Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the great western desert, the buffalo played a vital role in their very survival. Lewis and Clark’s combined journals discuss the buffalo in at least 707 separate entries. The first mention occurred on June 6, 1804, in present-day Missouri, when Clark noted that they observed “Some buffalow Sign today.” On August 23, 1804, the expedition killed its first bison near the Nebraska–South Dakota border.7
As with later travelers in the West, the buffalo provided the Lewis and Clark expedition with a vital source of food. When it was available—most particularly as they crossed Montana between Fort Mandan and the Continental Divide—the men ate buffalo, and in prodigious quantities. “The hunters killed three buffaloe today,” wrote Captain Lewis on July 13, 1805, near the Great Falls of the Missouri River. “[W]e eat an emensity of meat; it requires 4 deer, an Elk and a deer, or one buffaloe, to supply us plentifully 24 hours.” A typical buffalo cow—always preferred over bulls when it came to eating—provided around 400 pounds of meat. Given the opportunity, the thirty-seven men of the expedition could consume 9 pounds of fresh meat per day per man.
If the voyage of Lewis and Clark famously failed in its mission of finding a water passage to the Pacific, it certainly succeeded in opening up new streams of commerce. Commerce, in the context of the far West of the early nineteenth century, meant fur. Fur, as a general matter, meant beaver. Hence the importance of Captain Lewis’s famous report back to President Jefferson at the conclusion of the voyage in 1806: “The Missouri and all it’s branches from the Chyenne upwards abound more in beaver and Common Otter, than any other streams on earth, particularly that proportion of them lying within the Rocky Mountains.”8
The period of Western history between 1806 (Lewis and Clark’s return) and 1841 (the start of the great California–Oregon migration) was defined by the pursuit of beaver.
Since the mid-1600s, fashionable Europeans had worn hats they called beavers. The beaver hat was made not from the animal’s skin (à la the coonskin cap) but rather from the downy underlayer of shorthairs. These shorthairs were trimmed from the skin, chemically treated, and pressed into felt. The felt was used to make the hat. By 1800, the European beaver had been trapped into near extinction, placing a particular premium on the North American trade.
So central was the beaver to the fur trade that the Hudson’s Bay Company, operating continuously in Canada since 1670, used beaver pelts as the currency of exchange. “Beaver being the Chief Commodity we Trade for,” wrote a company officer, “We therefore make it the Standard whereby we value all Furs and Commodities.” In 1811, for example, it took almost three buffalo robes to equal the value of a single beaver pelt.9
Beaver pelts, in sharp contrast with buffalo hides, were well matched to both the consumer demands and the trade logistics of the day. While the demand for beaver felt hats was high, the demand for buffalo hides was limited. The leather made from buffalo hides was notoriously soft and spongy, unusable for most common applications (such as the making of shoes and belts). The primary application for buffalo was robes used as cold-weather covering by riders in sleighs and carriages. Another common use was among teamsters: The famous warmth of buffalo coats made them a veritable symbol of the trade, though their great weight made them impracticable for the average person on foot.10 Aside from these limited areas, demand for buffalo robes was modest.
From the standpoint of logistics, beaver pelts had another great advantage over buffalo hides. A beaver pelt was lightweight, barely more than a pound, and therefore relatively easy to transport. The hide of a bull buffalo, when first stripped from the carcass, could weigh as much as 150 pounds. The process of staking out and drying the hide caused it to lose around two-thirds of its weight, but even a “flint” hide could tip the scales at 50 pounds. The difficulty of transporting such heavy goods ate quickly into profits—even for those locations with access to the Missouri River, the principal highway for robes before the advent of the railroad.
By comparison with what was to come, the trade in buffalo hides prior to the 1870s was modest. This was particularly true in the years before 1840, when beaver provided an attractive alternative. In this era, most buffalo robes were supplied not by white hunters but in trade with the Indians. Coffee, sugar, calico, blankets, butcher knives, beads, guns, and whiskey were common items of exchange.11
By 1840, the beaver trade had come crashing to the ground. On the supply side, the beaver had been plucked clean from virtually every waterway that drained the Rocky Mountains. On the demand side, meanwhile, fashion proved fickle. Silk top hats became the rage, and the market for beaver pelts evaporated (just in time, in all likelihood, to save the humble animal from extinction).
With the beaver trade gone, some former trappers turned to the hunting of buffalo. Still, neither the lack of demand for buffalo nor the difficulties in transport had been solved in the period between 1840 and 1870. The available numbers are haphazard. But even with the new interest in buffalo resulting from the end of the beaver era, it appears that only rarely would the annual harvest exceed 200,000 hides. Many years produced fewer than 100,000. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, there is a revealing series of letters between Pierre Chouteau, a leading trader in St. Louis, and Ramsay Crooks, president of the American Fur Company (the largest producer of buffalo hides). In their correspondence, the two men worry constantly about flooding the buffalo hide market even at modest levels of trade, and Crooks repeatedly directs Chouteau to send fewer robes east.12
It was about this time, 1843, that the painter John James Audubon made his last journey west. Beginning from his home in Audubon Park, Audubon ultimately ascended the Missouri and then the Yellowstone River through present-day Montana. At a time when few prairie travelers could see past a landscape covered in buffalo, Audubon (like his wife’s student, George Bird Grinnell), had the rare ability to see over the horizon. “One can hardly conceive how it happens,” wrote Audubon in his diary, “so many [buffalo] are yet to be found. Daily we see so many that we hardly notice them more than the cattle in our pastures about our homes. But this cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared.”13 (Grinnell would read Audubon’s journal before his first trip west.)
It was a flash of remarkable insight, for even as Audubon spoke, the pace of change had begun to accelerate.
IN 1836, A PARTY OF FIVE MISSIONARIES CROSSED THE CONTINENT with the intention of ministering to the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest. The party traveled in the company of a large group of fur trappers and included the first two white women ever to cross the Rockies—Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding. Eighteen-year-old Narcissa kept a diary, and the experiences she recorded foreshadowed a generation of emigrants on the verge of transforming the American West. The buffalo played a central role in their drama.
For emigrants traveling west, sighting the first buffalo marked a signature moment in their voyage—true arrival on the frontier. For Narcissa, the event took place on June 4, 1836, in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, thirty miles above the confluence of the river’s north and south branches.
We have seen wonders this forenoon. Herds of buffalo hove in sight; one a bull, crossed our trail and ran upon the bluffs near the rear of the camp. We took the trouble to chase him so as to have a near view. Sister Spalding and myself got out of the wagon and ran upon the bluff to see him. This band was quite willing to gratify our curiosity, seeing it was the first. Several have been killed this forenoon. The [fur trade] Company keep[s] a man out all the time to hunt for the camp.14
As with Lewis and Clark, the buffalo provided early transcontinental emigrants with a vital source of food. Indeed provisions for the voyage were planned around the expectation of reaching the herd. “On the way to buffalo country we had to bake bread for ten persons,” wrote Narcissa. “It was difficult at first, as we did not understand working outdoors … June found us ready to receive our first taste of buffalo.”15
And she liked it. Reporting rapturously on their new food source, Narcissa wrote, “I never saw anything like buffalo meat to satisfy hunger. We do not want anything else with it. I have eaten three meals of it and it relishes well.”