by Farley Mowat
The black-robed, forest-dwelling eastern buffalo was not only the largest of its kind, it also bore the greatest sweep of horns and its extraordinarily tough hide was proof against penetration by any except the sharpest of weapons. For native bowmen or spearmen on foot (and it will be remembered that there were no domesticated horses in the Americas until the Spaniards introduced them), it made exceedingly formidable prey. In consequence, and also because the woodland Indians had a plethora of easier prey at their disposal, buffalo seem to have seldom been hunted by them. However, northeastern tribesmen sometimes took the risk to obtain the huge, woolly hides because there were no better winter sleeping robes. It may well have been some of these robes, stolen or traded from east-coast Indians by the first Portuguese, that alerted them to a bonanza in buff in this New World.
During the first third of the sixteenth century the Portuguese maintained a monopoly on North American buff, but then the French got wind of it. After his 1542 excursion up the St. Lawrence River, the Sieur de Roberval noted that the natives “feed also on stagges, wild boares, bufles, porsepines...” Before another decade had passed, the French were themselves busily trading for buffalo skins. By mid-century, they had virtually supplanted the Portuguese. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, two nephews of Jacques Cartier “continued from year to year to traffic there with the said savages, in the skins of bufles, [and] bufle calves.” The French also expanded the trade to the south. Pedro Menendez wrote angrily to his master, King Philip II of Spain, to complain about French inroads on the coast. “In 1565,” he reported, “and for some years previous, buffalo-skins were brought by the Indians down the Potomac River and there carried along shore in canoes to the French about the Gulf of St. Lawrence. During two years 6000 skins were thus obtained.”
Before very long, buff manufactured in France had become particularly renowned. As Charlevoix wrote: “There is none better [than this hide] in the known world; it is easily dressed, and though exceeding strong, becomes as supple and soft as the best chamois.” According to the Bristol merchant Thomas James, it was equivalent in toughness to walrus leather, and a great deal was imported from France into England, where entire regiments were outfitted with it. At least one, the famous Buffs, even took its name from the leather worn by its soldiers.
The English were initially behind in getting their share of this new wealth. Nevertheless, by 1554 they at least knew what a buffalo was, as is evidenced by John Lok’s comment that an elephant was “bigger than three wilde Oxen or Buffes.” By the 1570s, they knew what it looked like. “These Beasts are of the bigness of a Cowe, their flesh being very good foode, their hides good lether, their fleeces very useful, being a kind of wolle... it is tenne yeares since first the relation of these things came to the eares of the English.”
Anthony Parkhurst, who fished Newfoundland waters from 1574 to 1578, befriended some Portuguese seafarers who promised to pilot him to Cape Breton and into “the River of Canada”—the St. Lawrence. To his annoyance they reneged, but he seems to have learned from them of the existence of “buffes... in the countries adjacent [to Newfoundland] which [buffes] were very many in the firm land [mainland].”
It was at about this time that another English sailor, John Walker, made what was probably a buccaneering visit to Norumbega—the Maine coast/Bay of Fundy region—which was then coming under French influence. Walker explored the lower reaches of the St. John River where he and his men “founde... in an Indian house... 300 drye hides, whereof the most parte of them were eighteen feet by the squire.” We are told these hides came from “a kinde of Beaste much bigger than an [domestic] Oxe,” and that Walker carried his stolen hides to France where he sold them for forty shillings each—a large sum in those times. The report concludes by adding: “With this agreeth David Ingram, and [he] describeth that beast as large, supposing it to be a certain kind of Buffe.”
David Ingram was the English seaman marooned on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1568 by John Hawkins. Ingram spent the next two years walking north, mostly along the Atlantic seaboard, in search of fellow Europeans, meantime being succoured by the native people. He eventually met a French trader in what is now central Nova Scotia and got passage to France with him, thence making his way back to England. Here, in 1582, he was interviewed by agents of Sir Humphrey Gilbert and told them: “There is a very great store of these Buffes [in the coastal regions he travelled through] which are beasts as big as two oxen... having long ears like a bloodhound with long hairs about their ears, their horns be crooked like rams horns, their eyes black, their hairs long, black and rough and shagged as a goat. The hides of these beasts are sold very dear.” In another context, Ingram is quoted as speaking of “[Norum]Bega, a country or town of that name... wherein are good store of [wild] Oxe Hides.”
Historians contend that the skins Walker stole (and which the Norumbega Indians had probably amassed to trade to the French) were moose hides, but such a conclusion is not warranted in view of their size—“eighteen feet by the squire.” By the squire, or square, means the measurements of two adjacent sides multiplied to give the square footage, which is how such hides were sold. Even when stretched, hides of the biggest moose do not exceed fifteen feet on the square, while those of the wood buffalo—the largest surviving race—though nevertheless smaller than the eastern buffalo, do measure up to eighteen feet.1
* * *
1 Confusion has crept in because, after buffalo had been exterminated on the eastern seaboard, the French hide trade switched to moose, while retaining the name “buff” to identify the product.
Sir Humphrey Gilbert was especially interested in Ingram’s story and Walker’s voyage because, during the 1570s, he was trying to mount a colonizing venture with the intention of establishing English suzerainty over Newfoundland, Norumbega, and Nova Scotia. He had to persuade potential backers that the venture would show a profit, and he concluded that buffs would help to do just that. In 1580, he dispatched a Portuguese named Simon Ferdinando on a voyage to the Norumbega coast, from which Ferdinando brought back “many great hides” that are elsewhere identified as buffalo hides.
By this time the French were becoming alarmed at the prospects of an English encroachment on their buff monopoly. In 1583, Etienne Bélanger took a party of Frenchmen from Cape Breton as far south as Cape Cod in what was perhaps an attempt to forestall the English who, in the following year, according to Hakluyt, traded with the Indians of the Virginia coast for buff hides. These are probably but two of many ventures seeking a fortune in hides such as the one John Walker reaped in Norumbega.
It is unlikely that they met with such good luck. By 1590, after about a century of increasingly intense exploitation, it appears that most of the buffalo that had once lived between the Hudson River/Lake Champlain valley and the sea had already perished. As the century ended, so did the days of the species’ abundance anywhere east of the Appalachian Mountains. To sixteenth-century natives of the eastern seaboard region, buffalo hides had been what beaver skins later became for tribes farther to the west—the currency with which to purchase guns, metalware, trinkets, and booze. The magnificent black wild oxen of the eastern forests, which had taken small harm at the hands of men armed with stone-tipped weapons, fell in windrows before the same men now armed with guns. The stink of their rotting carcasses was the first whiff of a stench that would sweep across an entire continent.
During the first few decades of the new century, numbers of eastern buffalo still existed, but only well inland from the coast. In 1612, Sir Samuel Argoll sailed about 200 miles up the Potomac River to the vicinity of what is now southern Pennsylvania where, “Marching into the Countrie, I found great stores of Cattle as big as Kine, of which the Indians who were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meat, and are very easy to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow and not so wild as other Beasts of the wilderness.” “Easy to be killed with firearms” is how this passa
ge should be read.
Too easy. Buffalo were not again recorded on the Potomac after 1624 and, far to the northward in the Huron region of New France, the story was the same. By 1632, according to the Jesuit priest, Father Sagard, although “some of our Brothers have seen skins of them” none had been seen in life for some years past. Even Samuel de Champlain, who as early as 1620 had listed bufles, together with moose and elk, as valuable resources of New France, seems to have come on the scene too late to encounter the living animal. About 1650, Pierre Boucher reported: “As for the animals called buffaloes, they are [now] to be found only... about four or five hundred leagues from Quebec toward the west and north.”
Remnants of the eastern buffalo still held on in the central and southern portions of their range. Thus the Sieur de La Salle recorded their presence as late as 1680 in what are now New York, Pennsylvania, some western portions of New England, and south to Georgia. Courtemanche, in about 1705, reported that boeufs were still innumerable in the valley of the Illinois River.
West of the Appalachian mountain barrier they continued to survive until the last years of the seventeenth century, when a surge of Europeans came pouring over the passes following deep-cut trails made by the buffalo themselves. Daniel Boone was in the forefront of this invasion and he and his contemporaries spoke of places like Blue Licks, a salt lick where buffalo paths converging from all directions “were cut deep into the earth like the streets of a great city.”
These “hardy pioneers,” as they are so often referred to in history books, were not so much settlers as wandering ravagers whose sights were set on peltry rather than on land. They spread rapidly westward bringing such destruction to all the larger forms of life that, by 1720, the only survivors of the eastern buffalo consisted of a few small herds that had been bypassed and overlooked in the dark defiles and recesses of the Cumberland and Allegheny ranges. By 1790, according to a New York Zoological Society report, those hidden in the Alleghenies had “been reduced to one herd numbering 300–400 animals which had sought refuge in the wilds of the Seven Mountains where, surrounded on all sides by settlements, they survived for a short time by hiding in the almost-inaccessible parts of the mountains.”
It was indeed a short time. During the bitter winter of 1799–1800, the herd, by then shrunken to fewer than fifty, was surrounded by gunners on snowshoes. Immobilized in belly-deep drifts, the animals were slaughtered where they stood. The following spring, a bull, a cow, and her calf were found in the same region. The cow and calf were promptly shot. The bull escaped, only to be killed a little later at Buffalo Crossroads near Lewistown.
Now the end was near. In 1815, a solitary bull is said to have been killed near Charleston, West Virginia. No more were reported until 1825, when a cow and her calf were found deep in the fastnesses of the Alleghenies. To find them was to kill them. So perished the last known relicts, not only of the eastern buffalo but of all the wild ox east of the Mississippi River.
The passing of the eastern buff went unremarked, and probably unnoticed. The latter-day conquistadors who were then busily “conquering the West” were already engaged in a new slaughter—one that would soon become an all-engulfing tornado of destruction.
By around 1800, according to the assessment of naturalist-writer Ernest Thompson Seton, some 40 million buffalo remained alive in North America, almost all of them west of the Mississippi Valley. It had taken European man and his weapons three centuries to dispose of the first several million. It would require rather less than 100 years to obliterate the rest in one of the most wanton exhibitions of unbridled ferocity in the long list of atrocities man has committed against animate creation.
The Plains, Oregon, and wood buffalo were systematically slaughtered because of three interlinked motives. First, as part of a genocidal design on the part of the Americans to destroy the western Indian nations (which depended for their very existence on the buffalo); second, because of the profits to be obtained therefrom; and third, because of an untrammelled lust for killing.
The first motive is laid bare in a statement by General Philip Henry Sheridan, which epitomizes the prevailing policy of the U.S. government and military: “The Buffalo Hunters have done more in the past two years to settle the vexed Indian Question than the entire regular army in the last 30 years. They are destroying the Indians’ commissary. Send them powder and lead if you will, and let them kill, skin and sell until they have exterminated the buffalo!” Sheridan later told Congress it should strike a medal honouring the hide hunters, with a dead buffalo on one side—and a dead Indian on the other.
By about 1800, most of the large land mammals of eastern North America whose hides were suitable for the manufacture of leather, including the eastern buffalo, eastern elk, woodland caribou, and, in most regions, even the moose, were either commercially extinct or verging on it.2 Yet the demand for leather of all kinds had never been greater and was growing by leaps and bounds. The exploitation of the western buffalo herds opened up a magnificent opportunity for profit. This was reinforced by the growth of a vigorous demand for buffalo robes—tanned hides with the thick, woolly hair still attached. These had a great vogue in Europe but especially in eastern North America, where they inspired a positive rage of fashionable acquisition. Everyone, it seemed, simply had to have one or more buffalo carriage robes.
* * *
2 The eastern elk, which was common and widespread throughout the Atlantic seaboard region, is now extinct. The woodland caribou, once almost equally widely distributed and abundant, is virtually extinct throughout its eastern range. Having suffered such persecution by hide hunters and, later, from sportsmen that it was extirpated from much of the seaboard region, the moose remains moderately common in a few places, such as Newfoundland, but has vanished from about three-quarters of its original eastern range.
Mass slaughter on the western plains combined with mass production in eastern factories between them were soon producing a flood of buffalo-hide products ranging from machinery belting to policemen’s coats. During the 1840s, 90,000 buffalo robes alone were annually being sold in eastern Canada and the United States. However, these represented only the tip of a deadly iceberg of annihilation.
Seton estimated that only one out of every three Plains buffalo killed was ever even skinned. Furthermore, many of the skins that were taken were used locally in their raw state for such things as tarpaulins to protect haystacks against the weather, for fencing materials to confine the sod-busting pioneers’ small livestock, or as easily replaceable roofing and wall sheathing.
The potential for profit was not limited to robes and leather, either. Many hundreds of thousands of animals were shot solely for their fat, which, rendered into tallow, was used in great quantities by eastern industries. Uncounted other thousands were killed for their tongues alone, these being considered a great delicacy. But the greatest slaughter, apart from that for hides, was the meat hunt, which provided the staple food for construction crews then crawling like ant armies across the plains, leaving behind them the glittering steel paths of new railroads reaching out to span the continent.
By 1842, again according to Seton, the combined kill had reached 2.5 million buffalo a year and the great western herds were melting like their own tallow in an incandescent fury of destruction. In 1858, James McKay, a Red River trader and trapper, travelled for twenty days on horseback with a pony train through what was to all intents and purposes one continuous herd of buffalo—“on all sides, as far as the eye could see, the prairie was black with them.” Five years later, buffalo were a “thing of the past” throughout the whole of the region McKay had traversed.
Farther to the south, the Union Pacific Railway reached Cheyenne in 1867, penetrating to the heart of the remaining buffalo country. The iron horse brought with it innumerable white hunters and, at the same time, split the remaining buffalo into a south herd and a north herd.
“In 1871,” Seton tel
ls us, “the Santa Fe Railway crossed Kansas, the summer ground of the southern herd, now reduced to 4,000,000.” There followed a sanguinary slaughter by hide hunters, and by sportsmen who were now beginning to come west to take a hand in the massacre just for the fun of it. Between 1872 and 1874, these two agents of destruction between them recorded a kill of 3,158,730! One sportsman, a Dr. Carver, boasted of having killed forty buffalo in a “twenty minute run” on horseback and of having slaughtered 5,000 during a single summer.
To paraphrase Seton’s account: that was practically the end of the southern herd. A few scattered bands lingered on in out-of-the way places, but they, too, were relentlessly hunted down. The very last, a group of four individuals, were found in 1889 by a party hunting mustangs. The buffalo took alarm and fled westward. They were chased for several miles and a man named Allen fired four shots into a cow. She ran another two miles to a lake and, wading into the deepest water, stood at bay until death overcame her. A photographer then took a picture of the triumphant party with her skin and meat. The other three buffalo were killed a little later on.
The northern herd did no better. Although until 1876 severe winters coupled with the presence of hostile Indians discouraged white hunters, in that year U.S. troops “pacified” the Indians and encouraged an onslaught by hide and meat hunters. Then, in 1880, the Northern Pacific Railway opened a way into the central region, and that was the end of the last great buffalo herd on earth.
By 1885 none were known to remain alive in a state of freedom, yet their presence still endured. In 1887, William Greeb, an English naturalist, travelled through the West on the Canadian Pacific Railway. “Crossing and recrossing in all directions,” he wrote, “were the tracks of the buffalo and the skulls and bones of these fine animals bleaching in the sun. At some of the water tanks where we stopped, heaps of bones and skulls have been collected for export to sugar refineries and to the manure-works of civilisation.” As far as profits were concerned, the buffalo were good to the last bone.