Buffalo Kingdom

I had an archaeology professor once tell the class the definition, at least scholarly, of the Southwest was from Durango, Mexico to Durango, Colorado and from Las Vegas, Nevada to Las Vegas, New Mexico. While my own definition stretches that description in every direction, for the most part, he was spot on. I also include southern and eastern California, everything west of the front range in Colorado, and the beautiful Colorado Plateau that goes far north into Utah. But even more so, I believe that Texas and Oklahoma, parts of Wyoming and Idaho, and places I haven’t even been to yet still have that soul, identity, culture, or feeling of the southwest. Maybe this podcast should be called the American West instead of the Southwest but for now, we’re going to stick with that quintessential four corners area that brings to mind hardened cowboys, legendary outlaws, mythic Indians, and landscapes that define a nation and culture to the rest of the world.

This is a podcast of the People, places, and things of the American west. Think cowboys and Indians, bison and cactus, national parks and ghost towns, Mormons and Prospectors, nukes and aliens, Tombstone, the Anasazi, Route 66, and everything in between. I’ll dive deep into historical people and events and the cultures and policies that helped shape this area of the American frontier world that’s left so many of the rest of the planet in envy of the mythic American southwest.

I got my degree in anthropology with a focus on archaeology from the university of Oklahoma back in 2010. Since then I have been obsessed with the allure of the southwest, as anyone that knows me can attest. This is my public exploration of its many topics, themes, and history. I hope this will inspire you to learn and read about, dream of, and ultimately vis   it the Southwestern United States of America.

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Buffalo Kingdom

“The Buffalo never turned back, never gave up, kept on going ahead, whatever the danger, whatever the weather.”

That’s a quote by the American writer & poet Stanley Vestal who not only fought in France in WW1 but was also a professor of creative writing at my Alma Mater of the University of Oklahoma. That’s not the only place where our interests overlap though.

At some point in my late 20s, I became obsessed with Bison to the point of designing a tattoo of one that now sits forever on my left forearm.

What is it about these guys that so infatuate me and many Americans? How have they become such a symbol of the American west and America in general?

Early in 2021 I read a headline that got me excited, intrigued, and ultimately puzzled. Puzzled enough to want to make this podcast, to be honest.

On the northern side of the grand canyon a bison herd was running amok, destroying the delicate landscape and the cultural resources like the ancestral puebloan ruins which I love to visit. I got my degree in archaeology so the protection of these sites is very important to me and should be to other Americans as well I thought. Because of this destruction, the NPS decided to have a Bison cull. In other words, they were going to allow volunteers to shoot and kill and harvest some of the animals. 45,000 people applied. Forty. Five. Thousand. I didn’t apply because I’ve never big game hunted before but I plan on it. I love living Bison but I would also love to fill my freezer with meat and make the most badass coat ever out of a hide. I obviously wasn’t alone. Even the NPS was taken aback by that number. But then the media got ahold of it and the internet mob began loudly complaining and calling for the Park Service to either leave them be or remove and resettle them. It wasn’t a long lasting uproar, there were more “important” in air quotes things to complain about by the following news cycle… which is 5 minutes but it got me thinking.

Why do people care about this bison herd on the northern end of the Grand Canyon? A place where 99.9% of the population have never been and never will go? I can almost guarantee most of the people calling for action have never even seen a live buffalo. I suppose I understand the outrage; we don’t want to repeat the slaughter that europeans, Americans, and Canadians unleashed upon these “gentle giants” and we cringe at its association with our colonial and imperial past. I get it. But is that it? Are we allowing our current political landscape to dictate what’s best for the cultural and biological wonderland of the grand canyon?

I grew up in Northern Georgia and I don't think I’d ever even dedicated a single thought to a bison until I moved to Oklahoma at aged 16. The first time I remember seeing a bison was at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in southwest Oklahoma that first summer I lived there in 2003. The fascination didn’t quite click yet but the seeds were planted. When friends or family members from back east would come visit us we’d always pack two cars full and head there with the highlight being the buffalo herd. Eventually when I'd go there quite often in college to rock climb, I always sought out the big furry guys. I even remember the first picture of me taken with one. My roommate and another friend and I were hiking to Crab Eyes to get some climbing in on a beautiful weekend morning when to our right a Bison loner was gobbling up some grass just 30 yards away. I still remember getting more excited than I ought to have before getting as close as I felt comfortable, and in mock excitement pointed towards him for the camera. Over a decade later I'd take my niece and nephew to the park on multiple occasions for the sole purpose of checking out those woolly buffalo. I like to think my influence is the reason my niece loves the big creatures but it could also be the Oklahoma environment she’s grown up in.

The Bison is the mascot for the Oklahoma City Thunder NBA team. It’s also the mascot for North Dakota State University and The University of Colorado. It’s the state Animal of Oklahoma & Kansas and it’s the state Mammal of Wyoming which also sports one on its state flag. The Bison has even graduated to become the United States National Mammal and every first Saturday in November is now National Bison Day and you better believe I’m going to be celebrating it from here on out. Eighteen states have cities named Buffalo in them and as Steven Rinella points out in his fantastic book American Buffalo in search of a lost icon, the most famous of these, Buffalo, New York is the only one of these cities to NOT have had populations of Buffalo. Not to mention the oldest continuously-operating distillery in the United States, Buffalo Trace, takes their name from them. Here’s a quote I love from their label, “The ancient paths of countless buffalo led America westward. Legendary explorers, pioneers, and settlers alike followed these trails, known as traces, through rugged wildernesses to new lands, new adventures, and new-found freedom. End quote. They go on to claim that one such trace ran right through where their current distillery is located.

When the sculptor James Earle Fraser came up with the Buffalo Nickel he later said, quote, and in my search for symbols, I found no motif within the boundaries of the united states so distinctive as the American buffalo or bison. End quote.

Scientifically it’s bison but linguistically it can absolutely be buffalo. I find myself often switching between the two with ease. Their scientific name is Bison bison. And to be even more in depth about their name, north American bison can be further separated into two categories: woods bison or Bison bison athabascae and the aptly named plains buffalo or Bison bison bison. While the plains buffalo have the better name, the woods buffalo are found to be about 10% heavier, have thicker hair, longer legs, and a more pointed beard so they look a little cooler. But a bison’s a bison and I love hem all.

The first buffalo were native to Asia and Europe where they ate the grass in eastern europe and Siberia. Eventually though they followed that grass across the bearing land bridge or Beringia during the Pleistocene also known as the ice age which technically was more like many ice ages because there were 17 of them during that 2 million year period. I love the ice age and all of it’s many massive mammals like mastodons and mammoths, the American Lion and the Saber toothed tiger, and giant ground sloths. If you ever want to get a fantastic look at those now extinct creatures head to the La Brea Tar Pits museum in LA. They’ve got displays, models, and lots of fossils to enjoy. I freakin’ love that place. Back to the cold days though, Horses and camels, actually native to north America, crossed over into Asia while bison ancestors crossed over into north America. This is believed to have happened for the first time around 140,000 years ago. Once on the continent, they really enjoyed the massive sea of unparalleled quality grasslands that stretched south seemingly forever and which would allow them to thrive and evolve into what we now call the buffalo. By about 5,000 years ago they had evolved from the bigger and often strange variations down to about the size we’d recognize today.

One of those bigger and stranger ancestors was known as Bison latifrons. Now this guy is awesome. First of all, he’s huge, and secondly his horns are an ungodly length of 7 feet from tip to tip. And they were sharp. There’s a fantastic bronze sculpture of one at the Denver Museum of Natural Science that I would love to have in my house. There’s a picture of it at the site. There’s also a great chart on prehistoric fauna dot com which I will link that shows all of the bison in relation to a modern human. I really wish all of these guys were still around. Forget Jurassic Park, I want Pleistocene Park. Which I’m pretty sure Russia is actually doing.

Thankfully, and rather stunningly, we know exactly what an Ice Age Bison looked like. Some poor soul we’ve now named Blue Babe was killed by an American Lion and left on the tundra where it stayed frozen for 36,000 years until it was found in Alaska by some gold miners. How do we know it died from an American Lion? Because it has the claw marks and bite puncture wounds still visible on its carcass. I believe it has coagulated blood in the wounds! It was so cold though that it and it’s still pouring blood froze before the hunter could even finish the meal or really start it… I expect that poor lion didn’t survive either. And speaking of meals here’s a great passage from Rinella. Quote. Dale Guthrie, a professor emeritus at the university of Alaska, cooked and ate part of the animal’s neck, meaning Blue Babe. He reported it to be and he’s now quoting Guthrie quote well aged but still a little tough. End all quotes. What people will do for science... although... I mean.... no. I wouldn’t. Nevermind. But..

Anyways, Blue Babe did not fare well that cold day but Bison are actually pretty well evolved to live life in harsh winters. They have proportionate to their body size, the largest trachea of any large land mammal. So when it comes to breathing in a big fresh breath of cold air, by the time it reaches a bison’s lungs that breath has been warmed. This helps keep the big beasts internally warm during winter. Then there’s their super short eyelashes which keeps snow and ice from accumulating on their eye tissue. Those adaptations, along with their black skin and long dark hair that absorbs the suns rays keeps them cozy in the long winter months. Not to mention their super thick fur which is 2 to 4 times as thick as the average bovine cattle’s. Their fur’s said to be so thick and provide so much insulation that when snow lands on the their shaggy hide it will not melt. Also when there’s feet of snow on the ground, they find food by digging with their huge head, thick horns, and massive neck and shoulder muscles beneath the snow and ice to get to that sweet sweet grass. They can even dig as deep as four feet! Steven Rinella has a great story in American Buffalo about scientists trying to find the point at which an animal’s metabolic rate changes in response to cold. Basically they were trying to find their cold tolerance. He says, quote, Hereford cattle hit their critical temperature at 14 degrees Fahrenheit. The yak and the highland cattle hit theirs at -13 degrees Fahrenheit. At -22 degrees Fahrenheit, the buffalo’s metabolic rate was still decreasing as an energy saving strategy. The buffalo’s critical temperature remains unknown, because no one’s gotten a box cold enough to find it. End Quote. It’s no wonder they thrived in the Ice Age.

Bison are essentially migratory mammals. It seems that each bison belongs to a herd of about 6 individual animals to several hundred animals, which is quite a large disparity. That herd generally moves north in the summer and south in the winter. Or up in altitude in the spring and down in the autumn. They would move slowly and as one large unit to an easier place in a fairly predictable manor. Or so it would seem. Because at the same time Bison can also be described by this lovely phrase by the Canadian historian Frank Gilbert Roe who said the bison’s movements quote were utterly erratic and unpredictable and might occur regardless of time, place, or season, with any number, in any direction, in any manner, under any conditions, and for any reason- which is to say, for no reason at all. End quote. In September of 1784, 5 years before our greatest and first president was ever elected, George Washington headed west to Pennsylvania to check on some of his land. Along the way though, he got lost on an obscure trail known locally as McCulloch’s Path. This trail was one of the aforementioned buffalo traces and according to Washington, who had very little respect for the beast, that particular trail owed its origins to, quote, buffalos, being no other than their tracks from one lick to another and consequently crooked and not well chosen. End quote.

Bison evolved to be too fast to be completely killed off by paleo Indians unlike their large neighbors the giant ground sloths, mastodons, and mammoths. Actually, bison are one of the last megafauna to survive the Pleistocene along with polar bears and moose. What’s called the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age effectively ended when those ancient peoples came south from Alaska and down into the great plains of Canada, The United States, and northern Mexico. Once they’d arrived, the north American continent lost 50 percent of the large ice age mammals and every species weighing over four thousand pounds disappeared. Every one of those awesome guys that you see on display at La Brea Tar pits and in my sketch journals were gone. That also included dozens of species between four hundred and four thousand pounds. Sure, the earth’s changing climate may have played a role in their untimely demise but I believe human hunting took care of 90% of those long lost mega creatures. Essentially, humans can hunt. We have technology and the capacity and the desire to hunt and an animal being large and scary doesn’t appear to matter. Ask the mammoths… oh wait, you can’t because they’re all gone and have been for ten thousand years. Although populations of them remained on islands that humans didn’t inhabit until less than four thousand years ago. Long after the pyramids had been built in Egypt.

Of course it would seem that hunting a bison without a horse or a bow and arrow would be dangerous and exhausting and it probably was but we know that ancient native Americans accomplished it, just like they accomplished hunting mastodons and mammoths who were much larger. It would have been tricky but we know they used multiple techniques such as setting the prairie on fire, herding them towards water, Buffalo Corrals, and of course Buffalo Jumps.

Buffalo Jumps are best described as a tall place from which humans would have forced a large number of bison to fall from. That could be a cliff, an embankment, or a sinkhole in the prairie. In the Blackfoot tongue, Buffalo Jumps are known as pishkun which roughly translates to deep blood kettle. Keep that in mind. Before horses, killing bison most likely involved killing a lot of them. All at once. And it probably took a lot of coordination, practice, and planning. But ultimately it involved a lot of dead bison. There are a lot of these sites scattered around the country and I’ve even come across one on the road north of the Black Hills called the Vore Buffalo Jump National Historic Site. At the time I was traveling to Devils Tower and racing a storm that was brewing to the west so I didn’t stop but one day I would like to check it out. So at the bottom of these jumps rest layers upon layers and thousands upon thousands of buffalo bones. It’s estimated that the bone bed at Vore Buffalo Jump is twenty five feet deep, one hundred feet in diameter, and contains upwards of twenty thousand skeletal buffalo remains. But others nearby and all along the western edge of the Great Plains are much larger. Head-smashed-in buffalo jump in Alberta, Canada’s bone bed is thirty feet thick… others have been described as being just as thick but one whole mile wide. How did the horseless, bowless, people of the great plains attract these bison to the edge of cliffs they certainly knew would be their demise? Rinella tells about an amazing group of Indians who described past skilled hunters that wore buffalo hides so convincingly that they were able to lead an entire herd to the edge of a cliff which would allow those skilled hunter’s friends to emerge, startle, overtake, and convince hundreds of the sure hoofed animals to careen over the edge of a certain death cliff down to their impending doom. Now’s the time where you should probably expel the notion you may have about Native Americans using every piece of the buffalo and not letting it go to waste. While they did use every piece of the buffalo, they certainly didn’t use every piece every time. It’s time to expel the notion of the quote unquote noble savage term that became popular half a century ago and that my parents were taught. And that is also a little inappropriate. Dan Obrien in his fantastic book Great Plains Bison explains it perfectly. Quote. It is popular to glorify the land ethic of native Americans by saying that they used all the parts of the buffalo and to negatively compare the nineteenth century bloodbaths where europeans killed for a few body parts and wasted the rest. But if you can imagine a hot July afternoon in eastern Montana with a hundred dead and dying buffalo at the bottom of a cliff you will realize that this notion is pure romanticism. End quote. He later goes on to describe though how in reality nothing would have been wasted by these early Indians. The wolves, the foxes, the birds, the bugs, and even the ground would have benefited from the carnage and he’s absolutely right. Much later, the Lakota Sioux would kill 1,500 Bison in a single day and take only their tongues to trade for liquor with the Americans. But more on that later.

The mass killing used in jumps, staged fires, and the corrals aren’t the only ways Bison were hunted though. I will absolutely do a podcast on prehistoric Indians and Clovis and Folsom cultures in the future because I’m obsessed with them but it’s important for our story of the Bison to briefly cover the Folsom Points. Basically a flash flood in 1908 in the town of Folsom, New Mexico carved deep into a river embankment and exposed thousands of Pleistocene bones including a lot from a now extinct buffalo. The amazing part of the find though, were that spear points were found housed within the limbs, skulls, and in between vertebrae & ribs. Actual human made spear points! Except these spear points were old. Super old. And while that didn’t sit well with the godly folks of 1922, it fascinates the heck out of me now. This and a subsequent find would actually push the occupation of the new world back to at least twelve thousand years BC. Although, it seems a constant drip of new finds and studies continues to push it back even further. I honestly don’t see why humans would have waited until fourteen thousand years ago to start following the bison, their means of subsistence, when the bison had been walking that route for 130,000 years by then. There’s even a site in Siberia with tools and bones that’s just a stone’s throw away from THE massive land bridge that would have been traversed by the prey they were hunting. And that site is thirty thousand years old. But I digress. So! Folsom… I’ve actually been to Folsom, New Mexico. I’ve been to practically every corner of New Mexico because it’s my favorite state and it really is the land of enchantment and my future home but back in 2016 on one of my yearly treks out to the southwest I was heading from Oklahoma City through the Oklahoma Panhandle to Capulin Volcano National Monument, which is obviously a fantastic place that everyone should visit. But after traveling through the panhandle and crossing the Oklahoma / New Mexico border and driving in between mesas and red buttes the road ended in Folsom which I instantly recognized from my archaeology classes. I got excited and had wanted to check if there was a museum or any sign at all that such a cool discovery existed there but everything was closed as it was a Sunday afternoon in February. And Folsom’s really in the middle of nowhere. To finish the story of the Folsom points and the Bison though I’m going to extensively reference American Buffalo and Steven Rinella’s expertly crafted story. For his book he actually went and saw the excavations and the place where the man who discovered him lived. That man, by the way was an ex slave named George McJunkin who moved to the area and was already well versed in archaeology and paleontology before the great flash flood. He died in the Folsom hotel which I took a haunting picture of on that February trip of mine. The picture’s up on the site. So at the time of the bison hunt it would have been colder and in new mexico there were even glaciers. It was 12,000 years ago and besides glaciers, there was more grass and water in the area as well. So this band of hunters corralled against the natural walls of rock and dirt about 32 cows and calves before killing all of them with their specialized spear points. The group, probably one of only a few groups in the entire area, then stuck around to butcher the carcasses removing only high quality cuts and leaving the rest to rot, much like those at the Vore Buffalo Jump had and much like these ancient Americans future descendants would. There are now hundreds of sites scattered across the US that tell a similar story.

Because of these super successful ancient hunters, it’s believed that the Bison actually experienced a bottleneck in population about 11,000 years ago. They disappeared from Florida, northern California, Massachusetts, southern Ontario, and many islands throughout north America. But once the super mega fauna were all extinct and with them the scary cats and bears and Dire Wolves the Bison had far fewer natural predators and competitors. Other than humans, of course. Who absolutely turned their attention to the wooly beasts once their other massive sources of protein were gone. As Steven Rinella quips about the paleo Indians, quote, after all, you wouldn’t expect them to walk all the way back to Siberia. End quote. But thankfully for me and all of us, the bison survived against all odds. They definitely lost a lot of genetic diversity but it wouldn't be the last time these guys would be tested in such an extreme way.

The first European to see a bison would have been Hernan Cortez at a zoo in Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs which is present day Mexico City. The buffalo was on display to showcase the immense wealth and power of the Mixtec emperor Montezuma the second. Obviously this story is fantastic because it shows even pre-columbian Americans were fascinated with the big beast. Bison aren’t native to that area of Mexico at all and they’re not seen until a couple hundred miles north. We all know what happened to Montezuma and the Aztecs though. Which consequently is an eerily similar story to the Bison. Even down to the mixing of DNA with European invaders.

The possible first sighting of Bison by nonnative Europeans in what is the United States would have been by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca when he was shipwrecked in the gulf and walked through what is now Texas and saw them three times in around 1530. He’s got a great story about his time in the southeast swamps you should read up on. And by great I mean horrible and fascinating.

Then a decade later, Coronado’s Spanish expedition to look for the seven cities of cibola came upon the animals in Texas as well. Except the panhandle this time. And somewhere on that sea of grass he came upon a mound of bison bones he and his men estimated to be eighteen feet wide, 10 feet tall, and 1,500 feet long that lined the bank of a lake. Oh, Coronado, you will be getting the podcast treatment by me one day.

On the east coast in 1612 the Englishman Captain Samuel Argoll anchored his ship off the coast of Virginia, traveled up the Potomac, and near what would become Washington DC, he came upon a herd of bison where his Indian guides killed one for him. Later Argoll, as well as de Vaca, would claim how they enjoyed the taste of the meat with De Vaca writing quote it seems to me they have more and better meat than cattle here in Spain. End quote. I absolutely agree with him too. I love Bison and I’ve made the switch to it at home. I now buy bison steaks, ground bison, osso bucco, and bison jerky. I eat it myself, grill it for friends, and serve it to my picky family and everyone’s always pleasantly surprised. There’s a great quote I ran into in J S Holliday’s the world rushed in where William Swain, a 49er wrote in his journal about that night’s meal after a bison hunt. quote. oh if I could only send this great, tender piece of tenderloin to my friends at home! Such delicious, juicy meat I have never before put under the operations of my masticating organs. End quote. This dude instead of saying chew said put under the operations of my masticating organs. Apparently Eating bison inspires poetry. Or something similar.

Colonials frequently ran into the big beasts and after the revolutionary war and westward expansion, the hearty patriots continued to run into them west of the Appalachian mountains. As a matter of fact, the Cumberland Gap was a buffalo trace before it was a gateway to quote unquote the west. But even before europeans in America, Indians were using the same highways which were essentially buffalo traces through seemingly impenetrable woods and forests. There was a 225 mile trace throughout Kentucky that the Indians themselves nicknamed quote unquote the buffalo pass. Early americans, free from the constraints put upon them by the crown traveled westward into Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee to expand the new country used and I’m going to quote Rinella, buffalo trails instead of Indian trails because they were hoping to run into the one and not the other. End quote. But more importantly for the establishment and expansion of the United States, these same pioneers, explorers, hunters, and trappers followed the buffalo traces enough for them to become established routes. Which would eventually become wagon paths, which would eventually become gravel roads, which would eventually become local, state, and interstate highways.

On their trek out west to the promised land, Mormon settlers lived off buffalo meat. Sometimes exclusively. But they also often had their meager possessions and hand carts scattered from buffalo stampedes. Both mormons and gentiles though used buffalo chips or circular disks of dung to light fires for warmth and even cooking. William Swain would write, quote, Buffalo chips burn well when dry but if damp or wet are smoky and almost fireproof. They emit a delicate perfume… end quote. Imagine cooking over a fire made of crusty crap. Speaking of crap, buffalo dung and urine are super important for the health of the great plains. They both contain important sources of nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, sulphur, and magnesium for other plants and animals and even the microorganisms found within the soil. Bison chips also spread seeds, fertilize the soil, and attract tons of other species. The NPS states that as many as 300 species of insects will live in one bison patty, and 1,000 individual insects will occupy that same patty from the time it’s deposited to its removal. One important species that helps with this removal is the dung beetle which recent studies have suggested creates herbage growth when they’re surrounded by elk, deer, and bison. The bison’s importance on the plains and truthfully in all of its territory can never be understated.

Although I've seen numbers ranging from 75 to 40 million Bison pre European contact, recent science has suggested their range and feeding limit is no more than 30 million. Which is a ton of animals but remember, they stretched from the Atlantic to the pacific and from Alaska to Mexico... That is until the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

I’m going to cover this in yet another podcast but I’ll sum it up briefly here. By 1680, the Spanish had been in the new world for almost two hundred years and for one hundred of those years the Spanish had been in New Mexico. During that time they’d invaded the Native American Puebloan residents constantly with soldiers, settlers, and missionaries who waged a never ending campaign to convert both religiously and secularly the Indians to the European way of life. They outlawed kachina dances, mask wearing, and any religious ceremony that wasn’t catholic. The persecution was extremely severe and taxing. It got so bad that when a Spanish official named Nicolas de Aguilar tried to stop it, he was brought up on charges of heresy and tried before the inquisition. This whole time though, the Spanish had a strict policy of not giving horses to the pueblo people. Much like we do not want rogue nations to get the atomic bomb. Eventually after a rough drought in 1670 and some devastating raids by the Apache, the puebloans had had it. A prominent member of one of the many pueblos name Popé led the revolt on August 10th killing about 400 Spaniards, 21 of the 23 missionaries, and most importantly for our story, stole the Spaniards horses.

This single act changed the course of American Indian and consequently American buffalo history forever. In the year 1630, not a single native american in what is now the united states could mount riders. By 1700, every Texas tribe rode. The ability and ease of mastering the buffalo had begun. After the rebellion, horse numbers exploded into the tens of thousands and eventually by the year 1750 there were probably a million wild horses galloping across the western United States. Remember, Horses originally evolved in North America but had been lost from the continent for tens of thousands of years so it shouldn’t be surprising that their numbers exploded. And with those exploding numbers came the rise of the plains Indians horse culture and buffalo related warfare. Once weak tribes almost overnight became the fiercest people on the land because of the horse. Tribes that could barely farm and often begged neighbors for food packed up their meager belongings, severed what little ties they had to their land, and chose the horse as their home. Enter The Empire of the Summer Moon… which is also the name of an exceptional book by S C Gwynn. Future podcast alert.

The Empire of the Summer Moon refers to the 240,000 square miles of the Southern Plains region of Northern Mexico, most of Texas, Eastern New Mexico & Colorado, Oklahoma, and southern Kansas which was dominated by the most fearsome people to have possibly ever lived on the planet: The Comanche. Dan Carlin may disagree with me but The Comanche’s prowess on the horse rivaled or even exceeded that of the Great Khans much further to the west across the Pacific Ocean. S C Gwynn says, quote, such imperial dominance was the product of more than 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of land that contained the country’s largest buffalo herds. End quote. They fought Colonial Spanish, Mexicans, apaches, Utes, osages, pawnees, tonkawas, navajos, cheyennes, arapahoes, tejanos, and eventually americans. That list is not exhaustive. They were so proficient at killing that when early Americans began illegally descending upon Tejas, the Spanish and subsequent Mexican governments would assign these foolish americans lands in between the Comanches and the Tejano cities knowing full well that the Comanches would raid, rape, torture, carve up, desecrate, and kill those Anglos. The Texas Rangers were established to specifically deal with them and the largest army force the United States government ever created to deal with indians was created to deal with the comanches. They’re legendarily badass but they were also extremely tied to the bison. As a matter of fact, native americans connection to the buffalo might have been the single strongest connection between an animal and a group of humans in the entire history of humanity since the prehistoric times. S C Gwynn writes, quote, Before the arrival of the horse, they were peoples whose lives were based almost entirely on the buffalo. The horse did not change this. They merely became much better at what they had always done. End quote. He goes on to write that the horse, quote, virtually guaranteed that they would not evolve into more civilized agrarian societies. End quote. Old Ten Bears of the Comanches would later say, I love the open prairie, and I wish you would not insist on putting us on a reservation. The Comanche only wanted two things; to make war, and to hunt the buffalo.

But by 1800, The Comanche themselves would be increasingly desperate for Bison. In that same year, west of the Rocky Mountains, the buffalo would disappear. Then in 1832, Sioux Indians killed what were possibly the last Bison east of the Mississippi River in Northern Wisconsin. And 50 years later they’d be nearly extinct on the great plains. And with the loss of the bison herds it’s estimated that 95% of the grizzly bear’s range was reduced as well. But not because they depended on hunting the bison for the bulk of their food.

Buffalos have very few natural predators which is partly the reason they’ve reduced in size of body and horns since the Pleistocene. Grizzly’s rarely attack them, although I’ve seen a gnarly video on YouTube of a fight in Yellowstone. The grizz did eventually win. Black bears may prey on baby bison but it’s extremely rare. Even more rare but not unheard of would be a similar situation with coyotes and even mountain lions. All of these predators best chances though involve a newborn calf that hasn’t quite mastered the clumsy way a Buffalo walks. Which is where a pack of wolves is best suited to take advantage. Wolves are probably a bison’s biggest natural predator. And the wolves favorite prey are newborn bison. If the wolves go for adults, it’s usually in the wintertime and is accomplished by breaking up the herd and going after the slow or weaker ones by biting their legs and bringing them down whereupon the whole pack of wolves can tear em apart. Kind of like Achilles’ heel. Either that or In deep snow where the lighter wolves can hunt from above on the packed snow.

One of the main reasons why the grizzlies lost so much of their range was because once the buffalo numbers began to dwindle, they stopped dying by the thousands upon thousands by drowning in the various rivers and waterways of the great plains. It’s actually kind of insane how many buffalos just straight up died by themselves. They would drown in the 1800s in such large numbers that they’d damn the Missouri River. And there’s no reason to believe this hadn’t happened for thousands of years before then. A herd would get struck by lightning and a hundred would die instantly. There are recordings of both whites and indians seeing thousands burn to death in brush fires. Tornadoes would carry them away and burst their eyeballs from the air pressure! Early explorers to the great plains even recorded having trouble leading their horses through fields of endless bleached white bones. Teddy Roosevelt would later write that, quote, no sight is more common on the plains than that of a bleached buffalo skull. End quote. Obviously these deaths are nothing compared to the slaughter that this story’s about to dive into which has long lasting trickle down effects. Along with the Grizzly… wolves, lions, birds, bats, frogs, box turtles, dung beetles, butterflies, insects, and even the very ground itself which was shaped by and dramatically altered by 14,000 years of Bison intervention all declined, disappeared, or changed.

Buffalo wallows are one such ecological impact that disappeared with their destruction. Buffalo wallows are spots on the plains where a buffalo would rest and well… wallow by rolling around on the prairie floor enough to create a small crater which after a rain, would collect water. These little ponds known beautifully as ephemeral aquatic ecosystems supported life such as frogs and insects which thrive since there’s no fish in these tiny ponds. S C Gwynn refers to them in his book and says that in 1865 while the Army’s Fourth Cavalry was searching for The Comanches quote they were dismayed to learn that their principal water sources were buffalo wallow holes that according to Carter were, and it’s now quoting Robert g Carter who wrote a book called on the border with Mackenzie, the leader of the fourth cavalry quote stagnant, warm, nauseating, odorous with smells, and covered with green slime that had to be pushed aside. End all quotes. Even later homesteading Americans did not like the ponds either and would fill them in or use the hard mud at the bottom of them for their roofs.

I know this is a podcast about the bison and not about the bison’s destruction but unfortunately, so much of the big animal’s story is its death and near extinction seemingly multiple times. Thankfully though, they’re still around and by knowing their history it becomes even easier to celebrate them as the symbols they are and to be grateful that they’re still around. 

But speaking of death… with more modern native Americans, the way they killed the bison was somewhat different to how their ancestors accomplished the task. The main difference is that plains indians had the unbelievably effective technology of the bow and arrow and the horse. By the introduction of the horse, buffalo jumps became obsolete but other more ingenious methods began to appear. The simplest of those methods being riding up on a fleeing buffalo and driving a fourteen foot lance in between its ribs. The comanches would be so good at training their horses that once they fired their bows, the horses would jerk away from the now shot buffalo at the sound of the bow string. This is important because as S C Gwynn puts it, quote, a healthy buffalo could run nearly as fast as an ordinary horse for two miles. End quote. Other means of killing included the dressing up in a wolf or coyote skin, and slowly approaching the unperturbed bison only to plunge an arrowhead or spear into it’s heart from feet away. THEN the hunter would steal the cow’s child when the calf wouldn’t flee from the corpse, take it home to use as target practice for the hunter’s children, and eventually let them kill it. He would then skin the calf and wear it as camouflage for further bison related murders. ALSO! Indian hunters were known to drive bison into the snow during the winter months and using snowshoes, rapidly approach the slow moving beasts easily overtaking them and stabbing them from atop the snow as they slowly plowed their way to their inevitable deaths. Indians forced buffalo onto lightly frozen rivers where they’d break through the ice and float down stream to the waiting and no doubt frozen limbs of the rest of the tribe. Indians would also force buffalo into non frozen rivers where the beasts were so slow that the hunters could swim up to them and slit their throats before letting their slowly dying carcasses float to the waiting arms of the tribe. And let it be known that for their bulk and size and despite their proclivity for drowning in large numbers, bison are rather good swimmers. The Indians would light the prairie on fire and as the buffalo swarmed and crammed in fear through the small corridor the indians left unburned, they’d pick the bison off with their bows and arrows in considerable numbers. They would even use their own bodies as a collective noose to slowly tighten around a group of Buffalo before they would kill them and i’m going to quote Rinella as they tried to escape, often so close that the hunter could pluck out his used arrow from the side of the animal before it fell over and broke it. End quote. Even still, the native Americans favorite way to kill some bison was with arrows and bullets from the back of a horse.  R

In 1820, the Metis of Canada went on a Buffalo hunt and brought back one million pounds of dried meat. In other words, they had killed fifty thousand buffalo on the great plains that summer alone. Fifty thousand. That was just one group. Eventually, where they hunted in Montana and the Dakotas ran out of buffalo. They didn’t do this slaughter out of sheer hatred for the beast though. Here’s a long quote from S C Gwynn: Buffalo was the food the comanches loved more than any other. They ate steaks cooked over open fires or boiled in copper kettles. They cut the meat thin, dried it, and stored it for the winter and took it on long trips. They ate the kidneys and the paunch. Children would rush up to a freshly killed animal, begging for its liver and gallbladder. They would then squirt the salty bile from the gallbladder onto the liver and eat it on the spot, warm and dripping blood. If a slain female was giving milk, comanches would cut into the udder bag and drink the milk mixed with warm blood. One of the greatest delicacies was the warm curdled milk from the stomach of a suckling calf. End quote. If short on water, the comanches would also drink the blood straight from a slain buffalo. I can’t think that the Comanche were the only buffalo dependent tribe to engage in these practices. The buffalo literally meant life to so many native american and later American groups.

At the same time though, all over the united states and even Europe buffalo hides were in extremely high demand. Upwards of 200,000 a year were being bought from the indians. The uses for buffalo hides at that time were seemingly limitless. They could be used on saddles, as mattresses, coats, blankets, shoes, and more. They were especially popular as throw blankets for easterner’s laps as they travelled out west. The bison’s tongues were also popular pickled back east as was their dried meat and the Indians were handing them over at trading posts by the ton. But before trading ever happened with the Americans, the Indians themselves had truly limitless uses. Steven Rinella has a great couple of paragraphs that instead of paraphrasing, I’m going to quote.

Indians would use untanned skins, or rawhide, to make buckets, mortars, war shields, drums, splints, cinches, lariats, packing straps, knife sheaves, saddles, blankets, stirrups, masks, ornaments, quirts, snowshoes, boats, and moccasin soles. They’d use tanned buffalo hides to make moccasin uppers, blankets, beds, winter coats, shirts, leggings, dresses, belts, bridles, quivers, backrests, bags, tapestries, sweat lodge covers, tipi covers, and tipi liners. The skin from the hind leg could be taken directly off the buffalo and used as emergency footwear. Indians would make baby cradles with tanned buffalo hides, and they’d make buffalo skin sacks for carrying their babies on trips. He continues. quote. Indians would use buffalo hair, particularly the hair on the buffalo’s forehead, to stuff pillows, dolls, sleeping pads, and medicine balls. They’d braid buffalo hair into ropes and… I’m going to end the quote there actually. I could go on but I think you get the point. They made dice, toys, every tool imaginable from the bones. They used the tongue, organs, fat, meat, hooves, noses, tendons, literally every single thing on that bison could be used for damn near every single purpose you could think of. Even the skulls which symbolized rebirth to some Plains tribes were kept and venerated with some of those tribes arranging them in circles or lines on the open prairie or in front of villages. I have a bison skull I purchased in Custer, South Dakota hanging in my kitchen. I have a bison skull figurine made from bison bones. There’s a bison skull magnet on my fridge. I understand the Indian’s reverence for the bison skull. They’re quite beautiful.

The Indians though weren’t breaking down the bison into every single one of those components every time they killed one of the beasts. And now that Americans had come to the indians land, their only option was to capitalize and that’s what they did. They were making small fortunes in trading and in currency which further allowed them to get more hides. Bison hunting became so somehow even more central to the great plains tribes that it increased inter tribal warfare. This increased the procurement of slaves for wives and polygamy exploded among the leaders and strong men of the plains. After all, the hides didn’t process themselves.

Making leather’s been pretty consistent for forty thousand years and it involved copious amounts of feces, brains, urine, beating, stomping, soaking, putrefying, fermenting, and tree bark. It was hard and stinky work. But throughout the 19th century leather makers in Europe and on the east coast of the United States were constantly improving the process and inventing new ones. By the 1870s, a new way to convert buffalo hides into commercial leather spelled the beginning of the end for the buffalo as their hides were now in demand on factory floors and in machines as the industrial revolution’s wheels began turning.

And speaking of turning wheels, the rapid explosion of and extension into the great plains of the railroad lines was yet another nail in the bison’s rapidly sealing coffin. In 1869 the first transcontinental railroad was joined in Utah linking the two coasts forever and creating essentially two separate herds of buffalo. A northern and a southern herd. The southern herd became even more fractured with further encroachments by other rail lines as well. All of These lines carried meat and hides back east and men with guns to the plains. Not only did the trains themselves hit and kill bison but rail lines sold tickets for sharpshooters that could just take them out from the train. I actually find this particular method of extermination the worst. Not a single piece of that animal is harvested when it’s shot from the back of a moving train. In Holliday’s book I ran into a quote from a 49er, so about twenty years before the time of the railway. But this gold rusher heading west wrote after witnessing hunters in his and other groups chase down a herd that quote. Not less than fifty buffalo were slaughtered this morning, whereas not three in all were used. Such wanton destruction of buffalo, the main dependence to the indians for food, is certainly reprehensible but the desire by the emigrant of engaging once at least in a buffalo chase can scarcely be repressed. End quote. Killing bison was reprehensible because the Indians depended on them to stay alive? My how attitudes would change.

Bison can ram through barbed wire fence without taking a scratch and they can destroy railroad lines and telephone poles. They’re tough hombres for sure and Rinella mentions how the buffalo, unable to stop themselves from rubbing against the telegraph toothpick poles that dotted the landscape throughout the great plains in the eighteen hundreds would often completely topple the wooden pillars when a herd would wander through. Eventually someone out east suggested putting painful spikes on the poles to stop the Bison from rubbing and snapping them but this apparently only made them rub even harder! You have to remember, before Americans, huge amounts of the great plains looked entirely different. S C Gwynn puts it this way, quote, the contrast between the dense eastern woodlands and the quote unquote big sky country of the west would have been stark. A traveler going west would have seen nothing like open prairie until he hit the 98th meridian, whereupon, in many places, he would have been literally staring out of a dark, Grimm brothers forest at a treeless plain. It would have seemed to him a vast emptiness. End quote. Mostly because of the dust bowl, but even before that, there were massive tree planting campaigns all along the interior of the country. Prior to that though, trees, did NOT exist in the great plains. I remember walking through the student union of Oklahoma university and seeing photographs from the 1890s and early nineteen hundreds that showed a completely different landscape of the campus than the one I was used to. There was nary a tree in sight in any direction. Even arial shots showed the campus and surrounding area to be devoid of bark and leaves. The same goes for old pictures of Oklahoma City, or Guthrie, which was the first capitol of the state. Sure, occasionally along creeks and rivers throughout the great plains trees would pop up, but ultimately it was a massive treeless sea of grass that Coronado said was quote as bare of landmarks as if we were surrounded by the sea. Here the guides lost their bearings because there is nowhere a stone, hill, tree, bush, or anything of the sort. End quote. A terrifyingly empty sea of grass with no landmarks that had the most inhospitable climates in north America with brutal heat, freezing winters, constant blistering wind, frequent droughts, towering lightning spawning thunderstorms, and tornadoes. That was the Great Plains. That was the Buffalos home by the 1800s. At the Wichita mountains in Oklahoma I once witnessed a bison rub his rump against a pole, a singular pole, I’m actually not even sure what it was for except maybe to be rubbed up against by the bison. Although it was probably a pole to stop people from parking in that spot. But I sat and watched this guy rub his big body on this pole for about 5 minutes before I decided I needed to get going. His sheer joy was cracking me up. His lips would curl and his tongue would stick out as he rubbed back and forth to fix that itch. Obviously, I took a picture and you can see it on the site. So when telegraph poles were introduced onto this treeless sea of grass, the Bison took full advantage of it’s ass scratching qualities. Clearly, the railroad barons, the imperial government, and the progress of America couldn’t stand for this complete lack of respect for private property. Not to mention those pesky Indians who hunted those wanton destroyers. Something had to be done.

The Indians love and desire to hunt buffalo caused quote the gradual decadence of the slight civilization which the people had acquired. End quote. That was said by writer and scientist Nathaniel Shaler who couldn’t understand why the Indians wouldn’t adopt agriculture. Actually, it seemed all europeans and eventually American pioneers, settlers, priests, and soldiers couldn’t comprehend why the Indians refused to give up their nomadic lifestyle, settle down, accept Jesus, and farm. French traders, Jesuits, The Spanish and later Mexicans, and the Americans would all spend inordinate amounts of time complaining about and trying to convince the plains indians to quit hunting buffalo and adopt their European way of life. In Rinella’s book he cites a Kentuckian who said quote buffaloes were so plenty in the country that little or no bread was used, but that even the children were fed on game; the facility of gaining which prevented the progress of agriculture, until the poor, innocent buffaloes were completely extirpated, and the other wild animals much thinned. End quote. That would ultimately become the plan. Eliminate the Bison.

While competition with bovine and horses, native Americans and settlers, drought, railroads, the advent of barbed wire, and the destruction of the bison’s environment would all definitely take a toll on them, the main executioners were the US Army, hide hunters, and Manifest Destiny.

In October of 1867 The Treaties of Medicine Lodge were signed between the US Government and five thousand Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, and Arapaho from the Great Plains. The government wanted to protect those railroad workers, miners, and settlers steadily trickling west through the Arkansas River valley while the indians wanted to protect their buffalo hunting grounds to the south of the Arkansas river. Eventually, the government gave the indians their hunting rights but with the caveat of quote so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase. End quote.

Realizing the only way to quote unquote civilize these buffalo hunting bands of Indians was to take away their buffalo, the US Army began to take an active roll in the slaughter using the same generals and tactics they beat the confederacy with. They burned the prairie, they decimated the landscape, and they killed the buffalo. But even that was taking too long and using too many resources so the Army began sponsoring civilian American and European hunters to do the dirty work for them. Colonel Richard Dodge urged a buffalo hunter once to quote kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone! End quote. General Philip Sheridan once commented, quote, these men 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. They (meaning the hunters) are destroying the indians’ commissary. For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated. End quote.

William Tecumseh Sherman is a man who probably doesn’t need an introduction but seeing as how I’m from Georgia, I’m going to give him one anyways. I’m not biased in any way, mind you. Sherman was a man from Ohio named after a famous Shawnee Chief by the name of Tecumseh. It’s been said that Tecumseh was his actual given name but when he was baptized around age 9 the priest gave him the name William which apparently stuck. Almost as if he didn’t much care for the Indian. Eventually Sherman would join the Army, be in California instead of Mexico during that war, resign, only to rejoin in 1861 when the civil war broke out. He’d soon have a mental breakdown in Kentucky that the Cincinnati Commercial would describe as him going quote unquote insane before recuperating, and marching south to and I’m quoting Sherman make Georgia howl. End quote. He would succeed in that by looting, stealing, murdering, and burning every structure he came across that wasn’t a house on his famous march to the sea from Atlanta to the Atlantic. And one hundred and sixty years later Georgians are still howling. Because of this and his later exploits the British historian and military theorist B. H. Lidell Hart would dub him quote the first modern general. End quote. Congratulations. After his rape of Georgia, he became the Architect of the postwar army in the west and member of the peace commission of 1867 to 1868 also known as the Taylor Commission which had its stated goal as quote, to identify and remove the causes of hostility and attempt to consolidate all the plains indians on reservations. End quote. Boy did Sherman have some ideas for that. Key among them was the extermination of the buffalo. While speaking about the Souix’s insistence on hunting on their own lands at the Republican River, Sherman said quote I think it would be wise to invite all the sportsmen of England and America there this fall for a grand buffalo hunt, and make one grand sweep of them all. End quote. Sherman figured if they could replace the buffalo with cattle, the plains indians would settle down. Except what he actually said is that cattle would be a quote potent agency in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by substituting for the useless… indians… the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle ranches. End quote. With regards to cattle replacing buffalo I’m now going to quote a book called Frontiers a short history of the American west by Robert v Hine & John mack Faragher… in 1880, buffalo in Montana far outnumbered the 250,000 cattle; three years later; the buffalo had disappeared and the number of range stock had increased to 600,000. End quote. Sherman would win this war too. And just as brutally.

My feelings on Sherman and the way the Army dealt with the Native Americans and the buffalo should be obvious to the listener but I’m going to say it anyways. I disagree with the policies and how they were employed. I disagree with the theft and murder and slaughter and lying. BUT… I am glad the united states of America exists. And I love the southwest and the west and I’ve lived in northern Georgia, which was once home to the Muskogee and Cherokee. I’ve lived in Oklahoma which before it became the place of forced resettlement was home to the Wichita and Comanche and others. And I currently live in territory that the Illinois and the Winnebago would have called home. Theodore Roosevelt summed it up rather succinctly when he said The bison’s quote Destruction was the condition precedent upon the advance of white civilization in the West. End quote. I’m white and I live in the west so it wouldn’t be fair for me to lament the evils of our ancestors while simultaneously taking full advantage of the fruits of their labors. This is a podcast about bison so I won’t go too much into the Indian wars and their consequences but I will one day. I am proud to be an American although I wish it hadn’t been at the expense of hundreds if not thousands of indigenous tribes and nearly 30 million buffalo. I’ll leave it at that. For now.

So, while these policies were harsh and cruel, they were effective and only decades earlier these same plains Indians the military was trying to wipe out were using these same tactics against their Indian enemies themselves. As Rinella puts it, quote. For tribes west of the rocky mountains, such as the Nez Perce and Flatheads, it was a rite of passage for young mean to kill buffalo on lands claimed by the blackfeet. End quote. These affairs could actually escalate into genocide where the Blackfeet would murder entire enemy villages right down to the infants and dogs if they caught someone killing their Buffalo. And meanwhile on the plains, tribes would often travel through another’s hunting grounds, kill every buffalo they found, and leave them to rot on the ground where they died. Which is exactly what the Buffalo Hunters were doing by the 1880s. But in numbers the native Americans couldn’t fathom.

Most bison killed by the hunters were stripped of hides and left to rot or be fed upon by the rapidly expanding wolf population. Wolves were said to get so fat following hide hunters that they not only tamed themselves by sitting near camps waiting for scraps but they would be so weighed down after gorging themselves that native Americans were able to run them down and kill them with knives. In the end, the massive wolf population died right alongside the bison.

Not to be left out though, as the US Army and it’s swarm of buffalo hunters were destroying every beast they could find, the indians also began killing more extensively in a sad twist of fate. One of my least favorite images of this entire massacre is of the men standing on the enormous thirty foot tall and seemingly endless pile of bison skulls that were to soon be ground up and made into fertilizer near Detroit, Michigan. Those skulls were brought to the railroads by both white Americans and American Indians. And while it’s a haunting picture, it does give a sickening but necessary perspective on the era.

Dodge City, Kansas alone, housed more than 2,000 hide hunters including Buffalo Bill and Wyatt Earp, both of which I plan on doing a future episode about. Rinella has a great quote about the particular type of man that made up the hide hunters though. Quote. These fellows were not stay at home dad types. They were confederate soldiers escaping the shame of reconstruction. They were union soldiers escaping the boredom of victory. They were orphans. They were wanted alive for fraud here, wanted dead for murder there. End quote. S C Gwynn would say they were, quote, on the whole, a nasty lot. They were violent, alcoholic, illiterate, unkempt men who wore their hair long and never bathed. End quote. They would be covered in oils, fats, and grease. They’d throw their clothing over ant mounds so the ants could kill the lice they were infected with. They stank. Badly. And they hated the indians. These were some very colorful people. Wyatt Earp for instance was a tough man who ran away at 13 to join the Union army only to have his father find him and bring him back to tend to the family’s 80 acre farm. At 13.. Later he’d steal a horse, be accused of being a pimp, get arrested, become a lawman, get fired, get into fights, become a lawman again, be accused of corruption, get into more fights, his wife opened a brothel, he led teams of horses in dangerous territory in Arizona and California, he’d become famous for the shootout… you know the one in tombstone. Just picture Kurt Russell and his second best mustache. And somewhere in there Earp was a hide hunter in Dodge City although… that claim’s a little dubious. One hide hunter’s claim that isn’t dubious was William Fredrick Buffalo Bill Cody who bragged about killing 4,280 buffalo in an eighteen month period for the rest of his life. They weren’t all as good as Buffalo Bill… good may not be the correct word there. Not all the hide hunters would have been as proficient as Buffalo Bill but there were 2,000 of them and they’d eventually exterminate the creatures from that area. Some of the men’s claims are almost unbelievable but are seemingly true with one of the most outrageous ones being Bond, Brick Bond who killed 250 in a single day. But nothing that ive read beats Tom Nixon who claimed to have killed 3,200 in 35 days which makes Buffalo Bill’s number seem tame. From those plains outside of Dodge City, the hunters killed five million beautiful bison in two years. S C Gwynn quotes a scout who said, 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. End quote. At some point the hide hunters would have to continue moving further west towards the Texas panhandle where they’d break the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867 setting off an eventual confrontation with the Comanche and northern plains indians over the buffalo.

Those hide hunters though would work in teams, be out for days at a time with enough provisions, coffee, bullets, and their .50 Caliber extremely effective Sharps Rifle, and attempt to find herds. That main herd near Dodge City, by the way, was reported to be fifty miles deep and twenty five miles wide. Once a herd was located the hide hunters would take out as many buffalo as they can before the herd catches wind and moves on or at worst, stampedes. Often times though, because the bison had no knowledge of Sharps rifles, when one of their family members or friends dropped dead suddenly, they simply would not care and continue grazing. S C Gwynn even calls them stupefyingly easy to kill. Sometimes though, when a bison is injured and if it’s a bull, other bulls nearby will sense that it is weak and they will gore it. They will actively try and put that guy out of his misery. Bison can be aggressive and they can be rude as hell. That reminds me of the video of the news anchor setting up his shot at Yellowstone who after seeing approaching bison goes oh no, I ain't messin’ with you. Oh no. Nuh uhhh. Bison can be lethal and unpredictable and the hide hunters knew that too well. Buffalo are absolutely capable of going from a standing position to thirty miles per hour in a matter of seconds. In Jack Ballard’s Bison Falcon Pocket Guide he gives a thrilling story of Harvey Wallbanger, the fastest buffalo in the west. Quote. The male bison was subsequently entered in numerous exhibition races around the united states, winning seventy six of ninety two contests against racehorses. End quote. Nuh uh I ain’t messin with you.

At the closing of that first hide hunter year of 1871, 500,000, half a million buffalo hides were on trains heading east. By 1878, the days of the hide hunters in that region were over. In 1881 though, there’d by five thousand of them in Miles City, Montana. But by 1883, there’d be only about a thousand buffalo left in the area and a lot of them fled to the black hills… Where Sitting Bull and the Sioux killed every last one of them. Theodore Roosevelt said quote For many long years after the buffalo die out from a place, their white skulls and well worn roads remain as melancholy monuments of their former existence. End quote.

In American Buffalo, Rinella extensively covers all the various and curious and interesting ways that buffalo bones can be used and were used after the slaughters. Obviously, I highly recommend his book. But I’ll highlight some of them. Buffalo bones were used for American and English produced porcelain to give it a nice whiteness. Ground up Buffalo bones were used to make sugar more shiny and wine less cloudy. Ground bones were also used as polishing agents, baking powders, to help refine minerals, and as fertilizer. Rinella says of one such fertilizer company that quote managed to sell a lot of the product to homesteaders on the great plains who were trying to produce corn and wheat on lands recently abandoned by buffalo. End quote. Isn’t it ironic… Buffalo bones got in the way of tilling and sometimes they’d be so thick on the ground that travelers claimed it looked like fresh snow. The bones would be burned for fuel, and later they’d be sold for $8 a ton. Piles of bones began to appear at railway hubs like the aforementioned Boneville, near Detroit. Then there’s this staggering figure Rinella says quote The Empire Carbon Works, in st. louis processed 1.25 million tons of buffalo bones during the buffalo bone era. It paid on average $22.50 a ton. That’s over $28 million paid out for buffalo bones, which came from perhaps 125 million skeletons… or more than four times the number of buffalo that has ever existed at any one time. End quote. That is staggering. Rinella goes on to describe how once the plains had been picked clean and a bone shortage was declared, indians would travel to buffalo jumps and dig out as many bones as they could find regardless of the once held beliefs that quote these bones were capable of rising back up into brand new buffalo, but times changed. End quote. S C Gwynn writes about the hide hunters’ success that quote it would soon become the greatest mass destruction of warm blooded animals in human history. End quote.

At this point, I can’t take it anymore. I want to be done with all the death. 125 million skeletons of an animal that was never more than 30 million at a time? It makes me want to cry. By 1889 there were an estimated 1,091 buffalo left. By 1895, there were 800. They went from being innumerable and widespread in 1679 to as one biologist claimed... 85 by the late 1890s. I’m dubious of that extremely low number... but it’s not impossible. Nothing seems impossible in this story. And thankfully, it’s true because the buffalo survived. Today we have over 500,000 buffalo on this continent. And 30,000 of those are on National and Public Lands. The rest remain in private herds with Ted Turner owning more buffalo than exist in the wild.

So we’re at the turning point of the story, thank the lord. Enter... Teddy Roosevelt.

I would love to do an entire podcast on Teddy Roosevelt except Danielle Bolelli has already created a fantastic series on him with his history on fire podcast and you should absolutely go listen to it.

Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1854 in New York to a ridiculously wealthy family. Unfortunately for young Teddy though, he suffered from headaches, fevers, and a very severe form of asthma that was so bad he lived with the fear of suffocating and his parents were sure he’d die young. He was too physically weak and afraid to defend himself growing up and he was even bullied and roughed up. So to escape from this tough but privileged life he read and studied. He actually read and studied a lot, he was a huge nerd. But eventually he would overcome all of this and grow up to be the strong fighter, soldier, leader, and for our story, hunter and later conservationist. I'd say he became so strong he will outlive humanity itself in the Black Hills. On that little rock known as mount Rushmore.

So, I lied about the not being anymore death part. It’s unfortunately important to cover a few more solemn and sad passings of both beasts and humans that were critical in the life of Theodore Roosevelt and to the life of this story. So bear with me. No pun intended. Teddy... bear.

By the age of 24 and motivated by his quest to hunt the largest mammal in America, Roosevelt headed west to Montana. It was 1883 so remember what the landscape was like for Bison at that time. Still, with the help of an exceptional guide, he managed to find, shoot, and kill a bison. Afterwards he would dance enthusiastically around the animal to celebrate his success. I can’t blame him for that joy, I’ve felt the same while going hunting myself, it just seems irreverent after having listened to me go into such great detail about the slaughter of the bison. And even he’d feel different and maybe some irreverence after his second successful hunt that came in 1889 where he would later write, quote, So for several minutes I watched the great beasts as they grazed...mixed with the eager excitement of the hunter was a certain half-melancholy feeling as I gazed on these bison, themselves part of the last remnant of a doomed and nearly vanished race. Few indeed are the men who now have or evermore shall have, the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts, in all his wild vigor, surrounded by the tremendous desolation of his far-off mountain home. End quote. Some of that change in feeling may have been because the man himself had changed in between the two hunts.

Shortly after that first successful hunt in ’83, Theodore Roosevelt headed back to New York where on February 14th, 1884, he sat at his mother’s side as she died from Typhoid fever… hours later on that same valentine’s day he would be at his wife’s bedside as she too passed away. In his journal Roosevelt drew a large X followed by the sentence… the light has gone out of my life.

I’ve never lost anyone that close to me in my life and I cannot even fathom the immense sadness this must have brought him. But his story and that of the buffalo’s does get better.

After the immense loss, Roosevelt would travel between New York and the two north Dakota Ranches he’d purchased to get serious about ranching and immerse himself in his long romanticized western lifestyle. His biographer Edmund Morris would say about his two ranches, quote, fourteen thousand dollars was a small price to pay for so much freedom. End quote. I hear that.

Ive been to both sections of the very out of the way Theodore Roosevelt national park and both were breathtaking. I drove overnight from central Wisconsin stopping only twice. Once for a mosquito plagued rest stop homemade wrap and the other for a twenty minute nap. A hot 20 minute nap because we couldn’t roll down the windows on account of said mosquitos. I figured driving through some of the most boring landscapes in the nation made the most sense to do at night. Ultimately I was right but it’s hard on the body and mind. Although it forced me to drive right by the national buffalo museum which I wish I could have seen. But I was totally unaware it even existed at the time. Anyways, My friend and I arrived on the outskirts of the park as violent ground to sky lightning lit up the west and a bright pink, orange, and yellow gorgeous sunrise erupted in my rearview mirror. It was one of the best sunrises ive ever witnessed. Soon afterwards, we turned off I90 and headed north to that northern unit’s entrance and after 30 minutes, we knew we’d found it because right at the entrance sat a small group of about 8 bison. The sunrise was still glowing and storms were still brewing to the west in that early July morning but the light was right and all the drowsiness I had felt, left me in that moment. Minutes later, while descending into the badlands of the park we pulled over and took a short walk over to a sitting bison who began wallowing with joy in front of us and then he’d stand up and he’d clumsily shake the dust from his massive shaggy coat. The river cut deep into the badlands and there was a hill with bison grazing on it that looked like an Albert Bierstadt painting. It was a magical morning. And in the southern part of the park we saw even more of the creatures. They seemed happy to be there. As were we. All those pictures are on the site.

Roosevelt actually predicted the decline of the very Dakotas badlands ranching business he was a part of that id gone to visit. In the winter of 1886 to 1887, a now very infamous snowstorm wiped out 80% of the cattle population in the area. I read that cows who had survived the initial storm would climb snowdrifts that were so tall that it allowed them to eat the leaves off of the tops of trees only for said cows to get stuck in the branches, die, and be found in the spring up in them branches after the snow had melted. The NPS website has this to say about the experience. quote. Although the ranching venture had spelled financial disaster for Roosevelt, the physically and psychologically transformative experience proved priceless. End Quote. But this and other experiences would contribute to his growing ethics that would later earn him the moniker of The Conservation President. He was more responsible for affording federal protection to land than any other president and I believe because of his feelings and experiences with the bison, including his hunting them, he personally saved the buffalo from extinction. But more on that in a minute.

Those 500,000 bison I mentioned way earlier that are alive on this continent can be traced back to two main herds from the late nineteenth century. One of those herds came from Yellowstone. Like most mountainous and rugged territories, Yellowstone was never ideal for buffalo but its remoteness helped save them there from extinction.

When ancient indians used spears and atl-atls, the bison learned to keep a distance of a spear throw away. When indians gained the bow, the bison learned to stay an arrow shot away. When Europeans came with guns, there wasn’t time enough for the vast majority of the great clumsy shaggy beasts as Teddy Roosevelt affectionally called them to adapt. Although some may have and these Yellowstone bison of the late 19th century may just be proof of that. It’s not like the remaining bison got together and held a council and declared they were going into exile and hiding. No. Their only thoughts were hm where is the next good grass? And oh yeah, those skinny animals that walk on two legs or ride my cousins can kill me without me even seeing them so if I smell them I should run. They didn’t know they were running out of numbers and going extinct. They only knew to follow the good grass. And just as easily as we took them out, we have brought them back. Only bringing them back is just taking a little longer.

By the mid 1890s, the shame of the past twenty years over the killing and disappearance of the bison began to set in. Especially back east. And then, in 1894 a man named Ed Howell poached some of the last remaining buffalos in Yellowstone. I’ll let Paul Schullery in his book Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology & Wonder in the Last Wilderness tell the story of Howell’s capture and the aftermath. Quote. The capture involved a risky rush by the veteran scout Felix burgess on skis across a broad expanse of open snow to get within pistol range before Howell armed with a rifle or his dog saw him coming. Burgess and the trooper then escorted Howell on an arduous return trip to mammoth. As luck would have it, Emerson Hough, a young correspondent from forest and stream, was in the park at the time, and encouraged by park personnel, he wrote the story and rushed it back to George bird Grinnell in new york who published it in the magazine. End quote. The public’s outcry was swift and loud and on May 7th, 1894 the Lacey Act was signed into law giving protection to both birds and animals within Yellowstone. It may have been a bit too late but still better late than never. Especially if you’re a bison.

In 1902, even more federal help came to the aid of the bison when $15,000 was appropriated to purchase some from private herds and bring them to Yellowstone and other public lands. Three years later, which would turn out to be a good year for bison, Roosevelt would say in his annual message to Congress, quote. The most characteristic animal of the western plains was the great shaggy-maned wild ox, the bison, commonly known as buffalo. Small fragments of the herds exist in a domestic state, here and there, a few of them in Yellowstone Park. Such a herd as that on the flathead reservation should not be allowed to go out of existence. Either on some reservation or on some forest reserve like the Wichita reserve or some refuge, provision should be made for preservation of such a herd. End quote. Dan Obrien would write about Teddy that, quote, No previous president (or president that followed) had more of a grasp of what extinction actually meant, and in 1905 no man was more powerful. End quote.   

The same year and month of his speech to congress, The American Bison Society was formed in New York City at the Bronx Zoo by Roosevelt himself, a Mr. William T Hornaday, and a litany of other important conservationists with the sole objective of bringing bison owned on United States federal land to at least 20,000 by the 1930s.

A quick note about William T Hornaday as he plays such a central role in the resurrection of the bison in the early 20th century. Although this quick aside isn’t that quick and it does get a little sad… William T Hornaday, by 1882, after traveling the world in his pursuit of studying animals had become head of the Smithsonian Museum’s taxidermy collection. By the middle of that decade he grew concerned at the rapid loss of the buffalo and after realizing the museum’s complete lack of enough material of the beast to study decided to head to the great plains to remedy that situation before that situation became impossible to remedy. Remember Miles City, Montana? Where 5,000 hunters were converging on what would become the last of the bison in the US? The same place, in fact, that Teddy would get his first Bison? Well in 1886, Hornaday was there but was disappointed in what he saw. He actually returned again later that same year and explored even further into territory where bison don’t typically roam. So, yeah, he was a big conservationist but for science he and his team had killed and collected only three that first trip and 25 on the second. As even modern day conservationists who understand the endeavor would admit, conservation and hunting often go hand in hand. What becomes a little sad is that many of those 25 that he brought back to DC actually carried bullets in their meat and bones. I mean old bullets. Some of them a decade old by the time the scientists downed them on that expedition. One of the bulls they shot even ran for fourteen miles with the fatal wound before succumbing to it. Unfortunately for the scientists it was too late in the day to harvest what they needed so they headed back to camp. When they’d returned the next morning to finish the job they’d discover they were way too late. The butchering had been completed, the meat, tongue, and hide had been taken, and the bones had been broken so that the marrow could be sucked out. Indians who had once called that ground their hunting land had no doubt taken advantage of the opportunity dropped at their feet. Maybe they’d even watched the whole disgraceful affair. Mostly though, Hornaday was disgusted, that these Indians had smeared red paint on one side, yellow paint on the other, and had tied red flannel to a horn.

Don’t give up on Hornaday yet though. As Dan O’Brien writes, quote, William t Hornaday was a good man, and after his second trip to the northern buffalo range he understood one important thing: the buffalo were on the brink of extinction and he was in a unique position to help stop that slide into oblivion. End Quote. Back in DC, Hornaday would make a legendarily beautiful and haunting exhibit of the Buffalo that would inspire writers and americans to wonder at the beast’s future. Later, he’d become the first director of the New York Zoological Park or Bronx Zoo, which happened to house quite a few living Bison.

So under Roosevelt and Hornaday, The American Bison Society’s first mission was to bring buffalo to Yellowstone, the Wichita mountains of Oklahoma, and to establish the national bison range in Montana. Unfortunately through, that promising herd Roosevelt mentioned in his speech to Congress? It actually did end up going to Canada, much to Congress’s embarrassment. But it was no matter, the ABS would eventually use bison held at the bronx zoo and other privately held animals to ultimately accomplished their mission.

You know that wondrous place I’ve mentioned quite a few times? The Wichita Mountains? In 1907, fifteen bison boarded a train in New York City at the direction of Hornaday as a, quote. Gift to the people, for the express purpose of  helping to preserve the American bison from ultimate extinction. End quote. Seven days later, those buffs would arrive in Oklahoma. A town called Cache to be precise. Cache is just south of the current Wichita mountains wildlife refuge where those bisons descendants still meander and create wonder. At the time, in 1907 it was also the place where a lot of Comanche, you know, that empire of the summer moon, would eventually settle including their quote unquote greatest and last leader... if you could say the Comanche had a leader, quanah Parker. One day I will learn y'all about that amazing story but in the meantime read S C Gwynn’s masterfully crafted book. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service website has this to say about that fateful day. “There was great excitement in the little southwestern Oklahoma town of Cache when the train pulled in with the heavily-crated buffalo. The great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker was among those who came to the station. The crates were transferred to wagons and hauled the 13 miles to the Wichitas. People from the whole countryside flocked into the Wichita Forest to see the shaggy beasts. Mounted braves and their families rode in to see the bison of the plains that had provided meat and teepee skins for untold generations of their ancestors.” End quote. Some of those American Indians had once survived solely on raids and Bison yet their children and grandchildren had never even seen one.

By the fall of 1909, the united states government were the stewards of 158 bison and they owed it all to the American Bison Society, the New York Zoological Society, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and President Theodore Roosevelt. Of course there were countless other groups, tribes, and individuals that helped pave the way that would inevitably change the America’s Manifest Destiny and ensure that the wild lands, wildlife, and wild nature of America would always re  main. Dan Obrien writes, quote. Compared to what the government had been responsible for after the Louisiana purchase, it was a pitifully small number of animals on a postage stamp of land. But it was a first step on a symbolic journey back toward the dignity that had been stolen with unparalleled brutally and greed. End quote. By the time it had dissolved in the 1930s, the American bison society had helped to further establish herds in the fort niobrara reserve in Nebraska, wind cave national park, and Custer State Park. And they absolutely reached their goal. They’d been THE driving force behind the increase of buffalo in the national herd to over twenty… thousand…

Much like the Bison though, the ABS was saved from extinction and in 2005 it was reestablished to advance efforts for ecological restoration of the bison to its historic grassland landscapes and ranges across the continent. Then, in 2014, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bison Conservation Program, and I’m now going to quote the National Park Service’s website, helped facilitate the signing of the Buffalo Treaty by 13 indigenous nations as the first cross-border indigenous treaty creating an intertribal alliance between the United States and Canada. This treaty helped to restore bison to 6.3 million acres of Tribal and First Nations lands. WCS (wildlife conservation society) is also currently working with the United States, Canada, and the Blackfeet Nation to transfer bison from Elk Island National Park in Alberta to their bison ancestors' ranges on the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana. End quote. Although more work needs to be done, I can think of no better way to work towards a brighter future for my favorite creature.

Why does it seem like when you tell the story of the bison you ultimately are telling the story of its perpetual slaughter? Wouldn’t it have been better to open this podcast with a happy story that intrigued me like the cuteness of a light brown caramel colored calf prancing alongside its momma under a double complete rainbow that someone recorded in the badlands... instead of the fact that people were outraged at the call to a cull north of the Grand Canyon? Isn’t there a happy and fun way to talk about these silly and majestic creatures? Are they always going to be gnawed on by a cold Dicaprio, murdered by Wyatt Earp, or shot at by an American Indian in our cinema? Will there ever be a way to talk about the bison without focusing on the many ways 14,000 years of human beings have excelled at killing them in North America? Unfortunately, I don't think there is. But what I do think and feel is infinite hope that these guys are not only coming back but that they’re thriving. I feel in the future we will be seeing a lot more of these guys in our pop culture, in our grocery stores, and most importantly in our state and national parks and lands. I agree with and mirror the sentiments the NPS website says when it wrote, quote, to Theodore Roosevelt, the American bison was a symbol of wild nature and western culture which he loved. End quote. It’s impossible to tell the story of America and especially of the west without telling the story of the bison. Even with all its sad gruesomeness. But every year that goes by more of the bison’s story is being written. And now that story is a happy one.

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Epilogue

I didn’t quite think this fit anywhere into the narrative but I do think it’s important information or at least interesting information. In terms of those 30,000 public bison, Yellowstone’s got anywhere from 2,300 to 4,500. The amazing Custer State Park in the Black Hills has over 1,400 which I feel like ive seen half of. The under visited but overly pretty Theodore Roosevelt National Park has anywhere from 350 to 750 animals. Badlands National Park, one of the only places ive seen so many Bison that they looked like ants from far off tries to maintain 600 but often they exceed this number. The beautiful Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma’s got 650. Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake of Utah has around 550. And their ancestors were chosen personally by Hornaday from New York City way back in 1905. Wind Cave National park, a place I witnessed two youngin’s play fighting for fun which you can see on the website has 400. There are 200 to 400 Bison in the Henry Mountains of Southeast Utah which kinda blows my mind because of how often I’ve hiked and explored around that area without even knowing they were there. The National Bison Range in Montana maintains about 350 which is the same amount that The Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge in Nebraska maintains. In Illinois at Prairie State Park you can find around 40, and if you’re ever on  the west side of Denver on I-70, look on either side of the highway near Genesee Park because about 30 Bison roam there. There’s even a great trail on the southern end of the park where if you’re lucky you can get right up against the fence as the herd takes shelter in the wooded area from the hot sun in summer time. While not living, you can see a small herd of 14 Bison being perpetually driven forward by three Lakota warriors at Kevin Costner’s Tatanka Museum that lays at the northern end of the Black Hills. That Bronze statue is the third largest in the world and it’s beautiful to see for yourself. The museum’s also nice and a great tribute to both the Lakotas and the Bison.

While this list isn’t the definitive list of places you can see Bison, it is pretty exhaustive. Honestly though, you can see bison anywhere. Ive seen them in Central wisconsin, rest stops in Oklahoma, and even cooling themselves in a pond in a front yard in backwoods western South Carolina!

Hopefully one day we will be seeing them in even more places and far more often than we do now. I hope that day comes soon because every day that goes by without seeing a bison is a day not quite lived up to its potential.

Lastly, there was so much I couldn’t add like the Mormon beef incident, the northern plains wars, the fact that a bison bull’s bellows can be heard from three miles away, the fetterman fight, the fact that most of those 500,000 bison have cow DNA in them, people like Bufalo Jones, Samuel Walking Coyote, Harold Baynes, Black Elk, and countless, and I mean countless Native Americans, and so many other stories, facts, peoples, tid bits, and information so I encourage anyone and everyone still interested to check out the sources for this story and to find your own. Thanks for listening.

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Sources

American Buffalo by Steven Rinella

Great Plains Bison by Dan O’Brien

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

Frontiers : A Short History of the American West by Robert V Hine & John Mack Faragher

Bison Falcon Pocket Guide by Jack Ballard

The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846-1890 by Robert M Utley

Blood Brothers by Deanne Stillman

The World Rushed In by J.S. Holliday

The Adventures of Theodore Roosevelt by himself

The National Park Service Website

Searching for Yellowstone: Ecology and Wonder in the Last Wilderness

By Paul Schullery

Danielle Bolelli’s History on Fire Podcast three part series on Theodore Roosevelt