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

From the standpoint of logistics, beaver pelts had another great advantage over buffalo hides. A beaver pelt was lightweight, barely more than a pound, and therefore relatively easy to transport. The hide of a bull buffalo, when first stripped from the carcass, could weigh as much as 150 pounds. The process of staking out and drying the hide caused it to lose around two-thirds of its weight, but even a “flint” hide could tip the scales at 50 pounds. The difficulty of transporting such heavy goods ate quickly into profits—even for those locations with access to the Missouri River, the principal highway for robes before the advent of the railroad.

By comparison with what was to come, the trade in buffalo hides prior to the 1870s was modest. This was particularly true in the years before 1840, when beaver provided an attractive alternative. In this era, most buffalo robes were supplied not by white hunters but in trade with the Indians. Coffee, sugar, calico, blankets, butcher knives, beads, guns, and whiskey were common items of exchange.

By 1840, the beaver trade had come crashing to the ground. On the supply side, the beaver had been plucked clean from virtually every waterway that drained the Rocky Mountains. On the demand side, meanwhile, fashion proved fickle. Silk top hats became the rage, and the market for beaver pelts evaporated (just in time, in all likelihood, to save the humble animal from extinction).

With the beaver trade gone, some former trappers turned to the hunting of buffalo. Still, neither the lack of demand for buffalo nor the difficulties in transport had been solved in the period between 1840 and 1870. The available numbers are haphazard. But even with the new interest in buffalo resulting from the end of the beaver era, it appears that only rarely would the annual harvest exceed 200,000 hides. Many years produced fewer than 100,000. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, there is a revealing series of letters between Pierre Chouteau, a leading trader in St. Louis, and Ramsay Crooks, president of the American Fur Company (the largest producer of buffalo hides). In their correspondence, the two men worry constantly about flooding the buffalo hide market even at modest levels of trade, and Crooks repeatedly directs Chouteau to send fewer robes east.

It was about this time, 1843, that the painter John James Audubon made his last journey west. Beginning from his home in Audubon Park, Audubon ultimately ascended the Missouri and then the Yellowstone River through present-day Montana. At a time when few prairie travelers could see past a landscape covered in buffalo, Audubon (like his wife’s student, George Bird Grinnell), had the rare ability to see over the horizon. “One can hardly conceive how it happens,” wrote Audubon in his diary, “so many [buffalo] are yet to be found. Daily we see so many that we hardly notice them more than the cattle in our pastures about our homes. But this cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared.”

(Grinnell would read Audubon’s journal before his first trip west.)

It was a flash of remarkable insight, for even as Audubon spoke, the pace of change had begun to accelerate.

IN 1836, A PARTY OF FIVE MISSIONARIES CROSSED THE CONTINENT with the intention of ministering to the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest. The party traveled in the company of a large group of fur trappers and included the first two white women ever to cross the Rockies—Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding. Eighteen-year-old Narcissa kept a diary, and the experiences she recorded foreshadowed a generation of emigrants on the verge of transforming the American West. The buffalo played a central role in their drama.

For emigrants traveling west, sighting the first buffalo marked a signature moment in their voyage—true arrival on the frontier. For Narcissa, the event took place on June 4, 1836, in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, thirty miles above the confluence of the river’s north and south branches.

We have seen wonders this forenoon. Herds of buffalo hove in sight; one a bull, crossed our trail and ran upon the bluffs near the rear of the camp. We took the trouble to chase him so as to have a near view. Sister Spalding and myself got out of the wagon and ran upon the bluff to see him. This band was quite willing to gratify our curiosity, seeing it was the first. Several have been killed this forenoon. The [fur trade] Company keep[s] a man out all the time to hunt for the camp.

As with Lewis and Clark, the buffalo provided early transcontinental emigrants with a vital source of food. Indeed provisions for the voyage were planned around the expectation of reaching the herd. “On the way to buffalo country we had to bake bread for ten persons,” wrote Narcissa. “It was difficult at first, as we did not understand working outdoors … June found us ready to receive our first taste of buffalo.”

And she liked it. Reporting rapturously on their new food source, Narcissa wrote, “I never saw anything like buffalo meat to satisfy hunger. We do not want anything else with it. I have eaten three meals of it and it relishes well.” Good thing she liked it: “We have had no bread since [reaching buffalo country]. We have meat and tea in the morn, and tea and meat at noon … So long as there is buffalo meat I do not wish anything else.”

Like other travelers on the treeless plains, Narcissa discovered that the buffalo supplied not only the meat but also the means to cook it. “Our fuel for cooking since we left timber (no timber except on rivers) has been dried buffalo dung; we now find plenty of it and it answers a very good purpose, similar to the kind of coal used in Pennsylvania.” Anticipating the reaction of her eastern relatives to the notion of cooking with dung, Narcissa noted, “I suppose now Harriet will make up a face at this, but if she was here she would be glad to have her supper cooked at any rate in this scarce timber company.” Some pioneers, putting the best possible sheen on their fuel source, dubbed it bois de vache—wood of the cow.

After six weeks of a diet consisting exclusively of buffalo roasted over buffalo dung, Narcissa’s enthusiasm finally began to fade. “I thought of mother’s bread, as a child would, but did not find it on the table,” she wrote on July 18. “I should relish it extremely well; have been living on buffalo meat until I am cloyed with it.”

Still, as Narcissa would soon discover, fresh buffalo meat, however tiresome, was preferable to the available alternatives. As they traveled farther west, buffalo became scarce. “Have seen no buffalo since we left the [Green River] Rendezvous,” she wrote on July 27. “We have plenty of dried buffalo meat, which we have purchased from the Indians—and dry it is for me. It appears so filthy! I can scarcely eat it; but it keeps us alive, and we ought to be thankful for it.”

In late July or early August, Narcissa and her fellow travelers reached Fort Hall in Idaho. At the fort they ate more dried buffalo, along with “mountain bread,” described in Narcissa’s journal as “course flour and water mixed and roasted or fried in buffalo grease.” Not her mother’s bread, but “[t]o one who has had nothing but meat for a long time, this relishes well.”

This is the last mention of buffalo in her journal.

A few weeks later, Narcissa and her husband, Marcus Whitman, settled in the Walla Walla River Valley, founding a mission and ministering to the Cayuse Indians. After initial enthusiasm, events began to degenerate. The Whitmans lost their two-year-old daughter in a drowning accident. Relations with the Indians spiraled downward, especially after a measles epidemic killed most of the children in the Cayuse tribe. In 1847, a band of Cayuse murdered Narcissa, Marcus, and a dozen other whites, then burned their mission to the ground.

If the Whitmans failed in conveying their religious message to the Indians, they succeeded in conveying a message to their fellow whites, east of the Mississippi: White women—white families—could cross the continent. Indeed a wagon could be pulled across most of it. Unwittingly, the Whitmans were at the vanguard of America’s great westward migration.

In 1841, sixty-nine emigrants—including five women—crossed the continent by wagon. Their original goal was California, though half of the party ultimately would decide to veer north for Oregon. In 1842, a group of about 100 ventured to Oregon. The year 1843 marked the first large-scale crossing: 1,000 emigrants herding 5,000 head of cattle.

As it had for Narcissa Whitman, the buffalo played a central role in the frontier experience of other early emigrants—both symbolically and practically. If spotting the first buffalo signified arrival on the frontier, killing a buffalo—for food or otherwise—was a veritable right of passage for any man who traveled west. William Marshall Anderson, traveling near the present-day Nebraska–Wyoming border, recorded his first kill with near biblical zeal. “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.”

A powerful psychology took grip that no man seemed able to resist. Captain Howard Stansbury, who led a group of emigrants near the South Platte, recorded the following after the party’s first encounter with a large herd of buffalo: “The effect upon our hunters, and, in fact, upon the whole party, was that of a sudden and most intense excitement, and a yearning, feverish desire to secure as much as possible of this noble game.” A pioneer named Josiah Gregg described the scene after his party sighted their first herd:

Pell-mell we charged the huge monsters, and poured in a brisk fire, which sounded like an opening battle; our horses were wild with excitement and fright; the balls flew at random … One [buffalo] was brought to bay by whole volleys of shots; his eyeballs glared; he bore his tufted tail aloft like a black flag; then shaking his vast and shaggy main in impotent defiance, he sank majestically to the earth, under twenty bleeding wounds.

In summarizing the iron grip of this buffalo fever, Gregg stated simply that “[s]uch is the excitement that generally prevails at the sight of these fat denizens of the prairies that very few hunters appear able to refrain from shooting as long as the game remains within reach of their rifle.” Such hunters were called “plinkers” for the potshots they fired as they rolled along the trail.

Once the initial excitement faded, some pioneers found the buffalo so numerous as to be an irritant. Women waved aprons to shoo the beasts away from cooking fires, and wagon trains sometimes were delayed for days at a time by herds that refused to be hazed from the path.

A pioneer named Obadiah Oakley, who traveled to Oregon from Peoria, described herds “as thick as sheep ever seen in a field” and complained that animals “moved not until the caravan was within ten feet of them. They would then rise and flee at random, greatly affrighted, and snorting and bellowing to the equal alarm of the horses and mules.”

When not alarmed, horses and mules sometimes fell under the spell of their wild brethren and ran off with the buffalo. Explorer John Fremont described how one of his mules “took a freak into his head, and joined a neighboring band of buffalo today. As we were not in condition to lose horses, I sent several of the men in pursuit … but we did not see him again.”

In the early years of western emigration, the numbers, at least, still favored the buffalo.

A total of no more than 10,000 pioneers traveled to Oregon and California during the years 1841 to 1846.

Soon though, successive waves of enticements began luring more and more Americans west. In 1847, Mormon leader Brigham Young established Salt Lake City as a western haven for his beleaguered tribe. In 1848 came the earth-shaking discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California. In the early 1850s, Congress began to give away free land to encourage settlement in the territories of Oregon and Washington. This modest homesteading program was expanded dramatically when President Lincoln, on May 20, 1862, fulfilled a campaign promise by signing the Homestead Act. Six weeks later, even as his army failed in an attempt to end the Civil War by taking the Confederate capital of Richmond, Lincoln affixed his signature to another bill. The law it created would transform the West to a greater degree than any measure that came before it. From two poles, Sacramento and Omaha, began the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.

A pioneer woman with a load of bois de vache

Courtesy of the Kansas State Historical Society.

IN 1869, LESS THAN SEVEN YEARS AFTER LINCOLN LAUNCHED THE building of the transcontinental railroad, trains from east and west came together on a windswept butte in Utah. Leland Stanford, an executive of the Central Pacific Railroad, drove a golden spike into a waiting tie, and with this final fall of the sledge, America’s manifest destiny had been fulfilled. East and West had been connected.

In addition to the main line between Omaha and Sacramento, numerous other lines were being built or planned. In 1870, the Kansas Pacific Railroad connected Kansas City and Denver. In the same year, construction began on the Northern Pacific, a railroad to connect the Great Lakes with the Puget Sound. All along the main Union Pacific, meanwhile, rails branched out in the form of spur lines to connect the dots bypassed in the first wave of construction. All told, a remarkable 35,000 miles of new track were laid between 1866 and 1873.

Certainly the benefits of the new railroads were incalculable. Psychologically, as historian 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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.