Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
since running—and the herd itself—are a buffalo’s primary defenses.
Despite the buffalo’s plodding, cumbersome appearance, it is shockingly fast and agile. An adult buffalo is as fleet as some racehorses in the quarter mile, but unlike a horse, a frightened buffalo can run across the prairie for miles without stopping. A nineteenth-century scientific expedition once required a relay of three fresh horses to run down a buffalo cow, covering twenty-five miles in the chase. As for agility, a biologist at the National Bison Range in Montana once observed a 2,000-pound bull leap up a six-foot embankment from a standing start!13
The buffalo’s skill at running away is enhanced by the collective power of the herd to tell it when to run away. The phrase “herd mentality” may carry a pejorative connotation for humans, but not so the buffalo: Hundreds (or thousands) of pairs of eyes, scanning the broad horizon. Hundreds of noses, sniffing for foreign scent. And then, at the first sign of danger, a powerful instinct to follow after the fleet, fleeing mass. When pursued, the herd protects its members through sheer numbers. A buffalo doesn’t need to be faster than predators; it just needs to be faster than a few of the other buffalo.
Against the buffalo herd, even a predator as effective as the wolf represents little risk except to the young, the old, and the injured or sick.14 Healthy adult buffalo (not including cows with calves) pay little attention to wolves. Indeed Indian hunters sometimes cloaked themselves in wolf skins in order to crawl within easy shooting distance. The power of the herd (especially its size) even insulated the buffalo against its most effective predator—humans.
The question of how many buffalo walked the North American continent before the arrival of Europeans is a source of considerable disagreement. Sixty million has been a common number cited, and some estimates are as high as 100 million. The late Dale Lott, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, and a leading expert on the buffalo, studied these higher numbers and made a persuasive case as to why the number of 30 million—though still an educated guess—is the better estimate based on the continent’s carrying capacity.15 Still, 30 million is an enormous number.
Equally impressive is the range that these buffalo covered. The fact that buffalo inhabited the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada is commonly known. Less well known is the fact that at the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, some 2 million to 4 million buffalo lived east of the Mississippi—in every future state but the northeast cluster of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.16
The buffalo, in short, was a remarkable survivor. It had prevailed through prehistoric episodes that forced hundreds of other mammals into extinction. It thrived in climates ranging from subtropic Mexico to subarctic Canada. It could defend itself against the relentless attacks of the most deadly predators in its environment, including packs of wolves and prehistoric humans. The buffalo, it seemed, was perfect.
BY JULY OF 1872, GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL AND THREE COMPANIONS were crossing into northern Kansas on horseback, hurrying to catch up with a tribe of 4,000 Pawnee Indians. Relations between whites and Pawnees were peaceful, in part because the Pawnee ceded their traditional Kansas and Nebraska lands early. The Pawnee were enemies of the Sioux and the Cheyenne and often served as guides to U.S. Army soldiers during the wars with those tribes.17
In 1872, the Pawnee were confined to a small reservation along Nebraska’s Loup River. Twice a year, though, the army allowed the tribe to travel south to hunt buffalo in their historic Kansas hunting grounds. “[F]or a little while,” wrote Grinnell, “they returned to the old free life of earlier years, when the land had been all their own, and they had wandered at will over the broad expanse of the rolling prairie.”18 The tribe left the reservation two weeks before Grinnell arrived in Nebraska, so now Grinnell and his companions hurried to catch up. Their guide was Lute North, who, like his brother, was an experienced young army officer. Lute spoke fluent Pawnee and was known and respected by the tribe.
After a few days they overtook the Pawnee, cresting a butte to find 200 lodges, an entire village, spread across the prairie. The head chief, Peta-la-shar, received them warmly, referring to Lute as “my son.” Peta-la-shar reported that the hunt, so far, had not been successful. “But tomorrow,” he promised, “a grand surround will be made.” His young scouts had reported a large herd about twenty miles to the south.19
THE OLDEST CONFIRMED WEAPON FOUND IN NORTH AMERICA—A STONE spearhead—was discovered by archaeologists near Folsom, New Mexico, in 1927. Stone cannot be carbon-dated, but the material with which the famous “Folsom point” was discovered could be. The point was imbedded in bone—a 10,000-year-old bone of Bison antiquus, an extinct ancestor of the modern buffalo.20 Humans have been hunting buffalo for a long time. Indeed, in twenty-seven of thirty-five key North American archaeological sites revealing the story of early North American human activity, buffalo bones outnumber those of any other animal.21
By 9,000 years ago, Folsom Man was using many of the same strategies and techniques that American Indians would later use when hunting buffalo on foot. The foundation of these strategies was an intimate understanding of buffalo behavior. Humans could not outrun the buffalo, but they could turn the defenses of the herd against itself.22
Many hunting strategies involved sophisticated team efforts to move the herd to a killing zone. This did not, as a general matter, mean frightening the herd into a full-fledged stampede—at least not at first. Hunters, for example, might use the smell of distant smoke to steer the herd. Sometimes a skillful hunter draped in a buffalo skin could decoy a herd, actually leading it in the chosen direction. Once moving, a herd could sometimes be steered into giant V’s formed by stacked stones, mounds of dung, or, in winter, by a line marked in the snow.23
Ancient humans, and later Indians on foot, used different types of killing zones. The most famous is the buffalo jump, or pishkun. Meriwether Lewis described the critical moment: “The disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently nigh the buffaloe to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speede to the precipice … the (Indian) decoy in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranney or crevice of the clift.”24 The buffalo, pushed by their own frantic mass, tumbled to their deaths. At one Colorado site, 193 buffalo were killed in a single hunt that took place 8,500 years ago. In Montana alone, there are more than 300 pishkun sites. Along a one-mile stretch at one of them, Ulm Pishkun, the buffalo bones are thirteen feet deep.
Hunters on foot also killed buffalo by driving them into box canyons or giant corrals. In the winter, hunters wearing snowshoes ran down buffalo as they floundered in deep snow. Other herds were steered onto ice, where their hooved feet could find no traction.
At some point, probably around 1,500 years ago, Plains Indians began to use the bow and arrow. This development increased the range at which buffalo could be killed but not the basic hunting techniques. As a general matter, at the time Europeans arrived in North America, Plains Indians were hunting the buffalo in ways that differed little from earlier humans, thousands of years before them. In the seventeenth century, a French fur trader named Pierre Esprit Radisson was impressed by the ability of the Sioux Indians—then inhabitants of Minnesota—to hunt the buffalo on foot.25
The horse changed everything.
The prototypical image of the Plains Indian is the mounted hunter-warrior, and indeed, Plains Indians were among the greatest horsemen in history. But the history of Plains Indians on horseback is surprisingly short. It was not until the 1600s that Indians of the Southern Plains first acquired horses—from Spanish remudas brought up through Mexico. And it was not until the 1700s that horses were in widespread use by Indians of the Northern Plains.26
The horse, in a literal way, expanded the horizon of the Native Americans. A tribe on foot might travel five or six miles in a day. A mounted tribe could easily cover twenty. Increased mobility made it easier to follow the buffalo herd and gave Indians more choice about where to live. When the tribe needed to move, the horse’s ability to carry more weight also meant that more food could be preserved and transported, which in turn decreased the risk of starvation in the winter.