Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
cruelty of slaying the poor creatures. Many times did I “swear off,” and fully determine I would break my gun over a wagon-wheel when I arrived at camp … The next morning I would hear the guns of other hunters booming in all directions and would make up my mind that even if I did not kill any more, the buffalo would soon all be slain just the same …
—CHARLES “BUFFALO” JONES1
In the fall of 1870, a 19-year-old Vermonter named J. Wright Mooar left his home, or as he put it, “turned my face west.” He traveled to Fort Hays, Kansas, and took a job cutting wood for the army. By 1871, Mooar was working as a hunter, shooting buffalo to supply meat for the fort. In the winter of 1871–1872, a local fur trader spread the word of an intriguing proposition from Europe: An English company wanted 500 buffalo hides in order to experiment in the making of leather. Mooar signed on as one of the hunters and helped to supply the hides.
After filling his share of the English order, J. Wright found himself with fifty-seven surplus skins. He arranged to send them to his brother John in New York City, telling him of the English experiment and urging him to find a New England tanner with similar interest. The hides were transported through the streets of New York City on an open wagon, and J. Wright described how “the novelty of the sight created a diversion that amounted to a mild sensation.” Before the hides had even been delivered to John, several fur dealers were in tow. “[T]hose 57 hides were sold to the tanners, made up into leather, and the experiment proved immediately successful.”
For tanners, the timing could not have been more opportune. The industrial revolution of post–Civil War America had resulted in an explosion in the manufacturing of all manner of heavy machinery, and the belts that turned the wheels of those whirring machines were made from leather. With the discovery of new processing techniques, buffalo leather could now—for the first time—be used for the same purposes as cow leather. Demand exploded.
As J. Wright Mooar remembered, “even before the English firm had reported its success in the treatment of the buffalo hides … I was apprised of the fact that the American tanners were ready to open negotiations for all the buffalo hides I could deliver.” Mooar’s brother and cousin quit their New York City jobs and headed west to join him in this promising new venture.2
The last levy had been breached.
THE HUNTERS WHO CAME TO KANSAS IN THE EARLY 1870S, LIKE J. WRIGHT and John Mooar, were young men seeking money and adventure. Many were Civil War veterans who found civilian life too dull for their liking. A hunter named Frank Mayer, barely a teenager during the war, had served as a bugle boy in the Confederate Army of his native Louisiana. “Fortunately for us then we had what you don’t have now,” remembered Mayer in his memoirs. (He died in 1954 at the age of 104.) “We had a frontier to conquer. It was a very good substitute for war.”3
Blunt and concise, Mayer explained the logic that compelled him to chase buffalo: “He had a hide. The hide was worth money. I was young, 22. I could shoot. I liked to hunt. I needed adventure. Here it was. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing if you had been in my place?”4 Certainly thousands of Mayer’s contemporaries did.
Mayer was lucky enough to learn the ropes from Bob McRae and Alex Vimy, two experienced frontiersmen he met in Dodge City. McRae’s frontier credentials included punching cows and dealing faro. According to Mayer, “He ran away from a nagging wife to the quietude of the buffalo ranges.” Alex Vimy was a “French-Indian breed” who was the “best knife and tomahawk thrower in the whole southwest.” Vimy was also on the lam, having “knifed a lumberjack in a squabble over a girl.” There had been other knife fights too. In his pocket, as a good-luck charm, Vimy carried the ear of another former rival. Mayer claimed that McRae and Vimy were typical of the buffalo hunters he knew. If so, it’s not hard to understand why he called them the “saltiest goddamn men on the Western frontier.”5
Their past lives may have qualified them as “salty,” but one experience few could claim, circa 1872, was professional buffalo hunting. Aside from a few grizzled veterans of the Missouri fur trade, virtually no one had ever made his living from selling hides.
So they learned their trade as they went along. Because shooting from the ground was regarded as lowbrow, some early hunters attempted to harvest buffalo from horseback. As Buffalo Bill demonstrated, the mounted chase made for great spectacle—but as a business model it was a bust. The mounted hunter scattered the herd and left dead buffalo along a trail that could stretch for miles. Gathering up the hides of these far-flung victims was inefficient. By the time a skinning wagon had been dragged from carcass to carcass, no profit remained.6 Still, so powerful was the romantic image of running buffalo that hunters insisted on calling themselves “buffalo runners,” despite the fact that they hunted on foot. “Why a runner?” asked Frank Mayer when he first arrived in Kansas. “We don’t run buffalo the way you kill them.” His partner’s reply: “Must be because we have to do a hell of a lot of running across the plains to find them.”7
A few early hunters experimented with variants of the old Indian-style surround, but that didn’t suit their purposes, either. An effective surround required an army of men, diluting the proceeds in the process.8
Many early buffalo hunters settled on a system known derisively as “tail hunting.” In tail hunting, a few men would creep up on the herd afoot, fire off as many shots as they could, run after the fleeing tails, and squeeze off a couple more rounds. “This system was afterwards dubbed ‘tenderfoot’ hunting,” remembered a runner named Skelton Glenn, “and did not often pay expenses for either hunter or skinner.”9
Frank Mayer described the frustrations of all the novice buffalo hunters when he said, “I was a businessman. And I had to learn a businessman’s way of harvesting the buffalo crop.”
What they lacked in success, they compensated in that great common denominator of all who sought their fortunes in the West—hope. As Frank Mayer put it, “always was that dream that next season, I’d recoup my losses, and make that fickle jade Fortune stand and deliver what I had coming to me.” Mayer expected that he might kill a hundred buffalo a day at $3 per hide. After netting out expenses, he anticipated profits of $6,000 a month, or as he calculated, three times the salary of the president of the United States.10 A few men did get rich selling hides, but Fortune never did deliver for Mayer. According to his careful records, he netted $3,124 in his best year—a substantial sum (though substantially less than the president’s salary). After nine years on the buffalo plains, Mayer had $5,000 in the bank. In his experience, a typical hunter was lucky to clear $1,000 year, roughly equivalent to the wage of an underground miner.11
Hope, though, was a powerful magnet. It is impossible to know the precise number of hunters who swarmed the Kansas plains in 1872, but to Frank Mayer it seemed that “[t]he whole Western country went buffalo-wild.” One estimate puts the figure between 10,000 and 20,000.12 Whatever the true total, one thing is certain: It would soon grow much larger. In the East, financial calamity was about to rock the lives of many young men, among them George Bird Grinnell.
THE FRENETIC, PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE RAILROADS IN THE decade before 1873 was supported by equally frenetic activity in America’s financial markets. Railroads were the growth industry of their day, with rampant, can’t-miss speculation in hundreds of companies.
The investment firm owned by George Bird Grinnell’s father (Geo. B. Grinnell and Company, where 24-year-old Grinnell continued to grind out his days) was typical of its time. In other words, its clients were heavily invested in railroad stocks. Many of these clients traded on the margin, meaning that they purchased their stocks with money they borrowed from Geo. B. Grinnell and Company. For Grinnell’s father, the risk of extending such loans was tempered by the vast resources of his partner, Horace F. Clark. Clark was the son-in-law of the firm’s biggest client, Cornelius Vanderbilt. “So long as Mr. Clark was living,” remembered young Grinnell, “any additional margin required was always forthcoming.”13
In the spring of 1873, Clark died. In the fall of 1873, the mighty investment firm of Jay Cooke & Company, principal financial agent in the