

Back in Rougeville, the Michigan Carbon Works is long gone, but the famous photograph taken outside of it will live on forever. It's an eerie photo with a depressing backstory yes, but it's also a remarkable piece of American history with an unexpected connection to Michigan.