by Zane Grey
Out to the front of the black mass of buffalo a whirlwind twisted up a column of dust. Funnel-shaped it rose, yellow and spreading, into the air, while it raced across the valley. That, or something as natural, stirred a movement in the fore ranks of buffalo. All at once the leaders broke into a run, heading south. The movement, and the growing pound of their hoofs, ran through the herd as swiftly as a current. Then, magically and wondrously, the whole immense mass moved as if one spirit, one mind dominated it. The throbbing pound of hoofs suddenly increased to a roar. Dust began to rise and blow back, like low clouds of yellow smoke, over the acres, and then the miles of bobbing black backs. The vast herd seemed to become a sea in swift and accelerating action.
Soon, a rising pall of dust shrouded the thousands of buffalo, running under what seemed an obscure curtain. The volume of sound had swelled from rhythmic pound and beat to a mighty and appalling roar. Only the battlements of the upper air, assailed in storm by the ripping of lightning, could send back such thunder as now rose from the shaking earth. But this was one long continuous roll. The movement of buffalo in unison resembled a tidal wave and the sound was that of an avalanche. The ground trembled under the thundering herd.
The eagle perched motionlessly on his crag, indifferent to the rolling chaos beneath him. The valley-wide cloud of dust floated low down. Time passed. Halfway to the zenith rose the sun. Then gradually the tremor of the earth and the roar of hoofs diminished, rolled, and died away. The herd had passed. On his lofty perch the eagle slept, and the valley cleared of dust and movement. Solitude, loneliness, and silence reigned at the solemn noontide.
* * * * *
It was spring of an era many years after the lone eagle had watched the buffalo herd.
An upland prairie country rolled and waved down from snow-capped Rocky Mountains to spread out into the immense eastern void. Over the bleached white grass had come a faint tinge of green. The warm sun had begun its renewal of the covering of the earth. A flock of wild geese, late on their annual pilgrimage, winged swift flight toward the northland. On the ridges elk grazed, and down in the hollows, where murmuring streams rushed, clouded with the blue color of melted snow, deer nibbled at the new tender shoots of grass.
Below the uplands, where the plains began, herds of buffalo dotted and patched and streaked the monotony of the gray vastness. Leagues and leagues it spread, always darker for the increase of buffalo, until all was a dense black that merged into the haze of distance.
A river wended its curving way out across the plains, and in a wooded bend an Indian encampment showed its white teepees, and red blankets, and columns of blue smoke lazily rising.
Hidden in the brush along the river half-naked redmen lay in wait for the buffalo to come down to drink. These hunters did not need to sally forth for their game. They had only to wait and choose the meat and the hide that best served them for their simple needs. They did not kill more than they could use.
Along the riverbank, far as eye could see, the shaggy monsters trooped down to drink. Bulls and cows and calves came in endless procession. In some places, where the bank was steep, the thirsty buffalo behind pushed the row ahead into the water, whence rose a splashing mêlée. The tawny calves, still too young to shed their coats and turn the seal-brown of their mothers, bawled lustily as they were shoved into the river.
Near the encampment of the Indians, where trees and brush lined the shore, the buffalo were more wary. They liked the open. But stragglers came along, and the choicest of these fell prey to the deadly arrows of the redmen. A shaggy young bull, sleek and brown, superb in his approaching maturity, passed within range of the chieftain of that hunting clan. He rose from his covert, a lean dark Indian, tall and powerful of build, with intense face and piercing eyes turned toward his quarry. He bent a bow few Indians could have drawn. He bent it till the flint head of the arrow touched his left hand. Then he released the arrow. Like a glint of light it flashed, and, striking the bull behind the shoulder, buried half its length there. The bull grunted. He made no violent movements. He walked back as he had come, only more and more slowly. The chief followed him out to the edge of the timber. There other buffalo coming in saw both Indian and wounded bull, but they only swerved aside. The bull halted, and, heaving heavily, he plunged to his knees, and then rolled over on his side.
After the hunters came the squaws, with their crude flint and bone implements, to skin the buffalo and cut up the meat and pack it to the encampment.
There the chief repaired to rest on his blanket under a tree, and to think the thoughts and dream the dreams of the warrior. Beyond the white-peaked mountain range lived enemies of his, redmen of a hated tribe. Other than remembrance of them he had no concern. His red gods could not tell him of the future. The paleface, who was to drive him and his people into the fastnesses of the arid hills, was unknown and undreamed of. Into his lofty serene mind no thought flashed of a vanishing of the buffalo while yet his descendants lived. The buffalo were as many as the sands of the river bottoms. They had always been; they would always be. The buffalo existed to furnish food, raiment, shelter for the redman.
So the chief rested in his camp, watching beaver at work on the riverbank, as tame as were the buffalo. Like these animals he and his tribe were happy and self-sufficient. Only infrequent battles with other tribes marred the serenity of their lives. Always the endless herds were to be found, to the south or the north. This chief worshipped the sun, loved his people and the wild lonely land he believed was his, and if there was in his tribe a brave who was liar or coward or thief, or a squaw who broke the law, death was their portion.
* * * * *
A straggling band of white men wearily rode and tramped across the great plains centuries before that wonderful level prairie was to be divided into the Western states of America.
These white travelers were the Spanish explorers under the command of the intrepid Coronado. It was a large band. Many of them rode horses—Arabian horses of the purest breed, from which the Western mustang was descended. But most of them walked, wearing queer apparel and armor not suitable to such arduous travel. They carried strange weapons.
Hardy, indomitable, and enduring this first band of white men to penetrate the great plains and the deserts of the south and west, recorded for history something of their marvelous adventures and terrible experiences and strange sights.
Many hundreds of leagues they traveled, according to their historian, Castañeda, over tremendous plains and heaths of sand, stark and level, and so barren of trees and stones that they erected heaps of the ox dung they found, so that they could be guided back by the way they had come. They lost horses and men.
All the way across these great plains of grass and sand the Spaniards encountered herds of crooked-back oxen, as many as there were sheep in Spain. But they saw no people with the crooked-back cattle. These weary and lost travelers, almost starved, found in the oxen succor they so grievously needed. Meat gave them strength and courage to go on through obstacles none save crusaders could have overcome. Sometimes in this strange country it rained great showers of hailstones as big as oranges, and these storms caused many tears and injuries.
Castañeda wrote:
These oxen are of the bigness and color of our bulls. . . . They have a great bunch of hair on their fore shoulders, and more on their fore part than their hinder part, and it is like wool. They have a horse mane upon their backbone, and much hair, and very long from their knees downward. They have great tufts of hair hanging down their foreheads, and it seemeth they have beards because of the great store of hair hanging down at their chins and throats. The males have very large tails, and a great knob or flock at the end, so that in some respects they resemble the lion, and in some others the camel. They push with their horns; they run; they overtake and kill a horse when they are in their rage and anger. The horses fled from them, either because of their deformed shape, or else because they had never before seen them. Finally it is a foul and fierce beast of cou
ntenance and form of body.
Coronado and Castañeda, with their band of unquenchable spirits, were the first white people to see the American buffalo.
Chapter Two
All during Tom Doan’s boyhood, before and through the stirring years of the Rebellion, he had been slowly yielding to the call that had made so many young men adventurers and pioneers in the Southwest.
His home had not been a happy one, but as long as his mother lived and his sisters remained unmarried he had stayed there, getting what education there was available at the little Kansas village school and working hard on the farm. When Kansas refused to secede to the South at the beginning of the Rebellion, Tom’s father, who was a Rebel, joined Quantrill’s notorious band of guerillas. Tom’s sisters were in sympathy with the South. But Tom and his mother held at first secret, and then later open, leanings toward the North. It was a divided family. Eventually the girls married and left home. Tom’s mother did not long survive her husband, who was shot on one of Quantrill’s raids.
Tom outlived the sadness and bitterness of his youth, but they left their mark upon him. His loyalty to his mother had alone kept him from the wildness of the time, and their poverty had made hard work imperative. After the war he drifted from place to place, always farther and farther toward the unsettled country. He had pioneer blood in him, and in his mind he had settled the future. He meant to be a rancher, a tiller of the soil, a stockman, and a breeder of horses, for these things he loved. Yet always there was in him the urge to see the frontier, to be in the thick of wild life while he was hunting and exploring for that wonderful land that would content him. Thus Tom Doan had in him a perfect blending of the dual spirit that burned in the hearts of thousands of men, and which eventually opened up the West to civilization.
Not however until the autumn of 1874 did he surrender to the call. The summer of that year had been a momentous one in the Southwest. Even in years of stress this one stood out as remarkable, and the tales drifting up from the frontier had thrilled Tom’s heart.
A horde of buffalo hunters lured by the wild life and the development of a commercial market for buffalo hides had braved the Indians in their haunts, and started after the last great herds. This had resulted in an Indian war. The Cheyennes, Kiowas, Arapahoes, and the Comanches had gone on the warpath. A thousand warriors of these tribes had made the memorable siege of a small band of buffalo hunters and their soldier escort, and after repeated and persistent charges had been repulsed. The tale of this battle was singularly thrilling to Tom Doan. Particularly had the hunting of buffalo appealed to him. Not that he had ever hunted a buffalo, for in fact he had never seen one. But stories told him as a boy had fixed themselves on his mind, never to be effaced.
* * * * *
Early spring found Tom Doan arriving at the outfitting post from which an army of buffalo hunters were preparing to leave for the long haul to the south.
The atmosphere of this frontier fort and freighting station was new to Tom, and affected him deeply. The stir of youthful love of wild tales was here revived. At a step, almost, he had found himself on the threshold of the frontier. Huge freighting wagons, some with six horses attached, and loaded with piles and bales of green buffalo hides, lumbered in from the level prairie land. The wide main street of the town presented a continual procession of men and women, mostly in rough garb of travel, and all intent on the mysterious something that seemed to be in the air. There was a plentiful sprinkling of soldiers, and pale-faced, frock-coated gamblers, and many stylishly dressed women who had a too friendly look, Tom thought. There were places of amusement, saloons and dance halls, that Tom found a peep into sufficient. Dust lay inches deep in the street, and the horses passing along continually raised clouds of it.
The camps on the outskirts of this town soon drew Tom. Here, ranged all around, it appeared, were the outfits of the buffalo hunters, getting ready to travel south. Tom meant to cast his lot with one of them, but the tales he had heard about the character of some of these outfits decided him to be careful. According to rumor some of them were as bad as the Comanches.
The first man Tom accosted was a tall, rugged, bronzed Westerner, with a stubby red beard on his lean face. He was camped under a cottonwood, just bursting into green, and on the moment was busy jacking up the hind wheel of his huge canvas-covered wagon.
“I’ll give you a lift,” offered Tom, and with one heave he raised the rear end of the wagon.
“Wal!” ejaculated the Westerner, as he rapidly worked up his jack to meet the discrepancy occasioned by Tom’s lift. “Reckon you’re husky, stranger. Much obliged.”
Tom helped him complete the job of greasing the wagon wheels, and then asked him if he was a buffalo hunter.
“I am thet,” he replied. “An’ what’re you?”
“I’ve come to join one of the outfits. Are there really good wages to be made?”
“Wal, you are new heahaboots,” returned the other, grinning. “My early fall hunt netted me five hundred dollars. Late fall then I made four hundred. An’ this winter I hunted down on the Brazos, cleanin’ up six hundred an’ eighty.”
Tom was amazed and excited over this specific information, direct from the hunting grounds. “Why, that’s wonderful,” he replied. “A fellow can make enough to buy and stock a ranch. Did you have a helper?”
“Shore, my two boys, an’ I paid them wages.”
“How much?” inquired Tom.
“Twenty-five a month. Are you lookin’ fer a job?” rejoined the Westerner, with an appreciative glance at Tom’s broad shoulders.
“Yes, but not for such wages as that. I’d like to go in for myself.”
“It’s the way to do, if you can buy your own outfit.”
Upon inquiry Tom found that outfits were high, and with his small savings he could hardly hope to purchase even an interest in one. It would be necessary for him to hire out to the best advantage, and save his earnings toward buying horses, wagon, and equipment for himself. Nevertheless, opportunity seemed indeed knocking at his door. The rewards of buffalo hunting, as set forth by this Westerner, were great enough to fire the blood of any young man. Tom experienced a sudden lift of his heart. A new and strong tide surged through him.
At the end of the road Tom came to a small grove of cottonwoods, just beyond the edge of town, and here he caught the gleam of more canvas-covered vehicles. He found three outfits camped there, apart from each other, and the largest one was composed of several wagons. A campfire was burning. The smell of wood smoke assailed Tom’s nostrils with more than pleasurable sense. It brought pictures of wild places and camps by lonely streams. A sturdy woman was bending over a wash-tub. Tom caught a glimpse of a girl’s rather comely face peering out of the front of a wagon. Two young men were engaged at shoeing a horse. Under a cottonwood two men sat on a roll of bedding.
As Tom entered the grove one of the men rose to a lofty stature, and showed himself to be built in proportion. He appeared past middle age, but was well-preserved, and possessed a bearded jovial face, with frank blue eyes that fastened curiously upon Tom. The other man had remarkable features, sharp, hard, stern, set like a rock. Down his lean brown cheeks ran deep furrows, and his eyes seemed narrowed inside wrinkled folds. They were gray eyes, light and singularly piercing. Tom had an impression that he was in the presence of real Westerners, and, in the one case, by a man of tremendous force. Quick to form his likes or dislikes, Tom lost no time here in declaring himself.
“My name’s Tom Doan,” he said. “I want a job with a buffalo hunter’s outfit.”
“Glad to meet you. I’m Clark Hudnall, an’ this is my friend Jude Pilchuck,” replied the giant.
Whereupon both men shook hands with Tom and showed the interest common to the time and place. Hudnall’s glance was a frank consideration of Tom’s stalwart form and beardless face. Pilchuck’s was a keen scrutiny associated with memory.
“Doan. Was your father Bill Doan, who rode with Quantrill?” he inquired.
“I knew your father. You favor him, only you’re lighter complexioned. He was a hard rider and a hard shooter. . . . You were a boy when he got. . . .”
“I was fifteen,” said Tom as the other hesitated.
“Were you on your dad’s side?” asked Hudnall curiously.
“No. I was for the North,” returned Tom.
“Well, well, them days were tough,” sighed Hudnall, as if he remembered trials of his own. Then he quickened with interest. “We need a man an’ I like your looks. Have you any hankerin’ for red liquor?”
“No.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Ever hunt buffalo?”
“No.”
“Can you shoot well?”
“I was always a good shot. Have hunted deer and small game a good deal.”
“What’s your idea . . . throwin’ in with a hide-hunter’s outfit?”
Tom hesitated a moment over that query, and then frankly told the truth about his rather complicated longings.
Hudnall laughed, and was impressed to the point of placing a kind hand on Tom’s shoulder. “Young man, I’m glad you told me that,” he said. “Back of my own reason for riskin’ so much in this hide huntin’ is my need to make money quick, an’ I’ve got to have a ranch. So we’re two of a kind. You’re welcome to cast in your lot with us. Shake on it.”
Then Tom felt the mighty grip of a calloused hand that had known the plow and the axe. Pilchuck likewise offered to shake hands with Tom, and expressed himself no less forcibly than Hudnall.
“Reckon it’s a good deal on both sides,” he said. “The right kind of men are scarce. I know this buffalo huntin’. It’s a hard game. An’ if skinnin’ hides isn’t tougher than diggin’ coal, then I was a meat hunter on the U.P. an’ the Santa Fe for nothin’.”