American Buffalo

by Steven Rinella

  THE HIDE BOOM only lasted a dozen years before the buffalo ran out. The first big hunting push was in the vicinity of Dodge City. In 1871, the first big year, the hide hunters killed so many animals so close to town that residents complained about the stench of rotting carcasses. That winter, a half-million buffalo hides were shipped out of Dodge. The hunters spread out from there, organizing their hunts along the eastward-flowing rivers of the Great Plains. They hunted out the Republican River, near the Nebraska-Kansas line. Along the south fork of the Platte River, hundreds of buffalo hunters lined fifty miles of riverbank and used fires to keep the buffalo from getting to the water at night. In four daytime periods, they gunned down fifty thousand of the thirst-crazed animals. Within a year or two the hunters had cleaned out the regions immediately to the north of the Arkansas River, and then they hunted out the watersheds of the Cimarron, Canadian, and Red rivers. The hide hunters pushed south into the Texas Panhandle and southwest Oklahoma. Soon, hunters who outfitted in Dodge were straying so far from home that their hides were shipping out of Fort Worth, Texas. By 1878, there weren’t enough buffalo on the southern plains to warrant the chase.

  The Texas hunt was followed by a brief lull in the action while a new railroad, the Northern Pacific, cut into the northern range. Once the railroad made it to Miles City, Montana, in 1881, word spread that the core of the last great herd had been tapped. Hide dealers calculated that 500,000 buffalo ranged within 150 miles of town. Soon there were five thousand hide hunters killing the animals. A herd that was estimated at seventy-five thousand head crossed the Yellowstone River three miles outside of Miles City, moving north as a great mass. Hunters stayed with the buffalo like sheepdogs, pushing them along. Accounts vary, but anywhere from zero to five thousand buffalo were all that was left by the time the herd reached Canada. By 1883, the one remaining large herd had moved into the Black Hills. It started out as ten thousand buffalo and was quickly reduced to one thousand by white hide hunters. Then the Sioux warrior Sitting Bull and a thousand of his men fell on the herd and killed the rest. A man who took part in the slaughter said that “there was not a hoof left.”

  When the hide hunters were done, the skinned-out carcasses that they left behind rotted down, and green grasses sprang up in the places where the juices oozed. Then the green grass turned brown in the fall, and the carcasses were picked down to the bone by scavengers. The bones turned white in the sun. At that moment it might have seemed as though there was nothing more that we could get out of the buffalo, but there was. Makers of fine bone china began to purchase the best of the bones, those that weren’t too dry or weathered. Burned to ash and added to ceramics formulas, the bones gave American-and English-produced porcelains a translucency and whiteness that could compete with imported Oriental china. Other big consumers of quality buffalo bones were the sugar, wine, and vinegar industries; they had been using wood ash to neutralize acids and clarify liquids, but in the early nineteenth century they found that bone ash did a better job of making sugar more shiny and wine less cloudy. Industries also used buffalo bone ash in fine-grained polishing agents and baking powders. Metallurgists found that bone ash was useful in the process of refining minerals.

  By far, the biggest consumer of buffalo bones was the fertilizer industry. It didn’t care so much about quality; cracked, dried-out, dirty bones were just fine. Workers would grind them into a coarse powder known as bonemeal, which can be tilled into nutrient-poor or acidic soils. Firms that produced buffalo bonemeal fertilizer managed to sell a lot of the product to homesteaders on the Great Plains who were trying to produce corn and wheat on lands recently abandoned by buffalo.

  The homesteaders who bought buffalo bonemeal were often the same people who’d been picking the buffalo bones up. Upon their arrival in the wake of the hide hunters, homesteaders burned whatever buffalo chips were lying about, and then they were forced to burn buffalo bones as heating and cooking fuel. The smoke from these fires smelled just like burning hair. Some men found the buffalo bones to be an encumbrance to tilling and working the soil. A homesteader arrived in Nebraska and cursed the bones. “Buffalo bones was laying around on the ground as thick as cones under a big fir tree,” he said, “and we had to pick them up, and pile them up, and work around them until we was blamed sick of ever hearing the name buffalo.” Settlers stacked the bones in great heaps and torched the stacks. When the bone market developed, or when railroad spurs reached their “neighborhood,” the settlers took to selling bones. For many, buffalo bones were the first cash crop to rise up out of their newly acquired dirt. An advertisement on the front page of the July 23, 1885, edition of North Dakota’s Grafton News and Times read: “Notice to Farmers: I will pay cash for buffalo bones. Bring them in by the ton or hundred. I will give fifty pounds of the best twine for one ton of bones, for this month only, or a $40 sewing machine for forty tons. I want 5000 tons this month.”

  Remains of a hide hunter slaughter somewhere in Canada.

  A train car could haul the bones from approximately 850 buffalo. Stacked alongside the railroad tracks, bones fetched $8 a ton. It took about a hundred buffalo skeletons to make a ton of bones, so each animal’s skeleton was worth eight cents. If the bones were wet, it might take only about seventy-five skeletons, so a burst of rain on a pile of dried bones was considered a good thing by bone pickers. In all, the money was good enough to inspire many bone pickers to go full-time instead of just cleaning up their own land. A man named George Beck and his brother hunted bones outside of Dodge City. The Beck brothers operated with two wagons and two teams of oxen. They camped under the stars and cooked bread, bacon, and sweet potatoes over buffalo chip fires. When their wagons were filled, they hauled them to the wagon trails connecting Dodge City to peripheral military forts out on the wild prairie. They would dump their load and paint their mark on a prominently displayed skull. Government freighters who supplied goods to the forts would fill their empty wagons with the Becks’ bones on the way back to Dodge City and then drop the bones at the railroad tracks.

  On the northern Great Plains, a group of Indians gathered 2,550 tons of buffalo bones in anticipation of a railroad coming through. In Kansas, bone pickers accumulated a pile of bones along the Santa Fe Railroad that was ten feet high, twenty feet wide, and a quarter mile long. The Santa Fe was greeted outside Granada, Colorado, with a mound of bones that was ten feet by twenty feet and a half mile long. Railroads would build spurs from the main line just for the sake of collecting stacks of buffalo bones. It was good business for them. The Empire Carbon Works, in St. Louis, processed 1.25 million tons of buffalo bones during the buffalo bone era. It paid on average $22.50 a ton. That’s over $28 million paid out for buffalo bones, which came from perhaps 125 million skeletons—or more than four times the number of buffalo that ever existed at any one time.

  Before the buffalo bones were all picked up, people traveling through buffalo country reported bones so thick on the ground that they looked like fallen snow. If you could have watched the bone pickers’ progress in time-lapse photography taken from outer space, it would have looked like the snow was melting ahead of a great westward-moving heat wave. The wave traveled fast, pushing up river valleys and railroads first and then spreading outward until there was hardly a bone left anywhere. By 1890 it was hard to find a buffalo bone south of the Union Pacific Railroad. As the skeletons petered out, the fertilizer and carbon industries announced a “bone crisis.” Prices shot up. Indians began digging bones with shovels and picks beneath buffalo jumps that dated to the birth of Christ. They once believed that these bones were capable of rising back up into brand-new buffalo, but times had changed.

  What locals refer to as “Boneville,” along Rouge River, Detroit, Michigan, late 1800s.

  The Detroit Public Library houses a famous photo from around the time of the bone crisis. It shows a mountain of stacked buffalo skulls that’s thirty feet high at the crest and hundreds of feet long. The photo was taken in a rail yard at the Michigan Carbon
Works in Detroit, a place that locals called “Boneville.” I’ve driven past there several times—crossing the Rouge River on the I-75 bridge, you can look down and see the exact place. It would require an involved feat of extrapolation to calculate just how many thousands of skulls were in that heap. The most interesting thing about the photo is the man standing at the top. Wearing a suit and top hat, a large buffalo skull propped against his leg, he resembles an exclamation point standing at the top of a very long sentence about death and destruction.

  Since the end of the buffalo bone days, the Michigan Carbon Works has downsized dramatically. The agricultural industry turned away from bones and began using pulverized phosphate rock as a source for phosphorous fertilizer. Many old markets for bone carbon are now satisfied by carbon black, a by-product of fossil fuel combustion that is otherwise known as soot. Today, what’s left of the Michigan Carbon Works is a small company called Ebonex, located on South Wabash Street in Melvindale, Michigan. They burn cattle bones to create ash that is used as dye in colored plastics, coated paper, wood stains, and paints. The Food and Drug Administration has given bone ash GRAS status, or generally regarded as safe. It’s used to treat water on fish farms, and it’s used in water filters for household aquariums. They also sell a lot of bone ash to movie production companies that want to replicate oil spills. Mixed with vegetable oil, bone ash makes a biodegradable dead ringer for Texas tea. If you’ve seen The Beverly Hillbillies, Die Hard 3, Men in Black, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or Jarhead, you’ve seen the contemporary products of a company that once produced about 650 tons of buffalo bone ash every year.

  11

  WHATEVER BUFFALO FEVER IS, it doesn’t last long. When I wake up just before daylight, I feel perfectly fine. I kick my legs inside my sleeping bag for a minute. Still fine, no nausea. I’m using a plastic Popov vodka bottle as a water bottle, and the contents are frozen almost completely solid. The temperature must have dropped in the night. The expanding ice has forced the bottle into a bulbous, gourd-like shape. There’s a pocket of open water in the center of the ice, so I reach through the neck of the bottle with the blade of my Leatherman and auger a hole toward it. Everything outside the tent is crusted in a thin hard layer of frost. The cooking pot is so cold that my fingertips stick to it. I go over to the river, kick away some ice, and dip the pot into the water. My fingertips are immediately released. The river’s flowing with slush. The thawing of the glacier at the head of the Chetaslina River must have slowed considerably because the water level has dropped nearly a foot. I scrub the pot with fine gravel and then fill it with water.

  Rather than messing with the buffalo chips or looking for wood, I try to get my gas-powered stove lit. When I remove the fuel tank, my thumb sticks to the metal. I blow some warm air on there to get my thumb back, and then I open the filler cap on the tank. I don’t have a funnel with me, so I use a short stick to guide the gas from the fuel can into the small port on the tank. I tighten the filler cap, slide the tank into place, and then turn the pump plunger a half crank counterclockwise. After a dozen pumps the tank is pressurized. When I open the valve wheel on the generator, the stove lets off a sound like a can of shook-up beer getting opened. After four flicks of my lighter the stove hasn’t lit and the tank quits hissing. The stove’s too cold.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say.

  I close the valve wheel and pump the plunger a couple more times. Then I pour a dab of gas on the master burner and light it. The metal clinks and clacks as it heats up. With the flame burned out and the metal good and hot, I dip a twig into the fuel can and then light it with the lighter. A turn of the valve wheel and a touch of the twig to the hot burner bring the stove to life. I wave my fingers over the flame until the feeling returns.

  I want to get going early, so instead of a regular breakfast I eat a couple of mini-sized candy bars and some half-frozen pasta chased down with a cup of coffee. When I’m done, I rinse the cup in the river and pack it into a nylon sack with a couple days’ worth of food and some other odds and ends that I’ll need. The tent’s on top of a small tarp to help keep the floor’s fabric dry; I yank the tarp out from under the tent like a magician pulling a tablecloth from under plates and glasses. There’s a layer of glacial flour frozen to the tarp like sandpaper, so I shake it out and brush it off before rolling it up and fastening it to the outside of my pack. I stuff my sleeping bag into its sack and stuff that into the bottom of my pack.

  My dry suit is frozen like a rock, and I can’t even get my legs into the openings. I turn the stove back on and stand over it, exposing a little bit of the material at a time until the suit is limber enough to climb into. I don’t want my boot liners getting all wet, so I pull them out of the boots and tuck them under the lid of the pack. I put the boots on over the feet of the dry suit and tie them up enough to prevent me from tripping on the laces. I strap my rifle to my pack with a bungee cord and then find a good walking stick to help me across the Chetaslina River. I step into the water, taking it slow, and I ease across by using the stick as a point of resistance against the current. Once I’m on the other bank, I take off the suit and shake out the boots as best as I can. The boots start to freeze almost instantly, and I have to walk around for a couple of minutes before they’re loose enough to lace them up. I stick a smooth rock into each leg of the dry suit so it doesn’t blow away while I’m gone, and then I hang it over a patch of willow. My toes are so cold they ache.

  I barely go two hundred yards and a wolf’s standing in front me. He’s so close that I could spit a cherry pit and hit him if I wanted to. He doesn’t see me, but he knows something’s not right. I hold dead still. The wolf swipes his nose through the air as fast as a waving hand. He looks through me before looking at me, like I’m just another clump of willow standing here. He licks his upper lip, in a quick flash of the tongue that goes from his left to his right. Then his eyes pass over me again and he seems to see what I am, or maybe what I am not, and his body shrinks down into the ground as though suddenly supporting a great weight from above. When the wolf springs into a run, headed upstream, his head and front shoulders are scrunched low to the ground as if he’s preparing to duck under a fence. I jog ahead to catch another glimpse, but there’s nothing to see but willows and rocks.

  My plan is to follow the Chetaslina upstream until I get clear of the Ahtna land and then make my way up to the crest of the ridge where I’d seen the four bulls a couple days before. In my mind, I’ve come to think of the ridge as “Buffalo Ridge.” I’m going to start sleeping up there so I won’t have to waste daylight hours hauling myself back and forth to my main camp.

  As I work my way upstream, I notice some wet splashes on the rocks ahead of me. Something came out of the river dripping wet. I follow the splashes across the river rocks and come to a fresh set of buffalo tracks stamped into the frozen crust of ground. The tracks are huge, the biggest set I’ve seen by far. Buffalo hunters used to swap tales about giant buffalo that were one and a half times taller than regular buffalo. They called them buffalo oxen. In livestock terminology, oxen are adult castrated bulls used as draft animals. They’re thinner in the neck and get taller than bulls that are allowed to keep their nuts, so when hunters saw particularly big buffalo on the Great Plains, they assumed that the same processes were at play except that it was wolves doing the castrating. Maybe the wolf that I just saw was licking his lips over the thought of getting himself a set of buffalo balls for lunch.

  The sudden appearance of the tracks kind of depresses me. I’m not feeling very good about my prospects of finding a buffalo, and for some reason this encounter with the tracks makes me feel even worse. The tracks seem so purely random in their occurrence—just a single animal cutting through hundreds of square miles of wilderness with no apparent aim. The tracks aren’t in any of the places where I’ve been concentrating my energies: they aren’t on a trail; they aren’t in a meadow; they aren’t on a ridge. This might be the closest I’ve gotten to a buffalo, and the only reason
I know it was here is because of a few droplets of water on some rocks. Indians used to find buffalo in lots of ways beyond actually seeing the animals. On the Great Plains, clouds of stirred-up dirt often gave buffalo herds away. The animals would kick up the dirt while they ran or wallowed, creating what one explorer described as “vast clouds of dust rising and circling in the air as though a tornado or whirlwind were sweeping over the earth.” In hot weather, people could see clouds of water vapor coming off large herds that were hidden from view behind hills. When it was cold, a cloud of frost sometimes hung over large herds. The nature of the frost could tell a skilled hunter how large the group was and how compactly they were herded together. Birds gave buffalo away, too. Some birds followed the herds in order to pick grass seeds out of their fresh droppings or to hunt for insects kicked up by the buffalo’s feet. One of these species of birds used to be called a buffalo bird, but now it’s known as a cowbird. A small flock of these birds flying over the distant prairie could tell a hunter that it might be worthwhile to walk over there and see what was up.

  I try to follow the buffalo, but I lose its trail. In the trees, the crust of frost on the ground is not thick enough to show animal tracks. Sometimes, I’ll lose an animal’s trail and then find it again by looking for likely routes. Then I’ll jump ahead to see if I can find fresh tracks that validate my guess. I try this a few times but don’t find anything. Instead, I continue along, staying on the west bank of the Chetaslina. I follow the river’s course through alder snags and across gravel bars. Sometimes the river cuts so close to the spruce forest that I’m forced into the woods to bushwhack. I start crossing intermittent sets of buffalo tracks on the softer ground. Some are old and some are fresh, and I can see places where the animals have been milling around and feeding on patches of willow. I move very slowly, scanning the land in front of me and taking only a few steps at a time. I’m a little over four miles upstream from my campsite at the confluence of the Copper and the Chetaslina. Here, the east fork of the Chetaslina flows into the river’s main channel. The rivers collide at an angle similar to how your fingers come together when you make a peace sign with your hand. The land between the two branches is filled by a ridge that collapses sharply into the valley floor. Like every ridge around here, it’s capped by a worn buffalo trail. I should go over and check that for fresh sign, I think. I take a few steps that way and then come into a small opening amid the spruce trees, and I get hit by a breeze that’s carrying the smell of buffalo. It’s a lot like the smell of horses—not the smell of horses standing in a stable amid their own filth, but that of horses out in the open, on green pasture. I slowly drop down to my haunches, then inch my way over to a spruce tree so that my profile is broken up. I start looking ahead through the brush and trees with my binoculars. I don’t see anything yet. I’ve often found elk like this, just by smelling them. I can usually tell the difference between the smell of elk that are there and the smell of elk that used to be there. This odor I smell now has a strange touch of warmth to it, like they either are here or have just left.