'Guns, Germs, and Steel' - This is controversial?

Cafe Society
141

The problem is that while saying that Diamond simultaneously concedes that there is nothing about the bison themselves that prevented domestication, and he concedes that we know this because with just 100 years of trying bison have been successfully domesticated by Europeans.

I don’t know whether you missed it, but this is excactly what everyone has been criticising. Diamond adopts a position that there is something about bison that make them undomesticable as you admit, yet in the very same chapter he admits that bison have been domesticated by Eupeans in less than a centuruy and even that “bison meat occasionally appears in some US supermarkets”.

So how does Diamond reconcile those two apparently contradictory views? Well despite that factthat bison have been so rapidly domestistces he claims they aren;t really domesticated because “none of these efforts has yielded a result of sufficient economic value to attract many ranchers.”

The man is moving the goalposts. He starts out saying that something about bison makes it energeticaly impossible to domesticate them, yet when faced with the fact that they can be rapidly domesticated he switches to a completely different argument about their ability to compete economically in an established market with selectively bred hybrid beef cattle.

It’s like saying that because recycled sewage water hasn’t attracted many customers this proves that there is something inherent in recycling water that makes it impossible. And you see nothing wrong with that argument?

142

All of which just makes my speculation about the lack of sedentary crop farming overlapping with bison range all the more plausible. :slight_smile:

143

Yes, but it leaves the problem that the vast majority of people living in the bison’s geographic range were crop farmers who only supplemented their diet with bison meat. IOW the lack of overlap is fictional. While the overlap of farming and the bison’s range wasn’t perfect it was a lot better than the overlap of HGs and the bison’s range.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by sedentary farming. The idea of having permanent fields that are never fallowed is fairly recent phenomenon even in Europe, and postdates the domstesication of animals by many years.

144

Huh? Cite? Most of the bison’s range is the Great Plains, and to a lesser extent into the boreal forest to the north. I’m not aware of any significant penetration of corn farming into this area. Corn extended up the eastern seaboard, and into what’s now the Southwest US. Now, I could be wrong about this, but I’ve honestly never heard of Plains Indians having anything to do with corn before.

145

Oh, and by sedentary farming, I mean permanent villages as opposed to quasi-nomadic moving about between planting seasons. This existed, again along the east coast of the US, but there the hunting was almost exclusively of whitetail deer. My theory is that so long as you’re free to follow the bison, you have next to no incentive to try to get the bison to follow you instead.

146

No, you aren’t entirely wrong on that point, the Plains Indians at the time of European contact were nomadic HGs for the most part, but that is a derived trait. Before Europeans re-introduced horses to the Americas they had been mostly farmers. As such even they had centuries at least existing as farmers in which they could have domesticated bison. They only moved onto the plains as hunters because they had never domesticated bison when they were farmers. Had they domesticated the species they could have lived as nomadic herdsmen do on the African grasslands. And of course in some parts of the Great Plains, notably the Missouri valley, Indians even formed large fortified towns, which of course was only possible because they were farmers. So while it’s true enough to say that Great Plains Indians were mostly HGs when European first settled its’ not true to say that this was the situation for the entire period they lived there. Some tribes had always been HGs, but most within that range were farmers

Where you are really wrong is in your belief that most of the bison’s range is the Great Plains, and to a lesser extent into the boreal forest to the north. As I posted earlier, even in historic times bison ranged from Mexico to Canada and from Pennsylvania to California, ie their range was most of what is now the mainland USA and sizable chunks of Canada and Mexico. There’s a reasonable map of historic bison distribution here ( www.northern.edu/natsource/MAMMALS/Bison1.htm ). As you can see by no stretch is most of the range contained within the Great Plains and northern forests. It’s really only Arizona, parts of New England and Alaska that never had buffalo.

Numerous problems.

First off sedentary farmers indisputably existed in the Missouri valley and New Mexico/Arizona amongst other places. We know that because they left behind the ruins of bloody great fortified towns. You don’t build fortified towns if you are nomadic. So we know for certain that sedentary farming wasn’t only practised along the east coast but was quite widespread. How widespread we will never know, because of course permanent villages are densely populated and easy to flee to, making them the hardest hit by introduced epidemics. It’s impossible to say how much Indian culture was village based before disease struck the continent, but we know that it was far more than what the Europeans actually saw.

The next problem is that the HGs wern’t free to follow the bison. As with such people everywhere they could only follow the bison until they left their home territory. Follow them any further and they risked war.

The next problem is that this doesn’t explain any differences at all between Eurasia and the Americas. People in Eurasia were just as free to follow the cattle and bison as people in America were to follow the bison. Yet the people in Eurasia domesticated their animals, people in the Americas didn’t.

Then we have to deal with the fact that Europeans were probably nomadic farmers when they domesticated animals.

This is now running a real risk of becoming more ad hoc reasoning of the type that Diamond engaged in to explain discrepancies. Every time that an exception is found to falsify a theory we try to plug up the gap with qualifiers. They are what one of my uni professors called ‘fudge factors”. If the equation doesn’t fir the data then introduce a fudge factor, and keep introducing them until it fits, no matter how convoluted it gets. That’s not strictly unscientific or logically invalid, but as Popper said, it weakens the science the more you do it.

So we hypothesise that Indians weren’t farmers within the buffalo’s range, then we discover they are, so we hypothesise that they need to be sedentary farmers, and when we discover evidence of widespread fortified villages we modify it again, and again, and again. The problem with this is that it takes an elegant explanation and forces it to fit the data no matter how convoluted and untestable it becomes. We could make any theory at all fit if we could add qualifiers every time an observation falsified it. It inevitably means that our theory is no more satisfactory than any other physically possible explanation, including genetic and cultural ones.

147

They reverted to being hunter-gatherers after getting horses? Fascinating. News to me, but not a huge shock. So, looks like my theory is shot. Frankly, I think your cultural theory is next to useless. There’s just too many cultures over too long a time frame for it to be plausible that all of them had some arbitrary cultural taboo against domestication, like the arbitrary anti-camel meat cultural views in your earlier example. If every last culture in contact with bison had some cultural reasons for not domesticating them, then there simply has to be an underlying reason of some sort. Anything else is postulating a coincidence of mammoth proportions. So where does that leave us?

Maybe the ornery sumbitches really aren’t domesticable without using modern techniques, i.e., physical restriction to large pastures via fences, and no direct control over breeding. Even today’s “domesticated” bison aren’t remotely herdable, and won’t stick around without fences the way cattle will. I dunno. I just find vague handwaving towards arbitrary cultural mores that are nonetheless entirely uniform across hundreds of groups and thousands of years even less compelling than Diamond’s undomesticable bison hypothesis.

148

That’s probably a bit simplistic, but broadly true. What probably happened is that many areas of the great plains simply weren’t occupied. People travelled across them but never lived in them. The arrival of horses allowed the farmers living in river valleys and on the margins of the plains to multiply and split into new tribes, one in the old territory and one living in the plains. But the ancestors of the plains Indians seem to have been farmers as often as not. IIRC the Cheyenne were one group that really did abandon agriculture completely for hunting, but they were bale to supplement that with pillaging so it may not have been typical.

But once again I stress that I ever said that culture was the solution, simply that it is no more problematic or implausible than biogeogaphic explanations. Raising objections to a cultural answer really doesn’t get us anywhere, because exactly the same objections are going to plague any alternative explanations. We know that buffalo weren’t domesticated, we know that they can be, and we know that there is no biogeographic commonality over the buffalo’s range.

Yes, but this is just a rehash of Diamond’s position, and with all the same bugbears.

The biggest problem is that it’s still a tortured, forced fit explanation. It essentially attempts to explain away the problem, rather than explaining it.

And it’s dangerously close to a True Scotsman.

a) “We don’t know why buffalo weren’t domesticate by Indians, therefore they mustn’t be domesticable.”
b) “But that man domesticated buffalo.”
a) “No, he didn’t truly domesticate them.”

See, we have no evidence or any reason to believe that bison can’t be herded, and considerable evidence that they can. It’s certainly not true to say that they aren’t remotely herdable. They may not be as tractable as cattle after 6000 years of selective breeding for tractability, but they can be and routinely are herded.

And we have no evidence that wild cattle could be herded, and some written records saying that they can’t. And if you believe that cattle will stick around without fences that is only because you have never seen cattle in an environment where they could escape. There is a good reason why we build barbed wire fences, and why every part of the world where they have had the chance cattle have gone feral. It’s not because they are prone to sticking around.

So it all comes down to ad hoc reasoning. We have no evidence that buffalo are any less domesticable than aurochs so we are forced to invent reasons that might imply that they are. But we could even more easily say that they are more domesticable, and support that with at least a little evidence.

I find neither explanation particularly satisfactory, but we have evidence that cultural taboos can cover huge ranges and diverse cultural groups for millennia. Australia is just as large as the US, and at least as culturally diverse and has been settled for even longer. We also know that people in Australia never adopted the use of the bow despite having ample exposure to it. That can only be explained as a cultural decision that influenced hundreds of groups over thousands of years. Similarly North Americans never adopted the wheel for transport, not even a wheelbarrow or handcart despite having ample exposure to the wheel. Once again that can’t be explained geographically. So unless we are to conclude that the people were genetically precluded form using wheelbarrows we have to assume that too was a cultural artefact that influenced hundreds of groups over thousands of years. From the evidence we do have it seems that it’s entirely possible for cultural decisions to influence hundreds of groups over thousands of years.
In contrast we know there is no geographic or biological barrier to domesticating buffalo. As such the cultural explanation, dubious as it is, is more compelling than the alternatives.

149

You gradually change your wording here in order to attribute to Diamond a silly argument that he never makes. In the case of Japan, he does not claim that “environmental features explain the cultural decision to reject guns.” He says, as you’re clearly aware, that geographical conditions made it possible for Japan, but not Europe, to reject guns. These are two very different statements.

150

No, you selectively edited my posts and pasted them together to make it appear that way. Clearly you have been taking lessons form Michael Moore.

No, they are not very different statements, they are two sides of the same coin.

“Geographical conditions made it possible for Japan, but not Europe, to decide to reject guns” is simply the converse of “geographical conditions made it impossible for Europe, but not Japan, to decide to reject guns.” That is something that you should be well aware of, but apparently are not. Diamond is making a special case attempt at explaining why the decision could only have arisen in Japan, why it it wasn’t possible for it to have arisen in Europe and why, by extension, European culture isn’t superior but simply a product of a lucky environmental lottery.

That was precislely my original point and one that I am sticking by, despite your disingenuous and dishonest attempts at implying otherwise by selective editing.

As I previously stated quite clearly the position is an ad hoc, case-by-case attempt to reconcile obvious flaws to the desired theory. To avoid conceding that Europeans made ‘superior’ choices he say that such choices could effectively never be made in Europe because they were unworkable there, all with no evidence whatsoever.

151

No, we don’t know that. No one has ever domesticated bison using stone age tech.

As for herdable, bison are only herdable in the sense that they will run away from you (usually - and the alternative is extremely unnerving). Of course, various Indian groups had been exploiting that for millenia, as is seen by the innumberable buffalo pounds and drops. Run a herd over a cliff or into a makeshift corral and shoot them at your leisure. Well, not exactly leisure. When bison are confined as they would have been in a pound, they panic and run in circles at top speed looking for an exit. I’ve seen them do this in a chute about 10’ x 40’, and it was just incredible how fast they managed to move in spite of being so confined. So shooting them still would have been a non-trivial enterprise. But I digress. We know that Indians “herded” bison in this way. This, however, is entirely irrelevant to being able to herd them as one would domesticated sheep or cattle, where one moves the herd around in a controlled fashion without elaborate and heavily-constructed handling systems and miles and miles and miles of 6’ high electrified fencing. Even with elaborate and heavily-constructed handling systems, modern bison herds are not easily controlled. They can and do destroy heavy steel gates. They kill themselves trying to get out of pens with walls too high to jump. In short, if aurochs of time long past behaved the way modern “domesticated” bison do, they would never have been retained. They would just have buggered off, never to be seen again. Unless those early nomadic farmers who domesticated them had foundries and TIG welders. (Note also that we don’t have any extant aurochs to study to determine whether or how their behaviour might have been different. I’m sure they were surly and oft-aggressive critturs, but we simply don’t know any details about how they behaved, and never will.)

Now, I’m not saying that it’s a fact that this obstacle couldn’t be overcome. Start with a bison calf isolated from a herd, and you may be able to alter its social behaviour patterns sufficiently to get somewhere, i.e., an adult bison that behaves differently than modern domesticated bison. I don’t know that we know this to be the case, though. (Especially when it comes to breeding season, something which is kind of important. If you raise a tame bison calf and it’s nicely docile, your work is all for not if it goes feral come breeding time. Note that modern practice with regards to bison breeding is to leave the herd the hell alone at that time of year.) But the simple fact is that saying that “they can be and routinely are herded” misses the point that the techniques used to “routinely” (it’s not really very routine, trust me) herd modern bison are beyond the technological means of stone age tribes. Maybe they could have used other means to get there. Quite possibly, given enough time and the development of other technology.

But it’s just not an established fact that domesticating bison was a feasible project for the actual pre-contact Indians who lived in the same regions as bison.

152

I think you may have missed VarlosZ’s point, which was that Diamond doesn’t contend that environmental features explain cultural decisions, but merely that they constrain what decisions a cultural can feasibly make.

I haven’t followed that part of the debate closely enough to know whether his characterization of what you said re: Japanese and guns is accurate or not, and do not comment on that aspect of things.

153

No, nor did I ever say it was feasible for stone age people to domesticate bison.

Nor did say that it was feasible for stone age people with red hair to domesticate bison.

Nor did I say that it was feasible for stone age people with red hair between the ages of 18 and 36.6 years to domesticate bison.

And so for every footling variation on the theme.

We will never, ever under any circumstances be able to know whether it was possible for bison to be domesticated accounting every conceivable unique feature of North American Indian life. That’s impossible. Which is why I pointed out that we know that bison can be domesticated, not domesticated by stone age people, but domesticated, period, under any circumstances. They can be domesticated.

There is no geographic or biological barrier to domesticating buffalo. There may be technological barriers, though we have no evidence for that, but my point still stands. Contrary to your assertion there are clearly no geographic or biological barrier to domesticating buffalo because we have domesticated them and neither the geography nor the biology of the beats has changed in the last hundred years. You never actually contend that point, you simply gainsay it.

That then leaves us resorting to precisely what I criticised earlier: introducing unending fudge factors that exploit every conceivable unique feature of North American Indian life.

They can’t be domesticated. They can’t be domesticated without farming. They can’t be domesticated without sedentary farming. They can’t be domesticated without sedentary farming and horses. They can’t be domesticated without sedentary farming and horses and bronze age technologies. And so forth. The problem with this tactic remains, and that is that using this tactic we can construct a theory that explains anything at all because we can always explain away any contradictory observations by introducing fudge factors.

It may not be unscientific or illogical, but it does mean that we vary our position in the debate every time anything contradicts it, meaning that we can never actually be engaged in a debate. Using precisely this technique I could construct an equally strong argument that it is culturally produced. Sure the cultures are variable and extend over a long time period, but I can introduce fudge factors to explain that away.

It isn’t true that bison can only be herded by running away from you. Not even close to true. Bison can be herded just as cattle can be herded. The only critical difference is that if a bison decides it doesn’t want to be pushed in a direction you can’t beat it or attack it with dogs to make it change its mind. That usually results in a stampede. However even that isn’t absolute, and doesn’t make them unherdable. Nor is their any reason to believe that aurochs are any different.

And all that terrible behaviour you describe for bison? I’ve seen it all in feral cattle. And more! They can and do destroy heavy steel gates. They kill themselves trying to get out of pens with walls too high to jump. They attack people and kill horses. They break their own limbs and necks trying to force their way through yard rails. They attack one another viciously from being confined. In short, we don’t need to look at aurochs of time long past to see cattle behaving the way modern “domesticated” bison do, we only need to look at modern feral herds. Yet feral herds are domestic cattle and easily re-domesticable for all that. After shooting any bulls and placing the cows and calves in pens without food and water for three days you wouldn’t know they were the same animals. Not tame by any means, but tractable enough for branding, dipping, ear tagging and the collection of blood samples, and ultimately tractable enough to be trucked to market.

All of which tells us what? That the way an unconditioned animal behaves tells us approximately nothing about its potential to be domesticated. That the fact that an animal acts in a violent and unpredictable way isn’t any indication at all of domesticability with perseverance. And most importantly it tells us that even if aurochs or their descendents behave in exactly the way modern “domesticated” bison do, they would can still be retained. So that particular argument holds no water.

And no, you don’t need foundries and TIG welders for this process. Solid hardwood logs and a crowbar and shovel have worked for generations. TIG welded portable yards are far more convenient in rough countries, but trap yards and wings that will handle the wildest beast can be built using nothing but timber. So your claims that any technology used in the handling f bison was beyond the means of Indians is simply not true. It was well within their capabilities.

Similarly your objections about breeding seasons. That is just as true of many Bos indicus bulls even today. These can be the nicest creatures most of the time, but one whiff of a bulling cow and they become unstoppable monsters. I’ve seen over a kilometre of three strand fencing destroyed by a couple of bulls that weren’t separated early enough. Barbed wire be damned, they just don’t feel pain. I’ve been chased by the damn things and I’ve seen the damage they can do. Even after they were domesticated bulls killed people often enough that the bible contains specific laws about the punishments for your bull killing someone. The idea that wild aurochs bull was any less uncontrollable than a buffalo bull makes no sense at all.

The trouble with all this is that it involves introducing exception, after exception after exception. I fully expect that now that I have told you about wooden yards (and I can provide references if you like) you will produce yet another exception that explains why Indians couldn’t build them. And of course you can. But the question now becomes one of when does it all stop? When will the exceptions become so numerous and convoluted that we accept that there is no particular reason to believe Indians would have a harder time domesticating Bison than Asians had domesticating aurochs? When does it just become special case pleasing for a favoured position that we are desperate to hold onto?

154

Someone raised that criticism quite a while back and I responded to it fully. VarlosZ knows that because he quoted from my response.

In short form the response is simply that there is no practical difference between “you can only feasibly make decisions within the constraints of your environment” and “the constraints of your environment explain the cultural decisions you can feasibly make”. It’s really that simple.

These aren’t wildly different arguments, they are practically the same.

If an English parliament couldn’t feasibly outlaw firearms (even if they desired to) because they were constrained by environment then for all practical purposes I can explain why they didn’t outlaw firearms by those constraining environmental features, can’t I? Maybe that doesn’t technically allow me to say that environmental features explained the cultural decision not to ban firearms, but the practical outcome is the same: England has firearms because of environment. That is true whether environment explains the decision or merely explains why the decision isn’t feasible. Anyone knowing about England’s environment could tell you that the English will inevitably decide not to ban firearms. If environment allows a prediction of the inevitable result then environment explains the result.

An English king may decide to grow bananas, but bananas are a tropical fruit, and so environment means that his decision isn’t feasible. Maybe that doesn’t technically allow me to say that environmental features explained his cultural decision to grow bananas, but the practical outcome is the same: England has no bananas because of environment. That is true whether environment explains the decision or merely explains why the decision isn’t feasible. Anyone knowing about England’s environment could tell you that the English will inevitably decide not to grow bananas. If environment allows a prediction of the inevitable result then environment explains the result.

As such I fail to see what the practical distinction is. If the English had no feasible choice but to decide to retain firearms due to environmental factors then doesn’t mean that environmental factors explain the choice to keep them? I’m having hard time understanding what the practical difference between those two points might be. Maybe in the absurd or hypothetical they might be distinct but in the concrete they mean the same thing.

Maybe all Englishmen could decide to fly to the moon, and maybe they will all die jumping off buildings. In such an absurd case the environment didn’t explain the decision to fly, just explained why it wasn’t feasible. The trouble is that in the real world England will still have people, even if they immigrate, and the new people must have decided not to fly, and that decision we can explain by environment. Outside the absurd and lunatics aside if the feasibility of a decision is dictated by environment then that decision is explained by environment.

155

You must look at at from the other side, the Japanese. They were, because of their isolation, free to make the decision. The could choose to ban firearms, or not to ban firearms. That doesn’t explain why they made the decision to ban them. It was a purely cultural decision and could have gone the other way. It just explains why they got away with it, while Europeans wouldn’t have gotten away with it.

156

It was inadvertant, but I did make a mistake, and I apologize. You did not subtly, nefariously alter your argument to make it easier to defend as the post went on. Rather, your argument was in error from the first line of the post (#138).

Exactly. It is not the converse of “geographical conditions determined that Japan, and not Europe, would reject guns.” Diamond “explains” the Japanese rejection of guns in explicitly cultural (and not, as you claim, geographic) terms, merely pointing out that geography made that choice sustainable:

Diamond does not provide examples of European rulers who tried to reject guns, but do you think that he is making that up out of whole cloth?

I don’t disagree that that, as worded, is Diamond’s argument. However, you go a great deal further than that in post #138. Examples:

1.

No, that is incorrect. Assuming that you are referring especially to the Japanese guns and Aboriginal bows, nowhere does Diamond imply that their abandonment of those technologies was an “inevitable result of geography.” Please provide a cite if you think I’m wrong.

2.

Emphasis added. Regarding the lack of agriculture, Diamond explains in detail why farming in the region was limited to the New Zealand highlands (pp. 295-311). If you find his explanation unsatisfying, fine, tell us why. But don’t just complain because he uses geography to explain it.

As for bows (or other technology), again, Diamond does not ascribe geographic reasons for their abandonment. As far as I can tell, he describes the abandonment of useful technology solely as being motivated by cultural forces. His actual position is this:

Emphasis added.

3.

Again, he never says that those decisions were a result of geography – please provide a cite if you disagree.

I also think that you’re misusing the phrase “strongly selected by.” Geography does not dictate, or even suggest, a particular decision toward technological reversion. It can, however, make such a decision feasible for a much longer period of time.

4.

This is a misrepresentation of what Diamond says. It implies that he ascribes solely geographic causes to the aboriginal failure to adopt bows, when he actually points out that the proximate cause was an accident of culture:

No, see above. He merely refers to the unknown cultural reasons for the aboriginal rejection of bows at Cape York, and does not imply that environmental features had anything to do with the decision (p. 316). Likewise, he details the cultural basis for the Japanese rejection of guns, and, again, does not imply an environmental explanation for the decision (pp. 257-8).

Finally:

Diamond does not seek to predict that such societies will lose technology. He only argues that it’s possible in some circumstances (sufficiently isolated socities), and impossible in others (closely packed, competing societies).

157

Yes, but the latter is not the argument you have been attributing to Diamond. Rather, you have portrayed his arguments as such: “the constraints of your environment explain the cultural decisions you do make.” This is clearly not his contention.

Also, see mkl’s suggestion. Examine the situation from the Japanese perspective instead of the English one. That may give you an idea of what I’m driving at.

In other words, it’s one thing to say that environmental circumstances gave Japan the option of rejecting guns for a time. It’s a very different thing to say that Japan chose to reject guns because of those circumstances. Diamond makes the former argument, but rejects the latter.

158

“No particular reason to believe. . .”? There are several reasons to believe that. First, white people also had great trouble domesticating bison (hence their near extinction by hunting, instead). Second, Native Americans immediately took to animal domestication once they had more suitable Eurasian mammals to use. Finally, the fact that, seemingly without exception, they didn’t domesticate bison (whereas cattle was widely, independently domesticated in Eurasia) suggests that they couldn’t (or that it was simply not feasible to do so, which is in essence the same thing).

There may have been a biological barrier. From Wikipedia: “Recent genetic studies of privately-owned herds of bison show that many of them include animals with genes from domestic cattle; there may be as few as 15,000 pure bison in the world.” This interbreeding could conceivably have caused what we now refer to as “bison” to be more docile than their ancestors.

159

Do you have examples of attempts to domesticate bison? Or is it more that they were hunted to near extinction because they were the primary food of the rebellious Plains Indians?

Excuse me, but this is something else that requires some expansion, explanation, and, dare I say, proof. While the Navajo, for instance, took up herding sheep in the mid-17th century most other groups only took it up at gunpoint, lacking another way to support themselves.

Except that you did not prove your first two points so this conclusion cannot be drawn from them.

When whites first reached the Great Plains they found vast herds containing millions of bison. Even without horses Plains Indians could follow the herds, picking off outlyers and generally operating as predators. It was not an easy life but it was no more difficult–and probably much easier–to support ones family as a hunter than as a farmer using only a hoe and digging stick. There was no reason to domesticate the bison because there were so many of them. Whites had no reason to domesticate bison because they already had cattle, the much tamer result of thousands of years of selective breeding. People will usually take the path of least resistance and in the case of bison the easy way was to hunt them, not domesticate them.

160

Even today, there are “farmed” or “ranch” bison, but I wouldn’t call them domesticated. They are huge, and not nearly as tractible as cattle. I don’t know of any intentional breeding of them and I don’t know if it could even be done given their cantankerous nature.

IMHO if it were possible to domesticate bison like cattle or sheep, the native Americans would have done so.