Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

PAWNEE CHIEF PETA-LA-SHAR MADE GOOD ON HIS PROMISE TO GRINNELL. The day after arriving at the Pawnee camp, the young stockbroker would hunt buffalo in a classic surround. Just as significant, he would witness the rituals of the traditional Pawnee hunt.

The entire 4,000-member tribe embarked in an early morning mist, having broken camp and loaded their horses in a matter of minutes. Grinnell described the grand procession, led by “eight men, each carrying a long pole wrapped round with red and blue cloth and fantastically ornamented with feathers, which fluttered in the breeze as they were borne along.” These were “buffalo sticks,” treated with reverence by the tribe because “the success of the hunt was supposed to depend largely upon the respect shown to them.” Behind the buffalo sticks rode thirty or forty of the tribe’s most important men, “mounted on superb ponies.” Grinnell was given the honor of riding in this lead group, much of the time next to Chief Peta-la-shar. Finally came the great mass of women, children, and men of lower station.

Grinnell was surprised to see many men on foot, sometimes leading multiple ponies. Lute North explained that they were saving their horses “so that they might be fresh when they needed them to run buffalo.”

The Pawnee had stopped at a new campsite when Grinnell noticed “a sudden bustle among the Indians.” On a horizon marked by distant bluffs, a horseman appeared, riding hard toward the camp. When he arrived, the rider reported quickly to the chiefs. A large herd had been spotted, only ten miles away.

Wild excitement now filled the camp. Women began immediately to break down teepees for transportation closer to the kill site. Men, meanwhile, stripped themselves and their ponies of all superfluous weight. Grinnell quickly prepared his own horse and weapons, mounting up to regard the stunning human vista of which he was privileged to be a part:

The scene that we now beheld was such as might have been witnessed here a hundred years ago. It is one that can never be seen again. Here were eight hundred warriors, stark naked, and mounted on naked animals. A strip of rawhide, or a lariat, knotted about the lower jaw, was all their horses’ furniture. Among all these men there was not a gun nor a pistol, nor any indication that they had ever met with the white men … Their bows and arrows they held in their hands. Armed with these ancestral weapons, they had become once more the simple children of the plains, about to slay the wild cattle that Ti-rá wa had given them for food. Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.

Grinnell and 800 hunters now thundered across the Kansas plains. Some of the Pawnee rode one horse while leading another, saving their best mount for the chase. The less prosperous rode double, pulling two mounts along behind. Grinnell marveled at the skill of the bareback riders, so perfectly attuned to their horses, he remembered, that the plains appeared to be “peopled with Centaurs.”

Despite the excitement of the hunters, tight discipline governed their advance. At regular intervals in the front of the procession rode the “Pawnee Police,” whose authority during the hunt was absolute. They set the pace, ensuring that no one dashed ahead and scared the herd. A hunter who disregarded their command might be “knocked off his horse with a club and beaten into submission without receiving any sympathy even from his best friends.” Much was at stake. The food supply of the tribe for the next six months would be determined in the moments about to unfold.

Ten miles from camp, the lead riders, Grinnell among them, carefully crested a high bluff. “I see on the prairie four or five miles away clusters of dark spots that I know must be the buffalo.” Close now, the hunters change course, using the line of bluffs to conceal their advance.

Finally only a single ridgeline separated the mass of hunters from the mass of their prey. “The place,” remembered Grinnell, “could not have been more favorable for a surround had it been chosen for the purpose.” The terrain before them consisted of an open plain, two miles wide, surrounded by high bluffs. “At least a thousand buffalo were lying down in the midst of this amphitheater.”

In a classic surround, Indians encircled the herd before the great charge. In this hunt, though, they would employ a variant of the strategy. All 800 hunters would ride into the herd from the same side. The objective was for the fastest riders to pass all the way through the herd, then turn back to face it. If successful, the herd too would turn—into the charging bulk of the hunters.

Behind the ridgeline, the hunters assembled in a long, crescent-shaped formation. Then over the hill they rode. “[W]hen we are within half a mile of the ruminating herd a few of them rise to their feet, and soon all spring up and stare at us for a few seconds; then down go their heads and in a dense mass they rush off toward the bluffs.” The leader of the Pawnee Police gave a cry, “Loó-ah!”

“Like an arrow from a bow each horse darted forward,” remembered Grinnell. “Now all restraint was removed, and each man might do his best.” Grinnell, who had only one horse, soon fell behind the Indians on fresh mounts. Great clouds of dust quickly filled the air, along with flying pebbles and clods kicked up by fleeing hooves. As he galloped forward, Grinnell could just make out the fastest riders, disappearing into the herd. Soon he could no longer see the ground, relying completely on his horse to navigate the field, aware that falling could mean death. Halfway across the valley, Grinnell realized that some buffalo were now coming back—directly at him. The herd had been turned.

“I soon found myself in the midst of a throng of buffalo, horses and Indians.” Grinnell began shooting, “and to some purpose.”

Two-thousand-pound animals tumbled and skidded to the earth around him. Shooting from a galloping horse required a skilled mount, steady hands, and even steadier nerve. Riders attempted to come alongside a coursing buffalo, then aimed behind the shoulder. It was difficult and dangerous. Overzealous gunners sometimes shot each other. George Armstrong Custer, likely hunting buffalo with a pistol, once misfired during a chase and blew out the brains of his horse.

A George Catlin image of a traditional Indian buffalo hunt.

Courtesy of the Amom Car ter Museum.

Indians usually hunted buffalo with bow and arrow. The bow was far superior in a mounted chase to a single-shot muzzle-loader, and as for repeating rifles, few Indians owned them. A skilled Indian archer could not only place his shot accurately but could do so with remarkable force: Arrows sometimes protruded out the opposite side of the buffalo and occasionally passed all the way through. A Sioux warrior named Two-Lance was once observed to shoot an arrow completely through the enormous body of a running bull. Grinnell watched the Pawnee fire “arrow after arrow in quick succession, ere long bring down the huge beasts and then turn and ride off after another.”

Grinnell noted how the well-trained Pawnee horses could bring their riders alongside a buffalo with no guidance whatsoever, “yet watch constantly for any indication of an intention to charge and wheel off.”

On the return trip of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sergeant Nathaniel Hale Pryor found it difficult to herd well-trained Indian ponies, because at every sighting of buffalo the ponies would dash off in pursuit, “surround[ing] the buffalo herd with almost as much skill as their riders could have done.” In frustration, Sergeant Pryor finally resorted to sending one rider ahead of the main party to drive away all buffalo before the arrival of their horses.

Grinnell’s own mount, as he learned the hard way, was untrained in the hunting of buffalo. One of Grinnell’s shots was off its mark, striking a cow without bringing her down. The cow spun around to make a “quick and savage charge.” Grinnell’s pony reacted slowly, and “his deliberation in the matter of dodging caused me an anxious second or two.” The horse just missed being gored by a swipe of the cow’s horn.

Having filled his quota of adventure for the day, Grinnell retired to a high knoll from which he could watch the rest of the hunt and its aftermath. The plain was dotted with downed animals, each soon attended by two or three men. The women would eventually catch up to the hunt and take over the grunt work of processing the hides and the meat.

PLAINS INDIANS WERE BORN ON A BUFFALO ROBE AND WRAPPED IN A buffalo robe when they died. In between, the buffalo was the foundation of both their economy and their culture. Before the arrival of whites, buffalo provided for virtually every need.

The Indians’ use of nearly every part of the buffalo they killed is well known. Certain nutrient-rich organs were cut from the still-warm animals and consumed raw, including the liver and the kidney. For days after a successful hunt, the entire tribe gorged on fresh meat at celebratory feasts. Delicacies included hump meat, tongue, nose, hot marrow from the roasted bones, calf brain cooked in the skull, soup made from blood, and boudins—intestines filled with diced tenderloin and then boiled. During the frenzied post-hunt feasting, men might eat ten or even fifteen pounds of meat. Meat not consumed in the immediate aftermath of the hunt was dried or smoked into jerky, some of which was pounded into pemmican, a nutritious mixture of meat, fat, and berries. Both jerked meat and pemmican could be stored for months. So too the buffalo’s thick back fat, which was stripped off and smoked.

Having provided the food, the buffalo also provided the fuel for cooking. As generations of white hunters and settlers would also learn, fires on the treeless plains were built with buffalo chips (dried dung).

Before the arrival on the plains of canvass as a popular trade item, Indian teepees were sewn from the hides of buffalo cows. It took around twenty for a single teepee. Cows’ hides were thinner and therefore both lighter and easier to work. Hides could also be used to make clothing (though the even softer hides of deer were also popular). The thick hides of bulls were used to make rawhide, battle shields, even “bullboats”—rawhide stretched over willow branches in the shape of a giant bowl. Rawhide pulled over a wooden frame was also used to make saddles, sometimes padded with buffalo hair.

Dozens of other objects came from the buffalo. Spine sinews became thread pulled by needles made from sharp fragments of bone. Tendons were used to make bowstrings. A dried tongue worked as a comb. Hair was braided into rope. The paunch held water, even during cooking. Bones became mallets, digging tools, awls. Horns became waterproof powder horns or spoons. And the Indians used the tail, as its previous owner did, to swat flies.

THAT NIGHT AT THE CAMP, GRINNELL AND HIS COMPANIONS JOINED the Pawnees’ feasting and celebration of the successful hunt. For his part, Grinnell could now say that he, like his wilderness heroes, had felled the mighty bison. Yet his mood was pensive. “And so the evening wears away, passed by our little party in the curious contemplation of a phase of life that is becoming more and more rare as the years roll by.”

The following year, the Pawnee returned to Kansas for their semiannual hunt. They were attacked by the Sioux. One hundred and fifty-six Pawnee were killed, including a large number of women and children. The Pawnee would never hunt buffalo again.

In the same year, 1873, Grinnell published an article about his buffalo hunt in a sporting journal called Forest and Stream. The article included a grim warning about the buffalo: “[T]heir days are numbered, and unless some action on this subject is speedily taken not only by the States and Territories, but by the National Government, these shaggy brown beasts, these cattle upon a thousand hills, will ere long be among the things of the past.”

It was a remarkable flash of foresight, written at a time when, by Grinnell’s own description, buffalo still “blackened the plains.” Yet with all his prescience, even Grinnell could little imagine the power of the forces then conspiring against the buffalo. Change, sudden and dramatic, was on the very near horizon.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_52b1c288-41d3-574e-ae2b-f9dfb85e15b1)

“I Felled a Mighty Bison” (#ulink_f34f20f4-3f95-5c63-9a6f-c44a76a6f09a)

This evening, about 5 o’clock, I felled a mighty bison to the earth. I placed my foot upon his neck of strength and looked around, but in vain, for some witness of my first great “coup.” I thought myself larger than a dozen men.

—WILLIAM MARSHALL ANDERSON, 1834

In 1519, Hernando Cortez and a handful of Spanish legionnaires entered the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), capital of the Aztec Empire as well as home of its emperor—Montezuma II. Montezuma’s city was an alien wonderland, including a menagerie of exotic animals given to the emperor as gifts or captured by his hunters. According to Spanish historian Antonio de Solis y Ribadeneyra, Cortez and his men saw “Lions, Tygers, Bears, and all others of the savage kind which New-Spain produced.” Of all Montezuma’s beasts, however, “the greatest Rarity was the Mexican Bull, a wonderful composition of divers Animals.” The animal “has crooked shoulders, with a Bunch on its back like a Camel; its Flanks dry, its Tail Large, and its Neck covered with Hair like a Lion. It is cloven footed, its Head armed like that of a Bull, which it resembles in Fierceness, with no less Strength and Agility.”

The first Europeans to see the buffalo in its native habitat were part of another small band of Spaniards, including a man named Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Shipwrecked in 1530 on the Gulf Coast of present-day Texas, Cabeza de Vaca encountered what he called cattle. In a book about his adventures, he described in detail an Indian tribe he dubbed the “Cow nation,” who hunted the buffalo and then distributed “a vast many hides into the interior country.” As a food, Cabeza de Vaca found buffalo to be “finer and fatter” than the beef of his native Spain.

The first Englishman to see the buffalo was an explorer named Samuel Argall, who in 1612 sailed a small frigate to the navigable headwaters of the Potomac River. There, with a group of his crewmen, he went “marching into the Countrie,” where he found a “great store of cattle as big as Kine [oxen], of which the Indians that were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meate, and very easy to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts of the wildernesse.” Assuming that Argall and his men did not penetrate far into the thick woodlands that hemmed the Potomac, it is quite likely that the buffalo he described were within the boundaries of what is today Washington, D.C.

Though less associated with the frontier territory east of the Mississippi, buffalo appear in numerous historical accounts. In 1701, a colony of Huguenots on the James River attempted, unsuccessfully, to domesticate two captured calves. In a 1733 report, George Oglethorpe, the first governor of Georgia, listed buffalo among the wild animals of his colony. Early settlers to hunt buffalo included residents of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. When Daniel Boone and other trailblazers penetrated the continent westward into Kentucky and Tennessee, they followed paths first trodden by buffalo, heading east.

Though the story of the buffalo in the eastern United States is less chronicled, the outcome, in its essence, rings familiar: By 1800, the buffalo east of the Mississippi had been exterminated.

IN THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE OF 1803, NAPOLEON BONAPARTE SOLD THE United States a fresh herd of buffalo, along with the half-billion pristine acres on which they roamed. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became the first Americans to explore the newly acquired land. Generations of American schoolchildren have committed to memory the goal of their exploration of the American West: to discover a passage by water to the Pacific Ocean. But President Thomas Jefferson gave more specific directions in his 1803 written orders to Captain Lewis:

The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.

As 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.

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.”

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.

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.

Aside from these limited areas, demand for buffalo robes was modest.