BUFFALO HUNTERS

After the Civil War had ended, America began to look west once again toward the great frontier.  The country was still suffering greatly from the burden of war.  Things were especially bad in the southern states where many of the wealthier plantation families had lost nearly everything as the war marched over their lands.  Without the aid of slave labor, most would never recover to their former success in life.  Many of them looked to new lands and new opportunity out on the Great Plains of America.

The west was still heavily populated by the native Indians left alone upon these lands as the white settlers concentrated on settling lands east of the Mississippi.  After the Civil War, that focus began to shift as more of the white settlers headed west attempting to gain a stake in the abundant lands yet unclaimed.  As a result, great suffering would come to two inhabitants of this region…the Indians and the great herds of buffalo which roam the plains.

Prior to the push westward by settlers, the population of buffalo was estimated at between 50 and 60 million strong.  These animals ran in great herds grazing the plains and continuing the cycles of reproduction ever expanding in numbers.  The buffalo was the Indians primary source of food as well as a provider of many other products made from the carcass such as buckskins, moccasins, leather ropes and lines as well as fur for winter clothing, bedding, and skins for use in teepee building.  The Indians held great respect for the buffalo and looked upon it as a beast of the Great Spirit.  They ate of it and used the leftover components of the carcass as efficiently as possible yet took only that which they could use in keeping the villages and tribes fed.  Sometimes they took more, sometimes less but never enough to threaten the extinction of the buffalo.

The massive herds of buffalo were quite visible to white settlers moving west.  Soon, they too were killing off animals from the herd to feed and clothe themselves.  Markets began to develop for the hides with heavy trading in buffalo products springing up around the area of Leavenworth, Kansas.  Buyers paid money for the hides; the fur was used in fur coats for customers in the eastern markets; blankets were also cut from the fur for use in sleighs and buggies on winter outings.  The bones and the horns could be ground into fertilizer.  The uses for the buffalo grew quickly as the white man discovered its existence.

With the population movement west, there was a developing desire to get the Indians off the plains and on to reservations. This step would improve the safety of travelers and those who settled in various areas occupied by the Indians. A first step in gaining control over the Indians was to erect army forts at strategic points along the plains. Calvary units of various types were assigned to these remote posts with the focus on keeping the Indians in check and protecting the settlers. With large numbers of men stationed in these remote outposts, the question of food came to the forefront rapidly. As such, the army also looked to the buffalo herds to provide food to these sites.

The U.S. Government wanted buffalo meat for the soldiers but did not want to use the soldiers to acquire the meat.  In a free economy, this left room for the buffalo hunter to evolve.  These hunters were primarily of white descent and were motivated mainly by the steady flow of money to be made shooting the buffalo for army meat contracts, selling the hides and other by-products.  This steady available of money attracted men to the task of hunting the herds.  Some of them would go on to earn their names in the folklore of the Wild West.  Men like Pat Garrett, Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, and William Hickok hunted these beasts for the money.  A cottage industry of slaughter began to erupt upon the Great Plains.  By the 1880’s, more than 5,000 men were engaged in the process of hunting the buffalo.

The railroad was also coming heading west and scores of men came with it to prepare the land and lay the track beds across the vast prairie.  Like the army assigned to the remote outposts, these groups of workers formed camps which took huge amounts of meat to supply their daily needs.  Again, the railroads turned to the meat contracts offered by the buffalo hunters.

Hides also brought in money with tanneries offering up to $3.00 for each one brought in.  The tongue of the buffalo became a delicacy in some of the major markets of the east.  Each tongue would fetch a hunter about 25 cents in earnings.  While many buffalo were killed to feed the army and railroad workers, there were far more buffalo hunters slaughtering the herds that there were meat contracts to consume the animal.  In many cases, the hunter was killing the animals just to gain the hide, horns, and tongue.  While the meat was tempting, it spoiled rapidly and was difficult to transport.  Faced with that dilemma, the hunters took what they could transport from the dead carcass and left the remains to rot in the sun as food for the buzzards.

The Indians of the plains had hunted the buffalo with crude instruments including spears and the bow and arrow.  Killing one of these large beasts was quite difficult using their crude weapons.  It was also quite dangerous in that one must move very close to the animal in order for the weapon to penetrate the thick skins and adequately damage vital internal organs leading to death.  For the Indian, death could easily come to him in the process of hunting the buffalo. Members of the various tribes looked upon their warriors who were brave enough to take on this conquest with great admiration as if only the Great Spirit could bring such power to one of their own.  In order to make a successful kill, the process called for either sneaking up close to the grazing animals as they rested or riding into the herd on horseback and attempting a kill while the animal was in motion. Either approach was extremely dangerous for the Indians.  The process was also time-consuming thus the Indians did not take the animals from the herds in great numbers.

The methods changed greatly with the advent of the buffalo hunter upon the plains.  These men brought high caliber rifles capable of delivering a death wallop from great distances.  The dangers faced by the proximity of the beast to the hunter were quickly erased.  The rifles employed were generally high-caliber black powder cartridge designs. Springfield, Remington, and Sharps made guns of this type for this particular use.  Sharps was by far the most popular among the three and the most common on the plains.  The Sharps gained its popularity by becoming known for its high level of accuracy at great distances.  The Sharps could be fired accurately and effectively at its intended target at distances exceeding 500 yards.

The advent of the high-caliber rifles further expanded the slaughter of the buffalo across the plains.  A good hunter equipped with his trusty Sharps rifle could down two hundred or more buffalo a day.  Given the large numbers of these hunters arriving on the plains by the 1880’s, it is easy to see how the buffalo herds were quickly driven toward extinction.

As this invasion of the white man was thrust upon the western plains, the Indian was slowly being pushed back in the name of progress and possession.  As time past the Indian came to realize that the white hunters were destroying the buffalo herds, the primary source of their subsistence and independence.  Pressure was growing to move on to reservations under control of the white soldier and the federal government.  What once had been a paradise for the Indian was disappearing before his eyes. For the small place in time, the Indian and the buffalo faced a similar fate.

The tribes of the Great Plains did not take things lying down.  They fought back steadily lashing out at settlers, railroad builders, and the soldiers from the remote outposts.  They fought to maintain their freedom and they fought to drive the white man away from their cherished buffalo. In the end, they fought in vain as the momentum of the white man overran their existence and imprisoned their numbers.

By the 1880’s railroads were becoming more common place on the western plains.  This brought even more people west.  Herds of buffalo were still common and often interfered with the movement of the trains as the herds crossed over the tracks.  These citing lead those operating the railroad to bring even more strife upon the herds by arranging recreational hunts for those individuals with the means to afford it.  One could now ride in relative comfort of a train car out to the open prairie. Once a herd of buffalo was sighted nearby, the train would stop and allow the shooters to attempt to kill a buffalo.  There were no controls exercised and the animals which were killed were not processed in any way.  They were simply left to rot in the sun upon the plains.

By 1884, the herds of buffalo were all but gone.  Ironically, this eradication of the buffalo was more effective in taking the Indians off the plains that any other program attempted by the government.  General Phillip Sheridan, one of the military leaders charged with gaining control over the Indians made the following remarks when queried about the impact of the buffalo hunters:  “These men have done more in the last two years, and will do more in the next year, to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last forty years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. And it is a well known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; but for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle.”

In the process of the struggling against the onslaught of the white man, Indians had lashed out in various areas.  In 1877, approximately 170 Comanche lead by Black Horse departed the reservation and launched attacks on buffalo hunters operating along Red River in the panhandle area of Oklahoma known as the Llano Estacado of Texas.  These attacks became known as the Buffalo Hunter War or the Staked Plain War.  These attacked caused death and wounding on both sides.  In other areas, the consequences were even greater as the now famous Battle of The Little Big Horn would market the annihilation of Custer’s 7^thCalvary and General George Armstrong Custer himself.

It also marked the end of an era for the American Indian.  Life would never be the same for the buffalo or the Indian.

Man can be a destructive instrument over the course of life.  In the case of the buffalo this destruction almost reached the brink of extinction of these great beasts of the plains.  By 1884 the remaining buffalo herds were estimated at 2,000 or less animals.  By 1984, man had learned his lessons regarding the buffalo and began conservation efforts in the form of large animal preserves on Federal Lands.  The first of these was YellowstoneNational Park.  These protected areas allowed the buffalo to roam free and to raise their young as the early efforts to grow the herds began.

Today, the buffalo is still a rather rare beast for most of us.  Although their numbers are growing the size of the herd estimated at around 150,000 animals still wavers in light of the immense size these herds had been in the early days of the Post Civil War era.  Eventually their unchecked growth would have created problems similar to those of the wild mustangs roaming our western plains today.  Still, the outright slaughter of these beasts of the plains is a scar on the history of mankind both in terms of the buffalo and the American Indian.

© Copyright WBrown2010.  All Rights Reserved.