buffalo

In today's excerpt - the tragedy that ensured the doom of the North American Plains
Indian was the unprecedented slaughter of the American buffalo since they had become
almost completely dependent on the buffalo for identity, sustenance and supplies:
"The greatest threat of all to the [North American Plains Indian] identity, and
to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in
the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill
thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering
creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be
restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without
a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.
"The first large-scale slaughter of buffalo by white men with high-powered
rifles took place in the years 1871 and 1872. There had been a limited market for
buffalo products before that. Even as far back as 1825, several hundred thousand
Indian-tanned robes had made it to markets in New Orleans. There had been demand
for buffalo meat to feed the railway workers building the transcontinental railroad
in the 1860s, spawning the fame and legend of hunters like Buffalo Bill Cody. But
there was no real market for buffalo hides until 1870, when a new tanning technology
allowed them to be turned
into high-grade leather. That, combined with a new railhead in Dodge City, Kansas,
meant that the skins could be shipped commercially.
"For hunters, the economics of the new business was miraculous, all the more so
since the animals were so stupefyingly easy to kill. If a buffalo saw the animal
next to it drop dead it would not flee unless it could see the source of the danger.
Thus one shooter with a long-range rifle could drop an entire stand of the creatures
without moving. A hunter named Tom Nixon once shot 120 animals in 40 minutes. In
1873 he killed 3,200 in 35 days, making Cody's once outlandish-sounding claim of
killing 4,280 in 18 months seem paltry by
comparison. Behind the hunters stood the stinking, sweating skinners, covered head
to toe in blood and grease and the animals' parasites. Legendary hunter Brick Bond,
who killed 250 animals a day, employed 15 such men. Covered wagons waited at [the
trading post of] Adobe Walls to take the stacked skins to Dodge City. Except for
the tongues, which were salted and shipped as a delicacy, the carcasses were left
to rot on the plains. The profits, like the mass killing itself, were obscene. In
the winter of 1871-72 a single hide fetched $3.50.
"Within two years these hunters, working mainly the Kansas plains close
to Dodge City, had killed five million buffalo. Almost immediately, they were victims
of their own success. By the spring of 1874 the herds on the middle plains had been
decimated. The economics of hunting became a good deal less miraculous. As one scout
traveling from Dodge City to the Indian territory put it: 'In 1872 we were never
out of sight of the buffalo. In the following autumn, while traveling over the
same district, the whole country was whitened with bleached and bleaching bones.'
Thus the hunters were forced to move farther from the railheads in search of prey.
...
"Surprisingly, only a few voices cried out against the slaughter of the buffalo,
which had no precedent in human history. Mostly people didn't trouble
themselves about the consequences. It was simply capitalism working itself out,
the exploitation of another natural resource. There was another, better
explanation for the lack of protest, articulated best by General Phil Sheridan,
then commander of the Military Division of the Missouri. 'These men [hunters] have
done in the last two years ... more to settle the vexed Indian question than the
entire regular army has done in the last thirty years,' he said. 'They are destroying
the Indians' commissary ... For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin
and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered
with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.' Killing the Indians' food was not
just an accident of commerce; it was a deliberate political act."
Author: S.C. Gwynne
Title: Empire of the Summer Moon
Publisher: Scribner
Date: Copyright 2010 by S.C. Gwynne
Pages: 259-262