American Buffalo (17 page)

In 1870, a pound of butter cost fifteen cents. Eight pounds of coffee cost $1. Land was usually bought and sold in 160-acre parcels, at about $5 an acre. A two-room house, measuring sixteen by twenty-two feet, could be built for $300. A very good monthly wage for dangerous, professional work on the frontier, such as a sheriff or hired gun, was around $150 to $250. A cowboy made from $20 to $40 a month. A good prostitute could take in $200 a month, at upwards of $5 a client. (Thus, when prices peaked, a good buffalo hide could buy a hunter an hour’s worth of intimate female company.)

Hide hunters were some of the grubbiest people on the face of the earth. As it was for the hippies of the late 1960s, long hair was a fad among them. Their blankets would get so full of lice and bedbugs that they’d lay them on anthills so that ants could carry away the larvae. The hunters would often eat little else besides buffalo. Beginners, or “tenderfeet,” would start out eating prime cuts, but within months they suffered nutrient deficiencies that caused their tongues to break out in lesions. After a while they learned to be more like the Indians and eat the buffalos’ internal organs and bodily fluids as well. They’d eat liver, kidney, and glands, and they’d dribble bile on red meat. Some hunters seasoned meat with gunpowder for a peppery effect. If they were away from water, they’d open a dead buffalo’s stomach and use their fingers to filter out the bits of vegetation while they slurped the watery ooze.

Often, the stench of rotting carcasses around their camps would prevent them from eating. Flies would get bad enough to run off their horses. Hunters would sprinkle their hides with strychnine, but flies and maggots still ruined many. In wet weather the hides would rot. In hot weather the hides would rot. When there was snow on the ground, the hunters would smear mixtures of gunpowder and buffalo grease under their eyes to help cut the glare. In blizzards, they would gut out freshly killed buffalo carcasses and spend the night inside, like in the
Star Wars
movie. They waterproofed their boots and clothes with raw buffalo fat and sat in the smoke of fires that were burning pound-sized globs of the stuff. They greased their lips with it as well. When they were thirsty, they’d suck on rocks. The canvas and buckskin material of their clothes would get so stiff from dry blood that it would crackle when they moved.

The job had its dangers. Hide hunters sometimes died from rabies after being bitten by skunks lured into camp by the carnage. Along the Yellowstone River near Glendive, Montana, a buffalo hunter was killed by a buffalo that woke up after the hunter had already cut out its tongue for dinner. Three hide hunters were killed in a prairie fire so intense that it stripped the wooden stocks off their rifles. In 1871, two hide hunters from Wisconsin froze to death in Nebraska. Their companion lost both feet. In the Easter blizzard of 1873, upward of a hundred hide hunters froze to death on the southern Great Plains. A man’s carcass was found frozen to a set of railroad tracks. Seventy amputations were performed in Dodge City after the blizzard; one man lost both of his arms and both of his legs.

The U.S. government made a mockery of its vow to protect Indian land from white encroachment, so the Indians attempted to do the job on their own. The Comanche were particularly vigilant against buffalo hunters. They killed scores of hide hunters, including well-known ones such as Marshall Sewall, John Sharp, and Joe Jackson. They’d scalp their heads and mutilate their bodies.
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Sometimes they’d stake the bodies to the ground and pepper them full of arrows and bullet holes. At least once they left behind an eerie drawing of dead white men, showing the exact locations of the wounds on the bodies. If the Indians were hungry, they’d shoot the hunters’ draft animals. Other hide hunters would come along and find legless mules and oxen still harnessed to the carts. If a hide hunter was killed by Indians, his colleagues would band together to drive the Indians back out of the hunting grounds. They sometimes took vigilante justice to such extremes that the U.S. Army would threaten to declare them illegal militias. Now and then, inexpertly scalped hide hunters and stolen hides would generate paranoia among other hunters, fearful that the killing was an inside job and that a murderer was in their ranks.

THE HIDE BOOM
only lasted a dozen years before the buffalo ran out. The first big hunting push was in the vicinity of Dodge City. In 1871, the first big year, the hide hunters killed so many animals so close to town that residents complained about the stench of rotting carcasses. That winter, a half-million buffalo hides were shipped out of Dodge. The hunters spread out from there, organizing their hunts along the eastward-flowing rivers of the Great Plains. They hunted out the Republican River, near the Nebraska-Kansas line. Along the south fork of the Platte River, hundreds of buffalo hunters lined fifty miles of riverbank and used fires to keep the buffalo from getting to the water at night. In four daytime periods, they gunned down fifty thousand of the thirst-crazed animals. Within a year or two the hunters had cleaned out the regions immediately to the north of the Arkansas River, and then they hunted out the watersheds of the Cimarron, Canadian, and Red rivers. The hide hunters pushed south into the Texas Panhandle and southwest Oklahoma. Soon, hunters who outfitted in Dodge were straying so far from home that their hides were shipping out of Fort Worth, Texas. By 1878, there weren’t enough buffalo on the southern plains to warrant the chase.

The Texas hunt was followed by a brief lull in the action while a new railroad, the Northern Pacific, cut into the northern range. Once the railroad made it to Miles City, Montana, in 1881, word spread that the core of the last great herd had been tapped. Hide dealers calculated that 500,000 buffalo ranged within 150 miles of town. Soon there were five thousand hide hunters killing the animals. A herd that was estimated at seventy-five thousand head crossed the Yellowstone River three miles outside of Miles City, moving north as a great mass. Hunters stayed with the buffalo like sheepdogs, pushing them along. Accounts vary, but anywhere from zero to five thousand buffalo were all that was left by the time the herd reached Canada. By 1883, the one remaining large herd had moved into the Black Hills. It started out as ten thousand buffalo and was quickly reduced to one thousand by white hide hunters. Then the Sioux warrior Sitting Bull and a thousand of his men fell on the herd and killed the rest. A man who took part in the slaughter said that “there was not a hoof left.”

When the hide hunters were done, the skinned-out carcasses that they left behind rotted down, and green grasses sprang up in the places where the juices oozed. Then the green grass turned brown in the fall, and the carcasses were picked down to the bone by scavengers. The bones turned white in the sun. At that moment it might have seemed as though there was nothing more that we could get out of the buffalo, but there was. Makers of fine bone china began to purchase the best of the bones, those that weren’t too dry or weathered. Burned to ash and added to ceramics formulas, the bones gave American- and English-produced porcelains a translucency and whiteness that could compete with imported Oriental china. Other big consumers of quality buffalo bones were the sugar, wine, and vinegar industries; they had been using wood ash to neutralize acids and clarify liquids, but in the early nineteenth century they found that bone ash did a better job of making sugar more shiny and wine less cloudy. Industries also used buffalo bone ash in fine-grained polishing agents and baking powders. Metallurgists found that bone ash was useful in the process of refining minerals.

By far, the biggest consumer of buffalo bones was the fertilizer industry. It didn’t care so much about quality; cracked, dried-out, dirty bones were just fine. Workers would grind them into a coarse powder known as bonemeal, which can be tilled into nutrient-poor or acidic soils. Firms that produced buffalo bonemeal fertilizer managed to sell a lot of the product to homesteaders on the Great Plains who were trying to produce corn and wheat on lands recently abandoned by buffalo.

The homesteaders who bought buffalo bonemeal were often the same people who’d been picking the buffalo bones up. Upon their arrival in the wake of the hide hunters, homesteaders burned whatever buffalo chips were lying about, and then they were forced to burn buffalo bones as heating and cooking fuel. The smoke from these fires smelled just like burning hair. Some men found the buffalo bones to be an encumbrance to tilling and working the soil. A homesteader arrived in Nebraska and cursed the bones. “Buffalo bones was laying around on the ground as thick as cones under a big fir tree,” he said, “and we had to pick them up, and pile them up, and work around them until we was blamed sick of ever hearing the name buffalo.” Settlers stacked the bones in great heaps and torched the stacks. When the bone market developed, or when railroad spurs reached their “neighborhood,” the settlers took to selling bones. For many, buffalo bones were the first cash crop to rise up out of their newly acquired dirt. An advertisement on the front page of the July 23, 1885, edition of North Dakota’s
Grafton News and Times
read: “Notice to Farmers: I will pay cash for buffalo bones. Bring them in by the ton or hundred. I will give fifty pounds of the best twine for one ton of bones, for this month only, or a $40 sewing machine for forty tons. I want 5000 tons this month.”

Remains of a hide hunter slaughter somewhere in Canada.

A train car could haul the bones from approximately 850 buffalo. Stacked alongside the railroad tracks, bones fetched $8 a ton. It took about a hundred buffalo skeletons to make a ton of bones, so each animal’s skeleton was worth eight cents. If the bones were wet, it might take only about seventy-five skeletons, so a burst of rain on a pile of dried bones was considered a good thing by bone pickers. In all, the money was good enough to inspire many bone pickers to go full-time instead of just cleaning up their own land. A man named George Beck and his brother hunted bones outside of Dodge City. The Beck brothers operated with two wagons and two teams of oxen. They camped under the stars and cooked bread, bacon, and sweet potatoes over buffalo chip fires. When their wagons were filled, they hauled them to the wagon trails connecting Dodge City to peripheral military forts out on the wild prairie. They would dump their load and paint their mark on a prominently displayed skull. Government freighters who supplied goods to the forts would fill their empty wagons with the Becks’ bones on the way back to Dodge City and then drop the bones at the railroad tracks.

On the northern Great Plains, a group of Indians gathered 2,550 tons of buffalo bones in anticipation of a railroad coming through. In Kansas, bone pickers accumulated a pile of bones along the Santa Fe Railroad that was ten feet high, twenty feet wide, and a quarter mile long. The Santa Fe was greeted outside Granada, Colorado, with a mound of bones that was ten feet by twenty feet and a half mile long. Railroads would build spurs from the main line just for the sake of collecting stacks of buffalo bones. It was good business for them. The Empire Carbon Works, in St. Louis, processed 1.25 million tons of buffalo bones during the buffalo bone era. It paid on average $22.50 a ton. That’s over $28 million paid out for buffalo bones, which came from perhaps 125 million skeletons—or more than four times the number of buffalo that ever existed at any one time.

Before the buffalo bones were all picked up, people traveling through buffalo country reported bones so thick on the ground that they looked like fallen snow. If you could have watched the bone pickers’ progress in time-lapse photography taken from outer space, it would have looked like the snow was melting ahead of a great westward-moving heat wave. The wave traveled fast, pushing up river valleys and railroads first and then spreading outward until there was hardly a bone left anywhere. By 1890 it was hard to find a buffalo bone south of the Union Pacific Railroad. As the skeletons petered out, the fertilizer and carbon industries announced a “bone crisis.” Prices shot up. Indians began digging bones with shovels and picks beneath buffalo jumps that dated to the birth of Christ. They once believed that these bones were capable of rising back up into brand-new buffalo, but times had changed.