Читать книгу Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West - Michael Punke, Michael Punke - Страница 12

Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.

—GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, July 1872

I had always had a settled dislike for the business,” was George Bird Grinnell’s understated summary of his time at his father’s firm, Geo. B. Grinnell and Company.¹ After the adventure and excitement of five months in the wild and wooly West, Grinnell settled in, as best he could, to his new life as a Wall Street broker. With his father as tutor, he learned the basics of buying and selling stocks. There were also more complicated lessons, including the high-stakes transactions of purchasing stocks—especially railroad stocks—“on a margin.” The risks of such deals would later become painfully apparent. But in the exuberance of the early 1870s, Grinnell remembered that there was no thought but that prices “would go much higher.”²

Grinnell, eager to please his parents, kept his nose to the grindstone during the long and tedious days at the brokerage house. His escape came in the evenings, when he retreated to Audubon Park, there to pursue his love for the outdoors through various vicarious activities. One outlet was a continuing relationship with Professor O.C. Marsh. Marsh had asked Grinnell to keep his eye out for the fossils and osteological materials that were “constantly coming into the menageries and taxidermists’ shops in New York.” When Grinnell found interesting pieces, he secured them for Marsh. Grinnell also took up a hobby popular among hunters and anglers of the day, taxidermy, with birds as his particular focus. Most nights, Grinnell wrote, he would spend “two or three hours of the evening down in the cellar, where I had an excellent outfit for mounting birds.”³

None of these activities, though, sufficed to fill the void he felt for true adventure. “In the summer of 1872 I was anxious again to go out West.” In particular, Grinnell wanted to undertake the quintessential western activity of the day—the buffalo hunt. “[T]hese hunts of the Indians [had] been described to me with a graphic eloquence that filled me with enthusiasm as I listened to the recital, and I had determined that if ever the opportunity offered I would take part in one.” With the assistance of Major Frank North (who had guided the Marsh expedition up the Loup River), Grinnell arranged for a hunt, and not just any hunt. Grinnell, guided by Frank North’s younger brother, Luther “Lute” North, would accompany an entire tribe of Pawnee Indians on their annual foray in the wild Republican River Valley of western Kansas.⁴

THE BUFFALO THAT GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, AT AGE 22, SOUGHT TO kill, had been a fixture on the Great Plains of North American for thousands of generations.

Ancestors of the modern buffalo walked across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia sometime between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago. One of these ancestors, Bison latifrons, was 20 percent larger than a modern buffalo and carried an intimidating rack of horns spreading seven feet. Bison latifrons shared the Great Plains with a number of the animals whose fossils Grinnell had dug up during the Marsh expedition, including miniature horses, mammoths, camels, and mastodons. These grazing animals were hunted by fierce predators, now extinct, including several species of saber-toothed tigers and the dire wolf, a larger version of its modern descendant.⁵

It is not clear exactly when humans first appeared on the Great Plains, though we do know that by at least 12,000 years ago, human hunters were among the predators stalking bison. We also know that around the same time, most of the large mammals of the plains became extinct. It is unknown whether they died because of human hunters, the climate change that followed the last ice age, or some combination of the two. Whatever the cause, a few resilient survivors were able to adapt to their rapidly changing world. One was mankind. Another was the modern wolf. Another was a new species of bison that zoologists would one day name Bison bison—the modern buffalo. Bison bison had at least one advantage that helped it survive against primitive human hunters. More ancient species of buffalo, with their gigantic horns, defended themselves by standing and fighting. Armed with a long spear, a hunter could defeat this strategy. Bison bison had a different defense, one more difficult for man to overcome. Instead of fighting, Bison bison ran away.⁶

The modern buffalo, winner of a brutal contest that wiped out hundreds of other species, is a survivor of stunning physical attributes. Though its ultimate defense is to run away, the buffalo projects a physical presence that is intimidating to most predators. Bulls can weigh more than a ton, with thickly furred heads and leg pantaloons that make them look larger still. Both male and female buffalo have hooked horns, far smaller than those of their ancient ancestors but still plenty potent. With powerful neck muscles to support their massive heads, a buffalo can throw a wolf thirty feet. In breeding season, a male buffalo can kill a rival with one goring stab of his horns. Indeed about 5 percent of mature bulls die each year from wounds they receive in battle with their peers.⁷

Having survived both the Ice Age and its aftermath, buffalo can thrive in a remarkable range of climates, from 110 degrees Fahrenheit on the deserts of Mexico (or Nebraska) to –50 degrees Fahrenheit on the windswept plains of Canada. A buffalo’s thick coat has ten times more hairs per square inch than the hide of a domestic cow. Yet in the summer, the buffalo sheds down to a thin coat as sleek as a lamb, newly shorn for the county fair.⁸

The buffalo and its relatives (including deer, elk, antelope, and the domestic cow) are ruminants, with digestive systems well attuned to subsist on the grasses of the Great Plains. Humans can’t eat grass because we can’t digest cellulose. Buffalo can because the first chamber of their alimentary canal—the rumen—is a sort of vat in which colonies of bacteria help to break down cellulose into usable carbohydrates. To further promote the process, ruminants chew their food twice: once before swallowing and a second time after fist-sized portions—the cud—are regurgitated and then chewed again.⁹

The buffalo’s gigantic head serves a purpose beyond intimidation. In the winter, it becomes a powerful plow to push snow away from buried grass. Cattle, by contrast, have no such ability to dig for food. If not fed by ranchers during an extended period of heavy snow, cattle die.

Buffalo reproduce in prodigious numbers, at least by comparison with other large mammals. Buffalo cows drop their first calf at age 3, and in domesticated herds they have been bred beyond age 30. If a herd is well nourished, 85 to 90 percent of mature cows become pregnant and give birth each year. Farmers of modern dairy cattle, by contrast, using high-tech, artificial insemination, might achieve a birth rate of only 50 percent.¹⁰

Buffalo calves are born ready to run. Within two minutes of birth, a buffalo calf tries to raise itself. Within seven minutes, it is standing. Within an hour, a buffalo calf can run after the herd.¹¹ In a domesticated herd, a newborn calf was once herded sixty-six miles, through deep snow, in its first two days of life, with no apparent ill effects.¹² Such early skill and endurance is vital, since running—and the herd itself—are a buffalo’s primary defenses.

Despite the buffalo’s plodding, cumbersome appearance, it is shockingly fast and agile. An adult buffalo is as fleet as some racehorses in the quarter mile, but unlike a horse, a frightened buffalo can run across the prairie for miles without stopping. A nineteenth-century scientific expedition once required a relay of three fresh horses to run down a buffalo cow, covering twenty-five miles in the chase. As for agility, a biologist at the National Bison Range in Montana once observed a 2,000-pound bull leap up a six-foot embankment from a standing start!¹³

The buffalo’s skill at running away is enhanced by the collective power of the herd to tell it when to run away. The phrase “herd mentality” may carry a pejorative connotation for humans, but not so the buffalo: Hundreds (or thousands) of pairs of eyes, scanning the broad horizon. Hundreds of noses, sniffing for foreign scent. And then, at the first sign of danger, a powerful instinct to follow after the fleet, fleeing mass. When pursued, the herd protects its members through sheer numbers. A buffalo doesn’t need to be faster than predators; it just needs to be faster than a few of the other buffalo.

Against the buffalo herd, even a predator as effective as the wolf represents little risk except to the young, the old, and the injured or sick.¹⁴ Healthy adult buffalo (not including cows with calves) pay little attention to wolves. Indeed Indian hunters sometimes cloaked themselves in wolf skins in order to crawl within easy shooting distance. The power of the herd (especially its size) even insulated the buffalo against its most effective predator—humans.

The question of how many buffalo walked the North American continent before the arrival of Europeans is a source of considerable disagreement. Sixty million has been a common number cited, and some estimates are as high as 100 million. The late Dale Lott, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, and a leading expert on the buffalo, studied these higher numbers and made a persuasive case as to why the number of 30 million—though still an educated guess—is the better estimate based on the continent’s carrying capacity.¹⁵ Still, 30 million is an enormous number.

Equally impressive is the range that these buffalo covered. The fact that buffalo inhabited the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada is commonly known. Less well known is the fact that at the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, some 2 million to 4 million buffalo lived east of the Mississippi—in every future state but the northeast cluster of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.¹⁶

The buffalo, in short, was a remarkable survivor. It had prevailed through prehistoric episodes that forced hundreds of other mammals into extinction. It thrived in climates ranging from subtropic Mexico to subarctic Canada. It could defend itself against the relentless attacks of the most deadly predators in its environment, including packs of wolves and prehistoric humans. The buffalo, it seemed, was perfect.

BY JULY OF 1872, GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL AND THREE COMPANIONS were crossing into northern Kansas on horseback, hurrying to catch up with a tribe of 4,000 Pawnee Indians. Relations between whites and Pawnees were peaceful, in part because the Pawnee ceded their traditional Kansas and Nebraska lands early. The Pawnee were enemies of the Sioux and the Cheyenne and often served as guides to U.S. Army soldiers during the wars with those tribes.¹⁷

In 1872, the Pawnee were confined to a small reservation along Nebraska’s Loup River. Twice a year, though, the army allowed the tribe to travel south to hunt buffalo in their historic Kansas hunting grounds. “[F]or a little while,” wrote Grinnell, “they returned to the old free life of earlier years, when the land had been all their own, and they had wandered at will over the broad expanse of the rolling prairie.”¹⁸ The tribe left the reservation two weeks before Grinnell arrived in Nebraska, so now Grinnell and his companions hurried to catch up. Their guide was Lute North, who, like his brother, was an experienced young army officer. Lute spoke fluent Pawnee and was known and respected by the tribe.

After a few days they overtook the Pawnee, cresting a butte to find 200 lodges, an entire village, spread across the prairie. The head chief, Peta-la-shar, received them warmly, referring to Lute as “my son.” Peta-la-shar reported that the hunt, so far, had not been successful. “But tomorrow,” he promised, “a grand surround will be made.” His young scouts had reported a large herd about twenty miles to the south.¹⁹

THE OLDEST CONFIRMED WEAPON FOUND IN NORTH AMERICA—A STONE spearhead—was discovered by archaeologists near Folsom, New Mexico, in 1927. Stone cannot be carbon-dated, but the material with which the famous “Folsom point” was discovered could be. The point was imbedded in bone—a 10,000-year-old bone of Bison antiquus, an extinct ancestor of the modern buffalo.²⁰ Humans have been hunting buffalo for a long time. Indeed, in twenty-seven of thirty-five key North American archaeological sites revealing the story of early North American human activity, buffalo bones outnumber those of any other animal.²¹

By 9,000 years ago, Folsom Man was using many of the same strategies and techniques that American Indians would later use when hunting buffalo on foot. The foundation of these strategies was an intimate understanding of buffalo behavior. Humans could not outrun the buffalo, but they could turn the defenses of the herd against itself.²²

Many hunting strategies involved sophisticated team efforts to move the herd to a killing zone. This did not, as a general matter, mean frightening the herd into a full-fledged stampede—at least not at first. Hunters, for example, might use the smell of distant smoke to steer the herd. Sometimes a skillful hunter draped in a buffalo skin could decoy a herd, actually leading it in the chosen direction. Once moving, a herd could sometimes be steered into giant V’s formed by stacked stones, mounds of dung, or, in winter, by a line marked in the snow.²³

Ancient humans, and later Indians on foot, used different types of killing zones. The most famous is the buffalo jump, or pishkun. Meriwether Lewis described the critical moment: “The disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently nigh the buffaloe to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speede to the precipice … the (Indian) decoy in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranney or crevice of the clift.”²⁴ The buffalo, pushed by their own frantic mass, tumbled to their deaths. At one Colorado site, 193 buffalo were killed in a single hunt that took place 8,500 years ago. In Montana alone, there are more than 300 pishkun sites. Along a one-mile stretch at one of them, Ulm Pishkun, the buffalo bones are thirteen feet deep.

Hunters on foot also killed buffalo by driving them into box canyons or giant corrals. In the winter, hunters wearing snowshoes ran down buffalo as they floundered in deep snow. Other herds were steered onto ice, where their hooved feet could find no traction.

At some point, probably around 1,500 years ago, Plains Indians began to use the bow and arrow. This development increased the range at which buffalo could be killed but not the basic hunting techniques. As a general matter, at the time Europeans arrived in North America, Plains Indians were hunting the buffalo in ways that differed little from earlier humans, thousands of years before them. In the seventeenth century, a French fur trader named Pierre Esprit Radisson was impressed by the ability of the Sioux Indians—then inhabitants of Minnesota—to hunt the buffalo on foot.²⁵

The horse changed everything.

The prototypical image of the Plains Indian is the mounted hunter-warrior, and indeed, Plains Indians were among the greatest horsemen in history. But the history of Plains Indians on horseback is surprisingly short. It was not until the 1600s that Indians of the Southern Plains first acquired horses—from Spanish remudas brought up through Mexico. And it was not until the 1700s that horses were in widespread use by Indians of the Northern Plains.²⁶

The horse, in a literal way, expanded the horizon of the Native Americans. A tribe on foot might travel five or six miles in a day. A mounted tribe could easily cover twenty. Increased mobility made it easier to follow the buffalo herd and gave Indians more choice about where to live. When the tribe needed to move, the horse’s ability to carry more weight also meant that more food could be preserved and transported, which in turn decreased the risk of starvation in the winter.

There were downsides to this increased mobility. More traveling meant more trespassing, and Indians fought other Indians more frequently as they defended their traditional territory. The advent of the horse also increased the dependence of Indians on the buffalo. With the ability to follow the herd and the vast food supply it represented, there was little incentive to farm—or even to hunt other types of game. Some tribes, such as the Cheyenne and the Crow, abandoned farming when they came into possession of the horse. Increased dependence on the buffalo, of course, increased the risk of starvation if the buffalo should become scarce.²⁷

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

The entire 4,000-member tribe embarked in an early morning mist, having broken camp and loaded their horses in a matter of minutes. Grinnell described the grand procession, led by “eight men, each carrying a long pole wrapped round with red and blue cloth and fantastically ornamented with feathers, which fluttered in the breeze as they were borne along.” These were “buffalo sticks,” treated with reverence by the tribe because “the success of the hunt was supposed to depend largely upon the respect shown to them.” Behind the buffalo sticks rode thirty or forty of the tribe’s most important men, “mounted on superb ponies.” Grinnell was given the honor of riding in this lead group, much of the time next to Chief Peta-la-shar. Finally came the great mass of women, children, and men of lower station.²⁸

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

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

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

The scene that we now beheld was such as might have been witnessed here a hundred years ago. It is one that can never be seen again. Here were eight hundred warriors, stark naked, and mounted on naked animals. A strip of rawhide, or a lariat, knotted about the lower jaw, was all their horses’ furniture. Among all these men there was not a gun nor a pistol, nor any indication that they had ever met with the white men … Their bows and arrows they held in their hands. Armed with these ancestral weapons, they had become once more the simple children of the plains, about to slay the wild cattle that Ti-rá wa had given them for food. Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.²⁹

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

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

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

Finally only a single ridgeline separated the mass of hunters from the mass of their prey. “The place,” remembered Grinnell, “could not have been more favorable for a surround had it been chosen for the purpose.” The terrain before them consisted of an open plain, two miles wide, surrounded by high bluffs. “At least a thousand buffalo were lying down in the midst of this amphitheater.”³⁰

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

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

“Like an arrow from a bow each horse darted forward,” remembered Grinnell. “Now all restraint was removed, and each man might do his best.” Grinnell, who had only one horse, soon fell behind the Indians on fresh mounts. Great clouds of dust quickly filled the air, along with flying pebbles and clods kicked up by fleeing hooves. As he galloped forward, Grinnell could just make out the fastest riders, disappearing into the herd. Soon he could no longer see the ground, relying completely on his horse to navigate the field, aware that falling could mean death. Halfway across the valley, Grinnell realized that some buffalo were now coming back—directly at him. The herd had been turned.³¹

“I soon found myself in the midst of a throng of buffalo, horses and Indians.” Grinnell began shooting, “and to some purpose.”³² Two-thousand-pound animals tumbled and skidded to the earth around him. Shooting from a galloping horse required a skilled mount, steady hands, and even steadier nerve. Riders attempted to come alongside a coursing buffalo, then aimed behind the shoulder. It was difficult and dangerous. Overzealous gunners sometimes shot each other. George Armstrong Custer, likely hunting buffalo with a pistol, once misfired during a chase and blew out the brains of his horse.

A George Catlin image of a traditional Indian buffalo hunt.

Courtesy of the Amom Car ter Museum.

Indians usually hunted buffalo with bow and arrow. The bow was far superior in a mounted chase to a single-shot muzzle-loader, and as for repeating rifles, few Indians owned them. A skilled Indian archer could not only place his shot accurately but could do so with remarkable force: Arrows sometimes protruded out the opposite side of the buffalo and occasionally passed all the way through. A Sioux warrior named Two-Lance was once observed to shoot an arrow completely through the enormous body of a running bull. Grinnell watched the Pawnee fire “arrow after arrow in quick succession, ere long bring down the huge beasts and then turn and ride off after another.”³³

Grinnell noted how the well-trained Pawnee horses could bring their riders alongside a buffalo with no guidance whatsoever, “yet watch constantly for any indication of an intention to charge and wheel off.”³⁴ On the return trip of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Sergeant Nathaniel Hale Pryor found it difficult to herd well-trained Indian ponies, because at every sighting of buffalo the ponies would dash off in pursuit, “surround[ing] the buffalo herd with almost as much skill as their riders could have done.” In frustration, Sergeant Pryor finally resorted to sending one rider ahead of the main party to drive away all buffalo before the arrival of their horses.³⁵

Grinnell’s own mount, as he learned the hard way, was untrained in the hunting of buffalo. One of Grinnell’s shots was off its mark, striking a cow without bringing her down. The cow spun around to make a “quick and savage charge.” Grinnell’s pony reacted slowly, and “his deliberation in the matter of dodging caused me an anxious second or two.” The horse just missed being gored by a swipe of the cow’s horn.³⁶

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

PLAINS INDIANS WERE BORN ON A BUFFALO ROBE AND WRAPPED IN A buffalo robe when they died. In between, the buffalo was the foundation of both their economy and their culture. Before the arrival of whites, buffalo provided for virtually every need.³⁷

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

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

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

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

THAT NIGHT AT THE CAMP, GRINNELL AND HIS COMPANIONS JOINED the Pawnees’ feasting and celebration of the successful hunt. For his part, Grinnell could now say that he, like his wilderness heroes, had felled the mighty bison. Yet his mood was pensive. “And so the evening wears away, passed by our little party in the curious contemplation of a phase of life that is becoming more and more rare as the years roll by.”³⁸

The following year, the Pawnee returned to Kansas for their semiannual hunt. They were attacked by the Sioux. One hundred and fifty-six Pawnee were killed, including a large number of women and children. The Pawnee would never hunt buffalo again.³⁹

In the same year, 1873, Grinnell published an article about his buffalo hunt in a sporting journal called Forest and Stream. The article included a grim warning about the buffalo: “[T]heir days are numbered, and unless some action on this subject is speedily taken not only by the States and Territories, but by the National Government, these shaggy brown beasts, these cattle upon a thousand hills, will ere long be among the things of the past.”⁴⁰

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