by H. W. Brands
Custer’s command survived for less than half an hour. He and 225 of his men died that afternoon above the Little Big Horn. Reno’s column, pinned down in the woods by the river, survived an overnight siege till Crazy Horse, learning of the approach of federal relief, abandoned the siege and moved the camp.
“We could not see much of the battle for the big dust,” Black Elk recalled of Custer’s last moments. “But we knew there would be no soldiers left.” The boy left his mother and the other women to scavenge the field with his peers.
We rode across the Greasy Grass to the mouth of a gulch that led up through the bluff to where the fighting was. Before we got there, the Wasichus were all down, and most of them were dead, but some of them were still alive and kicking. Many other little boys had come up by this time, and we rode around shooting arrows into the Wasichus. There was one who was squirming around with arrows sticking in him, and I started to take his coat, but a man pushed me away and took the coat for himself. Then I saw something bright hanging on this soldier’s belt, and I pulled it out. It was round and bright and yellow and very beautiful, and I put it on me for a necklace. At first it ticked inside, and then it did not any more. I wore it around my neck a long time before I found out what it was and how to make it tick again.… There was a soldier who was raising his arms and groaning. I shot an arrow into his forehead, and his arms and legs quivered.
Many Indians had been killed or badly wounded; the latter included one of Black Elk’s cousins. “His father and my father were so angry over this that they went and butchered a Wasichu and cut him open. The Wasichu was fat, and his meat looked good to eat, but we did not eat any.”
The celebration of the battle was postponed till the camp had moved safely beyond the reach of the new federal column. But the Sioux composed kill-songs as they traveled, and when they reached a resting place they feasted far into the night. Black Elk remembered some of the songs:
Long Hair has never returned,
So his woman is crying, crying,
Looking over here, she cries.…
Long Hair, where he lies nobody knows.
Crying, they seek him.
He lies over here.43
CRAZY HORSE COULD defeat Custer, but he couldn’t hold back the westering tide of capitalism. Conceivably the Sioux might have made peace with the presence of gold miners, but their way of living couldn’t survive the activities of commercial buffalo hunters. During the centuries they had hunted afoot, the Sioux and other predatory Plains tribes had lived in rough equilibrium with their principal prey. The equilibrium could indeed be rough, not least since the buffalo themselves depended on resources—grasses, primarily—that in turn depended on resources—the various forms of precipitation—that fluctuated dramatically over the short and longer term. Drought was a recurrent feature of the climate of the Plains, and in periods of drought the grass withered and the buffalo dwindled. Tree-ring patterns and other forms of evidence indicate that drought afflicted the central Plains from 1761 to 1773, from 1798 to 1803, and from 1822 to 1832. Farther north the timing and duration of the droughts were different, with the worst patch being a fifteen-year shortfall in moisture from 1836 to 1851. During the driest spells, as much as 90 percent of the prairie grass died.44
Deaths among the buffalo were certainly not as great, as the buffalo possessed a mobility the grasses didn’t. But the high reproductive rate of the buffalo—20 percent per year in optimal circumstances—suggests an evolutionary need to rebound from drastic mortality in bad times. Of course the increased buffalo mortality wasn’t simply due to starvation. Wolves had evolved along with the buffalo, and though a strong adult buffalo could withstand a wolf attack, sick or malnourished buffaloes often couldn’t. Nor could weakened adults defend their calves. The result was that during times of climatic stress the buffalo population could plunge. Neither were buffalo numbers guaranteed by adequate rainfall. Due to the potential for rapid population growth, during wet spells the herds could multiply exponentially and outstrip the ability of the range to support them. The resulting population crashes could be even more dramatic than those induced by drought.45
As long as the Plains tribes had remained pedestrian, they depended on the buffalo only in part. They hunted other game, gathered roots and berries, and planted beans and squashes. Though inadvertently, perhaps, they thereby insulated themselves from the worst effects of the buffalo crashes. But in acquiring horses they allowed themselves to become almost completely dependent on the buffalo, which in good times provided an easier living than their previous resource base but which in bad times forced them to share the buffalo’s hardship. Meanwhile their horses (and the large herds of feral horses) competed with the buffalo for forage, intensifying the pressure on the range.
Like the buffalo, the Indians and their horses migrated during droughts away from the most severely stricken areas. The resulting contact with neighboring tribes and peoples often led to war. The Sioux raided the Pawnees, Hidatsas, and Arikaras to the east and the Crows and Blackfoots to the west. The Comanches, the dominant people of the southern Plains, thrust aside the Apaches and constantly threatened the Texas outposts of Mexico.
Had the Plains Indians exploited the buffalo for their own use alone, the pressure on the herds might have been sustainable. But a few decades after the equestrian revolution transformed life in the North American West, the capitalist revolution began transforming life in the North American East, and its influence could be felt even upon the Plains. Steamboats plied the Missouri by the 1820s, carrying traders of the American Fur Company and its rivals. Till then the fur trade had focused on beaver pelts, but changing tastes and the depletion of the resource caused the traders to seek a replacement. Although buffalo robes (for blankets and carriage throws) served a different fashion purpose than the beaver pelts (which had been made into hats), from the standpoint of company profits they were interchangeable. During the latter half of the 1820s, traders shipped nearly 800,000 buffalo robes through New Orleans. White hunters secured some of the robes, but the principal suppliers were the Plains tribes, who traded the robes (and sometimes the tongues of the buffalo) for guns, ammunition, blankets, steel knives, and liquor.46
Before long the hunting made noticeable inroads upon the herds. A traveler along the Missouri reported in 1849 that the buffalo—“the robes of which constitute by far the most important article of traffic” in the region—“are now not near as numerous as a few years since, and the number is every year diminishing.”47
As it happened, the intensification of commercial hunting coincided with deepening drought in certain areas. It also overlapped the introduction of competing species and the pathogens they bore. Introduced disease wasn’t a problem for the human species alone in North America; the animals the humans brought with them carried bacteria and viruses that sickened the native animal species. Anthrax was a particular scourge, and as the cattle herds of the settlers pushed up against the buffalo herds of the Indians, the anthrax bacterium jumped species. Because the buffalo had no inherited immunity to the disease, its progression could be devastating. “It destroys the bison in a kind of slow explosion,” one authority later wrote. For reasons that remain unclear but doubtless involved climate, the effect was most acute on the far northern Plains, in Canada. But the impact rippled south into the United States.48
The disease and drought magnified the effect of the commercial hunting and accelerated the decline of the herds, threatening not merely the Indians’ trade with the fur companies but the Indians’ very existence. As early as 1855 the federal Indian agent at Fort Laramie declared, “The buffalo is becoming scarce and it is more difficult from year to year for the Indians to kill a sufficient number to supply them with food and clothing.”49
The intrusion of the railroads onto the Plains sealed the doom of the buffalo culture. The construction gangs of the railroads required large quantities of meat, which buffalo hunters provided. Upon completion, the railroads dramatically reduced
the transportation costs of buffalo products, including, for the first time, meat for Eastern markets. After tanners in Europe discovered the secret of curing buffalo hides, buffalo leather became a staple for the belts that spun the pulleys and flywheels of European and American factories. Chemical engineers learned to reduce buffalo bones to fertilizer and pigments. The railroads brought recreational hunters to the Plains, individuals who paid for the opportunity to kill the biggest game in North America.50
American arms makers designed special weapons for use against the buffalo. The most famous of the buffalo rifles was the Sharps “Big Fifty,” which could drop the biggest bulls at long range. The use of the weapons required skill and experience; seasoned hunters knew, among other things, not to waste time on a head shot. “Against the frontal bone of the bison’s skull, the lead falls harmless,” declared an astonished hunter, who proceeded to explain:
I once approached a buffalo which stood wounded in a ravine. I took position upon the hillside, knowing that he could not readily charge up it, at a distance of only fifteen yards. I fired three shots from a Henry rifle full against the forehead, causing no other result than some angry head-shaking. I then took a Spencer carbine and fired twice with it. At each shot the bull sank partly to his knees, but immediately recovered again. I afterward examined the skull, and could detect no fracture.51
Yet once the hunters mastered their art, the killing proceeded with industrial efficiency. In the 1870s John and Wright Mooar roamed the Plains with a fleet of sixteen prairie schooners. On the outbound voyage the wagons carried ingots of lead and barrels of powder, besides the tools necessary to service the Mooars’ arsenal of Sharps rifles. Inbound they replaced the lead and powder with buffalo hides, four to five thousand per season. Joe McCombs’s outfit was even larger and more destructive; in 1877 his crew came home with nearly ten thousand hides.52
As with other resources of the West, the opportunity to profit from the buffalo engendered a gold-rush mentality. Because no one held legal title to the herds, no one had material incentive to preserve them. Rather, the incentives all pointed the other way: toward a frenzy of exploitation, lest others capture the prize first. The killing climaxed in the first years of the 1880s, when hundreds of thousands of buffalo were killed annually.53
Within a few years it was all over. The young Theodore Roosevelt traveled to western Dakota Territory in 1883 expressly to hunt buffalo, but where a decade earlier the herds had been immense, that September Roosevelt had to search for a week to find a single specimen—whose rarity didn’t prevent his adding it to the slaughter’s total.54
BY THEN the war for the Plains was over, too. Word of Custer’s destruction on the Little Big Horn reached the East almost upon the hundredth anniversary of American independence. Some who heard the news sympathized with the Sioux in their desperate struggle to remain free, but more responded to the heroic myth that instantly sprang up about “Custer’s Last Stand”: how the valiant colonel and his men held out against overwhelming odds till the sheer weight of the savage attack brought them down. Not that it mattered much in the end, but the very magnitude of Crazy Horse’s victory probably cost him support among that minority of Americans disposed to treat the Indians leniently.
At the War Department, William Sherman was bombarded with demands to capture or kill Crazy Horse and his warriors. The governor of Montana Territory called on Congress to authorize a volunteer corps of Indian fighters. Sherman didn’t relish dealing with volunteers, who would be beyond the discipline of the regular army, and anyway he thought the volunteer bill a boondoggle chiefly designed to provide work—at a rate far higher than Sherman could pay his own soldiers—for the flotsam of the frontier. He managed to deflect the volunteer corps but only by promising swift action by his own men.55
Sherman sent reinforcements to George Crook, who chased the Sioux around the upper Missouri during the summer of 1876. Crook’s men burned Sioux villages and food stores, relying on hunger to succeed where direct force had failed. The Sioux occasionally counterattacked, but their lack of ammunition prevented them from inflicting serious damage on their pursuers. To the federals’ surprise and perhaps their own, the Sioux held out through the winter of 1876–77, but by the following spring they could stand no more. Crook sent Red Cloud to offer Crazy Horse a reservation on the Powder River if he would stop running and fighting. Crazy Horse saw no alternative. His people were starving, those horses they hadn’t eaten were barely able to stand, and his warriors lacked powder and bullets. He accepted the offer and led his people into what they all considered captivity.
But Crazy Horse wasn’t meant for reservation life. The federals distrusted him, as did some of the reservation Sioux, who resented the way his long holdout had intensified the repression they lived under. When the federal government procrastinated on its promise of a Powder River reservation and some of the Sioux grew restive, Crazy Horse’s Indian enemies spread stories that he intended to resume the fight. Crook ordered him arrested; as he was being transported to jail, he tried to break away. His guards mortally wounded him.56
Chapter 7
PROFITS ON THE HOOF
Nature may or may not abhor a vacuum, but empty ecological niches attract new species. The destruction of the buffalo left the grasslands of the North American interior available for other grazers, animals whose innards contained the microbes necessary to break down the cellulose of the grass stems and leaves into a form the gastric juices of the grazers could handle. Horses had shown their ability to match the buffaloes’ digestive feats, but horseflesh has never been honored in Euro-American cuisine. Beef was more to the taste of the newcomers, and so cattle became the replacement of (human) choice for the buffalo.
Yet the introduction of cattle to the Plains had to do less with anyone’s desire to see that grass not die uneaten than with the growing appetite of American capitalism. From the beginning, cattle husbandry on the Plains was a business, one driven by the same imperatives that governed the oil business and the steel business. The cattle business required inputs of capital and labor, it called for a matching of supply and demand, and it rewarded economies of scale and the application of technology. No single cattleman became as wealthy as Andrew Carnegie or John D. Rockefeller, but a few built empires that would have given princes pause and that proved more durable than many of the corporate fiefdoms of the captains of non-animal industry.
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CATTLE CROSSED THE Atlantic in the same Spanish ships that brought the horses, and they escaped into the wilds of the West about the same time the horses did. But they spread more slowly than the horses, largely because they didn’t seem such an improvement on the aboriginal status quo. Horses gave their adopters new powers; cattle simply put something different on the dinner plate. And humans being culinary conservatives, the difference rarely worked in the cattle’s favor. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, pork was the meat preferred by most Americans. Harriet Martineau, traveling across America in the 1830s, found pig flesh ubiquitous and inescapable. “In one house at Boston, where a numerous family lives in handsome style, and where I several times met large dinner parties, I never once saw an ounce of meat except ham,” she wrote. Elsewhere the theme was the same, with minor variations. “Throughout the South the traveler meets little else than pork, under all manner of disguises, and fowls.”1
Tastes shifted within decades. Most Americans who kept cattle did so for milk or draft, although the animals were often eventually eaten. But at the extreme southern edge of the Great Plains, where Texas meets Mexico, cattle were raised for beef and hides. For much of the century before the Civil War, feral cattle from northern Mexico roamed the broad valley of the Rio Grande. The mild winters and abundant grass allowed the herds to multiply almost unchecked. Mexican rancheros (ranchmen) and vaqueros (cowboys) learned to tend the cattle, rounding them up once or twice a year, branding them with the owners’ marks, selling or slaughtering some for their beef and hides, and turning the re
st loose to graze and multiply the more. The acquisition of Texas by the United States brought this cattle culture to Anglo-America, but it never lost its Latin flavor. The Anglos, mostly from the American East and South, knew cows as creatures kept in pens and small pastures, few in number and often treated as family pets; they had never seen anything like the giant herds of Texas longhorns. But the Anglo Texans were fast learners, adopting the tools and techniques of the cattle culture from the Mexican Texans, or tejanos. The Anglos adopted the terminology, too. Rancho anglicized to “ranch,” la riata to “lariat,” vaquero to “buckaroo.”2
Not that the cattle noticed. They treated the Anglos with the same disdain they had always shown the Latinos. Keen of scent, wary of danger, rugged of constitution, the longhorns continued to thrive on the Rio Grande, and they spread up the coastal bend as the Americans and the Indians decimated the buffalo herds that had once dominated the Texas grasslands.
Before 1860 enterprising cattlemen occasionally attempted to transport Texas cattle to markets farther east. Small herds were driven to the Red River of Louisiana and shipped downstream to New Orleans. A few went by sea from Galveston to New Orleans, Mobile, and even Havana. One particularly ambitious individual gathered a herd of a thousand Texas steers and drove them all the way to Ohio. Some Texas cattle reached Chicago during the 1850s. Gold drew Texans to California in 1849 and after, and some trailed cattle there, only to discover that California, like Texas heir to the history and traditions of New Spain, had cattle enough for its own needs.
