American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  One could make a cogent argument that the widespread advent of buffalo jumps marked the beginning of the end for buffalo. It seems as though the massive, wholesale slaughter of complete buffalo herds was like an addictive drug. North Americans had long viewed the buffalo as a giver of everything, but buffalo jumps may have helped create the fallacy that the buffalo was the giver of lots of everything—so much so, in fact, that tribes who used buffalo jumps were able to operate trade networks that distributed buffalo hides to tribes who lived outside of the buffalo’s range.

  Some of the largest buffalo jumps are on the plains of northern Montana and southern Canada, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that those landscapes were the first to produce buffalo slaughters big enough to clear out entire geographic regions. The hunters who first managed to pull this off were the Métis, a people of mixed French-Canadian and Indian ancestry who lived in settlements along the Red River of Manitoba, Canada. By 1820 they had perfected the industrial slaughter of buffalo, and they made a lot of money selling the meat and hides. On what became known as the Red River hunts, the Métis brought along chaplains to conduct Mass and police-like officials who enforced organizational rules. In June 1840, a typical year, the Métis organized a hunting party of 1,630 people, 1,210 two-wheeled “Red River carts,” 1,644 horses and oxen, 542 dogs, and 1,240 skinning knives. They returned in mid-August with over one million pounds of dried meat and buffalo hides. Estimates vary, but the total kill for such a year may have amounted to fifty thousand buffalo. For the Métis, the commercial value of the kill was around a quarter-million dollars. It was enough money to push the Métis toward ever distant horizons to find untouched herds of buffalo. They were hunting well into Montana and the Dakotas before they finally ran out of animals and the famed Red River hunts ground to a halt.

  A buffalo “robe” is a tanned hide with the hair still on it; the animal was usually killed in the fall or winter when it has prime fur. From 1830 to 1870, when the Red River hunts flourished, robes were the driving factor of the buffalo trade. They were fashionable in the eastern United States and Europe, and they were a necessity in the West. People used buffalo robes for mattresses, blankets, coats, or just about any application for which you needed something warm and soft. The market absorbed as many as 200,000 buffalo robes every year, and these were supplied almost exclusively by Native American and Métis hunters of the Great Plains. Prices for robes varied depending on the region and how dishonest the purchaser was, but one buffalo robe might fetch a hand-sized wad of tobacco, or three cups of sugar and a cup of coffee beans, or one quart of watered-down whiskey, or twelve steel arrowheads. Three robes could get a bracelet. Twenty robes, a gun. One of the robes would retail for anywhere from $5 to $50 in the East.

  The Indians may have gone on selling small numbers of buffalo hides for decades longer without running out of buffalo if it hadn’t been for a perfect storm of factors that struck the buffalo herds in around 1870. Perhaps most important, cheap transportation came to the Great Plains. The Union Pacific Railroad began in Omaha in 1865 and reached Utah in 1869, where it joined another line to become the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. At that point, the great western herd was said to be divided into the “northern herd” and the “southern herd.” Obviously buffalo continued to cross the line, and many were killed by trains and train passengers, but it was generally recognized that the tracks created a buffalo-free zone across the center of the animal’s range. Subsequently, the southern herd’s range was punctured and divided again and again by the Santa Fe Railroad and the Kansas Pacific branch of the Union Pacific. Besides fragmenting the buffalo’s habitat and providing an efficient way to transport massive amounts of buffalo hides to the East, the railroads delivered guns and people to buffalo country.

  The second phase of the perfect storm began when commercial tanneries in the eastern United States and Europe made some discoveries about buffalo hides. They’d been experimenting with the skins for years, but the hides were difficult to work with (too thick), and the end product was too porous. Eventually, though, they struck on a system by which they could produce high-quality buffalo leather with elastic tendencies that was perfectly suited for industrial belting and footwear. Orders for “flint hides”—air-dried, untanned buffalo skins—started to come in. And because the tanneries were producing hairless leather, it didn’t matter which time of year the buffalo were killed.

  One of the first large requests for flint hides came in 1871, when a merchant in Dodge City named W. C. Lobenstein took an order for 500 from a tannery in England that was producing leather goods for the British army. Lobenstein hired two suppliers to procure the hides, and the suppliers turned to a young man named J. Wright Mooar. Born in Vermont in 1851, Mooar headed west shortly after the Civil War and got started in the buffalo business by hunting meat to feed troops at Fort Hays, Kansas. After moving to Dodge City, he found work selling buffalo meat to track-laying crews working on the Santa Fe Railroad. He was a respected and polished buffalo hunter when he started hunting for flint hides, and in short order he had 557 of them. Mooar sent the surplus of 57 hides to his brother in New York City. The brother sold the hides to a local tannery, which tampered with the new tanning processes and then placed an order for 2,000 more. Soon, other tanneries were placing standing orders for “as many as we can get.” The price of buffalo hides jumped up, until they were fetching $3 apiece. Mooar immediately established a buffalo-killing “firm”; by the time the buffalo were all gone, about ten years later, he had personally killed twenty-five thousand.

  By the summer of 1872, literally thousands of buffalo hunters had converged on the Great Plains. They had (or would soon earn) names like Buffalo Bill Comstock, Buffalo Bill Cody, Cross-Eyed Joe, Apache Bill, Buffalo Curley, Wyatt Earp, Pat Garrett, Tom Nixon, Limpy Jim Smith, Buckshot Roberts, Squirrel Eye Emery, Mr. Hickey, Prairie Dog Dave, and California Joe.* As their names suggest, these fellows were not stay-at-home-dad types. They were Confederate soldiers escaping the shame of Reconstruction. They were Union soldiers escaping the boredom of victory. They were orphans. They were wanted alive for fraud here, wanted dead for murder there. They were men like Wild Bill Hickok, who killed a man after an argument about who could kill whom the fastest. They were men like Lonesome Charley Reynolds, who turned to buffalo hunting after he shot the arm off an army officer at Fort McPherson, Georgia.† They were men like Crooked Nose Jack McCall, who was hanged for shooting Wild Bill Hickok in the back of the head.††

  Different hide hunters worked in different ways, but the ones with a head for business started their own outfits. An outfit was usually managed by the shooter. He’d hire a couple of skinners and a camp tender. A six-man outfit might depart civilization with two or three ox-drawn carts loaded with barrels of coffee, salt, sugar, flour, camp equipment, skinning equipment, and bullet-making materials: five twenty-five-pound kegs of Du Pont gunpowder, eight hundred pounds of lead, hundreds of brass casings, and thousands of cartridge primers.

  Heading into dangerous country, a hide-hunting outfit might travel with another outfit or two for safety’s sake. While the wagons headed toward a general area where buffalo herds were expected to be hanging around, the shooters would cut broad circles on horseback scouting for buffalo sign. The scouts might be gone from the wagons for several days at a time, returning to their rendezvous point only when they found a herd or cut a good trail. When they did find buffalo, they didn’t storm into the herd with their guns ablaze. They were more calculated than that. First they’d check the lay of the land and find a good campsite, preferably in a deep gully or canyon where they were hidden from Indians. They also needed a water source and plenty of buffalo chips or wood for cooking fuel. With the camp set up and everything ready, the shooter would get some sleep and then ride out early in the morning. They liked .44-, .45-, and .50-caliber rifles manufactured by Sharps and Springfield, and they carried hundreds of cartridges. Most shooters liked cartridge belts that they could wear around
their waist; such a belt held about forty-two rounds. A shooter might wear two, or else put his ammo into a bandolier worn across his chest.

  A shooter would tether or hobble his horse somewhere close to the herd but well out of sight and downwind. Then he’d study the herd. Which way was the wind blowing? Were they feeding or sleeping? Holding still or walking? Preferably, the buffalo would be still. If there were thousands of the animals, the shooter would select a particular band off to the side of the main bunch. A group of about fifty was a good number. Then he’d use creek beds or sagebrush clumps or stands of cottonwoods to stalk within a couple hundred yards. If he got too close, he’d risk spooking the herd. If he was too far off, he’d risk making bad hits and wounding buffalo.

  He’d get his gear all set and ready before he started shooting. He needed a solid rest, someplace to steady the barrel of his gun. He might use a wadded-up jacket, crossed sticks stuck into the ground, mounds of packed snow, or mounds of buffalo chips. He’d take off his ammo belt and lay it next to him. Then he would try to determine the herd’s leader. Usually an older cow, the leader might be out in front of the herd and setting the pace of movement. That’s the one he wanted to hit first. If the buffalo were bedded down, the shooter might not know who the leader was. If that was the case, he’d pick a buffalo on the outer, distant edge of the herd.

  The shooter would send his bullet through the target’s lungs, which were called “lights.” A lung-hit buffalo usually wouldn’t run but would just take a few steps before sinking to its haunches and tipping over. It would kick for a second and then be still. The fallen buffalo’s herd mates could respond in a number of ways: the buffalo might walk up and smell the blood pouring from the animal’s nose; they might act very aggressively toward the downed animal and gore it; they might ignore it; they might slowly walk away; or they might take off in a wild stampede. The shooter was hoping for any reaction but the latter. The goal was to have the herd milling about in complete confusion—no idea where to go, no idea where the danger was coming from. As soon as one of the buffalo showed any initiative toward leaving, the shooter would put a bullet in its lungs. If the buffalo seemed to want to travel in a particular direction, the shooter would drop an animal or two in its path and change its mind. If a buffalo ran, the shooter would try to knock it down in a hurry. If he fired more than a round or two a minute, his rifle barrel would get too hot. J. Wright Mooar cooled his barrel by pissing on it. Snow came in handy for this purpose.

  When a herd started moving away from a shooter, it was said to be “adrift.” The shooter would follow along, going from downed body to downed body so he could use the carcasses as rifle rests and hiding places. He had to be careful, because half-dead or stunned buffalo might get up and charge him. Sometimes he’d prop his gun on a downed buffalo, and it would be breathing or twitching too much for him to get a solid rest. The buffalo might lift its head and stare at him, wild-eyed.

  There are documented reports of shooters killing one hundred or two hundred buffalo within an hour or two, but thirty or forty was usually considered a good day’s shooting.* A shooter didn’t want to go too far over that number, because he was limited by how many hides his skinners could remove. Left overnight, buffalo bloated too much, and the hides got tight and hard to pull off. Or wolves ripped them up. Or the carcasses froze.

  In really good hunting, skinners might make upwards of $20 a day. They usually got twenty-five or thirty cents per hide, though skinners from Mexico would do it for twenty cents. Skinners followed along in the shooter’s path with a wagon. Some skinners drove a big steel rod through the buffalo’s head, anchoring it to the ground. Then they’d make the skinning cuts and pull the hide free with a draft team. Other skinners didn’t like this method, because it left too much meat on the hide. They’d just skin the animal slice by slice with a knife. In skinning females, the entire skin was removed except for the forehead and nose. The hide on the head of a bull was too tough to skin, so they left the whole thing from the ears forward. The historian Mari Sandoz said that these bull buffalo, when covered in white fat, looked at a distance like maggots with black heads.

  The hides had to be pegged out to dry, meat side up and fur side down. In wet weather, the skinner flip-flopped the hides back and forth until dry. The skinners would either do the hide-staking right where the buffalo fell or else haul the hides back to camp and do it there. If the ground was soft, they’d use wooden pegs. If the ground was frozen, they might use rocks, or just stretch the hide as best as they could and hope that the bunchgrasses and cacti held it in place. A skinner might carve his initials in the subcutaneous tissue. When the hides were dried out, usually after a week or so, they’d stack them into piles that were eight feet high. They’d cut leather cords from fresh hides and then run the cords through holes cut in the bottom and top hides, so they could cinch the stack down tight. Now the hides were ready to be hauled to a railroad depot. After a few months out, or “a season,” a hunting outfit could have upwards of four thousand or five thousand hides. Prices varied. When the hides were really flooding in, they sometimes dropped down to $1.00 or less.* Toward the end of the hide-hunting era, when the only buffalo left were in Montana, hunters were getting $3.50 for cows, $2.50 for bulls, $1.50 for yearlings, and seventy-five cents for calves. Maybe a thousandth of that meat went to market. Beyond the occasional load of brined tongues (twenty-five cents apiece) or smoked hams (three cents a pound) it simply wasn’t profitable to handle meat.* If it had been, the hunters would have gladly buried the railroad tracks in the stuff.

  In 1870, a pound of butter cost fifteen cents. Eight pounds of coffee cost $1. Land was usually bought and sold in 160-acre parcels, at about $5 an acre. A two-room house, measuring sixteen by twenty-two feet, could be built for $300. A very good monthly wage for dangerous, professional work on the frontier, such as a sheriff or hired gun, was around $150 to $250. A cowboy made from $20 to $40 a month. A good prostitute could take in $200 a month, at upwards of $5 a client. (Thus, when prices peaked, a good buffalo hide could buy a hunter an hour’s worth of intimate female company.)

  Hide hunters were some of the grubbiest people on the face of the earth. As it was for the hippies of the late 1960s, long hair was a fad among them. Their blankets would get so full of lice and bedbugs that they’d lay them on anthills so that ants could carry away the larvae. The hunters would often eat little else besides buffalo. Beginners, or “tenderfeet,” would start out eating prime cuts, but within months they suffered nutrient deficiencies that caused their tongues to break out in lesions. After a while they learned to be more like the Indians and eat the buffalos’ internal organs and bodily fluids as well. They’d eat liver, kidney, and glands, and they’d dribble bile on red meat. Some hunters seasoned meat with gunpowder for a peppery effect. If they were away from water, they’d open a dead buffalo’s stomach and use their fingers to filter out the bits of vegetation while they slurped the watery ooze.

  Often, the stench of rotting carcasses around their camps would prevent them from eating. Flies would get bad enough to run off their horses. Hunters would sprinkle their hides with strychnine, but flies and maggots still ruined many. In wet weather the hides would rot. In hot weather the hides would rot. When there was snow on the ground, the hunters would smear mixtures of gunpowder and buffalo grease under their eyes to help cut the glare. In blizzards, they would gut out freshly killed buffalo carcasses and spend the night inside, like in the Star Wars movie. They waterproofed their boots and clothes with raw buffalo fat and sat in the smoke of fires that were burning pound-sized globs of the stuff. They greased their lips with it as well. When they were thirsty, they’d suck on rocks. The canvas and buckskin material of their clothes would get so stiff from dry blood that it would crackle when they moved.

  The job had its dangers. Hide hunters sometimes died from rabies after being bitten by skunks lured into camp by the carnage. Along the Yellowstone River near Glendive, Montana, a buffalo hunter was killed by a b
uffalo that woke up after the hunter had already cut out its tongue for dinner. Three hide hunters were killed in a prairie fire so intense that it stripped the wooden stocks off their rifles. In 1871, two hide hunters from Wisconsin froze to death in Nebraska. Their companion lost both feet. In the Easter blizzard of 1873, upward of a hundred hide hunters froze to death on the southern Great Plains. A man’s carcass was found frozen to a set of railroad tracks. Seventy amputations were performed in Dodge City after the blizzard; one man lost both of his arms and both of his legs.

  The U.S. government made a mockery of its vow to protect Indian land from white encroachment, so the Indians attempted to do the job on their own. The Comanche were particularly vigilant against buffalo hunters. They killed scores of hide hunters, including well-known ones such as Marshall Sewall, John Sharp, and Joe Jackson. They’d scalp their heads and mutilate their bodies.* Sometimes they’d stake the bodies to the ground and pepper them full of arrows and bullet holes. At least once they left behind an eerie drawing of dead white men, showing the exact locations of the wounds on the bodies. If the Indians were hungry, they’d shoot the hunters’ draft animals. Other hide hunters would come along and find legless mules and oxen still harnessed to the carts. If a hide hunter was killed by Indians, his colleagues would band together to drive the Indians back out of the hunting grounds. They sometimes took vigilante justice to such extremes that the U.S. Army would threaten to declare them illegal militias. Now and then, inexpertly scalped hide hunters and stolen hides would generate paranoia among other hunters, fearful that the killing was an inside job and that a murderer was in their ranks.