Steer Skulls and Bison Carcasses: Imagining Extinction in the Dust Bowl

During the New Deal, Arthur Rothstein’s 1936 photograph of a solitary steer skull baking in the arid South Dakota Badlands became a potent symbol of the Dust Bowl disaster. It was also a lightning rod for controversy when Great Plains residents reacted to Rothstein’s perceived photographic manipulation and the threat of government resettlement programs. This paper uses case studies from photography, murals, and film to examine the New Deal fascination with cattle death and the “extinct” American Bison. Specifically, how did narratives of animal extinction feed into contemporary fears about the resilience of settler communities on the distressed Plains? Yet these narratives also fit into a longer history of artists’ representations of animal death on the Plains, including settler portrayals of the genocidal campaign against Native peoples and bison that pushed the animal to the brink of extinction. My analysis draws from these image histories, settler colonial studies, and environmental history to consider how nonhuman animals are made into emblems of human anxiety in times of environmental crisis. Importantly, this examination of the symbols of animal extinction in New Deal visual culture provides context for the visual culture of our own contemporary moment in climate crisis, particularly given the divergent paths of cattle and bison— the former a fraught symbol of polluting industrial livestock production and the latter a complicated symbol of resurgence and resilience.