American Buffalo (9 page)

Since its foundation, the Copper River herd has been open to hunting only intermittently. The hunt was instituted in 1964, fourteen years after the animals were dumped off the truck on the Nabesna Road and three years after they wandered into their present location. There were about a hundred animals. Back then, the hunt was not administered under the permit lottery system. Instead, it was run as a registration hunt: if you wanted to hunt buffalo, you simply signed up and went. The season stayed open as long as it took for the hunters to kill whatever quota was set by the state, which ranged from just a few animals to a dozen. When a hunter bagged a buffalo, he was to report the kill to the Department of Fish and Game within two days. When the quota was hit, the hunting season ended.

This system caused problems. First off, it created something of a free-for-all, with too many hunters converging on the area in the first days of the season out of fear that they’d miss their chance if they waited too long. Also, there was an effective delay between reaching the quota and ending the season; the quota could be surpassed before anyone even had a chance to report his kill.

State wildlife biologists had determined that for the long-term viability of the herd, their numbers should not drop below a population of sixty-five adult animals (as estimated through aerial surveys in the spring); a series of rough winters in the late 1980s had knocked the herd size down to a critical level. The state canceled the hunt in 1989 and didn’t open it again for ten years.

When it was reopened, in 1999, the lottery system was put into place. It’s a far better system, in my mind, as it erased the competitive aspect. It changed the dynamic of the hunt in other ways as well. Under the registration system, successful hunters were almost exclusively local residents. For one thing, they were more likely to hunt because they were already up there. Also, they had access to information that outsiders didn’t; a local guy has his own regionally specific experiences, plus he can pick the brains of other locals and bush pilots who might not be so forthcoming to some jackass from the Lower 48.

But with the advent of the lottery system, locals were effectively shut out. Or, rather, they had the same chances of hunting a buffalo as anyone else—a paltry 2 percent. The hunt became a thing for anyone and everyone—Joe Blow from New Jersey had as much chance of hunting a buffalo as someone from Fairbanks. But a lot of these outsiders apply for permits without knowing what they’re getting into, and, after drawing a tag, make no attempt at all to hunt during the seven-month season. On top of that, the majority of those who do try are unsuccessful in their efforts. In response, the state issues more permits than the actual number of buffalo that they want to be killed. Getting the proper ratio has been difficult, perhaps, as evidenced by the recent doubling of permits.

Thanks to one of those permits, I’m now looking for America’s most iconic animal while crunching fine particles of glacial flour between my teeth. The wind has picked up since we left our camp near the mouth of the Dadina, about ten miles upriver, and now we’re paddling the raft up to a large willow flat that stretches hundreds of yards along the river and almost a quarter mile deep. I climb to the bank and take a look around. The ground is littered with evidence of the buffalo—chips and tracks—commonly known to hunters as sign. I make a quick scan of the area, peering into the shaded underbrush for any animals. Nothing. I motion to the guys to tie up the raft. “It looks like a herd of buffalo took laxatives and had a hoedown up here,” I whisper to Danny. We slip into the willows. Trails as wide as wheelbarrows course through the vegetation. The ground away from the trails is trampled with hoofprints like a rototiller came through. The willows are browsed low, the stems frayed from the scraping action of the animals’ teeth.

Fresh buffalo sign above the Chetaslina.

It all looks great, but after a more careful inspection I see that all of the sign is actually old and weathered. The smell of buffalo, sweet and musky like horses, does not linger in the air. The willow bark beneath the browsing marks has healed, and the most recent growth looks untouched. The trails are littered with leaves. There are no fresh squirts of urine in the dirt. A fresh buffalo track is a clean, palm-sized circle with a split-open crack down the center. But these tracks are rough and faded by drizzle. Some have undisturbed blades of grass growing at their centers. The buffalo shit looks old, too, partially decomposed and sodden. Some of it is capped by mosses and fungus.

Looking at the old evidence adds to the suspicions that I developed when I flew over this country a couple of days ago with Bushpilot Dave: that the bulk of the buffalo are still on their summer range up in the hills. Sure, I saw four buffalo within sight of the river the night before, but what’s four buffalo out of a herd that might total two hundred animals? Maybe those four wandered off from the main group. Who knows?

We climb back into the raft and continue downriver. Rafferty and Jessen paddle just enough to keep us clear of trouble. On the river’s straightaways they let the raft drift more or less as it wants. The headwind fights the raft, slows it down a bit. I lean back against a mound of gear with my feet up; my binoculars are stabilized against the chest of my life jacket. I can use the rotations of the raft to my advantage by training my binoculars on the bluffs ahead of us and then holding myself very still. As the raft slowly spins, the binoculars pan the country in a steady horizontal arc. They move down one bank of the river, then cross the water and work back up the other bank. I’ve been doing this for six or seven miles, ever since we made our foray into the willow flat, and I haven’t seen anything promising outside of buffalo trails. There have been lots of those, plastered all over the steep bluffs to the east. They look like brown ribbons wrapped around the hillsides that are colored green with prairie sagewort. The trails are stacked like dirt rings in a bathtub. Some of them are cut so deep into the soil that they remind me of the rice terraces on the mountainsides of Vietnam. Here and there, short, diagonal trails connect the horizontal lines. All of the ground that contains the trails is legally off-limits, private property, but that hardly matters now because the trails don’t have any buffalo standing on them.

It’s nearly dark by the time we hear the Chetaslina River. It’s a gentle gushing sound that grows louder and louder until we round a bend and there it is, spilling over the lip of a broad alluvial fan that ends in a sharp, clean edge where it intersects the fast-flowing channel of the Copper. The primary flow of the Chetaslina runs through a deep gravel-bottomed groove in the middle of the fan, and many shallower rivulets course along its edges like split ends coming off a hair. Danny and I jump out and drag the raft up a channel and beach it against the bank. I walk up to a mound of rocks that were stacked along the edge of the channel by floodwaters. The large rocks are cemented together by densely packed sediment that feels like coarsely cracked peppercorns in my bare hand. The light is falling, but from here I can see in all directions. There’s not much to look at across the Copper, just a steep embankment, maybe two hundred feet high and nearly straight up. But our view up the Chetaslina valley is great. The valley runs northwest through a willow flat for a mile and then makes a gradual northward bend, like the curve in a hockey stick where the blade joins the handle. After the bend, ridges rise out of the valley and crowd in toward the river like collapsing waves. Judging from my map, there’s a steep canyon above the bend. And above that canyon are hundreds of square miles of government-owned wilderness. Public land. It could be tough going to get up through the canyon; maybe tougher going to get back down. But this is the best plan we’ve got. The only plan we’ve got, actually. Based on everything I’ve heard, from Bushpilot Dave and others, buffalo get to be few and far between, or else nonexistent, when you get below this valley. And our raft only goes one direction: downriver. If we can’t get up this river, we’re pretty much out of luck. The temperature has dropped again. I look at the sky. The clouds are dull gray and thick. Light snowflakes are crumbling away from them.

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O
NE OF MY FAVORITE
buffalo-related stories begins on Thursday, August 27, 1908, with the destruction of the town of Folsom, New Mexico. That afternoon, about fifteen inches of rain fell on Johnson Mesa, in the northeast corner of the state. The rain came down so hard that it overfilled empty washtubs that were lying outside. The Dry Cimarron River, which drains much of the mesa, quickly overran its banks. A resident at the Crowfoot Ranch, in Colfax County, placed an urgent phone call to the telephone operator in Folsom, about ten miles away. The operator, Miss Sarah Rooke, made a series of frantic calls warning the residents of Folsom that a flash flood was bearing down on town. Her warnings were largely ignored, but she stayed at her switchboard, continuing her pleas. When the water hit, at about midnight, waves lifted Miss Rooke’s home right off its foundation and carried her away.

Water swept through the town’s streets in five-foot waves. The railroad bridge gave out. The Folsom newspaper later reported that John Young’s house had remained intact because he’d nailed it to a fence post. Young’s stable, “in which were tied three fine horses, was picked up like chaff, torn to pieces.” Alcutt McNaghten’s mother survived the flood by clinging to her piano. Horses owned by the Stringfellow family were out to pasture when the flood carried them off. Rescuers traveled downstream at sunup. John Young’s three fine horses were found downriver, all of them dead. The Stringfellows’ horses were recovered seven miles downstream from town, all of them alive except for one colt. Alcutt McNaghten lost a saddle in the flood, and he found it among a pile of dead people on the north side of the river about a mile from town. The Wegner family was found dead as well; their house had been trapped in a whirlpool, and the biggest piece left was half of a door. In all, sixteen bodies were recovered in the following days. There was no sign of Sarah Rooke, the telephone operator, until the next spring, when Dan Harvey was burning driftwood about eight miles from town. He noticed a shoe in the pile of wood and upon further investigation saw that it was attached to Miss Rooke’s body.

After the flood, a ranch hand named George McJunkin rode out to fix washed-out fences. McJunkin had been born a slave in the 1850s on a ranch near Midway, Texas, but some time after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation he joined a cattle drive headed to Dodge City. He eventually passed through New Mexico and liked the state because it had sided with the Union during the war. He found work tending cattle and breaking horses at the Crowfoot Ranch. He knew how to read and write and preferred books on archaeology, paleontology, and astronomy. While he was mending the washed-out fences, George noticed where the waters had gouged out the channel of Wild Horse Arroyo. It used to be just three feet deep, but now it was thirteen feet deep, and at the bottom a lot of buffalo bones were poking out of the ground. The bones, which were deeply buried and partially mineralized, caught McJunkin’s attention because they were bigger than normal buffalo bones. He loaded some into his saddlebag, unaware that his discovery would set back the clock of human occupation in the New World by about ten thousand years, help launch a new scientific discipline, and cause a minor religious controversy.

I VISITED THE TOWN OF FOLSOM
about five months shy of the flood’s ninety-eighth anniversary. I was escorted by David Eck, an archaeologist with the New Mexico State Land Office, who was dressed with southwestern flair—boots, jeans, a Western shirt, a down vest, a ponytail, and a scattering of jewelry on his ears, neck, and fingers. When we arrived in town, I could see that the place had never really recovered from the travesty; after the flood, the town’s population eventually dropped from eight hundred to sixty-five. Everything looked sleepy and brown, ready for spring. There were scatterings of occupied homes and disheveled barns and old stone buildings, all connected by busted-up fence lines. Cottonwoods bordered the streets and followed the river’s course in scattered clumps. To the west, I could see Johnson Mesa, where the flash flood developed. Strands of snow, shaped like jigsaw puzzle pieces, clung to the shadows near the top. We drove up and down a couple roads a few times, until we found the local cemetery. The ground inside the fence was sand and gravel, overgrown with clumps of grass and tumbleweed. A lot of little bones lay here and there, some in small clusters of three or four. I pointed to one and David Eck said, “That’s a finger bone. From a human.” There were a lot of unmarked graves and little wooden crosses that had busted free from the ground. We located McJunkin’s grave right away, though, just inside the gate. It was a simple and elegant granite slab that said “GEORGE McJUNKIN 1856–1922” and was decorated with pink and white plastic flowers that looked about as old as the finger bones.

I was glad that I’d come looking for McJunkin’s grave, because the man is due a bit of recognition—he certainly didn’t get very much in his own lifetime. While he visited his “bone pit” often and collected some of the buffalo remains, he could never talk anyone into coming out and looking at it with him. He gave a sample of the bones to the local blacksmith over in Raton. The blacksmith showed the bones to the banker, who had once dug up a mammoth skeleton. The two men agreed to head over there sometime, but they didn’t make the trip until December 1922, when McJunkin was four months dead.
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Still, the banker and the blacksmith were smart enough to know that they were looking at something worth investigating. They shipped some sacks of the bones by railroad to the Colorado Museum of Natural History, in Denver. Museum officials recognized the bones as belonging to an extinct Ice Age buffalo. They wanted a complete skeleton for the museum, so they hired the blacksmith to dig the site. He and a small crew started working in May 1926. By June, they were hitting the bones of many different buffalo. Come July, things got very interesting.

This granite tombstone replaced the original wooden marker above George McJunkin’s grave.

Until that month, archaeology had been compromised by the Bible, much the way evolutionary biology is plagued by that same text today. Academic studies were heavily influenced, both implicitly and explicitly, by the Old Testament barrier; serious scientists threw around terms such as “antediluvian,” which refers to things that occurred before the cataclysmic forty-day flood that Noah survived aboard an animal-laden ark. Back then, theories about human existence in the New World dovetailed somewhat perfectly with the biblical view—that man had only been on earth for six thousand years and only in the New World for two thousand years. It was assumed that Native Americans hadn’t been in North America long enough (and weren’t smart enough) to independently develop such technologies as agriculture and government, and so it was the job of science to determine how exactly those technologies were transferred across the oceans from Europe or Asia. To solve this puzzle, anthropologists relied on something called the direct historical approach. At the risk of grossly oversimplifying it, I will say that the approach involved looking at Native American tribal configurations at the time of European contact and then working backward in time from there. For instance, they knew that the Sioux Indians of the Great Plains had come westward from Minnesota and Wisconsin after the introduction of the horse. Using ethnographic and ethnohistorical approaches, such as oral history, linguistics, and written records, researchers hoped to piece together the answer to the next obvious question: Where did the Sioux live before they lived in the upper Midwest? If enough pieces of this puzzle could be assembled, researchers could gain a clear understanding of man’s brief history in the Americas.

That approach was seriously compromised by McJunkin’s find, because the bed of Ice Age buffalo remains happened to contain a number of intricately crafted, man-made stone projectile points that were clearly
in situ
, or “in place,” within the context of the bones: buried between ribs, wedged into vertebrae, stuck into skulls. The points resembled the classic Indian arrowhead shape, except these points lacked the two lobes, or prongs, at the base. They were about the size of a human male’s thumb, but only half as thick as a CD case. The most striking features on the points were the lateral channels, or “flutes,” made by removing a long chip up the axis of the point, from the base forward, which gives each face of the point a concave surface. If one of these points were coming at your eye vertically, it would look like a less exaggerated version of this shape: )(.
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The news of a direct link between humans and the Pleistocene echoed loudly in the scientific community, and soon representatives from the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Carnegie Institution, Harvard University, and the Bureau of American Ethnology had all journeyed to the Folsom site to weigh in on the evidence. They all agreed: human antiquity in the New World stretched back at least ten thousand years. From that day forward, the field of American archaeology, and the study of man’s relationship to buffalo, became an issue of deeper and much more complex history.

I wanted to see the actual Folsom site, so David Eck drove us through a series of grazing pastures surrounded by fences and locked gates. We parked at a collection of old vacated ranch buildings and walked through a yard strewn with rusted, obsolete farm equipment. At an old log building with low ceilings and no door, David Eck said, “Allegedly, here’s where McJunkin lived.” I made him take a picture of me standing in the building, and then we walked across a dry riverbed and continued up a grassy slope that was peppered with elk tracks. We were directly beneath Johnson Mesa. We started down into another brushy draw. “This is Wild Horse Arroyo up ahead,” David Eck said. The arroyo was deep, with steep walls. It was as if you’d ripped the roof off a house and stared down into a hallway from above. Attached to the hallway was something like a large, roofless bedroom where the arroyo widened out and bulged toward the south. A berm of excavated dirt lay above the arroyo, grown over in grass. Since the discovery of the site, it’s been excavated several times by a number of experts, and they’ve managed to assemble a fairly complete picture of what happened all those years ago.