Fortunately, there were plenty of people hard at work at the task of destroying them for the benefit of civilization. The Indians had started the work in ancient times by forcing herds over cliffs into “buffalo jumps” and killing them by the thousands. One buffalo jump near Sundance, Wyoming, was thought to contain the bones of twenty thousand animals.14 The whites vastly accelerated the massacre beginning around 1820, and what later came to be called “The Great Slaughter” steadily gained momentum until it peaked around 1880, culminating in one of the greatest animal bloodbaths in history.
A few buffalo were killed to feed settlers’ families or provision workers building the Union Pacific railroad line, the first to cross the West. Huge numbers also were killed for their luxurious pelts, used as carriage blankets, fashionable “buffalo robes,” or coats. The American market alone absorbed more than 200,000 buffalo robes a year.15 But many also were killed in a great American extravaganza of waste—hunters killed buffalo simply for their tongues or their humps, which were considered delicacies, leaving the slaughtered bulls, calves, and cows to rot. Even if the hides were harvested (and later sold for about fifty cents apiece), the rest of the animal was left for the vultures, coyotes, and the desert sun. But the herds were so vast that people crossing the Western territories on the Union Pacific line would simply fire their Sharps rifles out the train windows for sport. It wasn’t much sport: it would take more skill to miss a buffalo than to hit one. The sport hunters didn’t even take the tongue; they simply discarded the entire animal and took only the thrill of the kill.
Still, much work remained if the Indian were to be stripped of all sustenance and exterminated once and for all. When the Union Pacific Railroad was built from Omaha to Cheyenne in 1866 and 1867, it not only opened up the West, it also split the vast buffalo herd into a “southern herd” and a “northern herd.”16 Hunters got to work on the southern herd, and it was destroyed completely within about three years. Then they moved north from Texas to the Montana Territory and started in on the northern herd, which was said to be twenty times larger. At one point, there were said to be 5,000 buffalo hunters and skinners permanently encamped on the plains of the Montana Territory. In 1871, a new process for tanning buffalo hides made it possible to use buffalo leather for industrial uses, such as engine belts, and the speed with which the last herds were disappearing accelerated yet again.
Unfortunately, the Indian wars were not going as well as the war against the buffalo. In the summer of 1876, when word of the massacre of Custer and his men reached the cities of the East, Sherman, Sheridan, and most of the rest of the country were as shocked as they were angry. It seemed impossible that this gallant, well-known officer—and 268 of his men, no less!—could have been destroyed by what was supposed to be a weakened, desperate enemy.
The Indians, and the buffalo, would need to be wiped out once and for all.
CHAPTER 3
The Second Civil War
Hornaday, Hedley, and young Forney arrived in Miles City just after dawn on the morning of May 10, 1886, leaving a small tip for George the porter in the green-velvet Pullman car.1 When they tumbled out of the train into the awakening town, they were surprised to discover that the little settlement had a few substantial, false-fronted brick buildings, and the shop windows were stocked with fancy goods, including parasols and ladies’ gloves, as well as a huge assortment of fine leather saddles, bridles, spurs, and chaps. Although it would be three more years before the Montana Territory became a state, Miles City seemed on its way to becoming a real, bona-fide “city” in more than name only.
The three men found a place to stay in an incongruously well appointed hotel called the Drover House. Miles City was the northern terminus of the Old Western Trail, the longest of the cattle trails out of Texas, and “drovers” were the lean, hard men who drove the great herds of longhorns north—the original cowboys. Men who had not slept in a bed in six months and had just gotten paid came to the Drover House to live in the lap of luxury. To them, it must have seemed like heaven, with its brass spittoons, hanging lamps, and embossed tin ceilings.2
Hornaday noted in his journal that as he strolled through the town that first morning, almost every door on the side streets seemed to open into a cheap saloon, and the town was overrun with soldiers, Indian scouts, bullwhackers, cowboys, and idle, underdressed women. In 1880, a local doctor had boasted of Miles City in the Yellowstone Journal: “We have twenty-three saloons in our town and they all do a good business; we are going to have one church soon.”3 The tiny town was tossed about like a fallen speck into the windy immensity of the northern Great Plains, and there seemed to be no place in the town to escape the wind and dust. Proper women sewed small weights into the hems of their long skirts to keep a frisky gust from revealing their ankles.
Miles City, on the Tongue River, was a bustling shipping center for the open-range cattle industry, and the place where beef cattle were loaded onto trains for shipment to the slaughterhouses of Chicago.4 A huge annual meeting of the Montana Stockmen’s Association had just taken place, and young Theodore Roosevelt, a member of the executive committee and a man who seemed to be everywhere, had been in town for the event. Wherever Hornaday walked in town, the smell of cattle manure hung in the air like wood smoke, an ever-present reminder that the cattle industry was rapidly putting an end to the day of the buffalo.
Not wanting to waste a single moment, Hornaday, Hedley, and Forney decided to walk the two miles down the railroad tracks to Fort Keogh in the early afternoon of that first day they arrived in Miles City. Spencer Fullerton Baird, the Smithsonian director, had informed Hornaday that he would contact Secretary of War William C. Endicott about the Smithsonian party expedition. Baird promised that he’d ask the secretary to direct the commander of the post at Fort Keogh to provide a military escort into what might well turn out to be hostile territory. There was good reason to worry: Fort Keogh had been built only ten years earlier, shortly after Custer’s massacre on the Little Bighorn, about a hundred miles southwest of Miles City. The fort was now garrisoned by a part of the Fifth Infantry and the Seventh Cavalry, Custer’s old regiment.
When Hornaday and his companions arrived at the fort, they found little more than a forlorn collection of rough buildings at the edge of the sagebrush flats and tethered saddle horses, their heads hanging down in the midday heat. When Hornaday and his companions were ushered in to see the commander of the post, Hornaday informed him that they were there on behalf of the Smithsonian Instutition, in Washington, D.C., and that their intention was to collect museum specimens of the American bison. The commander could scarcely contain his amusement: Buffalo? Mister Hornaday, you’re joking. You’ll never find any around here, and I don’t think anybody in this post would disagree.
Hornaday and his companions walked disconsolately back up the railroad tracks to their hotel, more like downcast boys than members of the vaunted Smithsonian Expedition of 1886. Over the next several days, Hornaday worked the telegraph office, trying to get the Secretary of War in Washington to authorize a military escort out of Fort Keogh. He also began making inquiries among local ranchers, stockmen, and landowners about where (if anywhere) he stood a chance of finding buffalo. Eventually, he began to tire of the inevitable letdown:
There’s no buffalo anymore, and you can’t get any anywhere.5
Finally, he got some encouraging news. J. C. Merrill, the army doctor whom he’d corresponded with earlier, left a letter for Hornaday at Fort Keogh emphasizing his conviction that buffalo still could be found along Big Dry Creek, a tributary of the Missouri.6 Merill’s opinion was clearly the minority view, however—other people Hornaday spoke with told him, emphatically, that there were no buffalo left on the Big Dry, nor were there any left in the Powder River country of Wyoming, or the Judith Basin in Montana. Apparently, all three of the locations Dr. Merrill had thought likely hiding places for buffalo were “shot out.”
The third night after arriving in Miles City, though, Hor
naday’s fortunes seemed to shift. He happened to fall into conversation with a rancher named Henry Phillips, of the LU-Bar Ranch, who was broad as a barn door but oddly soft-spoken and polite. The LU-Bar was up on Little Dry Creek, about eighty miles northwest of Miles City, Phillips explained. This region, in a desolate triangle formed by the Yellowstone, Missouri, and Musselshell rivers, had once been a favorite of the hide-hunters, where there were rumored to have been as many as a quarter-million buffalo only a few years earlier. In a “quiet but mighty convincing way,” Hornaday later said, Phillips told him that he knew there were at least a few buffalo in the rugged badlands west of the LU-Bar Ranch. In fact, one of his men had killed a cow on Sand Creek just a few days earlier. The cowboys said they’d seen about thirty-five head altogether, Phillips told Hornaday. If he hunted up in the Sand Creek area, and stuck to it, he was sure Hornaday would get some in the end.
Hornaday had struck on some more good news. He decided to take the museum party north, toward the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, and explore the badlands around the headwaters of the Little Dry Creek, Big Dry Creek, and Sand Creek, the place that had been mentioned by two different people so far as the place the last remaining buffalo in the West might be hiding.
Once the Secretary of War finally made contact with Fort Keogh, the Smithsonian party had been provided by the quartermaster with camp equipment, field transportation, a lumbering wagon pulled by six mules, and a small military escort of five soldiers from the Fifth Infantry.7 (The very fact that only five soldiers were considered sufficient for a journey through Indian country showed how weakened the tribes had become, their strength and numbers diminishing with the disappearance of the great herds.) Still, it was a measure of safety for a journey through country still shadowed by Sioux, Crow, and Blackfoot, and by outlaws and rustlers.
Hornaday also had arranged to hire a guide through this unfamiliar country—a Cheyenne Indian called White Dog, who showed up wearing, absurdly, a pair of red overalls. White Dog turned out to be not only utterly worthless as a guide, but also a lazy crybaby who would pretend to be sick when there was any work to be done (according to Hornaday’s account). Far more helpful were the two rangy cowboys who’d also signed on for the trip. The cowboys were not the picturesque cowpunchers of lore, but polite young men in their twenties, many of whom had come west for adventure. They were not so much the mythological embodiment of the West as young wayfarers who had come in search of it.8
Nevertheless, they’d all spent so much time riding the wide stock saddles favored by cowboys that they’d become bowlegged—one cowboy’s legs were so wide “he could have thrown a cat between them, with perfect safety—to the cat,” Hornaday said. They all wore battered cowboy hats, leather chaps, and high-heeled riding boots, and carried six-chambered .45-caliber revolvers, with ammo belts full of cartridges. They used their guns for only two reasons, Hornaday found out—to shoot game on the range and to shoot out the lights at the local saloon, when they’d been paid a year’s wages and were in the process of wasting every bit of it on whiskey, women, and cards.
Even so, he found these young cowboys to be the hardest-working men he’d ever known, and also the most generous, loyal, and sweet-tempered. They were also among the most poorly paid. One of them, a young man who had been working as a store clerk in Chicago making twenty dollars a week, had come West to become a cowboy and was now working “sixteen hours a day in all kinds of weather, and without any of the comforts of life, at thirty dollars a month.” This, Hornaday said, was “pitiful,” although most of the cowboys seemed happy enough to be living this rough outdoor life under the boundless Montana sky. Still, more than one confided to him, “I’m sick of cowpunchin,’ and I’m going to quit it forever this fall.”9
The party crossed the Yellowstone River just outside Miles City on an old ferry, then began to rumble slowly northward on the Sunday Creek Trail, a famous cattle trail along Sunday Creek known variously as the Texas, Montana, or Northern Trail, and along which generations of cattle were driven north from Texas into the Missouri River country.10 A couple of the soldiers generally rode the buckboard of the clattering six-mule wagon, which was loaded to the wagonbows like a floundering ark. Along with Forney, Hedley and Hornaday usually rode their own mounts alongside the wagon. Hornaday, easy in the saddle and often wearing his Norfolk hunting jacket and low-brimmed Western hat, kept a constant eye on the party like a mother hen. White Dog trotted along on his Indian pony, along with the other soldiers and cowpokes, some on horseback, some on foot. Together, this motley museum party made its way into the “Big Dry country” of the badlands.
They reached the big divide between the Yellowstone and the Missouri rivers, a high, bare promontory that allowed them to gaze out across this sunbaked, godforsaken country, with its distant flat-topped buttes, unending sky, and vast canyons. They were searching for buffalo, or perhaps only buffalo ghosts. They scanned the horizon with a glass, but they spotted no life larger than a pronghorn antelope or a kettle of turkey vultures spiralling into the heat-hazy Western sky.
“What a prospect!” Hornaday scribbled in his journal of one of these surveys. “In every direction the view swept over from ten to twenty-five miles of wild, rugged country, composed of buttes, divides, coulies, wash-outs, and rugged ravines and creeks—nothing but badlands. But the view was truly grand, and impressive. We seemed to be looking over the whole of Montana, indeed.”
Now, as the lurching wagon, mules, and horses of Hornaday’s Smithsonian party crossed the desolate headland of the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide and began descending the north side, they found themselves entering a world that had been dramatically, and tragically, changed since the days when the plains peoples lived and flourished here. Now they were entering a vast sepulchre of death.
There, along the Sunday Creek Trail, sprawled in the prairie grass, lay the skeletonized carcass of an enormous buffalo bull, completely stripped of its hide like a dead chicken. The great head, fierce as a tribal mask with its muddy, lionlike mane and beard, had been left unskinned. The bull lay precisely as it had fallen, its head stretched far forward, as though at full gallop, its legs scattered behind it as though straining to escape. Moments later, Hornaday saw another of these “ghastly monuments of slaughter,” as he later described them, then another, and another, until the party found itself passing through a hushed battlefield that stretched to the far distance, where crumpled corpses appeared as little more than dark specks. It was as if, far out of sight of almost everyone in America, a second Civil War had been raging for decades, with such grievous losses, there was nothing left but silence and bones.11
Most of the men were wearing scarves over their mouths and noses, like rustlers, to keep the akali dust out of their throats. But the scarves also kept them from speaking in this lonesome place, where words meant nothing. It was a country almost completely bare of trees in every direction except for a few aspen and cottonwoods in the rugged brakes along the creek bottoms. It was also almost emptied of game. During the first two days of travel north of Miles City, in a country that was custom-made for pronghorn antelope, they did not see a single one; the only living creatures they saw were prairie dogs, rabbits, and turkey vultures, wheeling high overhead as if scouting for the last meal in Montana. It was forlorn, abandoned country, a country of great absences, which had once been filled by the dust and noise and dung of one of the planet’s greatest zoological spectacles but now was almost completely silent.
This area, they’d been told, was once a famous buffalo range. But now, to Hornaday’s infinite sorrow, it was a place whose name was desolation, the place, he wrote later, “where the millions had gone.” On either side of the wagon trail lay the bleaching skeletons of a great buffalo slaughter, from huge bull skeletons sprawled close beside the trail to those scattered into the distance like dark stars. Many of the skeletons were not even skinned, with hides baked hard as wood by the desert heat and wind. Sometimes there were forty or fifty skeletons in sight at
one time. The killing-ground appeared to be frozen in the moment the animals had fallen, what Hornaday estimated to be about four years earlier, “except that the flesh was no longer upon them.”
The emotional burden of these terrible sights, in this terrible place, was something that would change Hornaday’s life forever. “It was impossible to look at one without a sigh,” he wrote, “and each group of skeletons brought back the old thoughts, ‘What a pity!’ ‘What a pity!’ ”
The blast furnace of the desert heat and wind had stripped the flesh from the bones, which were bleached white as porcelain. Some of the enormous skeletons were perfectly preserved, the rib cages held together like strung bows with dried bits of ligament, and even the tiny carpal and tarsal bones, the size of hazelnuts, were preserved so fastidiously that it was as if the buffalo had been preserved for some far-off, fairer afterlife, like Egyptian pharaohs.
CHAPTER 4
Souvenir of a Lost World
The Smithsonian museum party, with its rattling six-mule wagon and assortment of Indian ponies and saddle horses, soldiers, hunters, and taxidermists, carefully trundled their way down the dusty switchbacks on the north scarp of the divide, which opened out across a world so vast it appeared to reveal the curvature of the earth. When they reached the bottom, they found Little Dry Creek, a small tributary of the Missouri which, despite its name, had a faint ribbon of muddy water coursing through it. The water was foul-tasting and, because of the alkali, slightly soapy to the touch. The party followed the creek twelve miles, through copses of aspen and cottonwood along the bottom, to the LU-Bar Ranch. The ranch had a lonesome, slapped-together appearance—it was really just a stone and adobe shack with a few outbuildings—with saddle horses tethered to the porch rail and a spindle of smoke trailing up out of the cookhouse into the big sky.1
Mr. Hornaday's War Page 4