Daily Inspiration Quote by George Crook

A military man poses the question like a shrug, but it lands like an indictment. Crook’s plain, almost logistical phrasing - “all gone,” “can’t catch enough,” “there aren’t enough” - stages scarcity as an arithmetic trap. Each clause tightens the vise: first the buffalo vanish, then the fallback food fails, then even the fallback disappears. The rhythm mimics a closing frontier, but for Native people it’s a closing world.

The intent is double-edged. On its face, it reads as paternal concern from a U.S. Army officer who spent much of his career fighting the very communities he’s now describing. Yet that concern is framed inside the vocabulary of inevitability. No perpetrators appear. No policy, no hunters, no railroads, no bounties, no deliberate slaughter. The buffalo aren’t killed; they are “gone,” like weather. That grammatical erasure is the subtext: a colonial catastrophe converted into a natural problem awaiting administrative solutions.

Context matters: by the 1870s and 1880s, the near-extermination of bison was not an accident; it was a strategy that cleared land and broke Indigenous autonomy. Crook, often cast as comparatively “sympathetic,” still speaks from within that apparatus. The question “What are they to do?” reads less like an invitation to justice than a prompt for containment - rations, reservations, dependency - the menu of options created by the same forces that emptied the plains.

It works because it exposes the cruel elegance of engineered hunger: remove the keystone species, then ask the dispossessed to improvise. The line turns moral violence into a management dilemma, and that’s precisely the point.