Dobak demonstrates that railroads were not necessarily essential to the eradication of buffalo.
For citations on recent literature on bison, see Geoff Cunfer.
Andrew Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000).
Dan Flores, "Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850," Journal of American History 78 (Sept. 1991): 465-85..
I have used Flores, "Bison Ecology," 47, 481, of six million out of an earlier eight million rather than Isenberg, Destruction of the Bison, 138, which has the higher number of 15 million following the Civil War.
Hornaday provides the four million figure. The northern herd was considerably smaller.
Isenberg, Destruction of Bison, 131.
M. Scott Taylor, "Buffalo Hunt: International Trade and the Virtual Extinction of the North American Bison," Working Paper 12969, National Bureau of Economic Research, March 2007, 9-11.
Isenberg, Destruction of Bison, 157, 159.
Taylor, "Buffalo Hunt," 46.
Richard White, "Animals and Enterprise," in Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss, eds., The Oxford History of the American West, (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994), 237.