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 14

Often while hunting these animals as a business, I fully realized the cruelty of slaying the poor creatures. Many times did I “swear off,” and fully determine I would break my gun over a wagon-wheel when I arrived at camp … The next morning I would hear the guns of other hunters booming in all directions and would make up my mind that even if I did not kill any more, the buffalo would soon all be slain just the same …

—CHARLES “BUFFALO” JONES¹

In the fall of 1870, a 19-year-old Vermonter named J. Wright Mooar left his home, or as he put it, “turned my face west.” He traveled to Fort Hays, Kansas, and took a job cutting wood for the army. By 1871, Mooar was working as a hunter, shooting buffalo to supply meat for the fort. In the winter of 1871–1872, a local fur trader spread the word of an intriguing proposition from Europe: An English company wanted 500 buffalo hides in order to experiment in the making of leather. Mooar signed on as one of the hunters and helped to supply the hides.

After filling his share of the English order, J. Wright found himself with fifty-seven surplus skins. He arranged to send them to his brother John in New York City, telling him of the English experiment and urging him to find a New England tanner with similar interest. The hides were transported through the streets of New York City on an open wagon, and J. Wright described how “the novelty of the sight created a diversion that amounted to a mild sensation.” Before the hides had even been delivered to John, several fur dealers were in tow. “[T]hose 57 hides were sold to the tanners, made up into leather, and the experiment proved immediately successful.”

For tanners, the timing could not have been more opportune. The industrial revolution of post–Civil War America had resulted in an explosion in the manufacturing of all manner of heavy machinery, and the belts that turned the wheels of those whirring machines were made from leather. With the discovery of new processing techniques, buffalo leather could now—for the first time—be used for the same purposes as cow leather. Demand exploded.

As J. Wright Mooar remembered, “even before the English firm had reported its success in the treatment of the buffalo hides … I was apprised of the fact that the American tanners were ready to open negotiations for all the buffalo hides I could deliver.” Mooar’s brother and cousin quit their New York City jobs and headed west to join him in this promising new venture.²

The last levy had been breached.

THE HUNTERS WHO CAME TO KANSAS IN THE EARLY 1870S, LIKE J. WRIGHT and John Mooar, were young men seeking money and adventure. Many were Civil War veterans who found civilian life too dull for their liking. A hunter named Frank Mayer, barely a teenager during the war, had served as a bugle boy in the Confederate Army of his native Louisiana. “Fortunately for us then we had what you don’t have now,” remembered Mayer in his memoirs. (He died in 1954 at the age of 104.) “We had a frontier to conquer. It was a very good substitute for war.”³

Blunt and concise, Mayer explained the logic that compelled him to chase buffalo: “He had a hide. The hide was worth money. I was young, 22. I could shoot. I liked to hunt. I needed adventure. Here it was. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing if you had been in my place?”⁴ Certainly thousands of Mayer’s contemporaries did.

Mayer was lucky enough to learn the ropes from Bob McRae and Alex Vimy, two experienced frontiersmen he met in Dodge City. McRae’s frontier credentials included punching cows and dealing faro. According to Mayer, “He ran away from a nagging wife to the quietude of the buffalo ranges.” Alex Vimy was a “French-Indian breed” who was the “best knife and tomahawk thrower in the whole southwest.” Vimy was also on the lam, having “knifed a lumberjack in a squabble over a girl.” There had been other knife fights too. In his pocket, as a good-luck charm, Vimy carried the ear of another former rival. Mayer claimed that McRae and Vimy were typical of the buffalo hunters he knew. If so, it’s not hard to understand why he called them the “saltiest goddamn men on the Western frontier.”⁵

Their past lives may have qualified them as “salty,” but one experience few could claim, circa 1872, was professional buffalo hunting. Aside from a few grizzled veterans of the Missouri fur trade, virtually no one had ever made his living from selling hides.

So they learned their trade as they went along. Because shooting from the ground was regarded as lowbrow, some early hunters attempted to harvest buffalo from horseback. As Buffalo Bill demonstrated, the mounted chase made for great spectacle—but as a business model it was a bust. The mounted hunter scattered the herd and left dead buffalo along a trail that could stretch for miles. Gathering up the hides of these far-flung victims was inefficient. By the time a skinning wagon had been dragged from carcass to carcass, no profit remained.⁶ Still, so powerful was the romantic image of running buffalo that hunters insisted on calling themselves “buffalo runners,” despite the fact that they hunted on foot. “Why a runner?” asked Frank Mayer when he first arrived in Kansas. “We don’t run buffalo the way you kill them.” His partner’s reply: “Must be because we have to do a hell of a lot of running across the plains to find them.”⁷

A few early hunters experimented with variants of the old Indian-style surround, but that didn’t suit their purposes, either. An effective surround required an army of men, diluting the proceeds in the process.⁸

Many early buffalo hunters settled on a system known derisively as “tail hunting.” In tail hunting, a few men would creep up on the herd afoot, fire off as many shots as they could, run after the fleeing tails, and squeeze off a couple more rounds. “This system was afterwards dubbed ‘tenderfoot’ hunting,” remembered a runner named Skelton Glenn, “and did not often pay expenses for either hunter or skinner.”⁹

Frank Mayer described the frustrations of all the novice buffalo hunters when he said, “I was a businessman. And I had to learn a businessman’s way of harvesting the buffalo crop.”

What they lacked in success, they compensated in that great common denominator of all who sought their fortunes in the West—hope. As Frank Mayer put it, “always was that dream that next season, I’d recoup my losses, and make that fickle jade Fortune stand and deliver what I had coming to me.” Mayer expected that he might kill a hundred buffalo a day at $3 per hide. After netting out expenses, he anticipated profits of $6,000 a month, or as he calculated, three times the salary of the president of the United States.¹⁰ A few men did get rich selling hides, but Fortune never did deliver for Mayer. According to his careful records, he netted $3,124 in his best year—a substantial sum (though substantially less than the president’s salary). After nine years on the buffalo plains, Mayer had $5,000 in the bank. In his experience, a typical hunter was lucky to clear $1,000 year, roughly equivalent to the wage of an underground miner.¹¹

Hope, though, was a powerful magnet. It is impossible to know the precise number of hunters who swarmed the Kansas plains in 1872, but to Frank Mayer it seemed that “[t]he whole Western country went buffalo-wild.” One estimate puts the figure between 10,000 and 20,000.¹² Whatever the true total, one thing is certain: It would soon grow much larger. In the East, financial calamity was about to rock the lives of many young men, among them George Bird Grinnell.

THE FRENETIC, PHYSICAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE RAILROADS IN THE decade before 1873 was supported by equally frenetic activity in America’s financial markets. Railroads were the growth industry of their day, with rampant, can’t-miss speculation in hundreds of companies.

The investment firm owned by George Bird Grinnell’s father (Geo. B. Grinnell and Company, where 24-year-old Grinnell continued to grind out his days) was typical of its time. In other words, its clients were heavily invested in railroad stocks. Many of these clients traded on the margin, meaning that they purchased their stocks with money they borrowed from Geo. B. Grinnell and Company. For Grinnell’s father, the risk of extending such loans was tempered by the vast resources of his partner, Horace F. Clark. Clark was the son-in-law of the firm’s biggest client, Cornelius Vanderbilt. “So long as Mr. Clark was living,” remembered young Grinnell, “any additional margin required was always forthcoming.”¹³

In the spring of 1873, Clark died. In the fall of 1873, the mighty investment firm of Jay Cooke & Company, principal financial agent in the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, declared bankruptcy. Panic—the Panic of 1873—ensued. In an economic depression that would stretch for six years, thousands of businesses failed and the unemployment rate soared to 14 percent.¹⁴

At the firm of Geo. B. Grinnell and Company,¹⁵ Grinnell’s father sought desperately to collect on the money he had lent to his clients. It was not forthcoming, in part because Cornelius Vanderbilt—who, as Grinnell noted, “might have helped”—bore a grudge against one of the other partners in the firm. Geo. B. Grinnell and Company failed, spending the next several months in contentious bankruptcy proceedings. In his memoirs, Grinnell would remember that the “winter was one of great suffering for the family.”¹⁶

To his credit, Grinnell’s father ultimately succeeded in recovering a portion of the funds owed him. In an action unique at the time, he also repaid his own debts in full and managed to leave the firm with “a little capital remaining.” Exhausted, he retired to Audubon Park, leaving the business to his son.¹⁷

For young Grinnell, though, the whole affair had only underscored his “settled dislike for the business.” After his father retired, “there was nothing to hold me to Wall Street.” He shuttered the company and moved to New Haven, there to resume his Yale studies under Professor Othniel Marsh.¹⁸

Grinnell was not the only young American to seek out a new career amid the turmoil of the Panic of 1873. Thousands of young men with less means would head west to hunt buffalo. “They were walking gold pieces,” said Frank Mayer, “and a young fellow who had guts and gumption could make his fortune.”¹⁹

BY 1873, THE BUFFALO HUNTERS ON KANSAS’S BROAD PLAINS WERE refining their craft. As time passed, the haphazard gave way to the methodical. In the space of a few short months, the men of Kansas had created an organized industry: commercial hunting for the hides of buffalo.

The basic work unit of the market hunters evolved into “outfits” that typically consisted of one or two riflemen, a couple of skinners for each shooter, and one or two men to cook and keep camp.²⁰

Their equipment, though simple, was expensive. As Frank Mayer explained, “over 10,000 men were bidding against one another for the necessities of the life they had chosen.” Mayer spent his life savings, $2,000, on two wagons, eighteen mules, rifles, ammunition, bedrolls, tents, and cooking utensils. The high cost didn’t worry him, though. “I’d make it up the first month, I kept telling myself, the very first month.”²¹

All self-respecting hunters made their own ammunition. Factory-loaded cartridges were expensive—25 cents a round versus half that price for hand-loaded. The runners anticipated shooting a lot, provisioning themselves with a veritable armory’s worth of supplies. John Cloud Jacobs, who chased buffalo in Texas, began the season with a ton of ammo, literally: “sixteen hundred pounds of lead, and four hundred pounds of powder—beside shells, paper caps, etc.” Jacobs described how the bullets he molded were inspected for the “least bit of flaw.” If imperfect, the offending ball was “put back in the heat.” Frank Mayer mixed one part tin to sixteen parts lead, which he said gave his bullets “just enough hardness to penetrate and enough lead softness to mushroom.”

Men who shot guns for a living could discriminate the subtleties between different varieties of gunpowder. Mayer, for example, disliked the leading American brands, DuPont and Hazard, which he believed left a residue that was particularly difficult to clean. When it was available, he paid premium prices for imported powder from England. Paying extra, in the view of most buffalo runners, was a superior option to the alternative. “It frequently happened that a man’s life depended on a cartridge that neither snapped nor flickered.”²²

The expense of ammunition and the toil of producing it underscored the importance of efficient shooting. As Frank Mayer explained, “the thing we had to have, we business men with rifles, was one-shot kills.” Yet the one piece of equipment that early buffalo hunters lacked was the right gun for the job.

Rifle technology had catapulted forward during the Civil War. Advances included breech loading, metal cartridges, repeaters, and telescopic sights. The fine weapons widely available in the early 1870s included such storied rifles as Henrys, Spencers, and Winchesters. But what these guns could not do—at least not with the mass-production consistency demanded by runners—was kill buffalo at long range with a single shot.

John Mooar, who along with his brother J. Wright had midwifed the industry of commercial hunting, can also be found in the lineage of the gun that would propel the industry to its zenith. In the earliest days of the Kansas hide hunt, Mooar wrote a letter to the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Sharps rifles were highly respected, but Mooar asked for a version built specifically for the exigencies of hunting buffalo on the plains.²³

The Sharps Company was quick to oblige, and its Sharps buffalo rifle was the answer to the prayers of the Mooar brothers and their fellow hunters. Indeed the men who carried the Sharps exalted it in reverent terms. Confronting a ferocious bull, hunter John Cloud Jacobs remembered “praying to the hunting god—Mr. Sharps.” Frank Mayer declared that “if my life depended on one shot from one rifle and I could take my choice, I’d rather have my old ‘Sharps Buff’ in my hands than any other gun.”²⁴

The early Sharps buffalo rifle was a true heavyweight, with models ranging from twelve to sixteen pounds. The bulk of this weight resided in a thick, octagonal barrel that could absorb the explosion of a 100-grain charge of black powder while spitting forth a 473-grain bullet. Though Sharps rifles were available in a range of calibers, the “Big 50” was the most famous. In 1874, Sharps issued a new buffalo gun, the “Sharps Old Reliable.” It weighed sixteen pounds and fired a 550-grain slug using a 120-grain charge of powder. Frank Mayer called it the “rifle to end all rifles … and I knew when I read about it the first time, my life would be blighted until I owned one.”

The blight on Mayer’s life was short-lived. In 1875, he bought the new Sharps for $237.60, an amount he deemed a “small fortune.” Hunter John Cook managed to purchase a Sharps, almost new, at the unheard of price of $36, including a reloading outfit, a bandoleer, and 150 cartridges. Cook explained that his good fortune came about because the man who sold him the rifle was getting out of the business, “having met with the misfortune of shooting himself seriously, but not fatally, in the right side with the same gun.”²⁵

Whatever they paid for their Sharps, the men who bought them thought it a bargain. When Mayer hit a buffalo with his Old Reliable, “I didn’t have to inquire whether he was down for good.” The Sharps’s knockdown power was also delivered with remarkable accuracy, an attribute that could be enhanced with the purchase of added features such as telescopic sights and hair-triggers. With a German-made, twenty-power scope, Mayer claimed (credibly) to have killed 269 buffalo with 300 cartridges at a range of 300 yards.²⁶

So legendary was the range and power of the Sharps that the Indians called it the gun that “shoots today, kills tomorrow.” One of the greatest Indian defeats in Texas history came as a direct result of their underestimating the potency of the Sharps. In 1874, responding to the invasion of their land by buffalo hunters, a combined force of some 700 Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho warriors attacked a crude outpost known as Adobe Walls. Only 29 whites occupied the post. Many of them, though, carried Sharps buffalo rifles. For three days the Indians laid siege, mounting charge after charge. Each time they were repulsed, the Sharps dealing out lethal force at great range. One Indian, reportedly, was shot from his horse at 1,500 yards.²⁷

THE SHARPS BUFFALO RIFLE, TOGETHER WITH THE RAILROAD, BROUGHT the industrial revolution to the Great Plains. The Sharps’s range, accuracy, and punch made it the perfect weapon for efficient, commercial slaughter—the mass production of hides.

In the early days of the hunt, one challenge the men did not face was finding their quarry. “It was easy enough to find the buffalo,” remembered John Cloud Jacobs. “We would go a mile or so from camp to begin the day’s hunt.” For Jacobs, the ideal group would number between twenty and seventy animals, preferably close to cover such as a coulee or the crest of a butte.²⁸

Before deciding on the direction from which to approach the herd, Jacobs checked the wind by dropping a few blades of grass. The buffalo relied on scent more than sight for protection, and hunters always approached from downwind. Still, at a distance of about 600 yards, Jacobs began to worry about the sentinels that each herd maintained. He stooped over, and “[s]o long as our course was straight, up to a distance of about 400 yards, they could not make out what we were.” At 400 yards, Jacobs dropped down and crawled, veering sideways only if forced by such obstacles as “a bunch of prickly pear or a stubborn, diamond-backed rattler that would not break ground.” Most hunters sought a position around 300 yards from their quarry; any closer and the shooting might cause a stampede. From 300 yards, though, a skillful runner might make a stand—state-of-the-art industrial hunting.²⁹

Gunning down a herd of buffalo without causing a stampede required good aim as well as keen insight to animal behavior. From a prone position on the plains floor, experienced runners took the time to study the herd, picking out the leaders and the sentinels. Ammunition was spread out for easy access, along with the second rifle and cleaning rods. Many hunters used shooting sticks, crossed pieces of wood on which they rested their gun barrel for a steady aim. Some achieved the same purpose with a stack of buffalo chips.

The Stand: A hunter finds the ideal condition for a stand in this painting, The Still Hunt, by James Henry Moser.

Courtesy of the Jefferson National Expansion Museum, National Park Service.

The runner’s first target was usually the old cow that typically led the herd. “Buffalo society was a matriarchy, and the cow was queen” was how Frank Mayer explained it. “Wherever she went, the others, including the big bulls who should have known better than follow a woman, went.” The basic strategy for the stand centered on this lead cow. “When she got into trouble, they didn’t know what to do. And our job as runners was to get her into trouble as soon as we could.”³⁰ Vic Smith, who killed a record 107 buffalo in a single stand,³¹ liked to put his first shot just in front of the lead cow’s hip. Other hunters shot the leader through the lungs. The goal, in any case, was the same—not to kill the lead animal but to wound it. Not only was a wounded leader immobilized but she also drew the confused attention of the remaining herd. “Then the rest was easy,” said Mayer.

Easy enough that an experienced hunter took his time, alternating rifles to keep the barrels from overheating, even cleaning his guns every five or six shots. Hunters differed in their preferred placement for the kill shots. Some aimed for the neck; others the heart. Runner John Cook put the sights of his Civil War Enfield on what he called the “regulation place,” defined as “anywhere inside of a circle as large as a cowboy’s hat, just back of the shoulderblade.”³²