Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to our latest bonus drop of the
Speaker 1: Meat Eater podcast. What you're about to hear is a
Speaker 1: chapter from our new audio original, Meat Eater's American History,
Speaker 1: The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: If you like what you're hearing, you can go find
Speaker 1: the complete work anywhere that you get your audio books. Again,
Speaker 1: Meat Eater's American History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five
Speaker 1: to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: And here's a little taste called Ghosts. Chapter one. Ghosts.
Speaker 2: Let's get something cleared up right away before we even
Speaker 2: begin this story. There is no difference between the animal
Speaker 2: known as the American buffalo and the animal known as
Speaker 2: a bison. Both names refer to the creature whose scientific
Speaker 2: name is bison bison. The confusion about this meaning, the
Speaker 2: confusion about whether you call them buffalo or bison, stems
Speaker 2: from the fact that Europeans who arrived in what is
Speaker 2: now America didn't know what to make of these one
Speaker 2: thousand pound or even two thousand pound catile like creatures
Speaker 2: with sharply curved horns, hugely humped backs, wooly textured hides,
Speaker 2: and delicious meat at various times, various people called them cows,
Speaker 2: crook backed oxen, and leboeuf sauvage, which translates to wild beeves,
Speaker 2: but eventually they settled on buffalo because the animal did
Speaker 2: look a hell of a lot like its distant relatives,
Speaker 2: the cape buffalo of Africa and the water buffalo of Asia. Eventually, though,
Speaker 2: it began occurring to folks that similarities be damned, the
Speaker 2: animal wasn't technically a buffalo. Species began to gradually shift
Speaker 2: to bison, and the bison adopters started to correct the
Speaker 2: buffalo users in classic no ith All fashion, usually by
Speaker 2: saying something like did you know that it's actually called
Speaker 2: a bison. So if you are one of these folks
Speaker 2: who has to roll their eyes or feign confusion whenever
Speaker 2: you hear them called the buffalo, I'm sorry you are
Speaker 2: in for a rough ride on this story, because this
Speaker 2: is a story about buffalo American buffalo. If you know
Speaker 2: only one thing about these animals, it's probably this. There
Speaker 2: used to be a hell of a lot of them,
Speaker 2: and now there aren't that many. For most Americans, the
Speaker 2: buffalo doesn't symbolize wild nature in the way that a
Speaker 2: wole for an elk or a mountain goat does. Instead,
Speaker 2: these massive creatures call to mind a lost world. When
Speaker 2: we look at the animals and the few places where
Speaker 2: they still exist as a wild creature, they bring to
Speaker 2: mind a sort of sadness or a sense of regret
Speaker 2: that things hadn't gone differently for the species, and in
Speaker 2: a way differently for us as Americans who love wildlife
Speaker 2: as well. This here is the story of the men
Speaker 2: who brought that unfortunate reality into existence. They refer to
Speaker 2: themselves as buffalo hunters, but we know of them today
Speaker 2: as the hide hunters. In little more than a decade
Speaker 2: after the end of the Civil War, they wiped the
Speaker 2: Great Planes clear of their most stunning, most visible, and
Speaker 2: most important wildlife species, the American buffalo. In the eighteen
Speaker 2: seventies and early eighteen eighties, commercial demand for leather made
Speaker 2: from the skin of these animals allowed the hide hunters
Speaker 2: to make a living shooting and skinning them by the
Speaker 2: thousands individually and by the millions collectively. At the most
Speaker 2: basic level, hide hunters were market hunters, a term that
Speaker 2: refers to individuals who kill wild animals to sell their meat, skin, feathers, horns,
Speaker 2: or any other part of their bodies that has commercial value.
Speaker 2: Over the course of American history, there have been a
Speaker 2: number of market hunting booms, and it's no coincidence that
Speaker 2: these eras have left us with some of our wildest
Speaker 2: tales of wilderness adventure. Daniel Boone was a market hunter
Speaker 2: who trafficked in white tailed deer skins in the mid
Speaker 2: to late seventeen hundreds. Davy Crockett was a market hunter
Speaker 2: who trafficked in bear meat and bear grease in the
Speaker 2: early eighteen hundreds. Jim Bridger and John Colter were market
Speaker 2: hunters who trafficked in beaver skins for a handful of decades,
Speaker 2: ending at around eighteen forty each of these generations. In
Speaker 2: each of these individuals pursued this unique existence for a
Speaker 2: variety of different reasons, but above all else, their primary
Speaker 2: motivation was financial. Whitetail hunting for Boone, beaver trapping for Bridger.
Speaker 2: Buffalo hunting for the hide hunters was a lifestyle, sure,
Speaker 2: but most importantly we need to understand it as a livelihood.
Speaker 2: These buffalo hide hunters did their work with ruthless efficiency,
Speaker 2: from the sweltering plains of Texas to the frozen planes
Speaker 2: of the Canadian border, armed with what we might call
Speaker 2: the next generation weapons of their day, high powered breech
Speaker 2: loading rifles, some with telescopic sights that could drop a
Speaker 2: two thousand pound bull buffalo at distances that most shooters
Speaker 2: today would have a hard time matching. Despite how foreign
Speaker 2: the actions of these men might seem to us in
Speaker 2: the twenty first century, this tragic, stunning, jaw dropping, awe
Speaker 2: inspiring saga took place in a world that is not
Speaker 2: so terribly distant from the one we live in now.
Speaker 2: In addition to shooting guns that fired brass casings, they
Speaker 2: read newspapers. They traveled by train, and they ordered some
Speaker 2: of the things they wanted, including sometimes their rifles, through
Speaker 2: the mail. Many of them, years after the slaughter, would
Speaker 2: flip light switches. Some would even drive cars. And yet
Speaker 2: they carried out a campaign of unintentional eradication that is
Speaker 2: unthinkable to us today. The hide hunters didn't arrive in
Speaker 2: ships from across the ocean. They weren't exploring places that
Speaker 2: had never been seen by a white man. They didn't
Speaker 2: rack up a list of crazy firsts. The first person
Speaker 2: of European descent to reach the Texas Panhandle where a
Speaker 2: good hunk of this story takes place, got there three
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty four years before the start of this story.
Speaker 2: It was the Spanish Conquisodor Coronado, the first non indigenous
Speaker 2: people to cross the continent. The Lewis and Clark expedition
Speaker 2: had done so sixty years before the start of this story.
Speaker 2: There are no frontier luminaries in here. There are no
Speaker 2: Daniel Boons or Jim Bridges among the hide hunters. We've
Speaker 2: mythologized those hunters and trappers into honorary founding fathers. They
Speaker 2: star in countless films and TV shows and songs and
Speaker 2: campfire tales. But the hide hunters. They don't make movies
Speaker 2: about them. Children don't play games pretending to be them. Sure,
Speaker 2: a few of the hide hunters became well known for
Speaker 2: doing other stuff later on, like being gunfighters and ranchers
Speaker 2: and entertainers and conservationists, but their names as hide hunters
Speaker 2: are largely absent from the annals of history. There were
Speaker 2: maybe about five thousand of them in total, who worked
Speaker 2: as either a shooter, a skinner, or simply a hired hand.
Speaker 2: There were many colorful characters, some with quite descriptive nicknames.
Speaker 2: You had Charles, squirrel Eye, Emery soor Toed Joe, Limpy,
Speaker 2: Jim Smith. You had Snuffer, Soda water Jack, three Finger Foley,
Speaker 2: and Buffalo Jones. Dirty Face Jones got his name when
Speaker 2: a bullet intended to kill him missed his head, but
Speaker 2: his would be killer was so close that the burning
Speaker 2: flash of powder seared his cheeks and nose. You could
Speaker 2: be forgiven for confusing dirty Face Jones with powder Face Hudson,
Speaker 2: but his two different fellas Wrongwheeled Jones committed an innocent
Speaker 2: act of stupidity that he'd never lived down when he
Speaker 2: insisted to a group of his fellow hunters that it
Speaker 2: was impossible to replace a broken wheel on the right
Speaker 2: side of a wagon with a wheel from the left side.
Speaker 2: To illustrate the fraught nature of their work, considered us
Speaker 2: a few short things about skunks. The hide hunter Skunk
Speaker 2: Johnson is largely remembered for an episode when he was
Speaker 2: trapped inside his cave like shelter known as a dugout
Speaker 2: by a party of hostile Indians. The siege lasted fifteen days,
Speaker 2: during which time he only ate skunks. Another hunter, known
Speaker 2: as Kentuck, was bitten by a rabbit skunk, causing him
Speaker 2: to crawl underneath a railroad water tank in a delusional fit,
Speaker 2: where he died. A third hide hunter, whose name is
Speaker 2: lost to history, also suffered a bite from a rabbit skunk.
Speaker 2: When he felt the beginning of a spasm of hydrophobia,
Speaker 2: as the condition was known, he walked out behind a
Speaker 2: building and swallowed a gulp of strychnine, which the hide
Speaker 2: hunters used to protect their stack of buffalo skins from bugs, vermin,
Speaker 2: and other prairie scavengers, and also on occasion to poison
Speaker 2: wolves for a little side money that could be made
Speaker 2: from selling their hides. These were not wealthy or well
Speaker 2: connected men. They were as blue collar, working class as
Speaker 2: it gets. They were poor guys born in places like
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania and Georgia and Illinois to farmers and blacksmiths and
Speaker 2: barrel makers. A great many of the hide hunters had
Speaker 2: been tangled up in the horrors of the Civil War
Speaker 2: on both sides of that conflict. As fighting men, killing
Speaker 2: buffalo by the dozens and sometimes upwards of one hundred
Speaker 2: in a day per man, the hide hunters wrought perhaps
Speaker 2: the most egregious episode of natural resource over exploitation in
Speaker 2: the history of the United States, if not the world.
Speaker 2: We simply don't have any other examples, at least in
Speaker 2: the historical era of a comparable, widely distributed wildlife species
Speaker 2: pushed to the brink of collapse so quickly by the
Speaker 2: hands of man. Whatever one thinks about the outcome of
Speaker 2: all that killing, and there's really only one thing to think,
Speaker 2: which is what an incredible waste? You can't escape from
Speaker 2: the reality that these guys were absolute masters of their craft.
Speaker 2: They were tough, They craved adventure, They had incredible endurance,
Speaker 2: They could think fast, they could shoot, they could fight.
Speaker 2: They were brave to the point that it resembles a
Speaker 2: suicidal recklessness. And man, they could work, like work harder
Speaker 2: than anyone you're ever likely to encounter in your own
Speaker 2: life today. What made the era of the hide hunters
Speaker 2: possible was a combination of factors too big and complex
Speaker 2: for most of them to have fully comprehended. In hindsight,
Speaker 2: it look like a perfect storm. For one, consider the
Speaker 2: impact of the railroads. Long hunters like Daniel Boone and
Speaker 2: mountain men like Jim Bridger were distinctly pre industrial. They
Speaker 2: operated within the natural constraints of muscle and bone. The
Speaker 2: Great Bottleneck and their operations was the cold reality of
Speaker 2: needing to move goods deer skins and beaver pelts, respectively,
Speaker 2: to market on the backs of horses and mules. For Boone,
Speaker 2: this meant leading a small string of horses over rough
Speaker 2: trails through the Cumberland Gap and across the Appalachian Mountains.
Speaker 2: The mountain men who plied the streams of the Rockies
Speaker 2: in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties moved their furs
Speaker 2: via an annual pack train that took several weeks to
Speaker 2: cross the plains even in good weather. Their operations were
Speaker 2: fueled and limited in scale by equine conveys. For the
Speaker 2: hide hunters, the railroads transformed everything. The heavy, cumbersome, quite
Speaker 2: rigid hides of buffalo were shipped back to the tanneries
Speaker 2: of the East in such quantities that they could not
Speaker 2: possibly have been moved by wagon, train or horseback. The
Speaker 2: timeline alone reveals the connection with stunning clarity. It is
Speaker 2: no coincidence that the hunt in Kansas erupted in eighteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, the same year that the Topeka and Santa
Speaker 2: Fe Railroad arrived in Dodge City. It is no coincidence
Speaker 2: that the height of the killing in Texas followed the
Speaker 2: arrival of the railroad in Fort Worth on July fourth,
Speaker 2: eighteen seventy six. And once again it is no coincidence
Speaker 2: that the Northern herd was quickly wiped out following the
Speaker 2: extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Miles City in
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty one. At the same time, the proliferation of
Speaker 2: factory machines and the accelerating industrialization of the American economy
Speaker 2: created an insatiable demand for tough, elastic leather that could
Speaker 2: be used as drive belts as in factory belting. Picture
Speaker 2: for a moment. The timing belt in your car are
Speaker 2: in your snowmobile. It's essentially a strap running around two wheels,
Speaker 2: so that when one wheel turns, typically powered by a motor,
Speaker 2: the wheel on the other end turns as well. Simply put,
Speaker 2: a belt transmits power from one place to another, and
Speaker 2: in the ever expanding industrial economy of the late eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 2: miles of belting were needed to apply power generated by
Speaker 2: steam or water wheels to looms, saws, lathes, and any
Speaker 2: number of applications where machines were doing work that was
Speaker 2: once done by hand. Buffalo leather, which compared to cattle leather,
Speaker 2: was more elastic, while also incredibly tough, served as an
Speaker 2: ideal material for machine belting, and at the very moment
Speaker 2: that transportation networks were able to deliver buffalo hides by
Speaker 2: the millions to eastern tanneries, and those eastern tanneries were
Speaker 2: able to sell unlimited quantities of those process hides. Advances
Speaker 2: and firearms technology accelerated by the Civil War made the
Speaker 2: American riflemen exponentially more effective than his predecessors of only
Speaker 2: a few decades before. Earlier breech loading rifles, to say
Speaker 2: nothing of the muzzleloaders that came before them, were too underpowered,
Speaker 2: too inaccurate, and too clumsy to reload to have been
Speaker 2: capable of the buffalo killing that the hide hunters unleashed
Speaker 2: on the planes. We'll get into the specifics of those
Speaker 2: rifles later on, But just as our story would have
Speaker 2: been impossible without the railroad, it would have been impossible
Speaker 2: without the cutting edge firearms of the post Civil War era.
Speaker 2: The Civil War lurks in the background of this story
Speaker 2: as a sort of dark prequel in the title of
Speaker 2: this work, you'll notice the date range eighteen sixty five
Speaker 2: to eighteen eighty three. Well, eighteen sixty five is the
Speaker 2: year the Civil War ended. The aftermath of that bloody
Speaker 2: war between the states pushed out westward a restless generation
Speaker 2: of men in search of work and opportunity. It pushed
Speaker 2: them away from the war ravaged cities and agricultural communities
Speaker 2: of southern reconstruction, away from the strictured discipline and meager
Speaker 2: rations of military service, away from the insecurity and claustrophobia
Speaker 2: of the family farm, way from the starvation wages of
Speaker 2: the northern factory floor. On the distant plains of the
Speaker 2: American West, they saw a new life of promise, adventure,
Speaker 2: and cash. A couple of years ago, I sat for
Speaker 2: a lengthy interview for a Ken Burns documentary on the
Speaker 2: history of the American buffalo, and during the editing process,
Speaker 2: I was invited to offer feedback. My primary concern with
Speaker 2: an early version of the series was that its short
Speaker 2: treatment of the subject of the hide hunters dehumanized them.
Speaker 2: It made it seem as though they were motivated by
Speaker 2: some sadistic desire to destroy American wildlife. It's understandable how
Speaker 2: people would get that idea, but it's naive. Rather than
Speaker 2: imagining the hide Hunters as soul as hell billies, it's
Speaker 2: better to see them as the vanguard of industrial capitalism
Speaker 2: on the western planes. In today's world, serious thinkers don't
Speaker 2: personally blame an Appalachian born coal miner for air pollution.
Speaker 2: We don't blame frontline soldiers for the conflicts they fight in,
Speaker 2: and we don't blame the guys driving concrete trucks and
Speaker 2: hanging drywall for suburban sprawl. Now to that, you might say, well,
Speaker 2: the Buffalo Hunters knew what they were doing, and the
Speaker 2: collective consequences of their individual actions were incredibly costly. Well,
Speaker 2: if in fifty years all of the most apocalyptic predictions
Speaker 2: about global warming have come true, I'm not going to
Speaker 2: say that a guy making a living in a North
Speaker 2: Dakota oil field was a bad guy. And I'm not
Speaker 2: going to cite all of the times you turned on
Speaker 2: your air conditioner or failed to organize car pools instead
Speaker 2: of driving alone. I'd instead point my finger at political inertia,
Speaker 2: societal indifference, imperative of economic growth, and the human tendency
Speaker 2: to endure changes for the worse, rather than trying to
Speaker 2: remedy them. Not that these guys were saints, they most
Speaker 2: certainly were not. It's fair to say that most held
Speaker 2: the same prejudice views of Native people that were common
Speaker 2: at the time, and they did not keep those prejudice
Speaker 2: views to themselves either. Some of them were objectively villainous figures,
Speaker 2: and many had a real pensiant for violence. And I
Speaker 2: hope it's clear by now that I mourned the consequences
Speaker 2: of their actions. At the same time, to understand them
Speaker 2: as real people requires recognizing the larger systems and structures
Speaker 2: of which they were just one small part, and acknowledging
Speaker 2: that everyone has limited choices from which to choose. As
Speaker 2: the hide hunter, Frank Mayer said of his time shooting
Speaker 2: buffalo on the pl planes, he had a hide, the
Speaker 2: hide was worth money. I was young, twenty two. I
Speaker 2: could shoot. I'd like to hunt. Wouldn't you have done
Speaker 2: the same thing? If I'm answering that question honestly as
Speaker 2: your author sitting at a microphone, as a guy who
Speaker 2: lives for hunting and fishing, and I put myself back
Speaker 2: in Frank Mayer's shoes, I think the answer would be Yeah,
Speaker 2: I would have done the same damn thing. If you've
Speaker 2: never heard of Frank Mayor, you could forgive yourself to
Speaker 2: put a human face on old Frank. Here's a bit
Speaker 2: about him. Born in eighteen fifty, he was a thirteen
Speaker 2: year old drummer boy for his father's artillery unit when
Speaker 2: he witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, where one man
Speaker 2: died for about every ten seconds of fighting. From age
Speaker 2: twenty two to twenty eight, Mayor hunted buffalo on the
Speaker 2: plains of Kansas and Texas, killing thousands. By the time
Speaker 2: the old hide Hunter died on February twelve, nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 2: my own father was thirty years old, Hugh Hefner was
Speaker 2: publishing Playboy magazine, and the Korean War was over. Mayor
Speaker 2: had survived some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil
Speaker 2: War and lived into the age of nuclear submarines, Burger
Speaker 2: king and corvettes. Mayor is one of those hide hunters
Speaker 2: we know a lot about. There are some others, such
Speaker 2: as Charles Wrath and Jay Wright Moore. These guys were
Speaker 2: pioneers of the trade, recognized by their contemporaries as influential characters.
Speaker 2: If you read anything about this era, you'll run into
Speaker 2: their names again and again. They appear throughout the historical
Speaker 2: record in ledgers, diaries, receipts, newspaper articles, and legal documents
Speaker 2: related to their careers as hide hunters. Other hide hunters
Speaker 2: recorded their experiences in great detail later on in life,
Speaker 2: either for posterity's sake or to make a little money.
Speaker 2: Among those is John Cook, who published a memoir, The
Speaker 2: Border and the Buffalo in nineteen oh seven. During the
Speaker 2: Civil War, Cook fought for the Union along the bloody
Speaker 2: boundary between Missouri and Kansas, where gorilla forces committed some
Speaker 2: of the most gruesome atrocities of that conflict. Afterward, like
Speaker 2: many of his fellow veterans, he drifted westward. From the
Speaker 2: fall of eighteen seventy four until the spring of eighteen
Speaker 2: seventy eight, Cook hunted the Panhandle of Texas. His descriptions
Speaker 2: of the day to day business of hunting and skinning
Speaker 2: are vividly detailed. Many hide hunters, like George Reigard, were
Speaker 2: interviewed later in life by local reporters writing for readership's
Speaker 2: hungry for stories from the so called Old West. Re
Speaker 2: Reguard was born in Pennsylvania in eighteen forty seven and
Speaker 2: enlisted in the twenty second Cavalry one month after the
Speaker 2: Battle of Gettysburg at sixteen years of age. After being
Speaker 2: wounded and discharged from the army, he set out for
Speaker 2: western Kansas, where he drove freight wagons and marveled at
Speaker 2: his strange new surroundings before adopting the occupation of a
Speaker 2: hide hunter. Between eighteen seventy one and eighteen seventy three,
Speaker 2: Reguard killed more than five thousand animals. It was he
Speaker 2: recalled buffalo butchery by wholesale. What makes the story you're
Speaker 2: about to hear so historically significant and so viscerally tragic
Speaker 2: is that the hide hunters came at the end, or
Speaker 2: rather caused the end, of a long procession of buffalo
Speaker 2: hunters who'd been chasing the animals for more than ten
Speaker 2: thousand years across the landscapes that we now call the
Speaker 2: United States. Their actions closed out one of the longest
Speaker 2: running cultural and economic life ways that this planet has
Speaker 2: ever seen since the arrival of the very first humans
Speaker 2: in North America. Indigenous people nurtured a relationship with these
Speaker 2: animals that, while it took on different forms at different times.
Speaker 2: Is most remarkable for its sustainability. The first American buffalo
Speaker 2: hunters were ice age immigrants from Siberia who killed a
Speaker 2: somewhat longer horned variety on the grasslands of northern Alaska
Speaker 2: using adladdles. Later on, there were buffalo hunters who killed
Speaker 2: great quantities of the animals by driving them over cliffs
Speaker 2: and Alberta and Montana and even down into Texas. There
Speaker 2: were buffalo hunters in the Dakotas who crept up on
Speaker 2: the animals camouflaged beneath the skins of freshly killed buffalo calves,
Speaker 2: close enough to sink a carefully placed arrow into their
Speaker 2: rib cage. And with the spread of equestrian culture among
Speaker 2: the Planes tribes after the Spanish introduced horses into North America,
Speaker 2: we had buffalo hunters in western Kansas who chased buffalo
Speaker 2: down on horseback and got so close they could have
Speaker 2: jumped onto the buffalo's back, but instead held a smooth
Speaker 2: bore musket barrel right up to the crease behind the
Speaker 2: buffalo's shoulder in order to deliver a lead ball into
Speaker 2: the heart. Without a doubt, the story of each of
Speaker 2: those buffalo hunting cultures is worthy of a project like this.
Speaker 2: But this here is not a holistic analysis of the
Speaker 2: different ways that different people hunted buffalo, nor is this
Speaker 2: a comprehensive history of the destruction of the buffalo. That
Speaker 2: tale of shrinking range and collapsing numbers actually spans hundreds
Speaker 2: of years in a huge swath of the continent. For
Speaker 2: our journey ahead, though a quick overview of that will
Speaker 2: be helpful to you. When Europeans started penetrating into the
Speaker 2: various corners of North America over the sixteen hundreds and
Speaker 2: seventeen hundreds, they found scattered groups of buffalo and sometimes
Speaker 2: impressive herds in the woods of Pennsylvania and stands of
Speaker 2: cain along the Ohio River, along streams in what is
Speaker 2: now Nashville, Tennessee, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and
Speaker 2: in the rolling hills and tall grass prairies of Wisconsin
Speaker 2: and western Minnesota and Iowa. Daniel Boone frequently targeted them
Speaker 2: for meat in Kentucky. As Boone and his contemporaries spread
Speaker 2: out and pushed ever westward, those eastern buffalo herds were
Speaker 2: killed off one by one by pot hunters feeding their
Speaker 2: families and small scale market hunters looking to make a buck.
Speaker 2: The various states buffalo populations fell like European nations in
Speaker 2: the wake of the German Blitzkreek. Boone's own son, Nathan,
Speaker 2: killed the last buffalo in Virginia in seventeen ninety seven.
Speaker 2: North Carolina wiped out theirs in seventeen ninety nine, and
Speaker 2: Kentucky did the same one year later, Pennsylvania the year
Speaker 2: after that. Louisiana killed its last buffalo in eighteen oh three,
Speaker 2: and the last in Illinois and Ohio died in eighteen
Speaker 2: oh eight, Tennessee eighteen twenty three, West Virginia eighteen twenty five,
Speaker 2: Wisconsin eighteen thirty two. By the close of the Civil
Speaker 2: War in eighteen sixty five, which again begins the story
Speaker 2: of the hide hunters that I'm going to tell here,
Speaker 2: the animals were still mind blowingly abundant and what you
Speaker 2: might think of as the core of their historic range
Speaker 2: the American Great Plains and the inner mountain valleys of
Speaker 2: the Rockies. Buffalo were still in the Panhandle of North Texas.
Speaker 2: They were still in western Oklahoma, Western Kansas, western Nebraska.
Speaker 2: They were still in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming,
Speaker 2: and Colorado were loaded, there were still buffalo in northern
Speaker 2: New Mexico. Admittedly, the best research out there today indicates
Speaker 2: that the herds wiped out by the hide hunters were
Speaker 2: already diminished by a host of factors. Besides bullets, a
Speaker 2: record drought between eighteen fifty six and eighteen sixty four
Speaker 2: helped the diminishment. Competition for grass from wild horses helped.
Speaker 2: Diseases like anthrax and bovine tuberculosis introduced by European cattle
Speaker 2: perhaps helped some. Added to that. Indigenous hunting pressure and
Speaker 2: harvest numbers certainly increased after the ascendancy of equestrian hunting culture,
Speaker 2: which inspired many tribes to move onto the plains in
Speaker 2: pursuit of meat for their families and buffalo robes to
Speaker 2: be sold to American traders. So, in terms of what
Speaker 2: the hide hunters destroyed after the Civil War, how many
Speaker 2: buffalo exactly are we talking about? Historians and ecologists are
Speaker 2: still fighting about that today. A total population of around
Speaker 2: fifteen million is a safe, currently fashionable number. Compare that
Speaker 2: to the estimated population size in the year eighteen eighty three,
Speaker 2: the end date used in the title of this work.
Speaker 2: At that point eighteen eighty three, the number of buffalo
Speaker 2: that were still left alive in the unit United States
Speaker 2: was less than one thousand, Or put another way, it
Speaker 2: was ninety nine zero point nine to nine percent fewer
Speaker 2: than at the close of the Civil War. Here's a
Speaker 2: thing we ought to clear up before we get too
Speaker 2: far along. Common American history lessons about the destruction of
Speaker 2: the herds like to include sordid details about the gross
Speaker 2: excesses of Western travelers and tourists gunning down buffalo from
Speaker 2: moving trains or shooting them simply to see how many
Speaker 2: they could get. Sir George Gore, an Irish nobleman, famously
Speaker 2: took a multi year safari in Wyoming's Powder River country
Speaker 2: in the mid eighteen fifties. Accompanied by a small army
Speaker 2: of servants, a selection of fine wines, and a French
Speaker 2: carpet for the floor of his tent. Gore killed some
Speaker 2: two thousand bison using seventy five different rifles he brought along.
Speaker 2: He's one of the most obnoxious, reviled characters of the
Speaker 2: American West, and there's no doubt there were a lot
Speaker 2: of buffalo killed just for the sport of it. But
Speaker 2: was it enough to wipe them off the face of
Speaker 2: the continent hardly. Another frequently repeated claim is that the
Speaker 2: US Army deliberately exterminated the buffalo in order to starve
Speaker 2: the tribes of the plans and force them onto reservations.
Speaker 2: To be fair, there is some anecdotal evidence of individual
Speaker 2: officers and units targeting local buffalo herds in a scorched
Speaker 2: Earth style tactic, and some hide hunters fought side by
Speaker 2: side with army units, including African American units known as
Speaker 2: Buffalo Soldiers, during periods of hostility, especially on the southern plains.
Speaker 2: But was there an actual policy or a broader military
Speaker 2: strategy targeting the buffalo. The most frequently cited evidence of
Speaker 2: anything resembling that General Phillip Sheridan's address to the Texas
Speaker 2: Legislature in eighteen seventy five has been thoroughly debunked as
Speaker 2: a hoax invented later in life by a hide hunter
Speaker 2: who wanted to drape the shame of his younger years
Speaker 2: in the flag of patriotic duty. If you start reading
Speaker 2: a lot about the history of the buffalo, you'll encounter
Speaker 2: that mention of Sheridan's speech again and again. It's bs
Speaker 2: and In truth, all the train shooting and army shooting
Speaker 2: didn't even matter biologically. It was inconsequential. Today, driving across
Speaker 2: certain stretches of the Great Plains, say Interstate ninety between
Speaker 2: Billings and Miles City, Montana, Interstate seventy from Abilene, Kansas,
Speaker 2: all the way to Colorado, or Interstate forty from Oklahoma
Speaker 2: City across the Texas Panhandle, will feel the hide Hunter's
Speaker 2: legacy in your bones, that haunting emptiness where millions of
Speaker 2: Buffalo should be grazing. This story is an effort to
Speaker 2: resurrect those men who last experienced the Great Herds, those
Speaker 2: men who lived and hunted among them and who destroyed them.
Speaker 2: It's an effort to bring them forward, to summon them
Speaker 2: so we can ask them some questions. Where did you
Speaker 2: come from, How exactly did you do what you did,
Speaker 2: what did it cost you, what did you gain in return?
Speaker 2: And why did you do it? We will ask those
Speaker 2: questions and seek their answers in the coming chapters. Here's
Speaker 2: a rough idea of how it will go. We'll begin
Speaker 2: by establishing some essential context for the Hide Hunter story,
Speaker 2: a deep time history of people in Buffalo on the
Speaker 2: Great Plains, in the emergence of the first market for
Speaker 2: buffalo skins in the form of the robe trade. Here
Speaker 2: you'll get a sense of the significance of the animal
Speaker 2: to the original inhabitants of the American West and the
Speaker 2: pre industrial constraints on its commodification. From there, we'll jump
Speaker 2: to the aftermath of the Civil War, in which a
Speaker 2: generation of displaced veterans looked westward for new opportunities at
Speaker 2: the same time that the transcontinental railroads connected the resources
Speaker 2: of the Great Plains with the industrial East. Ground zero
Speaker 2: for this explosive new economy was Dodge City, Kansas, the
Speaker 2: subject of chapter four. It was in this upstart railroad
Speaker 2: town where the business of the hide hunt took on
Speaker 2: its characteristic form and its impact on the resource was
Speaker 2: almost immediately made clear. From there will follow the hide
Speaker 2: hunters as they push into bloody Texas and violation of
Speaker 2: treaties signed between native tribes and the US government. The
Speaker 2: second phase showcases the speed and thoroughness of the slaughter,
Speaker 2: as well as the dangers faced by hide hunters as
Speaker 2: they endured unforgiving landscapes and the ever present potential for hostility.
Speaker 2: Then finally, we'll head north to the plains and bad
Speaker 2: lands of eastern Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas,
Speaker 2: where the Hide Hunters endured brutal cold as they finished
Speaker 2: off the last remaining herds of the Great Plains. Along
Speaker 2: the way, we'll discuss the weapons and tactics that made
Speaker 2: the hide Hunters such effective killers. We'll explore how a
Speaker 2: camp full of these rugged characters undertook their day to
Speaker 2: day work, and how they passed a little bit of
Speaker 2: free time when they weren't engaged in shooting and skinning.
Speaker 2: Will also give you an in depth examination of how
Speaker 2: they processed buffalo for the market and what happened to
Speaker 2: those hides once they were loaded onto eastbound trains. And lastly,
Speaker 2: we'll dive into the scene that faced the hide Hunters
Speaker 2: when their grizzly work was done and the planes had
Speaker 2: been emptied of herds that once numbered in the tens
Speaker 2: of millions. Throughout this story, you'll come to see the
Speaker 2: Hide Hunters not as larger than life characters or storybook villains,
Speaker 2: but as historical actors faced with a certain set of choices,
Speaker 2: and you'll see how their story shaped our contemporary understandings
Speaker 2: of environmental degradation, commercial exploitation, and the mythology of the
Speaker 2: American West. Throughout, we'll point to the facts of how
Speaker 2: we know what we know, so you understand the sources
Speaker 2: and research that went into this in case you want
Speaker 2: to do some follow up reading on your own. As
Speaker 2: for the sources, it would be a sin if I
Speaker 2: did not acknowledge the work of three historians, Miles Gilbert,
Speaker 2: Leo Ramager, and Sharon Cunningham, who have published two initial
Speaker 2: volumes A through D and E through K of an
Speaker 2: ambitious encyclopedia of Buffalo hunters and skinners. It's the most
Speaker 2: comprehensive resource out there for researchers who want to track
Speaker 2: down the names of hide hunters and figure out what
Speaker 2: published and archival materials might exist in order to better
Speaker 2: tell their story. Trust me when I say that our
Speaker 2: telling of the hide hunter story would be missing some
Speaker 2: choice details and incredible anecdotes if it weren't for these
Speaker 2: unique works. Now, let's get on with our story.