Bones were big business, especially bison bones in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Today it is hard to imagine that for a time bones littered the American Plains for as far as the eye could see. Bison skeletons varied in weight, some more than 125 lbs. (An adult human skeleton weighs a mere 20 or so lbs.) Now, imagine a landscape with ten million or more dead animals, more than one billion pounds of bones. This would be the combined skeletal weight of more than 60 million people, nearly the global total of people who died in WWII.