hides was notoriously soft and spongy, unusable for most common applications (such as the making of shoes and belts). The primary application for buffalo was robes used as cold-weather covering by riders in sleighs and carriages. Another common use was among teamsters: The famous warmth of buffalo coats made them a veritable symbol of the trade, though their great weight made them impracticable for the average person on foot.10 Aside from these limited areas, demand for buffalo robes was modest.
From the standpoint of logistics, beaver pelts had another great advantage over buffalo hides. A beaver pelt was lightweight, barely more than a pound, and therefore relatively easy to transport. The hide of a bull buffalo, when first stripped from the carcass, could weigh as much as 150 pounds. The process of staking out and drying the hide caused it to lose around two-thirds of its weight, but even a “flint” hide could tip the scales at 50 pounds. The difficulty of transporting such heavy goods ate quickly into profits—even for those locations with access to the Missouri River, the principal highway for robes before the advent of the railroad.
By comparison with what was to come, the trade in buffalo hides prior to the 1870s was modest. This was particularly true in the years before 1840, when beaver provided an attractive alternative. In this era, most buffalo robes were supplied not by white hunters but in trade with the Indians. Coffee, sugar, calico, blankets, butcher knives, beads, guns, and whiskey were common items of exchange.11
By 1840, the beaver trade had come crashing to the ground. On the supply side, the beaver had been plucked clean from virtually every waterway that drained the Rocky Mountains. On the demand side, meanwhile, fashion proved fickle. Silk top hats became the rage, and the market for beaver pelts evaporated (just in time, in all likelihood, to save the humble animal from extinction).
With the beaver trade gone, some former trappers turned to the hunting of buffalo. Still, neither the lack of demand for buffalo nor the difficulties in transport had been solved in the period between 1840 and 1870. The available numbers are haphazard. But even with the new interest in buffalo resulting from the end of the beaver era, it appears that only rarely would the annual harvest exceed 200,000 hides. Many years produced fewer than 100,000. In the late 1830s and early 1840s, there is a revealing series of letters between Pierre Chouteau, a leading trader in St. Louis, and Ramsay Crooks, president of the American Fur Company (the largest producer of buffalo hides). In their correspondence, the two men worry constantly about flooding the buffalo hide market even at modest levels of trade, and Crooks repeatedly directs Chouteau to send fewer robes east.12
It was about this time, 1843, that the painter John James Audubon made his last journey west. Beginning from his home in Audubon Park, Audubon ultimately ascended the Missouri and then the Yellowstone River through present-day Montana. At a time when few prairie travelers could see past a landscape covered in buffalo, Audubon (like his wife’s student, George Bird Grinnell), had the rare ability to see over the horizon. “One can hardly conceive how it happens,” wrote Audubon in his diary, “so many [buffalo] are yet to be found. Daily we see so many that we hardly notice them more than the cattle in our pastures about our homes. But this cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared.”13 (Grinnell would read Audubon’s journal before his first trip west.)
It was a flash of remarkable insight, for even as Audubon spoke, the pace of change had begun to accelerate.
IN 1836, A PARTY OF FIVE MISSIONARIES CROSSED THE CONTINENT with the intention of ministering to the native tribes of the Pacific Northwest. The party traveled in the company of a large group of fur trappers and included the first two white women ever to cross the Rockies—Narcissa Whitman and Eliza Spalding. Eighteen-year-old Narcissa kept a diary, and the experiences she recorded foreshadowed a generation of emigrants on the verge of transforming the American West. The buffalo played a central role in their drama.
For emigrants traveling west, sighting the first buffalo marked a signature moment in their voyage—true arrival on the frontier. For Narcissa, the event took place on June 4, 1836, in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, thirty miles above the confluence of the river’s north and south branches.
We have seen wonders this forenoon. Herds of buffalo hove in sight; one a bull, crossed our trail and ran upon the bluffs near the rear of the camp. We took the trouble to chase him so as to have a near view. Sister Spalding and myself got out of the wagon and ran upon the bluff to see him. This band was quite willing to gratify our curiosity, seeing it was the first. Several have been killed this forenoon. The [fur trade] Company keep[s] a man out all the time to hunt for the camp.14
As with Lewis and Clark, the buffalo provided early transcontinental emigrants with a vital source of food. Indeed provisions for the voyage were planned around the expectation of reaching the herd. “On the way to buffalo country we had to bake bread for ten persons,” wrote Narcissa. “It was difficult at first, as we did not understand working outdoors … June found us ready to receive our first taste of buffalo.”15
And she liked it. Reporting rapturously on their new food source, Narcissa wrote, “I never saw anything like buffalo meat to satisfy hunger. We do not want anything else with it. I have eaten three meals of it and it relishes well.” Good thing she liked it: “We have had no bread since [reaching buffalo country]. We have meat and tea in the morn, and tea and meat at noon … So long as there is buffalo meat I do not wish anything else.”16
Like other travelers on the treeless plains, Narcissa discovered that the buffalo supplied not only the meat but also the means to cook it. “Our fuel for cooking since we left timber (no timber except on rivers) has been dried buffalo dung; we now find plenty of it and it answers a very good purpose, similar to the kind of coal used in Pennsylvania.” Anticipating the reaction of her eastern relatives to the notion of cooking with dung, Narcissa noted, “I suppose now Harriet will make up a face at this, but if she was here she would be glad to have her supper cooked at any rate in this scarce timber company.” Some pioneers, putting the best possible sheen on their fuel source, dubbed it bois de vache—wood of the cow.17
After six weeks of a diet consisting exclusively of buffalo roasted over buffalo dung, Narcissa’s enthusiasm finally began to fade. “I thought of mother’s bread, as a child would, but did not find it on the table,” she wrote on July 18. “I should relish it extremely well; have been living on buffalo meat until I am cloyed with it.”
Still, as Narcissa would soon discover, fresh buffalo meat, however tiresome, was preferable to the available alternatives. As they traveled farther west, buffalo became scarce. “Have seen no buffalo since we left the [Green River] Rendezvous,” she wrote on July 27. “We have plenty of dried buffalo meat, which we have purchased from the Indians—and dry it is for me. It appears so filthy! I can scarcely eat it; but it keeps us alive, and we ought to be thankful for it.”
In late July or early August, Narcissa and her fellow travelers reached Fort Hall in Idaho. At the fort they ate more dried buffalo, along with “mountain bread,” described in Narcissa’s journal as “course flour and water mixed and roasted or fried in buffalo grease.” Not her mother’s bread, but “[t]o one who has had nothing but meat for a long time, this relishes well.”18 This is the last mention of buffalo in her journal.
A few weeks later, Narcissa and her husband, Marcus Whitman, settled in the Walla Walla River Valley, founding a mission and ministering to the Cayuse Indians. After initial enthusiasm, events began to degenerate. The Whitmans lost their two-year-old daughter in a drowning accident. Relations with the Indians spiraled downward, especially after a measles epidemic killed most of the children in the Cayuse tribe. In 1847, a band of Cayuse murdered Narcissa, Marcus, and a dozen other whites, then burned their mission to the ground.19
If the Whitmans failed
