Sea of Slaughter (17 page)

West of the Appalachian mountain barrier they continued to survive until the last years of the seventeenth century, when a surge of Europeans came pouring over the passes following deep-cut trails made by the buffalo themselves. Daniel Boone was in the forefront of this invasion and he and his contemporaries spoke of places like Blue Licks, a salt lick where buffalo paths converging from all directions “were cut deep into the earth like the streets of a great city.”

These “hardy pioneers,” as they are so often referred to in history books, were not so much settlers as wandering ravagers whose sights were set on peltry rather than on land. They spread rapidly westward bringing such destruction to all the larger forms of life that, by 1720, the only survivors of the eastern buffalo consisted of a few small herds that had been bypassed and overlooked in the dark defiles and recesses of the Cumberland and Allegheny ranges. By 1790, according to a New York Zoological Society report, those hidden in the Alleghenies had “been reduced to one herd numbering 300–400 animals which had sought refuge in the wilds of the Seven Mountains where, surrounded on all sides by settlements, they survived for a short time by hiding in the almost-inaccessible parts of the mountains.”

It was indeed a short time. During the bitter winter of 1799–1800, the herd, by then shrunken to fewer than fifty, was surrounded by gunners on snowshoes. Immobilized in belly-deep drifts, the animals were slaughtered where they stood. The following spring, a bull, a cow, and her calf were found in the same region. The cow and calf were promptly shot. The bull escaped, only to be killed a little later at Buffalo Crossroads near Lewistown.

Now the end was near. In 1815, a solitary bull is said to have been killed near Charleston, West Virginia. No more were reported until 1825, when a cow and her calf were found deep in the fastnesses of the Alleghenies. To find them was to kill them. So perished the last known relicts, not only of the eastern buffalo but of all the wild ox east of the Mississippi River.

The passing of the eastern buff went unremarked, and probably unnoticed. The latter-day conquistadors who were then busily “conquering the West” were already engaged in a new slaughter—one that would soon become an all-engulfing tornado of destruction.

By around 1800, according to the assessment of naturalist-writer Ernest Thompson Seton, some 40 million buffalo remained alive in North America, almost all of them west of the Mississippi Valley. It had taken European man and his weapons three centuries to dispose of the first several million. It would require rather less than 100 years to obliterate the rest in one of the most wanton exhibitions of unbridled ferocity in the long list of atrocities man has committed against animate creation.

The Plains, Oregon, and wood buffalo were systematically slaughtered because of three interlinked motives. First, as part of a genocidal design on the part of the Americans to destroy the western Indian nations (which depended for their very existence on the buffalo); second, because of the profits to be obtained therefrom; and third, because of an untrammelled lust for killing.

The first motive is laid bare in a statement by General Philip Henry Sheridan, which epitomizes the prevailing policy of the U.S. government and military: “The Buffalo Hunters have done more in the past two years to settle the vexed Indian Question than the entire regular army in the last 30 years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary. Send them powder and lead if you will, and let them kill, skin and sell until they have exterminated the buffalo!” Sheridan later told Congress it should strike a medal honouring the hide hunters, with a dead buffalo on one side—and a dead Indian on the other.

By about 1800, most of the large land mammals of eastern North America whose hides were suitable for the manufacture of leather, including the eastern buffalo, eastern elk, woodland caribou, and, in most regions, even the moose, were either commercially extinct or verging on it.
2
Yet the demand for leather of all kinds had never been greater and was growing by leaps and bounds. The exploitation of the western buffalo herds opened up a magnificent opportunity for profit. This was reinforced by the growth of a vigorous demand for buffalo robes—tanned hides with the thick, woolly hair still attached. These had a great vogue in Europe but especially in eastern North America, where they inspired a positive rage of fashionable acquisition. Everyone, it seemed, simply had to have one or more buffalo carriage robes.

Mass slaughter on the western plains combined with mass production in eastern factories between them were soon producing a flood of buffalo-hide products ranging from machinery belting to policemen's coats. During the 1840s, 90,000 buffalo robes alone were annually being sold in eastern Canada and the United States. However, these represented only the tip of a deadly iceberg of annihilation.

Seton estimated that only one out of every three Plains buffalo killed was ever even skinned. Furthermore, many of the skins that
were
taken were used locally in their raw state for such things as tarpaulins to protect haystacks against the weather, for fencing materials to confine the sod-busting pioneers' small livestock, or as easily replaceable roofing and wall sheathing.

The potential for profit was not limited to robes and leather, either. Many hundreds of thousands of animals were shot solely for their fat, which, rendered into tallow, was used in great quantities by eastern industries. Uncounted other thousands were killed for their tongues alone, these being considered a great delicacy. But the greatest slaughter, apart from that for hides, was the meat hunt, which provided the staple food for construction crews then crawling like ant armies across the plains, leaving behind them the glittering steel paths of new railroads reaching out to span the continent.

By 1842, again according to Seton, the combined kill had reached 2.5 million buffalo a year and the great western herds were melting like their own tallow in an incandescent fury of destruction. In 1858, James McKay, a Red River trader and trapper, travelled for twenty days on horseback with a pony train through what was to all intents and purposes one continuous herd of buffalo—“on all sides, as far as the eye could see, the prairie was black with them.” Five years later, buffalo were a “thing of the past” throughout the whole of the region McKay had traversed.

Farther to the south, the Union Pacific Railway reached Cheyenne in 1867, penetrating to the heart of the remaining buffalo country. The iron horse brought with it innumerable white hunters and, at the same time, split the remaining buffalo into a south herd and a north herd.

“In 1871,” Seton tells us, “the Santa Fe Railway crossed Kansas, the summer ground of the southern herd, now reduced to 4,000,000.” There followed a sanguinary slaughter by hide hunters, and by sportsmen who were now beginning to come west to take a hand in the massacre just for the fun of it. Between 1872 and 1874, these two agents of destruction between them
recorded
a kill of 3,158,730! One sportsman, a Dr. Carver, boasted of having killed forty buffalo in a “twenty minute run” on horseback and of having slaughtered 5,000 during a single summer.

To paraphrase Seton's account: that was practically the end of the southern herd. A few scattered bands lingered on in out-of-the way places, but they, too, were relentlessly hunted down. The very last, a group of four individuals, were found in 1889 by a party hunting mustangs. The buffalo took alarm and fled westward. They were chased for several miles and a man named Allen fired four shots into a cow. She ran another two miles to a lake and, wading into the deepest water, stood at bay until death overcame her. A photographer then took a picture of the triumphant party with her skin and meat. The other three buffalo were killed a little later on.

The northern herd did no better. Although until 1876 severe winters coupled with the presence of hostile Indians discouraged white hunters, in that year U.S. troops “pacified” the Indians and encouraged an onslaught by hide and meat hunters. Then, in 1880, the Northern Pacific Railway opened a way into the central region, and that was the end of the last great buffalo herd on earth.

By 1885 none were known to remain alive in a state of freedom, yet their presence still endured. In 1887, William Greeb, an English naturalist, travelled through the West on the Canadian Pacific Railway. “Crossing and recrossing in all directions,” he wrote, “were the tracks of the buffalo and the skulls and bones of these fine animals bleaching in the sun. At some of the water tanks where we stopped, heaps of bones and skulls have been collected for export to sugar refineries and to the manure-works of civilisation.” As far as profits were concerned, the buffalo were good to the last bone.

Between 1850 and 1885, more than 75 million buffalo hides had been handled by American dealers. Most were shipped east on the railroads, which had contributed heavily to the extinction both directly and indirectly. William Frederick Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” who was hired as a meat hunter by the Kansas Pacific Railway to feed its work gangs, gained much of his fame from having butchered 4,280 buffalo in a single eighteen-month period.

The railway companies also used buffalo to entertain their passengers. When a train came within rifle range of a herd it would be slowed or halted, the windows would be rolled down, and the passengers would be invited to have some sport, using guns and ammunition thoughtfully provided by the company. Men
and
women took advantage of this opportunity to enjoy themselves. No attempt was made to make use of the resultant carcasses, except that a trainman would sometimes cut out a few tongues to be served to the ladies and gentlemen at their next meal in tribute to their marksmanship.

Apologists for the destruction of the buffalo admit that their end was unfortunate, but they insist it was inevitable. The buffalo had to go, they say, to make room for more effective use of the land. That is another example of the dubious rationale used by modern man to justify the destruction of other species. Specialists studying the question of the meat-producing capacity of various ranges and grazing animals have recently concluded that the ability of the western plains to produce beef under human management has never exceeded, or even equalled, the ability of the same range to produce buffalo meat
without
human husbandry. All that was achieved by exterminating the buffalo and replacing them with cattle was to substitute a less successful and less valuable domestic animal for a more valuable and more successful wild one.

In any case, the buffalo were not butchered to make room for farmers. That excuse had not yet been invented at the time of their massacre. The brutal truth is that one of the most magnificent and vital forms of life on this planet was destroyed for no better reasons than our desire to eradicate the Plains Indians and an insatiable lust for booty... and for blood.

North America's Great Cat is the cougar—a tawny, long-tailed creature that can measure nine feet from tip of nose to tip of tail and weigh more than 200 pounds; and its frightful screams at mating time can be a source of terror to the uninitiated.

Before the arrival of Western man, the cougar (mountain lion in the West, puma in the South) inhabited the most extensive territory of any New World mammal, ranging from northern British Columbia and Yukon, east to Nova Scotia, and southward throughout the whole of the United States, Central America, and on to Patagonia at the southern tip of South America. The eastern race, often called painter (panther), roamed the forests of all Canada's Atlantic Provinces except Newfoundland, south to the Gulf of Mexico and Florida.

They were much feared in New England in early times. Higginson, in the 1620s, refers to them as lions, and William Wood, about 1634, wrote of them: “Concerning lions, I will not say I ever saw any myself, but some affirm that they have seen a lion at Cape Anne, which is not above six leagues from Boston. Some likewise, being lost in the woods, have heard such terrible roarings as have made them aghast, which must either be devils or lions... Besides, Plymouth men have traded for lions' skins in former times [on those coasts].”

By 1720 it had become well known to the French, through their contact with the Indians. Charlevoix describes it under its Indian name of
carcajou.

“The moose has other enemies besides the Indians... The most terrible of all is the
Carcajou
or
Quincajou,
a kind of cat, with a tail so long that he twists it several times round his body... As soon as this hunter comes up with the moose, he leaps upon him, and fastens upon his neck, about which he twists his long tail, and then cuts his jugular. The moose has no means of shunning this disaster, but by flying to the water the moment he is seized... [if the moose is successful] the carcajou, who cannot endure the water, quits his hold immediately... This hunter too as he does not possess the faculty of smelling with the greatest acuteness, carries three foxes a hunting with him, which he sends on the discovery. The moment they have got scent of a moose, two of them place themselves by his side, and the third takes post behind him; and all three manage matters so well, by harassing the prey, that they compel him to go to the place where they have left the carcajou, with whom they afterwards settle about... dividing the prey. Another wile of the carcajou... is to climb upon a tree, where couched along some projecting branch, he waits till a moose passes, and leaps upon him... Under what [other] climate can we find brute animals, indued with so strong an instinct, and so forcibly inclined to industry, as the fox... and the carcajou?”

The reputed co-operation between carcajou and foxes may make Charlevoix seem credulous, but it is a fact that foxes regularly scavenge cougar kills.

Despite its ferocious reputation, the carcajou proved no match for European arms and wiles. It would run from a pack of dogs or even a single dog and frequently take refuge in a tree. Here it could easily be killed even with the primitive firearms of the seventeenth century. Professional cat hunters considered it cowardly, but it only wished to avoid conflict with men. That avoidance, however, proved impossible and the carcajou of the northeast—the painter of the southeast—was harassed and harried, usually with a bounty on its head, until it had nowhere to hide except such havens as the great swamps of Florida, a few enclaves in the Appalachians, and the enormous tangle of forests in Gaspé and New Brunswick.

The last Quebec carcajou was killed near Sorel in 1863 and, with its death, even the name was lost, eventually to reappear attached to the wolverine in northwestern Canada. The last cougar known from Ontario was killed in 1884. By the turn of the century it was believed to be extinct everywhere in eastern Canada and the United States, with the exception of Florida where a few still held out in the depths of the Everglades.
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After World War II a peculiar phenomenon began to manifest itself in eastern North America. Rumours began to be heard, at first few and widely scattered, but eventually mounting almost to a flood, of cougars reappearing from Georgia to New Brunswick. Although such reports now number in the hundreds, all except four remain unsubstantiated. Four cougars have actually been killed in the eastern region since about 1950; but three seem to have been strays from the Florida swamps, while the fourth was an escaped, semi-domesticated animal. Nevertheless, the wish to believe that the eastern cougar still exists is so strong that even otherwise sceptical scientists have been caught up by it.

Beginning in 1948, Bruce S. Wright, then director of the Northeastern Wildlife Station in New Brunswick, began investigating reputed cougar sightings, and he was still doing so up to his death in 1975. By then he had collected 300 reports and had even found what he believed to be the track of a cougar. In a book he published in 1959, Wright maintained that the eastern form of the great cat not only survived but might number as many as a hundred individuals, mostly in Maine and New Brunswick but extending west to Gaspé and east to Cape Breton Island.

I, for one, would give a great deal to see Wright's optimism vindicated. Yet, despite the animal's great size, a heavy annual traffic of hunters through its supposed territory, and a mushrooming of visual reports from, among other unlikely places, the outskirts of the city of Truro, the hard fact is that not a single cougar has been reported killed and no scrap of flesh, bone, or hide has been found in eastern Canada or Maine in this century. Most reluctantly, I have to conclude that the wish has been father to the thought, and that the great cat of the eastern forests is now a ghost.

In the Gaspé region about 1680, according to LeClercq, there occurred “three kinds of Wolves. [One of these] the
Loup Cervier
has a silvery fur and two little tufts of wholely black fur on its head. Its flesh is pretty good though rank to the taste. This animal is more fearful to the eye than savage in reality.”

LeClercq's three kinds of “wolves” are a good example of the confusions encountered in reconstructing the natural history of this continent. While there were indeed three species of canines in the Gaspé, neither the
Loup Cervier
nor another of LeClercq's trio, the
Loup Marin,
belonged to the canine family at all. The
Loup Marin
is in fact a seal, while the
Loup Cervier
is the lynx.

The chunky, short-tailed, long-legged lynx was probably never common in southern parts. It ranged from the northern tier of the United States to the tree line in the Arctic. It was of only moderate interest to early fur traders whose European markets demanded short, densely haired pelts; nor does it seem to have initially aroused much animosity in European man, probably because it was so shy and nocturnal that men seldom encountered it or even knew it was about.

Then it fell victim to an absurdity of human categorization. English colonists, who had no name of their own for the creature, adopted the French Loup Cervier, but corrupted it to Lucifer or Lucifee. Soon, the old adage about giving a dog, or in this case, a cat, a bad name came true. The godly Puritans assumed that any animal called after the Prince of Darkness had to be an enemy of man; consequently, the Lucifer, now endowed with satanic qualities, joined the bobcat on the list of proscribed animals.

Although at first contact it seems to have been common along the eastern seaboard at least as far south as Chesapeake Bay, the Lucifee got such short shrift from the settlers that, by the mid-1800s, it had been exterminated from all but the most heavily forested portions of the northern United States. By then it had shed the name of Lucifer and was carrying the name originally given to its Eurasian relative, the lynx. But the removal of the devilish stigma brought no relief from human persecution, for its soft, pastel-coloured fur had become valuable over the centuries with the result that, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was being hunted commercially all across northern North America.

By the beginning of World War II it was virtually extinct in the United States, except for a few score individuals widely dispersed through northern New England. It was totally extinct in Prince Edward Island and so scarce in the other Canadian Maritime Provinces that only a handful could be trapped in any given year. This despite the fact that the price paid for lynx skins, even in the Depression era, ranged as high as $40.

Newfoundland was a special case. First mention of the lynx in the history of that province would appear to be a reference to the presence of “tigers” found there by the Corte Real brothers in 1500–01. By 1505, at least one live lynx from Newfoundland had been carried across the ocean as a gift for King Henry VII of England. Other references make it clear that the Lucifer or Luzarne, as it was sometimes called, was fairly common throughout Newfoundland until the nineteenth century, when it suddenly seemed to vanish. Its apparent disappearance was so striking that some biologists conclude it had never been in Newfoundland at all until the later part of the century, when lynx from Labrador crossed frozen Belle Isle Strait.

This misapprehension seems to have arisen from the current belief that the lynx is so dependent on the varying hare that it cannot exist without it, ergo, it could not have survived in Newfoundland before the introduction of that hare into the island in the 1880s. The truth is that, before the arrival of Europeans, the Newfoundland lynx (which had evolved into a separate subspecies) made a good living on the indigenous Arctic hare, and, to a lesser degree, on straying calves from the immense herds of caribou that roamed the island. It was the massive destruction of these two species by white men that nearly brought an end to the Newfoundland lynx and, by an ironic twist, it was the human introduction of the fecund varying hare that saved it from extinction.

The lynx has retained a hold in Newfoundland, but its fate elsewhere has been grim. Beginning about twenty years ago, lynx fur was elevated to the heights by the arbiters of fashion as a “superb natural fun fur.” Lynx pelts immediately shot up in value. By the late 1970s a good pelt was worth $200 and the market was so avid that entrepreneurs were chartering aircraft to fly trappers into previously untouched country where, by the use of traps, snares, and poison, they swept enormous regions clean of lynx. The slaughter had become so extensive by 1982 that pelt “production” was in sharp decline. In accordance with economic law, this shortage sent the price up just as sharply. Thus, although the 1983 catch of Canadian lynx was just half of what it had been in 1982, the price per skin had soared to an average of $400–$500, with as much as $1,000 being paid for a single pelt.

So drastic has been the consequent collapse in lynx populations that Ontario is contemplating a closed season in 1985. In the eastern seaboard region, where it was once abundant, the lynx is now so rare as to have been declared a protected species in New Brunswick. It may still be hunted in Nova Scotia, assuming it can be found, but only a handful of pelts have been taken in that province during the past several years.

On Cape Breton Island, which according to the always-optimistic Nova Scotia Department of Lands and Forests supposedly harbours a “healthy Lynx breeding stock,” I have only once seen a lynx track and have not been able to confirm a single sighting during the past three years. Trappers tell me that, to all intents and purposes, the species is extinct, not only in Cape Breton, but in the remainder of the province as well. It is commercially extinct
everywhere
in the eastern maritime region of North America, except possibly Labrador, and it is not in notably better shape across the continent to the westward.

At a weight of around twenty pounds, the stump-tailed bobcat was the smallest, and probably the most abundant, of the three wild cats initially inhabiting the region. Preferring a more southerly climate than the lynx, the bobcat ranged only as far north as the St. Lawrence River and the Gulf.

Its rather coarse and brittle fur was never worth much in the fur trade, but this did not save it from becoming the object of a vendetta waged by the invading Europeans who convinced themselves that the wild cat was an insatiable killer, not only of wild animals that men coveted, but of domestic stock as well.

As early as 1727, Massachusetts was paying a thirty-shilling bobcat bounty and, as late as the 1930s, was still offering a bounty of ten dollars. Similar treatment almost everywhere that the invaders settled eventually reduced the cat to vestigial numbers throughout most of its formerly widespread range, virtually extirpating it from the eastern portion of the continent except for the few forest sanctuaries that still endure in the eastern States and Canada's Maritime Provinces.

So secretive did it become as a result of centuries of persecution that it was not until the late 1960s that the existence of a relatively large bobcat population in the wilderness regions of central Nova Scotia was revealed as a result of a survey of fur-bearing animals conducted by the provincial Department of Lands and Forests. Once discovered, it was decided to “utilize this resource” as a means of attracting hunters to the province.

This led to the establishment of the World Bobcat Hunt, centred on the town of Truro where, in the words of one advertisement widely published in U.S. sportsmen's magazines, “there are always plenty of cats for your hounds to kill.” The first World Bobcat Hunt was literally a howling success as something like 600 hounds, mainly from the eastern and central United States, were loosed in the Nova Scotian woods. Hunters followed the hounds in 4x4 trucks or all-terrain vehicles. Some of the more affluent ones used helicopters. Like most cats when pursued by hounds, bobcats tree readily. They can then easily be shot, but many hunters do not kill the animals outright, preferring to disable them only enough so they will fall to the ground, where the hounds can tear them apart while still alive.