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.
This evening, about 5 o’clock, I felled a mighty bison to the earth. I placed my foot upon his neck of strength and looked around, but in vain, for some witness of my first great “coup.” I thought myself larger than a dozen men.
—WILLIAM MARSHALL ANDERSON, 18341
In 1519, Hernando Cortez and a handful of Spanish legionnaires entered the great Aztec city of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), capital of the Aztec Empire as well as home of its emperor—Montezuma II. Montezuma’s city was an alien wonderland, including a menagerie of exotic animals given to the emperor as gifts or captured by his hunters. According to Spanish historian Antonio de Solis y Ribadeneyra, Cortez and his men saw “Lions, Tygers, Bears, and all others of the savage kind which New-Spain produced.” Of all Montezuma’s beasts, however, “the greatest Rarity was the Mexican Bull, a wonderful composition of divers Animals.” The animal “has crooked shoulders, with a Bunch on its back like a Camel; its Flanks dry, its Tail Large, and its Neck covered with Hair like a Lion. It is cloven footed, its Head armed like that of a Bull, which it resembles in Fierceness, with no less Strength and Agility.”2
The first Europeans to see the buffalo in its native habitat were part of another small band of Spaniards, including a man named Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. Shipwrecked in 1530 on the Gulf Coast of present-day Texas, Cabeza de Vaca encountered what he called cattle. In a book about his adventures, he described in detail an Indian tribe he dubbed the “Cow nation,” who hunted the buffalo and then distributed “a vast many hides into the interior country.” As a food, Cabeza de Vaca found buffalo to be “finer and fatter” than the beef of his native Spain.3
The first Englishman to see the buffalo was an explorer named Samuel Argall, who in 1612 sailed a small frigate to the navigable headwaters of the Potomac River. There, with a group of his crewmen, he went “marching into the Countrie,” where he found a “great store of cattle as big as Kine [oxen], of which the Indians that were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meate, and very easy to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts of the wildernesse.” Assuming that Argall and his men did not penetrate far into the thick woodlands that hemmed the Potomac, it is quite likely that the buffalo he described were within the boundaries of what is today Washington, D.C.4
Though less associated with the frontier territory east of the Mississippi, buffalo appear in numerous historical accounts. In 1701, a colony of Huguenots on the James River attempted, unsuccessfully, to domesticate two captured calves. In a 1733 report, George Oglethorpe, the first governor of Georgia, listed buffalo among the wild animals of his colony. Early settlers to hunt buffalo included residents of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. When Daniel Boone and other trailblazers penetrated the continent westward into Kentucky and Tennessee, they followed paths first trodden by buffalo, heading east.
Though the story of the buffalo in the eastern United States is less chronicled, the outcome, in its essence, rings familiar: By 1800, the buffalo east of the Mississippi had been exterminated.5
IN THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE OF 1803, NAPOLEON BONAPARTE SOLD THE United States a fresh herd of buffalo, along with the half-billion pristine acres on which they roamed. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark became the first Americans to explore the newly acquired land. Generations of American schoolchildren have committed to memory the goal of their exploration of the American West: to discover a passage by water to the Pacific Ocean. But President Thomas Jefferson gave more specific directions in his 1803 written orders to Captain Lewis:
The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce.6
As the men of the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the great western desert, the buffalo played a vital role in their very survival. Lewis and Clark’s combined journals discuss the buffalo in at least 707 separate entries. The first mention occurred on June 6, 1804, in present-day Missouri, when Clark noted that they observed “Some buffalow Sign today.” On August 23, 1804, the expedition killed its first bison near the Nebraska–South Dakota border.7
As with later travelers in the West, the buffalo provided the Lewis and Clark expedition with a vital source of food. When it was available—most particularly as they crossed Montana between Fort Mandan and the Continental Divide—the men ate buffalo, and in prodigious quantities. “The hunters killed three buffaloe today,” wrote Captain Lewis on July 13, 1805, near the Great Falls of the Missouri River. “[W]e eat an emensity of meat; it requires 4 deer, an Elk and a deer, or one buffaloe, to supply us plentifully 24 hours.” A typical buffalo cow—always preferred over bulls when it came to eating—provided around 400 pounds of meat. Given the opportunity, the thirty-seven men of the expedition could consume 9 pounds of fresh meat per day per man.
If the voyage of Lewis and Clark famously failed in its mission of finding a water passage to the Pacific, it certainly succeeded in opening up new streams of commerce. Commerce, in the context of the far West of the early nineteenth century, meant fur. Fur, as a general matter, meant beaver. Hence the importance of Captain Lewis’s famous report back to President Jefferson at the conclusion of the voyage in 1806: “The Missouri and all it’s branches from the Chyenne upwards abound more in beaver and Common Otter, than any other streams on earth, particularly that proportion of them lying within the Rocky Mountains.”8
The period of Western history between 1806 (Lewis and Clark’s return) and 1841 (the start of the great California–Oregon migration) was defined by the pursuit of beaver.
Since the mid-1600s, fashionable Europeans had worn hats they called beavers. The beaver hat was made not from the animal’s skin (à la the coonskin cap) but rather from the downy underlayer of shorthairs. These shorthairs were trimmed from the skin, chemically treated, and pressed into felt. The felt was used to make the hat. By 1800, the European beaver had been trapped into near extinction, placing a particular premium on the North American trade.
So central was the beaver to the fur trade that the Hudson’s Bay Company, operating continuously in Canada since 1670, used beaver pelts as the currency of exchange. “Beaver being the Chief Commodity we Trade for,” wrote a company officer, “We therefore make it the Standard whereby we value all Furs and Commodities.” In 1811, for example, it took almost three buffalo robes to equal the value of a single beaver pelt.9
Beaver pelts, in sharp contrast with buffalo hides, were well matched to both the consumer demands and the trade logistics of the day. While the demand for beaver
