Americans made their own contribution to the demise of the buffalo. While the image of Indians using every bit of the buffalo they killed appears far more common than wanton slaughter, wasteful killing by Indians did take place. Catlin’s journal, for example, recounts an 1832 incident in which 500 Sioux killed 1,400 buffalo solely for their tongues—to be traded for whiskey with the American Fur Company.32
More significant than such isolated examples of buffalo slaughter by Native Americans was the impact of technology—the horse—on the Indians’ hunting techniques. Hunting on horseback allowed far greater choice in target selection than hunting on foot, and given the choice, hunters shot cows over bulls. The cows’ meat was superior and their hides easier to work. By the 1860s, anecdotal reports indicated cow-to-bull ratios of as high as 10 to 1. Modern game laws, of course, seek precisely the opposite effect—protecting cows instead of bulls. The impact of selective hunting, according to biologist Dale Lott, “sent the population in a downward spiral.”33
The westward emigration that began in the early 1840s caused the buffalo to retreat from the travel corridor of the California–Oregon Trail. While early pioneers could depend on buffalo meat as a food source when they crossed the Nebraska and Wyoming plains, emigrants by the 1850s were forced to rely on bacon. The combination of plinking and subsistence hunting drove the buffalo away from the trail, but there was another factor as well. The emigrants’ stock competed with the buffalo herd for grass. By the end of the wagon train era, pioneers were sometimes forced to drive their animals as far as eight miles off the trail to find suitable forage. Such denuded land offered little attraction for the herd.34
Construction of the railroad sealed the fate of the buffalo. If the impact of emigrants was significant, the disruption caused by the army of men who built the railroad was even greater. The construction crews that built the Kansas Pacific, for example, numbered about 1,200 men. To feed these workers, the railroad hired a young hunter named William Cody. In the company of a horse he named Brigham and a gun he named Lucretia Borgia, Cody killed 4,280 buffalo in eighteen months of Kansas service.35
It was in this same era that Cody won his nickname, Buffalo Bill. When it was discovered that an army scout, Billy Comstock, went by the same moniker, a contest was demanded to settle the title. “We were to hunt one day of eight hours,” remembered Cody in his autobiography. “The wager was five hundred dollars a side, and the man who should kill the greater number of buffaloes from on horseback was to be declared the winner.” The newspapers loved it, stoking the fires of controversy. The Kansas Pacific even sent out an excursion train full of spectators from St. Louis to witness the showdown. In Kansas (unlike the North Platte Valley of Nebraska), buffalo were still commonplace along the tracks. The excursion train pulled up alongside a suitable herd some twenty miles east of Sheridan, and the spectators spilled out, carrying picnic baskets and bottles of cold champagne. After three runs through the herd (with the occasional break for champagne), Cody beat Comstock by a score of 69 to 46. The Kansas Pacific gathered up the best heads, mounted them, and put them on display in rail stations around the country.36
Shooting buffalo from a moving train (like its antecedent, shooting from the deck of the steamboat) was a popular sport, while it lasted. An 1869 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine described a scene from a train ride between Denver and Salt Lake City: “It would seem to be hardly possible to imagine a more novel sight than a small band of buffalo loping along within a few hundred feet of a railroad train in rapid motion, while the passengers are engaged in shooting, from every available window, with rifles, carbines, and revolvers. An American scene, certainly.”37
The Northern Pacific Railroad in Montana offered its passengers the opportunity to “test the accuracy of their six-shooters by firing at the retreating herd.” The Kansas Pacific once chartered a buffalo excursion to a church group, including 26 representatives of the fairer sex. A reporter for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper documented the hunt, which culminated in the killing of a bull. “[A] rope was attached to his horns, and two long files of men, with joined hands, and preceded by the band, playing Yankee Doodle, dragged him bodily to the front car and hoisted him aboard.”38
THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILROAD MADE permanent a new geographic distribution of the American buffalo. Instead of a great mass stretching unbroken across the plains from Mexico to Canada, now there were two herds—northern and southern. The southern herd was larger, encompassing the present-day states of Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas. The smaller northern herd was spread across Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Montana.
In the three centuries since the arrival of the Europeans on the North American continent, the buffalo had been winnowed dramatically, though an estimate of the decrease is difficult. One scientist who studied the numbers came to this conclusion: “One may assume with reasonable certainty that the bison population west of the Mississippi River at the close of the Civil War numbered in the millions, probably in the tens of millions. Any greater accuracy seems impossible.”39
Despite a significant decrease in population, the idea that the buffalo could become extinct still failed to find purchase among average Americans of the early 1870s. The myth of inexhaustibility, by contrast, found support in the descriptions of surviving herds that still “blackened the prairie.” Indeed the ungraspable vastness of the prairie itself lent credibility to the notion that some infinite number of buffalo must surely remain beyond the reach of mankind.
But the railroad, as it spread across the nation, was making the country smaller. Of the two major impediments to wholesale harvest of the buffalo—market demand and efficient transportation—the railroad had conquered one.
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
