Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
being gored by a swipe of the cow’s horn.36
Having filled his quota of adventure for the day, Grinnell retired to a high knoll from which he could watch the rest of the hunt and its aftermath. The plain was dotted with downed animals, each soon attended by two or three men. The women would eventually catch up to the hunt and take over the grunt work of processing the hides and the meat.
PLAINS INDIANS WERE BORN ON A BUFFALO ROBE AND WRAPPED IN A buffalo robe when they died. In between, the buffalo was the foundation of both their economy and their culture. Before the arrival of whites, buffalo provided for virtually every need.37
The Indians’ use of nearly every part of the buffalo they killed is well known. Certain nutrient-rich organs were cut from the still-warm animals and consumed raw, including the liver and the kidney. For days after a successful hunt, the entire tribe gorged on fresh meat at celebratory feasts. Delicacies included hump meat, tongue, nose, hot marrow from the roasted bones, calf brain cooked in the skull, soup made from blood, and boudins—intestines filled with diced tenderloin and then boiled. During the frenzied post-hunt feasting, men might eat ten or even fifteen pounds of meat. Meat not consumed in the immediate aftermath of the hunt was dried or smoked into jerky, some of which was pounded into pemmican, a nutritious mixture of meat, fat, and berries. Both jerked meat and pemmican could be stored for months. So too the buffalo’s thick back fat, which was stripped off and smoked.
Having provided the food, the buffalo also provided the fuel for cooking. As generations of white hunters and settlers would also learn, fires on the treeless plains were built with buffalo chips (dried dung).
Before the arrival on the plains of canvass as a popular trade item, Indian teepees were sewn from the hides of buffalo cows. It took around twenty for a single teepee. Cows’ hides were thinner and therefore both lighter and easier to work. Hides could also be used to make clothing (though the even softer hides of deer were also popular). The thick hides of bulls were used to make rawhide, battle shields, even “bullboats”—rawhide stretched over willow branches in the shape of a giant bowl. Rawhide pulled over a wooden frame was also used to make saddles, sometimes padded with buffalo hair.
Dozens of other objects came from the buffalo. Spine sinews became thread pulled by needles made from sharp fragments of bone. Tendons were used to make bowstrings. A dried tongue worked as a comb. Hair was braided into rope. The paunch held water, even during cooking. Bones became mallets, digging tools, awls. Horns became waterproof powder horns or spoons. And the Indians used the tail, as its previous owner did, to swat flies.
THAT NIGHT AT THE CAMP, GRINNELL AND HIS COMPANIONS JOINED the Pawnees’ feasting and celebration of the successful hunt. For his part, Grinnell could now say that he, like his wilderness heroes, had felled the mighty bison. Yet his mood was pensive. “And so the evening wears away, passed by our little party in the curious contemplation of a phase of life that is becoming more and more rare as the years roll by.”38
The following year, the Pawnee returned to Kansas for their semiannual hunt. They were attacked by the Sioux. One hundred and fifty-six Pawnee were killed, including a large number of women and children. The Pawnee would never hunt buffalo again.39
In the same year, 1873, Grinnell published an article about his buffalo hunt in a sporting journal called Forest and Stream. The article included a grim warning about the buffalo: “[T]heir days are numbered, and unless some action on this subject is speedily taken not only by the States and Territories, but by the National Government, these shaggy brown beasts, these cattle upon a thousand hills, will ere long be among the things of the past.”40
It was a remarkable flash of foresight, written at a time when, by Grinnell’s own description, buffalo still “blackened the plains.” Yet with all his prescience, even Grinnell could little imagine the power of the forces then conspiring against the buffalo. Change, sudden and dramatic, was on the very near horizon.
This evening, about 5 o’clock, I felled a mighty bison to the earth. I placed my foot upon his neck of strength and looked around, but in vain, for some witness of my first great “coup.” I thought myself larger than a dozen men.
—WILLIAM MARSHALL ANDERSON, 18341
In 1519, Hernando Cortez and a handful of Spanish legionnaires entered the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), capital of the Aztec Empire as well as home of its emperor—Montezuma II. Montezuma’s city was an alien wonderland, including a menagerie of exotic animals given to the emperor as gifts or captured by his hunters. According to Spanish historian Antonio de Solis y Ribadeneyra, Cortez and his men saw “Lions, Tygers, Bears, and all others of the savage kind which New-Spain produced.” Of all Montezuma’s beasts, however, “the greatest Rarity was the Mexican Bull, a wonderful composition of divers Animals.” The animal “has crooked shoulders, with a Bunch on its back like a Camel; its Flanks dry, its Tail Large, and its Neck covered with Hair like a Lion. It is cloven footed, its Head armed like that of a Bull, which it resembles in Fierceness, with no less Strength and Agility.”2
The first Europeans to see the buffalo in its native habitat were part of another small band of Spaniards, including a man named Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Shipwrecked in 1530 on the Gulf Coast of present-day Texas, Cabeza de Vaca encountered what he called cattle. In a book about his adventures, he described in detail an Indian tribe he dubbed the “Cow nation,” who hunted the buffalo and then distributed “a vast many hides into the interior country.” As a food, Cabeza de Vaca found buffalo to be “finer and fatter” than the beef of his native Spain.3
The first Englishman to see the buffalo was an explorer named Samuel Argall, who in 1612 sailed a small frigate to the navigable headwaters of the Potomac River. There, with a group of his crewmen, he went “marching into the Countrie,” where he found a “great store of cattle as big as Kine [oxen], of which the Indians that were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meate, and very easy to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts of the wildernesse.” Assuming that Argall and his men did not penetrate far into the thick woodlands that hemmed the Potomac, it is quite likely that the buffalo he described were within the boundaries of what is today Washington, D.C.4
Though less associated with the frontier territory east of the Mississippi, buffalo appear in numerous historical accounts. In 1701, a colony of Huguenots on the James River attempted, unsuccessfully, to domesticate two captured calves. In a 1733 report, George Oglethorpe, the first governor of Georgia, listed buffalo among the wild animals of his colony. Early settlers to hunt buffalo included residents of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. When Daniel Boone and other trailblazers penetrated the continent westward into Kentucky and Tennessee, they followed paths first trodden by buffalo, heading east.
Though the story of the buffalo in the eastern United States is less chronicled, the outcome, in its essence, rings familiar: By 1800, the buffalo east of the Mississippi had been exterminated.5
IN THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE OF 1803, NAPOLEON BONAPARTE SOLD THE United States a fresh herd of buffalo, along with the half-billion pristine acres on which they roamed. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became the first Americans to explore the newly acquired land. Generations of American schoolchildren have committed to memory the goal of their exploration of the American West: to discover a passage by water to the Pacific Ocean. But President Thomas Jefferson gave more specific directions in his 1803 written orders to Captain Lewis:
The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication