Buffalo - Conclusion

By Dan R. Conway

(Originally printed in the Hysham Echo on March 3, 1927)

(Cont. from last week)

Over on this Jocko reservation, the herd on the National Bison reserve roams a country of romance, rich beyond measure in historic lore. For, his neighbors, the Selish tribesmen, who in his animal heart he most loves and respects, have dwelt in that vicinity since the harsh hand of the white man’s civilization ruthlessly and deceitfully drove them back from their once free hunting ground in the verdant Bitter Root valley. There in the Jocko valley, every gulch and every ridge and every river and lake bears a name that preserves a fragment of some tradition which ever reaches an unappreciative world in lessening whispers.

The Vanishing Races

Every old chief, whether he be Piegan, Crow, Nez Perce, Sioux or Arapahoe, and especially if he be Selish, feel a warm and a sympathetic interest in the bison, for the fate of the Selish and the fate of the bison are much akin. Both today exist at the mercy of their old-time common foe and they cannot be unmindful of the cruelty that brought to them their common fate. Thus, today, when we consider all these things; when we mount the green carpeted bluffs from whose grassy tops we drink in the wonders of the redman’s onetime domain, and our minds are invited to contemplation, we cannot but realize what this merciless transformation has meant to our aborigines.

It was not only the slaughter of the bison as it affected their food supply that stirred the bitter hatred of the Indian for the white man. All the tribes of the plains Indian nations were profoundly religious. To these natives, aside from killing to supply their material needs, all animal life was sacred. The myth and the legend of Piegan, Crow, Selish, Shoshone, Arapahoe, and all the rest, are every one rich in the beaver, the bear and the bison. Scarcely a religious rite was practiced by them in which the buffalo did not play a part. With the Piegans, the feast of the consecrated meat, not unlike one of the Christian ceremonies, was composed of buffalo tongues, which were held sacred to the sun.

The Sacred Bison

“The Sand Hills” - “The Shadow Land” - the Indians’ ultimate ideal, the spiritual Elysium of perpetual and eternal bliss, was a great sunlit country, inhabited by the creatures who shared life on Earth with them, chief among which was the bison. Heaven, to them, was to be a replica of what the mountains and plains were before the coming of the white man - a paradise where natures had developed her best in all things for her children who were native to it.

In a Usurped Country

Today, as I stand on the brown-grassed mound and behold from its top the windings, infinite, of the old Missouri, and its innumerable hills, its rolling domes of brown, patched white with snow, vanishing into the blue of yonder horizon, when naught but the sighing winds are heard to break the quietude of the panorama, I blush with shame, for I tread sacred ground that is not mine nor the property of the race from which I have sprung. I roam from hill-top to hill-top; I pluck the wild flowers; I travel the trail; but I dare not hunt upon this ground; I dare not fish its streams. And, had I the millions of Ford and Rockefeller I could not buy a deed which would convey to me title to one foot of its soil for that belongs to the aboriginal race and the wild life which have been forced back and back and back into the West - the redman and his bison. NOT - Authorities: Catlin’s “Indians in North America”; James Willard Schultz. Print this post