Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
Stephen Ambrose pointed out, the Civil War had united the country North and South, but it took the completion of the railroad to bind the nation East and West. A more quotidian benefit, of course, was the dramatic decrease in the time and expense of transportation. Before the railroad, coast-to-coast transportation by wagon was measured in months of arduous travel. By train, the journey took seven days. In the wagon train era, pioneers might pay $1,000 for the equipment and provisions to cross the continent. In June of 1870, a third-class “emigrant” ticket cost $65. For any location reachable by train, wagon travel virtually ceased. As George Bird Grinnell discovered in his trip west only fourteen months after the driving of the golden spike, the old pioneer trail already had grown over with flowers for lack of traffic.28
Few changes so dramatic, however, come without a price. Arthur Ferguson, a young man who thought about the future as he worked to survey the route for the railroad, wrote in his 1868 journal that “[t]he time is coming and fast too, when in the sense it is now understood, THERE WILL BE NO WEST.”29 A bit of hyperbole, perhaps. Yet clearly the railroad accelerated the transformations—positive and negative—of the nineteenth century.
FOR THE GREAT HERD OF BUFFALO THAT ONCE ROAMED THE PLAINS IN AN unbroken mass from Mexico to Canada, the impact of humankind had been significant even before the earliest waves of California and Oregon emigrants. John James Audubon was not the only early western traveler to notice the diminishing numbers of the herd. A trapper named Osborne Russell kept a journal from 1834 to 1843. Writing about the buffalo, he warned that “it will not be doubted for a moment that this noble race of animals, so useful in supplying the wants of man, will at no far distant period become extinct in North America.”30 Painter George Catlin, whose dramatic images helped to create the nation’s visual consciousness of the West, also warned of the buffalo’s demise in the 1830s. “It is truly a melancholy contemplation for the traveler in this country, to anticipate the period which is not far distant, when the last of these noble animals, at the hands of white and red men, will fall victims to their cruel and improvident rapacity.” 31
Catlin’s journal—consistent with other contemporaneous documents—hints at one impact on the buffalo herd that fits uncomfortably with our modern, popular images. Native Americans made their own contribution to the demise of the buffalo. While the image of Indians using every bit of the buffalo they killed appears far more common than wanton slaughter, wasteful killing by Indians did take place. Catlin’s journal, for example, recounts an 1832 incident in which 500 Sioux killed 1,400 buffalo solely for their tongues—to be traded for whiskey with the American Fur Company.32
More significant than such isolated examples of buffalo slaughter by Native Americans was the impact of technology—the horse—on the Indians’ hunting techniques. Hunting on horseback allowed far greater choice in target selection than hunting on foot, and given the choice, hunters shot cows over bulls. The cows’ meat was superior and their hides easier to work. By the 1860s, anecdotal reports indicated cow-to-bull ratios of as high as 10 to 1. Modern game laws, of course, seek precisely the opposite effect—protecting cows instead of bulls. The impact of selective hunting, according to biologist Dale Lott, “sent the population in a downward spiral.”33
The westward emigration that began in the early 1840s caused the buffalo to retreat from the travel corridor of the California–Oregon Trail. While early pioneers could depend on buffalo meat as a food source when they crossed the Nebraska and Wyoming plains, emigrants by the 1850s were forced to rely on bacon. The combination of plinking and subsistence hunting drove the buffalo away from the trail, but there was another factor as well. The emigrants’ stock competed with the buffalo herd for grass. By the end of the wagon train era, pioneers were sometimes forced to drive their animals as far as eight miles off the trail to find suitable forage. Such denuded land offered little attraction for the herd.34
Construction of the railroad sealed the fate of the buffalo. If the impact of emigrants was significant, the disruption caused by the army of men who built the railroad was even greater. The construction crews that built the Kansas Pacific, for example, numbered about 1,200 men. To feed these workers, the railroad hired a young hunter named William Cody. In the company of a horse he named Brigham and a gun he named Lucretia Borgia, Cody killed 4,280 buffalo in eighteen months of Kansas service.35
It was in this same era that Cody won his nickname, Buffalo Bill. When it was discovered that an army scout, Billy Comstock, went by the same moniker, a contest was demanded to settle the title. “We were to hunt one day of eight hours,” remembered Cody in his autobiography. “The wager was five hundred dollars a side, and the man who should kill the greater number of buffaloes from on horseback was to be declared the winner.” The newspapers loved it, stoking the fires of controversy. The Kansas Pacific even sent out an excursion train full of spectators from St. Louis to witness the showdown. In Kansas (unlike the North Platte Valley of Nebraska), buffalo were still commonplace along the tracks. The excursion train pulled up alongside a suitable herd some twenty miles east of Sheridan, and the spectators spilled out, carrying picnic baskets and bottles of cold champagne. After three runs through the herd (with the occasional break for champagne), Cody beat Comstock by a score of 69 to 46. The Kansas Pacific gathered up the best heads, mounted them, and put them on display in rail stations around the country.36
Shooting buffalo from a moving train (like its antecedent, shooting from the deck of the steamboat) was a popular sport, while it lasted. An 1869 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine described a scene from a train ride between Denver and Salt Lake City: “It would seem to be hardly possible to imagine a more novel sight than a small band of buffalo loping along within a few hundred feet of a railroad train in rapid motion, while the passengers are engaged in shooting, from every available window, with rifles, carbines, and revolvers. An American scene, certainly.”37
The Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana offered its passengers the opportunity to “test the accuracy of their six-shooters by firing at the retreating herd.” The Kansas Pacific once chartered a buffalo excursion to a church group, including 26 representatives of the fairer sex. A reporter for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper documented the hunt, which culminated in the killing of a bull. “[A] rope was attached to his horns, and two long files of men, with joined hands, and preceded by the band, playing Yankee Doodle, dragged him bodily to the front car and hoisted him aboard.”38
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD MADE permanent a new geographic distribution of the American buffalo. Instead of a great mass stretching unbroken across the plains from Mexico to Canada, now there were two herds—northern and southern. The southern herd was larger, encompassing the present-day states of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas. The smaller northern herd was spread across Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana.
In the three centuries since the arrival of the Europeans on the North American continent, the buffalo had been winnowed dramatically, though an estimate of the decrease is difficult. One scientist who studied the numbers came to this conclusion: “One may assume with reasonable certainty that the bison population west of the Mississippi River at the close of the Civil War numbered in the millions, probably in the tens of millions. Any greater accuracy seems impossible.”39
Despite a significant decrease in population, the idea that the buffalo could become extinct still failed to find purchase among average Americans of the early 1870s. The myth of inexhaustibility, by contrast, found support in the descriptions of surviving herds that still “blackened the prairie.” Indeed the ungraspable vastness of the prairie itself lent credibility to the notion that some infinite number of buffalo must surely remain beyond the reach of mankind.
But the railroad, as it spread across the nation, was making the country smaller. Of the two major impediments to wholesale harvest of the buffalo—market demand and efficient transportation—the railroad had conquered one.