Environmental Value

How many times have you read about the American Indian using every part of the buffalo, leaving nothing to waste?

The implication is that the White man wasted most of it.

Often this is accompanied with a picture of skinned bison carcasses left to rot on the prairie.

Very often it's impugned that the waste continues to this very day with cattle.

Except for the systematic eradication of the American Bison, such waste was uncommon even back then.

But why would someone use every part of an animal they've killed?

Those parts have value!

The list of things you can make from the carcass of a critter is nearly endless, but an Indian, being TL0, is going to have a different list of uses from an 1880's American, TL5.

Hardly anything goes to waste in a TL5 slaughterhouse.

What about the bison?

Professionals study logistics.

The goal was to force the Indians onto the reservations and as long as there were buffalo, they didn't need to go.  They could subsist readily on their own as long as there were enough buffalo to harvest.

Buffalo were the plains Indian log-train entire.

When the decision was made to kill as many buffalo as possible, the Army agreed to buy the meat and the hunters already had a market for hides.  But little else could be transported to where it could be utilized.

Remember, this is back in the days where cows were transported near to where they'd be used before slaughter because there was no refrigeration.

You really couldn't do a bison drive to a railhead and get them to Chicago to be used like a cow would be.

Even with the Army's units handy, there was more meat than they could use and no good way to preserve it for later in the quantities needed.

So the Army stopped buying the meat, but did keep paying a bounty on dead bison.