Well, when settlers first visited the new world and witnessed bison, they thought they looked like the Cape buffalo and water buffalo from other parts of the world, so they called them buffalo ...

Three large mammals in the world are commonly called “buffalo,” though each of them represents a different species. All of these are distantly related under the same family, Bovidae.

It is images such as George Catlin’s “Buffalo Chase with Bows and Lances” that engages our imagination of the unique relationship between Indigenous peoples and bison. Catlin wrote that he ...