Restoring Buffalo to the Dakota Plains::

Indian Hunters on the Plains II

In 1803, Jefferson acquired around four-fifths of the world's buffalo by negotiating the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon. In so doing he took possession of around thirty million buffalo along with their grazing lands. The westwards rush began, and the march toward extinction of the buffalo was dramatically accelerated.

Lewis and Clark were among the first to be officially sent out to explore the dark and remote hinterlands. Venturing into the unknown, the men frequently encountered herds of buffalo blackening the landscape. They also found boat-loads of fur trappers, traders, and the simply curious travelling up the Missouri River from St Louis, eagerly pressing into Indian Country in search of fur such as beaver, raccoon, and wolf. When supplies of these standard furs were found to be scant, attention was quickly turned to the buffalo - their robes and such by-products as smoked meats and fat.

At the time, trading and exploratory routes in the west were, for the most part, concentrated along the Missouri River. Buffalo along these routes were not plentiful, and few of the budding entrepreneurs had any idea of, or access to, the millions of buffalo thundering across the Great Plains, just west of the mighty river. But they continued to trade with the Indians, exchanging a variety of trade goods for buffalo and other fur, and trapping and hunting the animals themselves.

Enterprising men began to eagerly scour the published reports of Lewis and Clark, and trading posts slowly began to multiply on the northern Plains. In 1807, renowned Missouri fur trader, Manuel Lisa built a solitary post in Crow country, at the mouth of the Bighorn River and sent out his trappers. The furs trapped by Lisa's men and by the Crow fuelled a steady supply of buffalo robes to the St. Louis market until the last of the buffalo had been slaughtered in Crow country, seventy-five years later. Soon after, Lisa established another fur post in Three Forks country - an area that was being claimed by the Blackfeet at the time. The Astoria was established at the mouth of the Columbia River. Others soon appeared in Wyoming - hunting territory for the Sioux and other Indian tribes.

Several more companies came and went in the Plains region. Some were successful, others not so, in the face of increasing resistance and acrimony from Indians. The Blackfeet in particular were adamant in their antipathy to trappers hunting on their territory, even though they supplied thousands of tanned hides a year themselves in exchange for European goods. Lewis and Clark listed some fifteen tribes trading buffalo robes and buffalo tallow by 1804. The Kiowa and Cheyenne, and the Yankton, Brulé and Teton Sioux also traded buffalo skins.

Remarkably enough, despite all of this increased activity, buffalo numbers were not yet threatened. The resistant animals were still managing to renew themselves annually. The steepest decline in numbers occurred after the Civil War.

In the 1840s, covered wagons began to roll gently across the Plains toward Oregon and California. Then gold was discovered in California and from the first strike in 1848 to the last one in 1865, the trickle grew into a flood. The overland trail became crowded with bounty hunters eager to make their fortunes.

The building of the transcontinental railroads sealed the fates of both buffalo and Indians. First came the Union Pacific, then the Kansas and Pacific, then the Santa Fe. The cheap transportation was both furnished by and furnished eastern markets with their eyes on the west. The demand for buffalo hides was high. In 1840, the American Fur Company shipped around 67,000 buffalo robes to market. In 1850, 100,000 buffalo hides reached St. Louis. The demand almost sky-rocketed when the Argentinean cattle trade dried up in the 1860s and cow hide became less abundant and more expensive. In its first three months of existence in 1872, Dodge City shipped 43,029 buffalo hides and 1.4 million pounds of buffalo meat to the East Coast. The market for buffalo tongues was also large: in 1848, St Louis received 25,000 of them for pickling. Eventually, buffalo were forced onto train cars to be delivered to slaughter houses in order to satisfy the demand for their flesh and hide as quickly as possible.

Cattlemen and farmers also moved west, driven by the need for fresh land for grazing or ploughing. Between the end of the Civil War and 1890, some ten million head of longhorn cattle were driven north from the Texan trails. They were then shipped east to feed hungry city workers. Suddenly the buffalo were seen to be hindrances, feeding upon grass that the ranchers wanted for their cattle, roaming across land that farmers wanted cleared for their crops. Soon advertisements by railroad companies were reaching Europe in the effort to entice men into shoot buffalo for sport.

By 1874, the value of buffalo hides had significantly dropped, but still the hunting of them carried on unabated. More and more buffalo were driven off or killed, and new diseases cut a swathe through the fabric of Plains Indian life. Moreover, the division of the Plains by overland trails and railroads deterred the buffalo from coming near, and frustrated those Indians on whom their survival depended.

The reliance of the Indians upon the buffalo was not lost on a government eager for expansion. General George Custer recognised that reliance upon huge herds not only enabled Indian 'war parties' to subsist, but allowed their villages to move freely in all directions. In 1873, Columbus Delano, US Secretary of the Interior, declared: "The civilization of the Indian is impossible while the buffalo remains upon the Plains".

In 1876, Texan Representative, James Throckmorton said,

"There is no question that, so long as there are millions of buffalos in the West, so long [as] the Indians cannot be controlled, even by the strong arm of the Government […] I believe it would be a great step forward in the civilization of the Indians and the preservation of peace on the border if there was not a buffalo in existence."

It was a political expediency that held that in order to subdue the Indian, the buffalo on which they depended must be destroyed too. After the Civil War, President Grant ordered the mass slaughter of buffalo under the auspices of the US military, particularly the Army. Eventually hide hunters were enlisted by the Army to administer the final killings:

"Send them powder and lead, if you will; for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalos are exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilisation to advance. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization" - General Philip Sheridan to the Texas Legislature, 1875.

By 1894, an article in Forest and Stream magazine reported the sobering fact that no fewer than 500 wild buffalo remained in the United States. By the end of the century about 250 had been isolated in Yellowstone National Park and the majority of Indians had been herded onto barren reservations, reduced to the 'play-hunting' of cattle let loose from corrals.

Colonel Richard Dodge observed in 1882: "Ten years ago the Plains Indians had an ample supply of food. […] Now everything is gone, and they are reduced to the condition of paupers, without food, shelter, clothing, or any of those necessaries of life which came from the buffalo". If his words contained a touch of remorse or simply nostalgia, then it mattered not: the damage had been done and it was irrevocable. And no amount of pity would bring the buffalo back to the American continent.

In the late 1880s, there emerged from Nevada a movement called the Ghost Dance, whose prophet, a Paiute named Wovoka (or Jack Wilson) prophesied the return of the buffalo and all Indian lands if the people did the Dance. The message was brought back to the Lakota by Kicking Bear in 1889 and the ensuing frenzy of Ghost Dancing amongst the Lakota brought in the US Seventh Cavalry, who, on December 29, 1890, shot and killed more than 200 Sioux at Wounded Knee. The end had come once and for all:

"When the buffalo disappeared, the old, wild Indian disappeared too. There are places set aside for a few surviving buffalo herds in the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana. There they are watched over by Government rangers and stared at by tourists. If brother buffalo could talk he would say, 'They put me on a reservation like the Indians.' In life and death we and the buffalo have always shared the same fate" - Lame Deer 1972: 70).¹

Notes::

• 1 - John (Fire) Lame Deer. 1972. Lame Deer, seeker of visions. New York : Simon and Schuster.

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