Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
thousands of businesses failed and the unemployment rate soared to 14 percent.14
At the firm of Geo. B. Grinnell and Company,15 Grinnell’s father sought desperately to collect on the money he had lent to his clients. It was not forthcoming, in part because Cornelius Vanderbilt—who, as Grinnell noted, “might have helped”—bore a grudge against one of the other partners in the firm. Geo. B. Grinnell and Company failed, spending the next several months in contentious bankruptcy proceedings. In his memoirs, Grinnell would remember that the “winter was one of great suffering for the family.”16
To his credit, Grinnell’s father ultimately succeeded in recovering a portion of the funds owed him. In an action unique at the time, he also repaid his own debts in full and managed to leave the firm with “a little capital remaining.” Exhausted, he retired to Audubon Park, leaving the business to his son.17
For young Grinnell, though, the whole affair had only underscored his “settled dislike for the business.” After his father retired, “there was nothing to hold me to Wall Street.” He shuttered the company and moved to New Haven, there to resume his Yale studies under Professor Othniel Marsh.18
Grinnell was not the only young American to seek out a new career amid the turmoil of the Panic of 1873. Thousands of young men with less means would head west to hunt buffalo. “They were walking gold pieces,” said Frank Mayer, “and a young fellow who had guts and gumption could make his fortune.”19
BY 1873, THE BUFFALO HUNTERS ON KANSAS’S BROAD PLAINS WERE refining their craft. As time passed, the haphazard gave way to the methodical. In the space of a few short months, the men of Kansas had created an organized industry: commercial hunting for the hides of buffalo.
The basic work unit of the market hunters evolved into “outfits” that typically consisted of one or two riflemen, a couple of skinners for each shooter, and one or two men to cook and keep camp.20
Their equipment, though simple, was expensive. As Frank Mayer explained, “over 10,000 men were bidding against one another for the necessities of the life they had chosen.” Mayer spent his life savings, $2,000, on two wagons, eighteen mules, rifles, ammunition, bedrolls, tents, and cooking utensils. The high cost didn’t worry him, though. “I’d make it up the first month, I kept telling myself, the very first month.”21
All self-respecting hunters made their own ammunition. Factory-loaded cartridges were expensive—25 cents a round versus half that price for hand-loaded. The runners anticipated shooting a lot, provisioning themselves with a veritable armory’s worth of supplies. John Cloud Jacobs, who chased buffalo in Texas, began the season with a ton of ammo, literally: “sixteen hundred pounds of lead, and four hundred pounds of powder—beside shells, paper caps, etc.” Jacobs described how the bullets he molded were inspected for the “least bit of flaw.” If imperfect, the offending ball was “put back in the heat.” Frank Mayer mixed one part tin to sixteen parts lead, which he said gave his bullets “just enough hardness to penetrate and enough lead softness to mushroom.”
Men who shot guns for a living could discriminate the subtleties between different varieties of gunpowder. Mayer, for example, disliked the leading American brands, DuPont and Hazard, which he believed left a residue that was particularly difficult to clean. When it was available, he paid premium prices for imported powder from England. Paying extra, in the view of most buffalo runners, was a superior option to the alternative. “It frequently happened that a man’s life depended on a cartridge that neither snapped nor flickered.”22
The expense of ammunition and the toil of producing it underscored the importance of efficient shooting. As Frank Mayer explained, “the thing we had to have, we business men with rifles, was one-shot kills.” Yet the one piece of equipment that early buffalo hunters lacked was the right gun for the job.
Rifle technology had catapulted forward during the Civil War. Advances included breech loading, metal cartridges, repeaters, and telescopic sights. The fine weapons widely available in the early 1870s included such storied rifles as Henrys, Spencers, and Winchesters. But what these guns could not do—at least not with the mass-production consistency demanded by runners—was kill buffalo at long range with a single shot.
John Mooar, who along with his brother J. Wright had midwifed the industry of commercial hunting, can also be found in the lineage of the gun that would propel the industry to its zenith. In the earliest days of the Kansas hide hunt, Mooar wrote a letter to the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Sharps rifles were highly respected, but Mooar asked for a version built specifically for the exigencies of hunting buffalo on the plains.23
The Sharps Company was quick to oblige, and its Sharps buffalo rifle was the answer to the prayers of the Mooar brothers and their fellow hunters. Indeed the men who carried the Sharps exalted it in reverent terms. Confronting a ferocious bull, hunter John Cloud Jacobs remembered “praying to the hunting god—Mr. Sharps.” Frank Mayer declared that “if my life depended on one shot from one rifle and I could take my choice, I’d rather have my old ‘Sharps Buff’ in my hands than any other gun.”24
The early Sharps buffalo rifle was a true heavyweight, with models ranging from twelve to sixteen pounds. The bulk of this weight resided in a thick, octagonal barrel that could absorb the explosion of a 100-grain charge of black powder while spitting forth a 473-grain bullet. Though Sharps rifles were available in a range of calibers, the “Big 50” was the most famous. In 1874, Sharps issued a new buffalo gun, the “Sharps Old Reliable.” It weighed sixteen pounds and fired a 550-grain slug using a 120-grain charge of powder. Frank Mayer called it the “rifle to end all rifles … and I knew when I read about it the first time, my life would be blighted until I owned one.”
The blight on Mayer’s life was short-lived. In 1875, he bought the new Sharps for $237.60, an amount he deemed a “small fortune.” Hunter John Cook managed to purchase a Sharps, almost new, at the unheard of price of $36, including a reloading outfit, a bandoleer, and 150 cartridges. Cook explained that his good fortune came about because the man who sold him the rifle was getting out of the business, “having met with the misfortune of shooting himself seriously, but not fatally, in the right side with the same gun.”25
Whatever they paid for their Sharps, the men who bought them thought it a bargain. When Mayer hit a buffalo with his Old Reliable, “I didn’t have to inquire whether he was down for good.” The Sharps’s knockdown power was also delivered with remarkable accuracy, an attribute that could be enhanced with the purchase of added features such as telescopic sights and hair-triggers. With a German-made, twenty-power scope, Mayer claimed (credibly) to have killed 269 buffalo with 300 cartridges at a range of 300 yards.26
So legendary was the range and power of the Sharps that the Indians called it the gun that “shoots today, kills tomorrow.” One of the greatest Indian defeats in Texas history came as a direct result of their underestimating the potency of the Sharps. In 1874, responding to the invasion of their land by buffalo hunters, a combined force of some 700 Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho warriors attacked a crude outpost known as Adobe Walls. Only 29 whites occupied the post. Many of them, though, carried Sharps buffalo rifles. For three days the Indians laid siege, mounting charge after charge. Each time they were repulsed, the Sharps dealing out lethal force at great range. One Indian, reportedly, was shot from his horse at 1,500 yards.27
THE SHARPS BUFFALO RIFLE, TOGETHER WITH THE RAILROAD, BROUGHT the industrial revolution to the Great Plains. The Sharps’s range, accuracy, and punch made it the perfect weapon for efficient, commercial slaughter—the mass production of hides.
In the early days of the hunt, one challenge the men did not face was finding their quarry. “It was easy enough to find the buffalo,” remembered John Cloud Jacobs. “We would go a mile or so from camp to begin the day’s hunt.” For Jacobs, the ideal group would number between twenty and seventy animals, preferably close to cover such as a coulee or the crest of a butte.28
Before deciding on the direction from which to approach the herd, Jacobs checked the wind by dropping a few blades