American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  Because the buffalo has no concept of boundaries or private land, Native American buffalo hunters have historically forsaken those concepts as well. Or, as was more often the case, the hunters have tried to have it both ways: when buffalo were on their land, they defended their land against human trespassers; when buffalo were not on their land, they trespassed onto the lands of others. These disputes over buffalo hunting grounds likely dated back to the arrival of humans in the New World, but for most of human history the wars were probably low-intensity affairs that claimed few lives and required only small amounts of energy and resources.

  All of that changed when Cortés introduced the horse to the Americas. From then on, buffalo-related warfare became the defining aspect of intertribal politics. The transition was sudden and dramatic. The horse arrived in Mexico in 1519, and within thirty years there were thousands of horses in Mexico. By 1700 the Pueblo Indians had acquired the horse through warfare and theft, and they quickly became master horsemen and breeders. The Pueblos made no attempt to keep a lock on their newfound treasure. They established a thriving business in the horse trade and helped spread the animal throughout the United States as rapidly as the buffalo would later disappear. The Navajo got horses from the Pueblos and traded them up the western edge of the Rockies. The Comanche traded them up the eastern edge of the Rockies, along the Great Plains. The Nez Percé and Shoshones, way up around Idaho, had them by the 1730s. The Crows bought horses from the Nez Percé, and the Blackfeet stole them from the Crows. When the Crows had excess horses, they herded them toward the Missouri and sold them to tribes there. The Sioux, in the vicinity of the upper Mississippi, on the extreme northeast fringe of the Great Plains, had the horse by 1750. Their animals had come from tribes to both the south and the west. By that time, there were perhaps more than a million wild horses in the western United States that had no owners whatsoever.

  Pre-horse hunters usually only ventured out on large-scale buffalo hunts during the summer breeding seasons, when the herds congregated in terrific numbers along major rivers. In the fall, when the herds broke up and traveled in erratic directions, the Indians returned to their permanent villages to fish catfish and harvest crops of corn, beans, and squash. But the horse made it possible to give up farming and have no permanent home, because, in essence, the horse was your home: with a travois, the horse could pull all of one’s possessions, including family-sized tents that could withstand winter.

  The Indians’ rush to get horses and hunt buffalo on the Great Plains was like a slow-motion version of the westward exodus that accompanied the California gold rush of 1849. Many of the tribes that we now think of as dominant Great Plains buffalo hunters—the Crow, Blackfoot, Sioux, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche—were either weak, small tribes before the horse or part-time horticulturalists. The horse made them extremely powerful. These tribes initiated new wars with neighboring tribes, and old wars amplified in intensity. The Comanche left their traditional homeland at the interface of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin, and then displaced the Apache from the buffalo-rich lands of the southern plains. The Sioux routed the Kiowa from the Black Hills and chased them into the southern plains. At various times, the Sioux and Cheyenne fought the Crows for control of buffalo herds along the Powder River. The Crows fought the Blackfeet over herds along the Yellowstone River. When Kansa war parties traveled through the hunting grounds of the Osages, they killed and left to rot whatever buffalo they could find so the animals wouldn’t be available to feed their enemies. For tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains, such as the Nez Percé and Flatheads, it was a rite of passage for young men to kill buffalo on lands claimed by the Blackfeet. Such activities could turn grotesque and deadly. A fur trader named Ross Cox once ventured into Blackfoot territory with a Flathead hunting party and witnessed a startling set of events when his companions caught an enemy. While the Blackfoot prisoner was still alive, the Flatheads shortened his fingers knuckle by knuckle, scooped out his eye, cut his nose in half, and then put an arrow through his heart. The Flatheads could have expected the same treatment or worse if the tides were turned. The Blackfeet would murder entire enemy villages down to the babies for the crime of killing buffalo on claimed land.

  One has to wonder, why bother with it at all? Is the hunting lifestyle so great, is the thrill of chasing buffalo so tremendous, that it warrants the risk of life and limb? Apparently so. When Europeans first made contact with Native Americans, they were sometimes astounded by the unstoppable desire of the people to wander in search of buffalo even when it apparently contradicted their own economic self-interests. A Frenchman initiated contact with a band of Blackfeet on the Canadian prairie in 1754 and tried to convince them to begin hunting beaver for the fur trade. He promised them material wealth, but the chief rebuked him by saying that he didn’t need the beaver or the fur trade. “We hunt the Buffalo and kill them with the Bows and Arrows,” he blithely explained. Nathaniel Shaler, a writer and scientist, complained of how buffalo interfered with the Indians’ adoption of agriculture. Buffalo hunting, he said, caused “the gradual decadence of the slight civilization which the people had acquired.” A Canadian writer argued that it’s impossible to civilize a hunter until you take away his means of making a living The buffalohunting lifestyle rankled missionaries as well. A Jesuit complained about the allure of nomadic buffalo hunting because “it is the same thing in a Savage to wish to become sedentary and to believe in God.”

  The allure of searching for buffalo was not always lost on Europeans. The administrators of Spanish colonies in Mexico were so troubled by buffalo hunting that they instituted legislation forbidding it. The governor of a Spanish province handed down the law and its reasoning in January 1806: “Buffalo hunting expeditions in the settlements of this province are the cause of the neglect of families. The expeditions cause settlers to lose interest in stock raising. Hereafter, settlers are not to go out in organized parties for the sole purpose of hunting buffaloes.” The same troubles came out of Kentucky and Tennessee, where settlers couldn’t be bothered with agriculture so long as they stood a reasonable chance of finding buffalo. In the vicinity of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, a man complained, “buffaloes were so plenty in the country that little or no bread was used, but that even the children were fed on game; the facility of gaining which prevented the progress of agriculture, until the poor, innocent buffaloes were completely extirpated, and the other wild animals much thinned.”

  WHEN I THINK of the early buffalo hunters, I can’t help but think of the word “nomadic.” It’s a favorite word of mine, especially when it’s joined with the word “hunter.” Sometimes, sitting around, I’ll realize that I’ve been silently mouthing the words “nomadic hunter” over and over again to myself. Taking off to wherever the animals are strikes me as a perfectly noble reason to move around. In my life, maybe half of my moves around the country have been with that goal in mind. The other half were meant to get me close to particular women. (I’ve been frustrated to find that one move seldom accomplishes both of those things.) When I first left my parents’ home, I moved from Twin Lake, in Michigan’s more civilized Lower Peninsula, to Sault Sainte Marie, in the animal-rich Upper Peninsula. I ran traplines for beaver, mink, river otter, and muskrat, and caught steelhead, salmon, and whitefish out of Lake Superior. I got into a big fight with a professor because he refused to grant a deer-hunting exception to his mandatory attendance policy for a 9:00 a.m. class. I stormed out in a huff and went hunting anyway, feeling like an outdoorsy version of those kids in the Robin Williams movie Dead Poets Society. The next morning I got incredibly lucky right at daybreak and made no attempt to hide the deer blood on my hands when I tromped into the classroom just ahead of the bell. Take that!

  I stupidly moved back downstate, to Grand Rapids, to get closer to a girlfriend. I was depressed as hell down there, and as soon as the girl and I broke up, I moved out to western Montana, to Missoula. Fantastic things happened there. I approached a pine marten so close that I tou
ched it with my bare hand. I watched sandhill cranes feeding on steeply pitched ground that had been cleared of snow by an avalanche. I saw thousands of snow geese rise out of a steamy lake and swirl into a coiled cone that reminded me of a tornado. One time a bobcat stepped in front of me with a dead ground squirrel hanging from its teeth, the way it would carry its own kitten. I ran into four mountain lions and many grizzly bears. I hunted elk with my bow. I ate the flesh of black bears. And, perhaps best of all, I found my buffalo skull on a warm September day. After that day, I started to spend time watching the buffalo north of town, in the National Bison Range. I’d look at them as if I were watching something that happened a long time ago, the way you might look at Civil War reenactors. It bothered me that I felt that way. So I kept watching them, in hopes that someday my feelings about buffalo would drift away from the past and move toward the present.

  I left Missoula a total of four times before I actually stayed away for good. One time I moved east of the Continental Divide, to Bozeman, Montana, because they have more animals over there than they do in Missoula. Then I moved back to Missoula to be closer to a girlfriend. That girl threatened me with a shotgun one day, and they locked her up in jail. I got the feeling that I should move again, so I went down to Thermopolis, Wyoming, where a small herd of buffalo lives right outside of town. I’d go jogging in –10-degree temperatures, with clouds of steam coming off the Bighorn River so thick that cars would turn on their headlights while crossing the bridge. The buffalo would watch me with mild interest as I ran through their pasture. One time I kicked up a cottontail rabbit that ran out ahead of me; the buffalo looked back and forth between me and the rabbit the way you’d glance back and forth between a water skier and the boat that was pulling her.

  Next I moved to Miles City, Montana, which lies on the Great Plains at the confluence of the Tongue and the Yellowstone rivers.* Miles City has had roughly the same population for the last one hundred years. The town came into existence in 1876, in the aftermath that followed General Custer’s defeat along the Little Bighorn River. Its first boom came in 1882, when it served as the hub of operations for the professional hunters who were busy killing off the last big herd of wild buffalo in North America. In 1888, William T. Hornaday reported to the Smithsonian Institution that Miles City was one of only three places in America that had any buffalo left. He thought there were maybe a couple hundred in the breaks of the Musselshell River and a smaller bunch hiding in the badlands around Big Dry and Big Porcupine creeks. It’s never been clear what happened to those buffalo—it’s almost as if they vanished into the dirt. Hornaday also reported on the fate of the buffalo hunters who were still hanging around Miles City. The majority “cherished the fond delusion that the great herd had only ‘gone north’ into the British Possessions, and would eventually return in great force. Scores of rumors of the finding of herds floated about, all of which were eagerly believed at first. But after a year or two had gone by without the appearance of a single buffalo, and likewise without any reliable information of the existence of a herd of any size, even in British territory, the butchers of the buffalo either hung up their old Sharps rifles, or sold them for nothing to the gun-dealers, and sought other means of livelihood. Some … became cowboys.”

  When I was hanging around there, either drinking in the Bison Bar, or looking at the bullet holes in the window of the Montana Bar, or field-dressing an antelope so close to town that I could wave at motorists who were exiting the highway, or staring at the unmarked graves of poisoned and gun-shot buffalo hunters outside of town, I sometimes got the feeling that I had become one of those men, that like them I was there waiting for the return of the herds so that I could continue the hunt.

  Even with almost a half-million buffalo living in North America, I still figured that I’d never have a chance to hunt one. Like I said, 96 percent of those animals are privately owned livestock. They live within the confines of fenced ranches, under the management of individuals who are looking to use the animals to generate income. The bulk of this revenue is made through the commercial sale of buffalo meat, but many buffalo ranchers specialize in selling buffalo to people who want to pretend to hunt them. This type of “hunting” is popularly known as canned hunting, because the results are prepackaged. You go to a farmer, buy one of the animals that are fenced on his land, and then walk or drive out and shoot it with a gun. It’s estimated that about two thousand canned-hunting operations exist in the United States, ranging from places that specialize in native species of North American birds to African big game. To get a sense for the aesthetic of the canned-buffalo-hunting business in America, all one has to do is type “buffalo hunting” into an Internet search engine and then peruse the hundreds of hits for “guaranteed success” hunts.

  When I did such a search on Google, I discovered that killing a “trophy” buffalo on CNN founder Ted Turner’s Flying D ranch in Montana would set me back about $4,000. The High Adventure Ranch, in Missouri, was offering a “huge herd reduction sale.” For $4,285 (a $500 savings from last year’s prices) I could hunt a trophy-sized bull inside a fenced enclosure. If I didn’t get a buffalo, I didn’t have to pay a dime. If I was looking for something a little more “Western,” I could consider the Rockin’ 7 Ranch of Wyoming. They offer a fairly straightforward package: “We drive you out into a 2500 acre pasture and you shoot the buffalo you want.” There were more full-service operations as well. At Thousand Hills Bison Ranch, in Colorado, $4,550 would get me full accommodations as well as a “fair-chase” hunt: they separate a breeding bull from a domestic herd and then haul the animal away and release it inside a pasture. The rancher would then take me out in a truck to find the bull while the bull tried to find his way back to where he came from.

  Because there’s little romance or genuine experience in shooting a penned-up animal, companies that offer such services try to build up the experience with adventurous and dashing language. The Web site of an outfit in Iowa asks whether you have “the passion … the drive … the determination” to shoot down a buffalo inside its fenced pasture. Other places invoke the Wild West, as though shooting a penned animal is like a trip to the past. Thousand Hills Bison Ranch goes so far as to acknowledge that it’s mighty peculiar to use such newfangled technologies as the Internet to discuss something as old-timey as a buffalo hunt. The Two Heart Buffalo Ranch tells would-be customers that “the mighty American Buffalo still roams the virgin prairie of their ancestors and thrive on their prairie home.” Pipe Creek Buffalo Hunts invites customers to “slip back in time to when pioneers were filtering into Kansas and big herds of bison roamed the lush prairie.” I suppose this sort of language is necessary, because when you’re selling a captive buffalo, you’re selling the illusion of something rather than the thing itself.

  One of Ted Turner’s buffalo herds; Turner owns more buffalo than exist in the wild.

  It was thanks to my brother Danny that I learned about Alaska’s Copper River buffalo herd. Danny had moved to Alaska some years before, and in snooping around the state, he heard rumors that a wild buffalo herd lived in the foothills of the Wrangell Mountains. As soon as he told me this, I downloaded an application form from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Web site. Timing was my first bit of luck. While the state usually issues only a dozen or fewer permits every year, the number made a surprise jump to twenty-four in 2005. If any thanks are due for that, they should go to global climate change. A series of mild winters with unusually light snowfall had allowed greater survival rates for buffalo calves. What’s more, the lack of ice on the Copper River had prohibited hunters from accessing the area on snowmobiles during the winter months, a time when the buffalo herd is more easily located.

  Since its foundation, the Copper River herd has been open to hunting only intermittently. The hunt was instituted in 1964, fourteen years after the animals were dumped off the truck on the Nabesna Road and three years after they wandered into their present location. There were about a hundred animals. Ba
ck then, the hunt was not administered under the permit lottery system. Instead, it was run as a registration hunt: if you wanted to hunt buffalo, you simply signed up and went. The season stayed open as long as it took for the hunters to kill whatever quota was set by the state, which ranged from just a few animals to a dozen. When a hunter bagged a buffalo, he was to report the kill to the Department of Fish and Game within two days. When the quota was hit, the hunting season ended.

  This system caused problems. First off, it created something of a free-for-all, with too many hunters converging on the area in the first days of the season out of fear that they’d miss their chance if they waited too long. Also, there was an effective delay between reaching the quota and ending the season; the quota could be surpassed before anyone even had a chance to report his kill.

  State wildlife biologists had determined that for the long-term viability of the herd, their numbers should not drop below a population of sixty-five adult animals (as estimated through aerial surveys in the spring); a series of rough winters in the late 1980s had knocked the herd size down to a critical level. The state canceled the hunt in 1989 and didn’t open it again for ten years.

  When it was reopened, in 1999, the lottery system was put into place. It’s a far better system, in my mind, as it erased the competitive aspect. It changed the dynamic of the hunt in other ways as well. Under the registration system, successful hunters were almost exclusively local residents. For one thing, they were more likely to hunt because they were already up there. Also, they had access to information that outsiders didn’t; a local guy has his own regionally specific experiences, plus he can pick the brains of other locals and bush pilots who might not be so forthcoming to some jackass from the Lower 48.