European settlers in the Great Plains are estimated to have reduced the American bison population from 30 million to just 325 by the 1880s. Many Native American tribes relied heavily on the bison. They used the animals for food, shelter, clothing, and even spiritual imagery. Library of Congress Tribes took what they needed from the bison, who roamed the Plains in the millions. Library of Congress As American settlers started to push west, however, they hunted the bison for sport.

Teddy Roosevelt's death in 1919 at the age of just 60 left America in shock, though he’d quietly been battling both medical and emotional traumas for months before his demise.Library of CongressTheodore Roosevelt died after an active political and personal life that captivated many Americans. After Theodore Roosevelt died on January 6, 1919, his son Archibald sent a somber telegram to his siblings. “The old lion,” he wrote, “is dead.” Roosevelt’s death marked the end of a chapter in American history.

Born in 1913 on the Crow Reservation in Montana, Joseph Medicine Crow was raised in the warrior tradition of his people — which he put to good use while serving in France and Germany.Joseph Medicine CrowJoe Medicine Crow became the last Plains Indian war chief by stealing horses from the Nazis. When Joe Medicine Crow died in 2016, he was the last living Plains Indian war chief, ending a tradition that stretched back hundreds of years.

As the matriarch of the Barker-Karpis gang, Ma Barker oversaw her sons commit a spree of robberies, kidnappings, and murders that terrorized 1920s and '30s America.Wikimedia CommonsBorn Arizona Clark, Ma Barker raised four sons whose crimes made the family America’s most wanted gang. A strong-willed matriarch who allegedly helped organize her sons’ crimes, Kate Barker — better known as “Ma” Barker — was killed after a four-hour gun battle with FBI agents in Ocklawaha, Florida in 1935.

As Soviet troops advanced on Berlin in 1945, Adolf Hitler died by suicide inside his sprawling concrete Führerbunker buried 30 feet beneath the city where he'd spent the last 105 days of his life.Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy Stock PhotoA Soviet soldier sits in the study of the Führerbunker where Adolf Hitler died by suicide in April 1945. In January 1945, Adolf Hitler went underground. As the tides of World War II turned against Nazi Germany and its leader, Hitler and his close associates moved into a subterranean command center: the Führerbunker.