Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of Native Americans: An A to Z of Tribes, Culture, and History - Adele Nozedar - Страница 74

The American bison was renamed “buffalo” by default: early French settlers and fur trappers referred to the animal as boeufs, French for “bullock” or “ox.”

The buffalo was easily the single most important animal to the Plains Indians, and the range of the animal was vast. These huge creatures—which can weigh over 2,000 pounds—occupied the plains and prairies west of the Mississippi from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico. Prior to the commercialization of their hunting and slaughter in the 19th century, there were, literally, millions of buffalo. The animal was driven very close to extinction, and today there are only something in the region of 15,000 buffalo remaining that are considered to be wild. These days, they are restricted to reserves and parks, although the commercialized buffalo industry is another matter.

But not so very long ago, the buffalo provided everything that the Native American needed for survival, and the list of uses to which the animal was put is impressive. The hides provided bedding, clothing, shoes, and the “walls” of tipis. The meat was good, nutritious food. The bones and teeth were used to make tools and also sacred implements. The hooves of the animal could be rendered into glue. Horns made cups, ladles, and spoons. Even the tail of the buffalo made a fly whip. The bones could be used to scrape the skin to soften it, and was also fashioned into needles and other tools. Some tribes used the bone to make bows.

The buffalo provided leather and sinewy “string” for those bows. Even the fibrous dung was used to make fires. The rawhide, heated by fire, thickened; this material was so tough that arrows, and sometimes even bullets, couldn’t penetrate it, so it made an effective shield. This rawhide was used to make all manner of objects: moccasin soles, waterproof containers, stirrups, saddles, rattles and drums for ceremonial purposes, and rope. Rope could also be made from the hair of the buffalo, woven into tough lengths. Even boats were made from buffalo hide, stretched across wooden frameworks. Buffalo offal was eaten as soon as the animal was killed, or else the flesh could be dried to make jerky and pemmican. The stomach of the animal could be used as a cooking container by stretching it between four sticks, suspended over a fire. The buffalo actually has two stomachs; the contents of the first were used as a remedy for skin ailments and also frostbite.

Hunting the buffalo must have been a feat of endurance, agility, and strength; the buffalo, despite its lumbering appearance, is in fact built for speed, and can run up to 37 mph, is able to leap vertically to a height of 6 feet, and is infamously bad-tempered. Prior to the coming of the horse, buffalo were “captured” by being herded into narrow “chutes” made of brushwood and rocks; they were then stampeded over clifftops in areas called “buffalo jumps.” It would take large groups of people to herd the animals, often over several miles, until the stampede was big enough and fast enough to run head-first over the precipice. Such a method of killing meant that there was usually a massive surplus of meat, materials, bones, etc.

Another method would see the hunters form a large circle around a herd and, at the last minute, rush in and slay the animals with their spears and arrows. Arrows were marked to show which hunters had shot home, and the animal would be divided up accordingly, the hide reserved for the man who was deemed to have caused the fatal shot. Later, guns were used. When horses became available for hunting, there tended to be less waste than with the stampede method.

The buffalo was also hunted ceremonially, with strict observances, during the months of June to August. Buffalo were never hunted by a lone hunter, but always in a party.

The Native Americans believed that the buffalo had divine status, and describe the coming of the animal in the legend of the White Buffalo Calf Woman. They believed that the gods had created the animal as a special gift to them, and the head and horns were used in rituals and ceremonies. The buffalo, it was believed, had taught the first shaman or medicine man his skills in herbalism.

To understand exactly what status the buffalo held in tribal society is also to understand the effect that its wanton slaying by the white settlers had on the Native American psyche. During the 19th century, the white Europeans hunted the animal almost to extinction; the tongue of the buffalo, for example, was considered a rare delicacy, so the animal would be slaughtered, its tongue cut out and the rest of the carcass left behind. The animal was also hunted for its skin alone, the skinned animal left to rot on the ground. We can only imagine the outrage that the Native Americans would have felt when they saw their sacred animal being treated in this way. The U.S. Army and Government gave its blessing to the wide-scale slaughter of the herds; it would not be disingenuous to suggest that this was in part intended to weaken the Native peoples. If there were no buffalo, then they had to move or face the risk of starvation and death. The coming of the railroad, too, meant that vast herds of animals had to be cleared from the land, since they would sometimes stray onto the tracks, damaging trains that could not stop in time. And an extended period of drought between 1845 and 1860 further decimated the buffalo population.

Professional market hunters—including Buffalo Bill Cody—could slaughter hundreds of animals in one session; such hunting enterprises were a major operation and employed large teams of people, including cooks, butchers, skinners, gunsmen, and even men whose task it was to retrieve the bullets from the carcasses of the dead buffalo. From 1873 to 1883 it’s estimated that there could have been over 1,000 such commercial buffalo-hunting operations, with the capability to slaughter up to 100,000 creatures per day depending on the time of year. Skulls of slain buffalo, documented in photographs taken at the time, show a horrendous sight: those skulls were piled in huge mounds that would stand higher than a modern three-story house.

Once it became apparent that the buffalo could not sustain the barrage of slaughter at such an epic scale, there were murmurs of proposals to preserve them. Buffalo Bill Cody’s was among these voices. However, the objective to rid the Plains of the Indians took top priority: this aim was underlined by President Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1874 vetoed a Federal bill that would have protected the animal. A year later General Philip Sheridan pleaded the case for the continued slaughter of the buffalo, so as to deprive the indigenous peoples of America of one of their major resources. Nine years later, the buffalo was almost extinct. The animal that was most fundamentally important to the Native American way of life had gone, taking that way of life with it. Things would never be the same again.