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*Because I had found the skull on national forest land, Kenneth Cannon encouraged me to report the find to the proper authorities. I resisted this at first, fearing that I’d broken a law by removing the skull from federal property and now it would be taken away from me. Eventually the guilt was too much for me to handle, and I confessed my crime to Mark Sant, a federal archaeologist whose jurisdiction includes the Beaverhead National Forest. We discussed the skull, and he informed me that I fit into a sort of gray area between rules governing anthropological specimens. Because the skull does not show direct evidence of obvious human tampering, such as carvings or brain extraction, it is not necessarily a cultural artifact. And since the bone is not yet fossilized, it isn’t considered a fossil. He granted me immunity in exchange for information. I submitted photos, a copy of the radiocarbon report, and a marked U.S. Geological Survey quadrangle map. With these materials, Sant promised to compile an archaeological site form on the skull.
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Chapter 5
*Bradbury had an eventful, though ultimately fruitless, trip. He came to the United States to collect plants, but he got a whole lot more than he bargained for. Traveling the Missouri River, he hunted for grizzly bears and buffalo, got chased by a skunk, and was sexually propositioned by many Indian women, of whom he remarked that “chastity … is not a virtue.” At the end of his trip, he shipped his botanical specimens to London and attempted to return home by taking a detour down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He passed through New Madrid, Missouri, on December 14, 1811, and complained that the city was shabby and poorly stocked. Much of New Madrid was destroyed two days later, when the first of several powerful earthquakes struck the region. It was the most powerful series of earthquakes to ever hit the Lower 48. The aftershocks were felt across one million square miles (the great earthquake that destroyed San Francisco in 1906 was felt across only six thousand square miles), large areas of the earth disappeared into faults, rivers flowed backward, 150,000 acres of trees were destroyed, and the Mississippi River changed its course. Bradbury was actually on the river, near Memphis, Tennessee, when the quake hit. His boat was upset by tsunamis, and hours later the current was transporting hundreds of human bodies. Bradbury continued his journey toward home, making it to New Orleans in time for the War of 1812, when the United States rehashed the Revolutionary War in a series of battles with Britain. The war delayed Bradbury’s return home by several years. In his absence, a rival botanist pirated his treasure trove of specimens and published a book based on Bradbury’s findings. Bradbury’s bitterness over the fraud lasted him throughout his life, and he died in obscurity in 1823.
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*Today, when scientists with the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Biological Service discuss the disappearance of grizzly bears from 95 percent of their range in the Lower 48 over the last two centuries, they cite the termination of the supply of drowned buffalo carcasses on the Great Plains as one of the causes.
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*A black bear track has an arced, rainbow-shaped toe pattern, like your fingertips when your hand is stretched out flat. The tips of the claw marks fall within one or one and a half inches of the toe marks. On a grizzly’s footprint, the toes are arranged in a more or less straight line, so you can take a ruler’s edge and hit all five. Their claw marks can be two or three inches out from the toes.
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Chapter 6
*The historian Mari Sandoz argued vehemently that buffalo always, without exception, traveled into the wind. If this were true, every buffalo in the western United States would have eventually ended up congregated in great masses on the coasts of the Pacific and Arctic oceans. (Or else they’d swim, lemminglike, to their deaths.) However, she believed that seasonal wind changes routinely saved buffalo from such a disaster. Sandoz relates a story told to her by a Sioux man, which itself does a good job of illustrating the troubles that her own theory, if true, would cause for buffalo. The man described an unseasonably warm fall that allowed a massive herd of buffalo to push so far into northern Canada—perhaps into the predominant winds—that they weren’t able to go back down south in time for the winter. When Sandoz asked how many died, the Sioux man used hand signals to show that it was a hundred times a hundred times a hundred, or a million.
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*A couple of examples: In Yellowstone National Park, the largest seasonal migration is a midwinter movement toward the north, where there tends to be less snowfall. Along the Copper River, the herd’s fall migration is eastward, moving away from glaciers and toward a major river valley.
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*There are several competing theories about the origin of the Tongue River’s name: (1) the river is crooked like a white man’s tongue; (2) there’s a tongue-shaped formation of trees and rocks near the head of the river, in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming; (3) Indians called it the Talking River, and whites mistranslated it as the Tongue River; and (4) someone killed a bunch of buffalo along the river and only kept the tongues.
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Chapter 7
*McJunkin’s books, fossils, telescope, and an old Indian skull that he found were all destroyed when a lightning bolt struck his shack and burned it down. He aged fast, and when he started to slow down he moved into the Folsom Hotel. When he could no longer get out of bed, he drank bootleg whiskey through a hose. He died broke. Allegedly his final words were “I’m going where all good niggers go.” His original wooden tombstone was last known to reside in a small museum in Portales, New Mexico. His current tombstone, the one I saw, was purchased by the kids who taught him to read. (As is the case with just about everything having to do with old buffalo-related stuff, these details are conjectural.)
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*“Fluting” thinned the point and probably aided in the process of hafting it to a spear shaft. It is such an inefficient and technically demanding process that anthropologists believe it may have had religious as well as functional significance. The archaeologist Bruce Bradley has likened the fluting process to a football player crossing himself before a field goal attempt.
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*Ancient quarries for tool-grade stones were sometimes quite large. Archaeologists have recorded pits measuring nine feet deep and trenches measuring six feet in width and eighty feet in length. Settlers in the American Southwest sometimes mistook these pits for the old gold-mining operations of wandering Spaniards, because only Europeans would have the work ethic to dig so much. One such flint quarry in Wyoming was named Spanish Point, even though the place was littered with bone and antler digging tools. An interesting tidbit is that it’s possible to tell whether a Folsom hunter was left-or right-handed. Sometimes the hunters would re-sharpen spear points that were mounted to the spear shaft. They’d only sharpen one face on each edge of the point; looking at re-sharpened points, you can tell whether the hunter was holding the spear shaft in his right or left hand. Folsom hunters were basically like us; about 30 percent were lefties.
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*Clovis points are extraordinarily valuable. Recently, a well-known collection of thirteen Clovis points, dubbed the Fenn Cache, was sold from one private collector to another for a rumored one-million-plus dollars. Single Clovis points fetch up to $60,000. Folsom points are significantly less valuable, but still nothing to laugh at. A broken Folsom point of uncertain authenticity and questionable provenance might sell for around $3,000. A pedigreed Folsom point, of undisputed authenticity, will fetch ten times that amount. As with all antiquities, though, the establishment of a projectile point’s authenticity is troublesome. Today, an estimated five thousand recreational flint knappers produce 1.5 million arrowheads and flint tools annually. Through accident and ill intention, some of these points inevitably get circulated as authentic archaeological specimens.
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*“Paleo-” is of Greek origin an
d means, simply, “old.” My use of the word “cultures” in this context is imperfect, but it’s the best word we’ve got to describe the various groups of Paleo-Indians. They were marked by different technological systems and the occupation of different habitats, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they had varying lifestyles and belief systems. Whether they were actually “culturally distinct” by today’s standards (whatever those are) is unknown.
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*This is assuming that the elephant seal is an aquatic mammal; it births on dry land but spends up to 80 percent of its life in the ocean.
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Chapter 8
*The world of humans is much more colorful in the daytime and much darker at night than the world of buffalo. The retina of an eye contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive than cones, and much better in low-light conditions, but they don’t detect colors. Perhaps because buffalo are active at night (and because their predators are active at night), they have a much higher percentage of rods to cones than humans. As for low-light vision, human eyeballs have a density of cones in the center and a greater abundance of rods toward the periphery. When you’re messing around with something in the dark and can’t quite see it, try looking at it out of the corner of your eye. You’ll see it more clearly.
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Chapter 9
*Pioneers crossing the Great Plains would string blankets beneath their Conestoga wagons and fill the blankets with buffalo chips as they traveled along. Conestoga wagons were manufactured in the Conestoga River valley of Pennsylvania. People used to call the wagons Stogies for short. Nowadays, people call cigars stogies. If you read about this sort of thing much, you’ll come across a lot of reasons why: that cigars look like wagon spokes; that the drivers of Conestoga wagons liked to breathe through lit cigars to filter out trail dust; that tobacco farmers in Virginia used Conestoga wagons to haul their crops to market. None of those reasons are true. Instead, stogies are stogies because the first cigar producer in Pennsylvania set up shop in the Conestoga valley and he produced good, cheap cigars. The name stuck.
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†Sometimes a whole pack will howl together, on and on. Biologists believe that this type of group howling could be a form of entertainment, or a moment of bonding. But the dominant wolves in a pack will often bite less-dominant wolves if they join in the chorus. If the howling doesn’t mean anything, I wonder, why would they care?
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Chapter 10
*These hunters, variously called “buffalo callers,” “bringers-in,” or “bringers of plenty,” held a position of religious significance in their clans and tribes. One bringer-in refused to eat any buffalo that he lured to its death, for fear that he’d lose his abilities. Instead, he ate buffalo that were killed by others out on the open ground.
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*Earp was a participant in the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The actuality of his career as a buffalo hunter is sometimes challenged. A man by his name was arrested several times on prostitution charges in Peoria, Illinois, at a time that Wyatt Earp later claimed to be buffalo hunting in Kansas. Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid, a.k.a. Henry McCarty, William Antrim, and William Harrison Bonney. Tom Nixon was killed by Deputy Sheriff Mysterious Dave Mather, a sometime buffalo hunter who was rumored to be an ancestor of the Puritan writer Cotton Mather, who played an influential role in the Salem witch trials. Buckshot Roberts was killed by Billy the Kid’s gang, the Regulators. California Joe was killed by the Sioux.
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†Lonesome Charley died with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Legend has it, he had a premonition of his own death the night before he was killed and gave away all of his belongings.
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††Jack McCall sometimes went by Billy Sutherland and Billy Barnes. Oddly, Billy Barnes was a name used on occasion by both Wild Bill Hickok and his brother. After Wild Bill’s death, there was confusion about who killed whom. Some thought he’d been gunned down by his own kin.
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*Tom Nixon used two rifles to kill 120 buffalo in forty minutes. In Montana, a hundred miles northeast of Miles City, Vic Smith killed 107 without moving. A Dodge City resident “known for his truthfulness” killed 250 in a single day by making several consecutive stands. Colonel Dodge saw where a hunter killed 112 buffalo in forty-five minutes, dropping the animals within a semicircle of two hundred yards. Charlie Hart, a survivor of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, had several such days. He once killed 63 in two hours; another time he killed 171 in a single day; yet another time he downed 203 on ten acres of ground. Brick Bond killed 250 in a single day. A hunter named John R. Cook once killed 88 in a stand, and later admitted that the sight of them made him feel sick.
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*Buffalo tongues were prepared for shipment in a variety of ways. They were packed fresh into wooden barrels between layers of salt; they were brined in a mixture of water, sugar, and salt, then smoked like bacon and packed into barrels; and they were air-dried with salt and then submerged in barrels full of brine. A popular brine recipe, for a nineteen-gallon barrel, was water, two pounds of sugar, and a tablespoon of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. As a food additive, saltpeter inhibits some bacterial growth and gives meat a reddish color. (It is also a principal component of gunpowder.) In the days of eating buffalo tongues, saltpeter was produced from various forms of decomposing organic matter, such as stale urine, pigeon shit, or bat guano. Now it’s produced through the Haber process, which uses atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia and, in turn, saltpeter. Despite its more appetizing modern production method, the use of saltpeter in food has waned in recent decades thanks to health concerns—it’s been linked to kidney disease, anemia, and heart problems. I only recently quit adding the substance to my own home-smoked hams and tongues, and then only because I learned that it diminishes the male libido. There’s no direct proof of this particular health effect, though prison officials used to add saltpeter to prison food in order to chill the inmates’ sexual frustrations.
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*Marshall Sewall carried a three-pronged tripod, or “rest stick,” to support the barrel of his rifle while he shot buffalo. His killers poked two of the tripod’s prongs into his temples, the third in his navel. Other hunters had their heads opened and their brains scooped out. Indians also liked to move the dead hunters’ scrotums from their groins to the insides of their mouths. Sometimes the hunters’ abdomens were opened and packed with hot coals.
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Chapter 11
*Buffalo wallows often collect standing water in the spring, providing a valuable type of wildlife habitat known to ecologists as ephemeral aquatic ecosystems. Because they eventually dry up, fish cannot live in them. This makes buffalo wallows popular places for frogs and aquatic insects to lay their eggs, because there’s nothing in them that can eat their tadpoles and larvae. When the buffalo were removed from the West and replaced by people, the people weren’t as happy with the wallows as the frogs had been. In fact, homesteaders thought that wallows were a tremendous nuisance because cattle didn’t use them and no grass grew there. The farmers struggled to get rid of them. The mud in the wallows was loaded with water-soluble salts, and they called it alkali mud. It dried like concrete. People who lived in sod houses would collect the mud from the wallows and use it to cover their roofs, and then they’d fill the wallows with sand, dirt, or manure until they started to sprout grass. Now ecologists have begun to wonder what we lost when we destroyed thousands upon thousands of small ephemeral ponds. For instance, researchers studying western chorus frogs in Kansas have been trying to understand the frog’s historic relationship to buffalo wallows. One thing they’ve found is that tadpoles hatched in buffalo wallows will develop differently from tadpoles hatched in streams. Also, they’ll have different responses to environmental variables such as w
ater acidity and ammonium concentrations. This is particularly interesting at a time when frogs are vanishing from North America at an alarming rate.
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Chapter 13
*The fuzzy, tangled hair on the buffalo’s forehead was used as stuffing in commercially manufactured pillows as well. Because hide hunters didn’t usually skin the buffalo’s heads, people would sometimes follow in their wake to shave the hair away and collect it in sacks to sell by the pound.
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*The same set of methods works for aging horses. That’s where the old saying “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” comes from. To do so is like asking how much a present cost.
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Chapter 14
*Today, there’s a much higher percentage of white buffalo than there was in historic times. Many of the “sacred white buffalo,” a fixture of Western tourist traps, are the result of crossbreeding between buffalo and white breeds of cattle.
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†It’s been reported that the Crows feared and respected white buffalo hides, but would not use or touch them. Hunters from tribes that did not consider the white buffalo sacred, such as the Cree and Assiniboin, would attempt to kill white buffalo in order to sell the hide to a tribe that did.
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