American Buffalo (14 page)

In the mid- to late nineteenth century, during the great buffalo slaughter of the Euro-American hide hunters, there was such an abundance of unused buffalo flesh strewn across the landscape that wolves grew fat and plentiful. Indians talked of running overfed wolves down on horseback to kill them with knives, and Euro-American explorers described “tamed” wolves lurking near the camps of hide hunters. When the hide hunters began to run low on buffalo, they sought alternative ways to supplement their incomes. Some expanded into the wolf hide business. When a wolfer killed a buffalo, he’d lace its carcass with strychnine. In the morning, all he had to do was collect the dead wolves. Some wolfers would wait until they had a wounded buffalo on the ground and then open a vein with a sharp knife and give the buffalo a mainline of strychnine. The buffalo’s circulatory system would carry the poison all through the carcass, saving poison and increasing the wolf kill. It’s commonly said that the wolf hunters were some of the only white people who were disappointed to see the buffalo vanish. They suspected that wolves would vanish right along with them, and they were ultimately right.

AS I FOLLOW THE STREAM CHANNEL
, I realize that I’ve lost the set of wolf tracks. Maybe the wolf smelled me and took off. I follow the channel for another half hour, taking it very slowly, and it begins to split into many other smaller channels. I stay to the middle branch, and the surrounding hills close in. I reach the back end of the willow flat without noticing any fresh buffalo tracks. So much for this plan, I think. I check out my map and compass. If I walk to the northeast, I’ll hit the eastern bank of the Chetaslina River at a point that is much higher up the valley than I went yesterday. I should go up there and find a good lookout, I think, where I can see across to the other side of the valley where those four bulls were hanging around.

To get there, I have to cut through a couple miles of land owned by Ahtna, Inc., or else go all the way back to the mouth of the Chetaslina and then follow the river up. This presents an unsavory dilemma, because I hate looking at the same ground twice even more than I hate trespassing. So with a nagging feeling of guilt I follow a small game trail into the spruce forest, and once again I’m a reluctant violator of the laws of private property. Also, I’m once again struggling through alders, rose hips, and downed spruce trees. I step over a log and snag the leg of my wool pants on a broken limb. It rips a hole just big enough to accommodate my thumb. I always carry a travel-sized spool of dental floss in my pack along with a curved needle designed for stitching people up. I think about stopping to stitch the tear, but for some reason I don’t. After ten more minutes of fighting through the brush, I look down and see that the small rip has expanded from the back of my knee clear down to my ankle, offering a vivid validation of the old saying “a stitch in time saves nine.”

In fact, a stitch in time would have saved about seventy. For a half hour I sit on a wet log in a thin pair of underwear while I sew my pants back together. Once I’m on my way again, I run into a well-trodden buffalo trail that seems to be going more or less where I want to be. The trail is stamped through the mosses and lichens on the forest floor, right down to bare dirt and rock. When I stand on the bottom of the trail, the normal level of the forest floor is at my shins. Like many of the buffalo trails I’ve found, this one seems perfectly errant in its patterns. In truth, though, there’s a system to its direction. Buffalo select their trails in order to travel over the path of least resistance, even if that involves taking a few extra steps. But there’s a limit to how far a buffalo will detour. Following their trails, I can almost understand their thinking. If the trail intersects a nasty swath of tangled and downed timber that would take a long time to go around, they’ll opt to plow on through like bulldozers. In some places, the trail breaks into several routes through the obstacles, as though different buffalo have different opinions about how to handle travel annoyances.

A few hundred years ago, Euro-American explorers who traveled through buffalo country thought that the animals were incapable of walking straight lines. Buffalo have a thick mat of hair between their eyes that resembles souped-up pubic hair in its texture. People assumed that buffalo trails were crooked because the animals had to walk sideways in order to see where they were headed. Other people thought this was ridiculous. They figured that buffalo walked in crooked lines because their eyes were too far off to the sides of their heads; buffalo, they explained, couldn’t see forward or backward at all, hair or no hair. “Not being good travelers sideways,” one man said, “they look ahead with one eye and to the rear with the other, deflecting to the right and then to the left for a distance of two or three hundred yards.”

In the early 1830s, when engineers were laying out the route for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, it’s said that they had to follow buffalo trails through West Virginia. In two places where the railroad was run through tunnels, along the eighty-three-mile stretch between Grafton and Parkersburg, the buffalo trails are supposedly directly overhead. There are many such stories across the eastern United States. The passage through the Cumberland Gap is said to have started out as a buffalo trail. Indians in Kentucky used a 225-mile path between Big Bone Lick and Maysville that they called, simply, “the Buffalo Path.” When Euro-American settlers started coming into the first “far west” of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, they often used buffalo trails instead of Indian trails because they were hoping to run into the one and not the other. Their movements and settlements were influenced by the buffalo paths, which led them to things that they needed: meat, water, salt licks, meadows, and good places to cross rivers. Later, they widened the paths into wagon trails and, later still, roads.

One man who did not think that buffalo made good engineers when it came to the routing of roads was George Washington. The buffalo had minor cameo roles throughout Washington’s life. He killed a buffalo in the Ohio Territory back in 1770. A year before the Declaration of Independence, Washington asked a friend to catch some buffalo calves for him because he was kicking around the idea of raising a herd and marketing cloth made from the wool. During the Revolutionary War, Washington corresponded with his officers about killing buffalo in order to feed troops. In the winter of 1780–81, officer Daniel Brodhead wrote to Washington about the lack of game in the vicinity of Fort Pitt. He warned Washington, “I have risked the sending of a party of hunters to kill buffalo at Little Kanawha,” an Ohio River tributary that flows through western West Virginia, “and to lay in the meat until I can detach a party to bring it in, which cannot be done before spring.”

After the war, in 1784, Washington made a westward trip to check on his Pennsylvania landholdings. He was a surveyor by training, and on his way home he cut through western Maryland to scout out possible routes for a canal system that could connect the Virginia coast with the Ohio River. (It was never built.) He got lost on an obscure trail called McCulloch’s Pack Horse Path, which, Washington wrote in his diary, “owes its origen to Buffaloes, being no other than their tracks from one lick to another & consequently crooked and not well chosen.”

The trail is especially obscure nowadays, because no one knows where it began or ended, or how exactly it got its name. Generally, it’s accepted that the buffalo trail passed close to Gorman, West Virginia, and then snaked its way north and west across Garrett County, Maryland, before passing back into West Virginia and heading off toward the Ohio River. I wanted to see it, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance of finding it without some help. The Garrett County Historical Society put me in touch with the Reverend John A. Grant, who wrote an unsigned article about the path in 1948. Grant was now eighty-four years old, a clergyman for the Episcopal Church. I made arrangements to meet him at a crossroads in two weeks, and when I called on the morning of our appointment to make sure he remembered, he acted as though it was the most superfluous phone call that he’d ever received in his entire life.

Grant drives a Buick and wears a style of hat commonly worn by churchgoing old men, with a bill that snaps to the body of the hat. His skin looked as pale and thin as wax paper, and was textured like wax paper that had been wadded up and then smoothed back out again. He was born and raised in Oakland, Maryland. “I had the most fortunate childhood,” he told me. His father took him hiking and taught him a lot about history. He liked to be outside as a kid, so he slept on his porch in the summertime and the birds woke him up very early in the morning, before his family was stirring. “That’s how I became a voracious reader,” he said. Under his mattress, he kept books about ancient Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Scandinavian runes. When World War II started, he enlisted for pilot school. He was nearby when the first atomic bomb was tested in New Mexico, and he heard a rumor that the explosion was from a munitions train blowing up.

Grant appreciates the small coincidences of history, the places where the past and the present collide with some sort of tangible, visible result. Outside of Oakland, he showed me a dipping well where George Washington once drank water. Grant dipped up a handful and tasted it. “That’s good water,” he said. “No wonder Washington drank that.” In downtown Oakland he showed me some railroad tracks and the exact location of a train depot used by Confederate agents to move contraband during the Civil War. Whenever the Confederate sympathizers were loading supplies, they’d send beautiful women out to urinate in the bushes in order to distract the attention of Union agents.

Next he showed me a place along a road where Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and the writer and conservationist John Burroughs got stuck in the mud in Edison’s Packard. A local man pulled them out with his Model T, and he advised Henry Ford to “get yourself a Ford.” Down that same road we passed a red log cabin with a late-model Chevy 4x4 in the drive-way. Grant said that his friend lived there and drove that truck. Before he retired, this friend was deputized as a “federal agent” by the late Bobby Kennedy. Later, the friend was invited to the White House to receive an award. He shook hands with President John F. Kennedy, who asked him where he was from. “Western Maryland,” answered Grant’s friend.

“Where in western Maryland?” asked the president.

“Oakland,” said the friend.

“I know Oakland,” said the president. “I ate buckwheat cakes next to the church.”

Our final destination was the Herrington Manor State Park. Of the female rangers at the park’s entrance, Grant said, “They’re pretty tough hombres.” We drove down a park road that was shaded by thick timber. Grant stopped the Buick at a very arbitrary-looking place, stepped from the car, and invited me to inspect a piece of rock that he had picked up. I hadn’t really thought about how old he was until I saw his palm. “This rock we’re standing on,” Grant said, “was crushed with sledgehammers by workers with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a program founded by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Those workers lived in a camp here. We would come here to swim and watch them work.”

He looked into the woods. There were many kinds of trees growing in the forest, including several that I was unfamiliar with. And there was the faintest trail coming through the trees. “I believe your trail, the trail that Washington followed, crossed this road here.” I walked up and down the road a few steps and looked around. I picked up one of the hand-crushed rocks and put it into my pocket. Birds chirped. I became worried that I’d someday lose the rock, and so I picked up another and put it into a different pocket. I looked back into the woods. It was hard to imagine a line of buffalo plodding single file through the undergrowth with George Washington coming behind them, but I stared until I could see them crystal clear.

A shedding bull buffalo near Yellowstone National Park.

AS I’M WALKING DOWN
the buffalo trail, I notice that the spruce limbs hanging over the trail hold strands of tangled and bleached buffalo wool. The tufts look like someone dragged a brownish cotton ball across the bristles of a wire brush. Some of the tufts are as high as my own head, and the individual strands are several inches long. Those tufts probably came from the humps of big bulls shedding their winter coats. Travelers on the Great Plains reported walking through cottonwood groves where the ground was covered ankle deep in shed buffalo hair. Settlers who crossed the Great Plains without seeing a single buffalo would still find enough wool hanging on sagebrush and hawthorn bushes to experiment with weaving it. I was thinking about this as I walked along, and I worked a few tufts of wool into a twisted piece of thread about two inches long. The thread felt nice in my fingers, and I started grabbing whatever tufts of hair I passed. My hand was nearly full by the time the trail climbed out of the spruce forest and entered a large network of meadows punctuated by thin stands of aspen. In areas that now contain buffalo, researchers have found that one-third of all nesting birds use buffalo wool to line their nests. The wool is also hoarded by rodents such as mice and voles. I think about this, then wad the wool into a small ball and hang it from a low stem on an aspen tree.