Buffalo - Part Six

By Dan R. Conway

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

(Cont. from last week)

The Sane Hunters

There were, it is true, many men such as the Earl of Dunraven, Dr. Allen and others, who came west and hunted western game as did the Indian, for meat or trophies, but the final extinction of the bison and other wild game on the prairies was accomplished by the most cowardly and inhuman methods.

The commercial slaughter of the bison and the sale of buffalo hides reached vast proportions in the seventies. In St. Louis, one firm received 250,000 robes in 1871. There were many trading posts dealing in these and smaller peltries. In Cheyenne, in 1872 there was at the Union Pacific tracks a shed that measured 175 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet high, and this was literally so packed with buffalo hides that the walls bulged. Fort Benton, Montana, sent 80,000 buffalo hides to the St. Louis market in 1876. It is estimated that from 1872 to 1874 there were 1,780,461 buffalo killed and wasted, the meat being left to rot on the plains, the hides only being utilized. During this same time, also, 3,158,780 were killed by white hunters and the hides transported over the Santa Fe Trail. Add to these figures the 540,000 killed by the Indians during those years and you have a grand total of 3,698,780. By 1877 the great southern herd had been exterminated.

The Hide Hunters

Colonel Harry Young states that one hunter, Kirt Jordan, in Ford county, Kansas, held a record of having killed 100 buffalo at one stand. Colonel Young also described the “mule” method of removing the hides, leaving the carcasses to the elements and the coyotes. But a very few years saw the northern herd pass in much the same manner.

The most conspicuous person engaged in the killing of bison was the late Colonel William F. Cody, more familiarly known as Buffalo Bill, Which sobriquet has been a household word for more than half a century. In 1867, when the Kansas Pacific was being built across the plains to Denver, Cody, then a young man, was employed at $500 a month to keep the army of workers supplied with meat. He was engaged in this work for eighteen months, during which time he killed on an average eight buffalo a day.

Buffalo Bones

When, in the sixties, the vast army of argonauts trekked the plains westward toward the new “diggings” of Idaho, the prairies were in many places fairly white, with the bleached bones of buffalo. Little, then, did these pioneers dream that but a decade later profitable use would be made of these gruesome reminders of a forgotten past. However, following the completion of the Union Pacific railroad and sister lines, a new industry was inaugurated in the collection and shipping of bones. The trade thus carried on is astonishing to contemplate. In ten years’ time, the sales of bones aggregated $4,000,000, at an average of $8 per ton. In 1874, alone, there were shipped east over the Kansas Pacific and Santa Fe roads 10,000,000 pounds of bones, more than 1,250,000 buffalo hides, and 6000,000 pounds of buffalo meat. The bones were ground up into fertilizer and the horns were polished and sold largely for dwelling and office ornaments.

The Santa Fe Railroad company compiled the following table showing the shipments made over their line as well as the Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific roads:
Buffalo Statistics for the Years 1872-73-74:
   
    A. T. &    and all other   
Year    S. F.    Railroads
    Hides    Hides    Total
1872    165,721    331,342    497,163
1873    251,443    502,886    754,329
1874    42,289    84,578    126,867
____________________________________
Total    459,453    918,906    1,378,359

    Meat, lbs.    Meat, lbs    Total
1872    None    None
1873    1,617,600    3,235,200    4,852,800
1874    632,800    1,265,600    1,898,400
____________________________________
Total    2,250,400    4,500,800    6,751,200

    Bones, lbs    Bone, lbs.    Total
1872    1,135,300    2,270,600    3,405,900
1873    2,743,100    5,486,200    8,229,300
1874    6,914,950    13,829,900    20,744,850
____________________________________
Total    10,793,350    21,586,700    32,380,050

Despite the fact that these figures are staggering, they represent but a part of the traffic, for in the same years, shipments in vast quantity were transported down the Missouri river and by other modes of carriage.
It will never be known just how many buffalo were slaughtered to make way for the white man’s civilization, nor how much profit was derived from the traffic in hides and by-products . The traffic represented the greatest industry the west ever knew or, perhaps will ever again witness.

The Robe Trade

The trading posts made enormous profits bartering for buffalo hides. There were scores of these throughout the northwest, many of them located in Montana. Among the more important of these traders to operate in Montana and across the line in Canada in the later days, were Joe Kipp and James Healey, who operated at Fort Benton. Other posts were located in the Judith Basin country and along the course of the Missouri, for a pound or two of cheap grade of brown sugar or an equivalent of cheap coffee, or perhaps a small flask of diluted trade whiskey, these traders could buy a buffalo robe worth from five to ten dollars at the Missouri river markets. The finest tanned cow hides could be obtained for twice that amount of brown sugar or coffee. Some of these were painted in aboriginal style, with the many hieroglyphics of the redman. Eastern tourists would pay from $50 to $100 for a fine painted robe. These cost the traders, perhaps, 50 cents.

As early as 1863 the trade in buffalo robes with the Indians were enormous, hundreds of thousands of the animals being killed annually, and the hides became a staple article of commerce. Every plainsman had one or more robes, and thousands were made into overcoats. Every freighter and mule or ox skinner had buffalo overshoes, made with the hair inside.
Colonel Sam Gordon, a pioneer editor of Miles City, was in Montana before the big extermination commenced. He stated that in eastern Montana, the Yellowstone valley in particular, was a place of wholesale slaughter, after the coming of the railroad.

A number of parties operating in the interest of St. Louis fur concerns, headquartered at Miles City. They would equip hunters with an outfit. These hunters would build blinds on the prairies and in the valleys where the buffalo fed. From this point of vantage, they would shoot all day. They were, of course, good shots, and it was not unusual for an experienced hunter to bag 100 buffalo in a day’s shooting according to Col Gordon.

The hunter would not even skin the animals, Indians following him performing this service. The green hides would be wrapped in bundles, and in a few days wagons would come along and pick these up and take them to Miles City. Colonel Gordon’s estimate is that one season’s shipment from Miles City was 250,000 robes.

Tanning and Dressing

The secret of tanning and dressing the buffalo hide has never been acquired by the white man, says Colonel Gordon, who gives the following account of the commercial failure incident to the wholesale slaughter of the bison:
“A concern in Michigan had experimented with buffalo hide tanning and had succeeded in producing a robe that was fairly pliable. Buffalo coats and robes were in demand. An average Indian-tanned robe was worth in the states from $10 to $15. Agents were sent out to the frontier to employ good shots to kill buffalo, and, as a starter, they were paid $2 a hide on the prairie. The only limit to the kill in the beginning of the slaughter was the resistance offered by the buffalo’s thick hide and heavy skull. The heaviest caliber rifles then to be had were quite often found inadequate to the task of dealing certain death, but inventive genius came to the rescue and perfected an extra heavy Sharp’s rifle, against which nature’s armor was powerless to protect, and the doom of the bison was signed and sealed.

“By this time the business had become systematized and the labors of the chase divided, so that the first-class hunter carried a half-dozen ‘skinners’ in his outfit and established a permanent camp somewhere in the vicinity of the ranging buffalo herds.
“The hunter was, nine times out of ten, an improvident, unreliable ‘cuss’ whose only recommendation was his ability to shoot. Such men never had a cent to equip themselves with, but found no difficulty in getting ‘staked’ to a team, wagon and harness, gun and ammunition, camp outfit and grub for the party, an investment of from $800 to $1,000, in addition to which the principal agreed to pay the hunter the going price for the hides, piled where killed, to be gathered by him in the spring, and, as an additional evidence of the lunacy which afflicted otherwise intelligent business men at this time they did not hesitate to make cash advances during the winter on this supposititious killing.

“In the spring it was generally found that the killing had been largely overstated; that the hides had been poorly handled and left to rot in pools of snow and water and those that were recovered and brought in, when shipped to eastern tanners, were in such bad condition that they rarely paid the freight from Miles City eastward, leaving the bulk of the original investment a permanent debit to experience.

“The winter of 1880-81 was the record breaker in buffalo killing, owing, no doubt, to the very deep snows of that winter, making it impossible for the herds to move. It was estimated that 250,000 were killed in Custer county, Montana, alone.”

Passing of the Bison

Today the bison lives; but, no longer is he monarch of the wilderness. The wilderness has passed, and with its passing have vanished the vast herds which, through strength of numbers and instinctive sagacity, defied the hundreds, the remnant of this once proud horde, roam the limited, strongly fenced private and national pastures, the greatest of the National reserves being located in the southwestern part of the Flathead Indian reservation, not far from the town of Ravalli.
(Concluded next week!) Print this post