Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke
home.”25
Far from severing his ties to the East, though, Grinnell was about to secure them. In the contest between Lucy Audubon and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt appeared to have won.
Less than a month after his return to New York, remembered Grinnell, “I entered my father’s office at 36 Broad Street, as a clerk without pay.” His father, by 1870, was Vanderbilt’s principal Wall Street agent. His father’s business partner was Horace F. Clark, Vanderbilt’s son-in-law. George Bird Grinnell, it appeared, would follow in his father’s footsteps. “[O]n talking it over with my father I found that he was anxious to have me go into business, to relieve him, and ultimately to take his place. This seemed the proper thing to do.”26
The Marsh expedition had awakened in Grinnell a deep passion, but for the time being anyway, he would cede to the wishes of his father. The great engine of the Gilded Age was barreling forward, and instead of jumping off, Grinnell was climbing aboard. As for pursuit of his western dreams, “the knowledge of the grief this would give my parents pulled me back again.”27
Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.
—GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, July 1872
I had always had a settled dislike for the business,” was George Bird Grinnell’s understated summary of his time at his father’s firm, Geo. B. Grinnell and Company.1 After the adventure and excitement of five months in the wild and wooly West, Grinnell settled in, as best he could, to his new life as a Wall Street broker. With his father as tutor, he learned the basics of buying and selling stocks. There were also more complicated lessons, including the high-stakes transactions of purchasing stocks—especially railroad stocks—“on a margin.” The risks of such deals would later become painfully apparent. But in the exuberance of the early 1870s, Grinnell remembered that there was no thought but that prices “would go much higher.”2
Grinnell, eager to please his parents, kept his nose to the grindstone during the long and tedious days at the brokerage house. His escape came in the evenings, when he retreated to Audubon Park, there to pursue his love for the outdoors through various vicarious activities. One outlet was a continuing relationship with Professor O.C. Marsh. Marsh had asked Grinnell to keep his eye out for the fossils and osteological materials that were “constantly coming into the menageries and taxidermists’ shops in New York.” When Grinnell found interesting pieces, he secured them for Marsh. Grinnell also took up a hobby popular among hunters and anglers of the day, taxidermy, with birds as his particular focus. Most nights, Grinnell wrote, he would spend “two or three hours of the evening down in the cellar, where I had an excellent outfit for mounting birds.”3
None of these activities, though, sufficed to fill the void he felt for true adventure. “In the summer of 1872 I was anxious again to go out West.” In particular, Grinnell wanted to undertake the quintessential western activity of the day—the buffalo hunt. “[T]hese hunts of the Indians [had] been described to me with a graphic eloquence that filled me with enthusiasm as I listened to the recital, and I had determined that if ever the opportunity offered I would take part in one.” With the assistance of Major Frank North (who had guided the Marsh expedition up the Loup River), Grinnell arranged for a hunt, and not just any hunt. Grinnell, guided by Frank North’s younger brother, Luther “Lute” North, would accompany an entire tribe of Pawnee Indians on their annual foray in the wild Republican River Valley of western Kansas.4
THE BUFFALO THAT GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, AT AGE 22, SOUGHT TO kill, had been a fixture on the Great Plains of North American for thousands of generations.
Ancestors of the modern buffalo walked across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia sometime between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago. One of these ancestors, Bison latifrons, was 20 percent larger than a modern buffalo and carried an intimidating rack of horns spreading seven feet. Bison latifrons shared the Great Plains with a number of the animals whose fossils Grinnell had dug up during the Marsh expedition, including miniature horses, mammoths, camels, and mastodons. These grazing animals were hunted by fierce predators, now extinct, including several species of saber-toothed tigers and the dire wolf, a larger version of its modern descendant.5
It is not clear exactly when humans first appeared on the Great Plains, though we do know that by at least 12,000 years ago, human hunters were among the predators stalking bison. We also know that around the same time, most of the large mammals of the plains became extinct. It is unknown whether they died because of human hunters, the climate change that followed the last ice age, or some combination of the two. Whatever the cause, a few resilient survivors were able to adapt to their rapidly changing world. One was mankind. Another was the modern wolf. Another was a new species of bison that zoologists would one day name Bison bison—the modern buffalo. Bison bison had at least one advantage that helped it survive against primitive human hunters. More ancient species of buffalo, with their gigantic horns, defended themselves by standing and fighting. Armed with a long spear, a hunter could defeat this strategy. Bison bison had a different defense, one more difficult for man to overcome. Instead of fighting, Bison bison ran away.6
The modern buffalo, winner of a brutal contest that wiped out hundreds of other species, is a survivor of stunning physical attributes. Though its ultimate defense is to run away, the buffalo projects a physical presence that is intimidating to most predators. Bulls can weigh more than a ton, with thickly furred heads and leg pantaloons that make them look larger still. Both male and female buffalo have hooked horns, far smaller than those of their ancient ancestors but still plenty potent. With powerful neck muscles to support their massive heads, a buffalo can throw a wolf thirty feet. In breeding season, a male buffalo can kill a rival with one goring stab of his horns. Indeed about 5 percent of mature bulls die each year from wounds they receive in battle with their peers.7
Having survived both the Ice Age and its aftermath, buffalo can thrive in a remarkable range of climates, from 110 degrees Fahrenheit on the deserts of Mexico (or Nebraska) to –50 degrees Fahrenheit on the windswept plains of Canada. A buffalo’s thick coat has ten times more hairs per square inch than the hide of a domestic cow. Yet in the summer, the buffalo sheds down to a thin coat as sleek as a lamb, newly shorn for the county fair.8
The buffalo and its relatives (including deer, elk, antelope, and the domestic cow) are ruminants, with digestive systems well attuned to subsist on the grasses of the Great Plains. Humans can’t eat grass because we can’t digest cellulose. Buffalo can because the first chamber of their alimentary canal—the rumen—is a sort of vat in which colonies of bacteria help to break down cellulose into usable carbohydrates. To further promote the process, ruminants chew their food twice: once before swallowing and a second time after fist-sized portions—the cud—are regurgitated and then chewed again.9
The buffalo’s gigantic head serves a purpose beyond intimidation. In the winter, it becomes a powerful plow to push snow away from buried grass. Cattle, by contrast, have no such ability to dig for food. If not fed by ranchers during an extended period of heavy snow, cattle die.
Buffalo reproduce in prodigious numbers, at least by comparison with other large mammals. Buffalo cows drop their first calf at age 3, and in domesticated herds they have been bred beyond age 30. If a herd is well nourished, 85 to 90 percent of mature cows become pregnant and give birth each year. Farmers of modern dairy cattle, by contrast, using high-tech, artificial insemination, might achieve a birth rate of only 50 percent.10
Buffalo calves are born ready to run. Within two minutes of birth, a buffalo calf tries to raise itself. Within seven minutes, it is standing. Within an hour, a buffalo calf can run after the herd.11 In a domesticated herd, a newborn calf was once herded sixty-six miles, through deep snow, in its first two days of life, with