SAGA OF THE BISON

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 21 February 1931, Page 9

SAGA OF THE BISON

VAST HERDS OF THE PAST

RIVER BLOCKED FOR DAYS SLAUGHTER DOOMED INDIANS George W. Rciglihard, 83 years old, of Dodge City, Kansas, is one of the few survivors of the great army of hide hunters who exterminated the last of the vast herds of buffalo that once roamed the Western plains. He still has in his home the guns with which he killed as many as 3000 buffalo in one month. In the following article he relates his amazing experiences. I hesitate to ted folks nowadays of the vast number of buffaloes I have seen drifting northward in the springtime on the plains of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Only about sixty years have come and gone since those prairies were alive with buffaloes, and many a fortune and many a substantial business and prosperous farm of to-day was founded fifty and sixty years ago upon the money that came from buffalo lades and buffalo bones

I came west in 1867, and for several years drove a Government team in the. reserve train for General Custer and the Till Cavalry, our route being from Fort Hays to Fort Dodge, on the Arkansas River, and on south to Fort Supply in Texas, and back again. This was through tno very heart of the buffalo country. On those long drives I was always deeply interested in watching the buffalo herds come in the springtime, following the northward moving sun and the upspringing grass.-

IN ONE HERD FOR 175 MILES On one of our trips in tile spring, from Fort Hays southward, we met the advancing herd at Pawnee, 50 miles south of Fort Hays, and from there, clear on to Fort Supply, 175 miles, we travelled through a continuous mass of buffaloes grazing slowly northward. Often we would be stopped by a group of a few hundred that was so compact, it blocked the wav and we would wait until it drifted past and a lane opened ahead of us.

It was impossible, of course, to count the buffaloes in a herd, for the average herd was spread over the earth far beyond the range of vision, and it was equally impossible to estimate the number of buffaloes upon the great western pasture at any one time. William T. Hornaday, of the Smithsonian* Institute, caine out here in the plains in an early day and made a study of the buffalo. • He said that of all quadrupeds that ever lived upon the earth no other species had marshalled such innumerable hosts as those of the American bison, or, as we always called it, the buffalo. Steamboats on the upper Missouri River were stopped, often for hours sometimes for days, by buffaloes swimming across in such densely gathered masses that the boat could not push in amongst them. I have ridden on trains on the Kansas Pacific railroad, west of Fort Hays, that were stopped for hours by buffaloes streaming across the track ahead. When that road was first built out across buffalo land) the engineers meeting herds like that, tried to force their trains through them, but not even a locomotive could open a way, and after several engines had been shunted off tho rails bv the bodies of buffaloes piling up beneath the wheels, the engineers abandoned the attempt to head off a moving buffalo' herd.

STAMPEDE OF HIDE HUNTERS Millions of buffaloes were in this broad pasture of the plains in the late ’6o’s when several circumstances, occurring at about the same tiriie, worked together to wipe them out within ten vears. The first was the invention of the breech-loading, long-range, heavy-cali-bre rifle, with which a man could creep to within 200 or 300 yards of the herd, Me hidden, and pump lead into it at the rate of two bullets a minute fen as long a time as the herd was within range. With these rapid-fire guns to do the butchering, only two other conditions were needed to seal the doom of the buffaloes; a market for the hides and a transportation system by !which those hides could go to the market. Curiously enough, both of those conditions were developed together, in the late ’6o’s, when it was found that the buffalo hide was better for machinery belting than cowhide. There also arose a great demand for buffalo robes all over the world, and coincident with that demand three railroads pushed their tracks oat into the, heart ot the buffalo country. - , , The stampede of hide hunters that poured into the buffalo range ova: those three railroads was never equalled by any other American migration excepting, maybe, tho rush of 'gold hunters to California in the late 40 V To become a buffalo hunter required only nerve and health enough to go out and rough it and shoot, and capital enough to buy a couple of guns. To become a buffalo skinner required no capital at all, only strength enough and a willingness to work. Good wages could be made at both callings. The hide of a buffalo shot, in' warm weather was unfit for a robe; the hair was too thin then. It was sent to be made into leather, and on the lexas prairie it brought from 50 to 60 cents for a cow hide, and up to 1 dollar, foi a. bull hide. Good robes came from buffaloes killed in cold weather, and brought from two to three dollars.

SCIENCE OF SLAUGHTER This influx of hunters soon mowed a swath through the centre of the herd, and exterminated all the buffaloes witniu 50 miles of the rail lines, and divided tho one great herd into two herds, one south of the Santa he lines, rangintr in Texas and New Mexico, and known thereafter as the ‘ southern herd ” and another, called the great northern herd,” north .of the ifmon Pacific tracks, mostly in the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming. . In 1872, when I wont down into the Texas Panhandle with a buffalo limitin'' outfit, it was estimated the southern herd numbered three million head. By that time buffalo hunting had been developed into an exact science. In the early ’7O s we did not think

we were exterminating tho herds. We thought the 3,000,000 buffaloes in the southern herd enough, with the natural increase to supply the market for a Kuuured years. And yet that vast buffalo herd had become almost extinct in lour years. By the spring of 187 b on.v nhoitt 10,0'?:) buffaloes remained, and they had fled from the huntert ,;..u v\t-io sutiteieu m sinaii bands on toward the Pecos country. The last of the southern herd, about 20D head, were killed off in 1867 by a party led by Lee noward. Buffaloes were so scarce then that Howard sold the bull heads for mounting for 50 dollars apiece, and robes for 20 dollars.

MORE THAN 31,000,000 BUFFALOES SLAIN Even then many of the hide hunters could not be convinced that the buffalo game was ended. They had followed Licet business for years, had seen buffaloes by Lie millions drifting on the plains, lucl believed there were so many they col !.! never be annihilated, and in the* fall ••■i 1883 many of them outfitted again ' 'LI teams and wagons and camp equipment and went out' into the wilds of Montana and Wyoming after buffaloes. They found none and lost the money they had invested. By that time a market had developed in Lie East for the millions of buffalo skeletons that lay out on the plains. They were made into phosphate fertiliser and into carbon used in the refining of sugar, and sold for seven dollars to 10 dollars a ton at the railroads. At first a man with a team could make big wages gathering and hauling the bones. I saw them so thick on the prairie west of Hays City that a wagon could be filled with all two horses could haul from less than an acre ot ground. I saw a pile of buffalo hones alongside the railroad track that was 10ft. high, 15 or 20ft wide, and a quarter'd a mile long. Coionel Henry Inman made an investigation of the buffalo bone business, gathered statistics of shipments of bones on the railroads, and announced that 31,000,000 buffalo skeletons were shipped out of Kansas alone. I doubt if you could find on all the prairies of Kansas to-day one buffalo bone or any vestige of a buffalo. I often hear it said that it was a wilful waste to butcher the buffalo as we did, but, while the buffalo ranged the plains the Indians could not he con-' trolled. The buffalo was his bread basket; he lived on it; it furnished him food and tepees and everything, he needed to live a wild life on the plains, and so long as the buffalo existed the Indian, was a savage warrior. > When wo killed off the buffalo, the Indian’s commissary was gone, he was starved into submission, went upon his reservation. I and the other thousands of buffalo hunters had no high-minded motives ni slaughtering the buffalo. Av e were after his hide and the money it would bring, but yet the buffalo hunter was the true pioneer who cleared the way for the steer and the cowboy the settlers with his plough, the church and school and civilisation on these plains. The country never could have been settled so long as the buffalo was here-to support the Indian.