WEBVTT - Ep. 779: Bonus - The Hide Hunters, Ch. 1: Ghosts 0:00:00.200 --> 0:00:02.840 Thanks for listening to our latest bonus drop of the 0:00:02.880 --> 0:00:05.920 Meat Eater podcast. What you're about to hear is a 0:00:06.040 --> 0:00:11.559 chapter from our new audio original, Meat Eater's American History, 0:00:12.080 --> 0:00:16.319 The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three. 0:00:17.000 --> 0:00:20.040 If you like what you're hearing, you can go find 0:00:20.079 --> 0:00:24.320 the complete work anywhere that you get your audio books. Again, 0:00:24.800 --> 0:00:29.120 Meat Eater's American History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five 0:00:29.680 --> 0:00:31.000 to eighteen eighty three. 0:00:31.520 --> 0:00:42.080 And here's a little taste called Ghosts. Chapter one. Ghosts. 0:00:43.200 --> 0:00:46.520 Let's get something cleared up right away before we even 0:00:46.600 --> 0:00:50.680 begin this story. There is no difference between the animal 0:00:50.760 --> 0:00:54.840 known as the American buffalo and the animal known as 0:00:54.840 --> 0:00:59.560 a bison. Both names refer to the creature whose scientific 0:00:59.640 --> 0:01:04.440 name is bison bison. The confusion about this meaning, the 0:01:04.480 --> 0:01:07.880 confusion about whether you call them buffalo or bison, stems 0:01:07.920 --> 0:01:10.840 from the fact that Europeans who arrived in what is 0:01:10.920 --> 0:01:14.160 now America didn't know what to make of these one 0:01:14.240 --> 0:01:19.160 thousand pound or even two thousand pound catile like creatures 0:01:19.760 --> 0:01:25.759 with sharply curved horns, hugely humped backs, wooly textured hides, 0:01:26.360 --> 0:01:32.039 and delicious meat at various times, various people called them cows, 0:01:32.440 --> 0:01:39.280 crook backed oxen, and leboeuf sauvage, which translates to wild beeves, 0:01:40.040 --> 0:01:43.479 but eventually they settled on buffalo because the animal did 0:01:43.560 --> 0:01:46.319 look a hell of a lot like its distant relatives, 0:01:46.720 --> 0:01:51.800 the cape buffalo of Africa and the water buffalo of Asia. Eventually, though, 0:01:52.200 --> 0:01:55.800 it began occurring to folks that similarities be damned, the 0:01:55.920 --> 0:02:01.920 animal wasn't technically a buffalo. Species began to gradually shift 0:02:02.120 --> 0:02:05.720 to bison, and the bison adopters started to correct the 0:02:05.760 --> 0:02:09.839 buffalo users in classic no ith All fashion, usually by 0:02:09.880 --> 0:02:12.760 saying something like did you know that it's actually called 0:02:12.800 --> 0:02:15.960 a bison. So if you are one of these folks 0:02:16.000 --> 0:02:19.640 who has to roll their eyes or feign confusion whenever 0:02:19.680 --> 0:02:23.760 you hear them called the buffalo, I'm sorry you are 0:02:23.880 --> 0:02:26.760 in for a rough ride on this story, because this 0:02:26.840 --> 0:02:31.640 is a story about buffalo American buffalo. If you know 0:02:31.840 --> 0:02:36.040 only one thing about these animals, it's probably this. There 0:02:36.160 --> 0:02:38.160 used to be a hell of a lot of them, 0:02:38.639 --> 0:02:42.720 and now there aren't that many. For most Americans, the 0:02:42.760 --> 0:02:46.680 buffalo doesn't symbolize wild nature in the way that a 0:02:46.720 --> 0:02:50.079 wole for an elk or a mountain goat does. Instead, 0:02:50.400 --> 0:02:55.320 these massive creatures call to mind a lost world. When 0:02:55.320 --> 0:02:57.520 we look at the animals and the few places where 0:02:57.520 --> 0:03:00.720 they still exist as a wild creature, they bring to 0:03:00.800 --> 0:03:04.280 mind a sort of sadness or a sense of regret 0:03:04.440 --> 0:03:07.680 that things hadn't gone differently for the species, and in 0:03:07.720 --> 0:03:11.800 a way differently for us as Americans who love wildlife 0:03:12.240 --> 0:03:16.160 as well. This here is the story of the men 0:03:16.280 --> 0:03:21.320 who brought that unfortunate reality into existence. They refer to 0:03:21.440 --> 0:03:24.960 themselves as buffalo hunters, but we know of them today 0:03:25.600 --> 0:03:28.760 as the hide hunters. In little more than a decade 0:03:28.840 --> 0:03:31.520 after the end of the Civil War, they wiped the 0:03:31.560 --> 0:03:35.840 Great Planes clear of their most stunning, most visible, and 0:03:35.920 --> 0:03:41.440 most important wildlife species, the American buffalo. In the eighteen 0:03:41.560 --> 0:03:46.080 seventies and early eighteen eighties, commercial demand for leather made 0:03:46.080 --> 0:03:48.840 from the skin of these animals allowed the hide hunters 0:03:48.880 --> 0:03:51.920 to make a living shooting and skinning them by the 0:03:52.080 --> 0:03:58.320 thousands individually and by the millions collectively. At the most 0:03:58.360 --> 0:04:02.560 basic level, hide hunters were market hunters, a term that 0:04:02.640 --> 0:04:08.240 refers to individuals who kill wild animals to sell their meat, skin, feathers, horns, 0:04:08.640 --> 0:04:12.880 or any other part of their bodies that has commercial value. 0:04:12.960 --> 0:04:15.840 Over the course of American history, there have been a 0:04:15.920 --> 0:04:20.320 number of market hunting booms, and it's no coincidence that 0:04:20.360 --> 0:04:23.560 these eras have left us with some of our wildest 0:04:23.600 --> 0:04:28.600 tales of wilderness adventure. Daniel Boone was a market hunter 0:04:28.680 --> 0:04:32.000 who trafficked in white tailed deer skins in the mid 0:04:32.040 --> 0:04:36.400 to late seventeen hundreds. Davy Crockett was a market hunter 0:04:36.440 --> 0:04:39.680 who trafficked in bear meat and bear grease in the 0:04:39.760 --> 0:04:44.240 early eighteen hundreds. Jim Bridger and John Colter were market 0:04:44.279 --> 0:04:48.560 hunters who trafficked in beaver skins for a handful of decades, 0:04:48.680 --> 0:04:53.680 ending at around eighteen forty each of these generations. In 0:04:53.720 --> 0:04:58.000 each of these individuals pursued this unique existence for a 0:04:58.120 --> 0:05:03.480 variety of different reasons, but above all else, their primary 0:05:03.760 --> 0:05:09.920 motivation was financial. Whitetail hunting for Boone, beaver trapping for Bridger. 0:05:10.400 --> 0:05:13.960 Buffalo hunting for the hide hunters was a lifestyle, sure, 0:05:14.400 --> 0:05:19.000 but most importantly we need to understand it as a livelihood. 0:05:20.240 --> 0:05:24.960 These buffalo hide hunters did their work with ruthless efficiency, 0:05:25.360 --> 0:05:28.600 from the sweltering plains of Texas to the frozen planes 0:05:28.680 --> 0:05:32.040 of the Canadian border, armed with what we might call 0:05:32.200 --> 0:05:37.120 the next generation weapons of their day, high powered breech 0:05:37.200 --> 0:05:41.200 loading rifles, some with telescopic sights that could drop a 0:05:41.240 --> 0:05:45.520 two thousand pound bull buffalo at distances that most shooters 0:05:45.520 --> 0:05:49.960 today would have a hard time matching. Despite how foreign 0:05:50.120 --> 0:05:52.839 the actions of these men might seem to us in 0:05:52.880 --> 0:05:58.360 the twenty first century, this tragic, stunning, jaw dropping, awe 0:05:58.440 --> 0:06:02.560 inspiring saga took place in a world that is not 0:06:02.760 --> 0:06:06.599 so terribly distant from the one we live in now. 0:06:07.560 --> 0:06:12.320 In addition to shooting guns that fired brass casings, they 0:06:12.360 --> 0:06:16.520 read newspapers. They traveled by train, and they ordered some 0:06:16.680 --> 0:06:20.760 of the things they wanted, including sometimes their rifles, through 0:06:20.800 --> 0:06:24.640 the mail. Many of them, years after the slaughter, would 0:06:24.720 --> 0:06:29.320 flip light switches. Some would even drive cars. And yet 0:06:29.360 --> 0:06:34.359 they carried out a campaign of unintentional eradication that is 0:06:34.520 --> 0:06:39.000 unthinkable to us today. The hide hunters didn't arrive in 0:06:39.080 --> 0:06:43.560 ships from across the ocean. They weren't exploring places that 0:06:43.640 --> 0:06:47.239 had never been seen by a white man. They didn't 0:06:47.400 --> 0:06:51.240 rack up a list of crazy firsts. The first person 0:06:51.240 --> 0:06:54.839 of European descent to reach the Texas Panhandle where a 0:06:54.839 --> 0:06:58.479 good hunk of this story takes place, got there three 0:06:58.640 --> 0:07:03.160 hundred and twenty four years before the start of this story. 0:07:03.279 --> 0:07:08.680 It was the Spanish Conquisodor Coronado, the first non indigenous 0:07:08.720 --> 0:07:12.280 people to cross the continent. The Lewis and Clark expedition 0:07:12.720 --> 0:07:16.480 had done so sixty years before the start of this story. 0:07:17.400 --> 0:07:21.000 There are no frontier luminaries in here. There are no 0:07:21.160 --> 0:07:25.480 Daniel Boons or Jim Bridges among the hide hunters. We've 0:07:25.520 --> 0:07:31.000 mythologized those hunters and trappers into honorary founding fathers. They 0:07:31.080 --> 0:07:34.440 star in countless films and TV shows and songs and 0:07:34.520 --> 0:07:38.600 campfire tales. But the hide hunters. They don't make movies 0:07:38.600 --> 0:07:43.680 about them. Children don't play games pretending to be them. Sure, 0:07:43.840 --> 0:07:46.240 a few of the hide hunters became well known for 0:07:46.320 --> 0:07:50.600 doing other stuff later on, like being gunfighters and ranchers 0:07:50.640 --> 0:07:55.720 and entertainers and conservationists, but their names as hide hunters 0:07:56.200 --> 0:08:00.840 are largely absent from the annals of history. There were 0:08:00.840 --> 0:08:05.000 maybe about five thousand of them in total, who worked 0:08:05.040 --> 0:08:09.160 as either a shooter, a skinner, or simply a hired hand. 0:08:09.960 --> 0:08:14.440 There were many colorful characters, some with quite descriptive nicknames. 0:08:15.160 --> 0:08:20.800 You had Charles, squirrel Eye, Emery soor Toed Joe, Limpy, 0:08:20.960 --> 0:08:26.320 Jim Smith. You had Snuffer, Soda water Jack, three Finger Foley, 0:08:26.600 --> 0:08:30.560 and Buffalo Jones. Dirty Face Jones got his name when 0:08:30.600 --> 0:08:34.000 a bullet intended to kill him missed his head, but 0:08:34.040 --> 0:08:36.679 his would be killer was so close that the burning 0:08:36.760 --> 0:08:41.440 flash of powder seared his cheeks and nose. You could 0:08:41.440 --> 0:08:46.760 be forgiven for confusing dirty Face Jones with powder Face Hudson, 0:08:47.200 --> 0:08:51.840 but his two different fellas Wrongwheeled Jones committed an innocent 0:08:51.960 --> 0:08:54.960 act of stupidity that he'd never lived down when he 0:08:55.040 --> 0:08:57.960 insisted to a group of his fellow hunters that it 0:08:58.040 --> 0:09:01.679 was impossible to replace a broken wheel on the right 0:09:01.800 --> 0:09:06.240 side of a wagon with a wheel from the left side. 0:09:06.720 --> 0:09:10.560 To illustrate the fraught nature of their work, considered us 0:09:10.600 --> 0:09:15.200 a few short things about skunks. The hide hunter Skunk 0:09:15.440 --> 0:09:18.680 Johnson is largely remembered for an episode when he was 0:09:18.760 --> 0:09:21.960 trapped inside his cave like shelter known as a dugout 0:09:22.480 --> 0:09:27.440 by a party of hostile Indians. The siege lasted fifteen days, 0:09:27.520 --> 0:09:32.320 during which time he only ate skunks. Another hunter, known 0:09:32.320 --> 0:09:36.120 as Kentuck, was bitten by a rabbit skunk, causing him 0:09:36.160 --> 0:09:40.160 to crawl underneath a railroad water tank in a delusional fit, 0:09:40.600 --> 0:09:44.040 where he died. A third hide hunter, whose name is 0:09:44.120 --> 0:09:47.600 lost to history, also suffered a bite from a rabbit skunk. 0:09:48.080 --> 0:09:51.520 When he felt the beginning of a spasm of hydrophobia, 0:09:51.679 --> 0:09:54.400 as the condition was known, he walked out behind a 0:09:54.440 --> 0:09:58.160 building and swallowed a gulp of strychnine, which the hide 0:09:58.200 --> 0:10:02.720 hunters used to protect their stack of buffalo skins from bugs, vermin, 0:10:02.840 --> 0:10:07.120 and other prairie scavengers, and also on occasion to poison 0:10:07.200 --> 0:10:10.160 wolves for a little side money that could be made 0:10:10.480 --> 0:10:15.280 from selling their hides. These were not wealthy or well 0:10:15.280 --> 0:10:19.320 connected men. They were as blue collar, working class as 0:10:19.320 --> 0:10:23.040 it gets. They were poor guys born in places like 0:10:23.080 --> 0:10:28.320 Pennsylvania and Georgia and Illinois to farmers and blacksmiths and 0:10:28.440 --> 0:10:31.800 barrel makers. A great many of the hide hunters had 0:10:31.840 --> 0:10:34.680 been tangled up in the horrors of the Civil War 0:10:35.280 --> 0:10:40.080 on both sides of that conflict. As fighting men, killing 0:10:40.120 --> 0:10:43.520 buffalo by the dozens and sometimes upwards of one hundred 0:10:43.520 --> 0:10:46.760 in a day per man, the hide hunters wrought perhaps 0:10:46.800 --> 0:10:51.400 the most egregious episode of natural resource over exploitation in 0:10:51.440 --> 0:10:54.680 the history of the United States, if not the world. 0:10:55.440 --> 0:10:58.840 We simply don't have any other examples, at least in 0:10:58.880 --> 0:11:04.520 the historical era of a comparable, widely distributed wildlife species 0:11:04.559 --> 0:11:07.720 pushed to the brink of collapse so quickly by the 0:11:07.800 --> 0:11:12.040 hands of man. Whatever one thinks about the outcome of 0:11:12.080 --> 0:11:15.040 all that killing, and there's really only one thing to think, 0:11:15.080 --> 0:11:19.480 which is what an incredible waste? You can't escape from 0:11:19.520 --> 0:11:24.640 the reality that these guys were absolute masters of their craft. 0:11:25.440 --> 0:11:30.120 They were tough, They craved adventure, They had incredible endurance, 0:11:30.480 --> 0:11:34.040 They could think fast, they could shoot, they could fight. 0:11:34.440 --> 0:11:36.880 They were brave to the point that it resembles a 0:11:36.960 --> 0:11:42.160 suicidal recklessness. And man, they could work, like work harder 0:11:42.360 --> 0:11:46.080 than anyone you're ever likely to encounter in your own 0:11:46.120 --> 0:11:50.040 life today. What made the era of the hide hunters 0:11:50.120 --> 0:11:54.720 possible was a combination of factors too big and complex 0:11:55.040 --> 0:11:59.280 for most of them to have fully comprehended. In hindsight, 0:11:59.720 --> 0:12:03.880 it look like a perfect storm. For one, consider the 0:12:03.920 --> 0:12:08.560 impact of the railroads. Long hunters like Daniel Boone and 0:12:08.679 --> 0:12:14.120 mountain men like Jim Bridger were distinctly pre industrial. They 0:12:14.200 --> 0:12:19.000 operated within the natural constraints of muscle and bone. The 0:12:19.080 --> 0:12:23.600 Great Bottleneck and their operations was the cold reality of 0:12:23.760 --> 0:12:27.880 needing to move goods deer skins and beaver pelts, respectively, 0:12:28.360 --> 0:12:33.600 to market on the backs of horses and mules. For Boone, 0:12:33.600 --> 0:12:36.600 this meant leading a small string of horses over rough 0:12:36.679 --> 0:12:40.440 trails through the Cumberland Gap and across the Appalachian Mountains. 0:12:41.320 --> 0:12:44.080 The mountain men who plied the streams of the Rockies 0:12:44.120 --> 0:12:47.400 in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties moved their furs 0:12:47.480 --> 0:12:51.240 via an annual pack train that took several weeks to 0:12:51.280 --> 0:12:55.559 cross the plains even in good weather. Their operations were 0:12:55.679 --> 0:13:01.920 fueled and limited in scale by equine conveys. For the 0:13:02.040 --> 0:13:08.400 hide hunters, the railroads transformed everything. The heavy, cumbersome, quite 0:13:08.600 --> 0:13:12.199 rigid hides of buffalo were shipped back to the tanneries 0:13:12.240 --> 0:13:15.280 of the East in such quantities that they could not 0:13:15.600 --> 0:13:20.640 possibly have been moved by wagon, train or horseback. The 0:13:20.679 --> 0:13:25.720 timeline alone reveals the connection with stunning clarity. It is 0:13:25.800 --> 0:13:29.760 no coincidence that the hunt in Kansas erupted in eighteen 0:13:29.880 --> 0:13:33.520 seventy two, the same year that the Topeka and Santa 0:13:33.520 --> 0:13:38.120 Fe Railroad arrived in Dodge City. It is no coincidence 0:13:38.400 --> 0:13:40.920 that the height of the killing in Texas followed the 0:13:41.040 --> 0:13:44.640 arrival of the railroad in Fort Worth on July fourth, 0:13:45.160 --> 0:13:49.600 eighteen seventy six. And once again it is no coincidence 0:13:49.920 --> 0:13:53.600 that the Northern herd was quickly wiped out following the 0:13:53.640 --> 0:13:58.280 extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Miles City in 0:13:58.360 --> 0:14:03.280 eighteen eighty one. At the same time, the proliferation of 0:14:03.400 --> 0:14:08.640 factory machines and the accelerating industrialization of the American economy 0:14:09.040 --> 0:14:14.040 created an insatiable demand for tough, elastic leather that could 0:14:14.040 --> 0:14:19.720 be used as drive belts as in factory belting. Picture 0:14:19.800 --> 0:14:22.760 for a moment. The timing belt in your car are 0:14:22.800 --> 0:14:27.800 in your snowmobile. It's essentially a strap running around two wheels, 0:14:28.120 --> 0:14:31.720 so that when one wheel turns, typically powered by a motor, 0:14:32.240 --> 0:14:36.000 the wheel on the other end turns as well. Simply put, 0:14:36.320 --> 0:14:40.280 a belt transmits power from one place to another, and 0:14:40.400 --> 0:14:44.760 in the ever expanding industrial economy of the late eighteen hundreds, 0:14:45.360 --> 0:14:49.920 miles of belting were needed to apply power generated by 0:14:50.000 --> 0:14:55.400 steam or water wheels to looms, saws, lathes, and any 0:14:55.520 --> 0:14:59.360 number of applications where machines were doing work that was 0:14:59.400 --> 0:15:04.400 once done by hand. Buffalo leather, which compared to cattle leather, 0:15:04.600 --> 0:15:09.040 was more elastic, while also incredibly tough, served as an 0:15:09.080 --> 0:15:15.440 ideal material for machine belting, and at the very moment 0:15:15.640 --> 0:15:19.920 that transportation networks were able to deliver buffalo hides by 0:15:19.960 --> 0:15:24.240 the millions to eastern tanneries, and those eastern tanneries were 0:15:24.280 --> 0:15:29.560 able to sell unlimited quantities of those process hides. Advances 0:15:29.640 --> 0:15:34.240 and firearms technology accelerated by the Civil War made the 0:15:34.280 --> 0:15:40.000 American riflemen exponentially more effective than his predecessors of only 0:15:40.040 --> 0:15:44.680 a few decades before. Earlier breech loading rifles, to say 0:15:44.720 --> 0:15:49.280 nothing of the muzzleloaders that came before them, were too underpowered, 0:15:49.640 --> 0:15:53.520 too inaccurate, and too clumsy to reload to have been 0:15:53.600 --> 0:15:57.720 capable of the buffalo killing that the hide hunters unleashed 0:15:57.840 --> 0:16:01.240 on the planes. We'll get into the specifics of those 0:16:01.320 --> 0:16:04.760 rifles later on, But just as our story would have 0:16:04.800 --> 0:16:08.800 been impossible without the railroad, it would have been impossible 0:16:09.040 --> 0:16:13.120 without the cutting edge firearms of the post Civil War era. 0:16:14.480 --> 0:16:18.240 The Civil War lurks in the background of this story 0:16:18.600 --> 0:16:22.120 as a sort of dark prequel in the title of 0:16:22.160 --> 0:16:25.800 this work, you'll notice the date range eighteen sixty five 0:16:26.200 --> 0:16:30.200 to eighteen eighty three. Well, eighteen sixty five is the 0:16:30.360 --> 0:16:34.680 year the Civil War ended. The aftermath of that bloody 0:16:34.720 --> 0:16:39.040 war between the states pushed out westward a restless generation 0:16:39.240 --> 0:16:42.920 of men in search of work and opportunity. It pushed 0:16:42.920 --> 0:16:46.840 them away from the war ravaged cities and agricultural communities 0:16:46.840 --> 0:16:51.880 of southern reconstruction, away from the strictured discipline and meager 0:16:52.000 --> 0:16:57.880 rations of military service, away from the insecurity and claustrophobia 0:16:58.120 --> 0:17:02.680 of the family farm, way from the starvation wages of 0:17:02.760 --> 0:17:06.639 the northern factory floor. On the distant plains of the 0:17:06.680 --> 0:17:11.520 American West, they saw a new life of promise, adventure, 0:17:12.000 --> 0:17:17.520 and cash. A couple of years ago, I sat for 0:17:17.560 --> 0:17:21.160 a lengthy interview for a Ken Burns documentary on the 0:17:21.240 --> 0:17:24.880 history of the American buffalo, and during the editing process, 0:17:24.920 --> 0:17:29.399 I was invited to offer feedback. My primary concern with 0:17:29.480 --> 0:17:32.560 an early version of the series was that its short 0:17:32.680 --> 0:17:37.160 treatment of the subject of the hide hunters dehumanized them. 0:17:37.560 --> 0:17:40.080 It made it seem as though they were motivated by 0:17:40.160 --> 0:17:46.280 some sadistic desire to destroy American wildlife. It's understandable how 0:17:46.320 --> 0:17:50.400 people would get that idea, but it's naive. Rather than 0:17:50.440 --> 0:17:54.360 imagining the hide Hunters as soul as hell billies, it's 0:17:54.440 --> 0:17:58.760 better to see them as the vanguard of industrial capitalism 0:17:59.200 --> 0:18:04.160 on the western planes. In today's world, serious thinkers don't 0:18:04.200 --> 0:18:08.639 personally blame an Appalachian born coal miner for air pollution. 0:18:09.320 --> 0:18:13.240 We don't blame frontline soldiers for the conflicts they fight in, 0:18:13.720 --> 0:18:16.919 and we don't blame the guys driving concrete trucks and 0:18:17.000 --> 0:18:23.120 hanging drywall for suburban sprawl. Now to that, you might say, well, 0:18:23.160 --> 0:18:25.919 the Buffalo Hunters knew what they were doing, and the 0:18:25.960 --> 0:18:31.760 collective consequences of their individual actions were incredibly costly. Well, 0:18:31.880 --> 0:18:35.720 if in fifty years all of the most apocalyptic predictions 0:18:35.760 --> 0:18:39.320 about global warming have come true, I'm not going to 0:18:39.400 --> 0:18:41.800 say that a guy making a living in a North 0:18:41.880 --> 0:18:45.399 Dakota oil field was a bad guy. And I'm not 0:18:45.480 --> 0:18:48.359 going to cite all of the times you turned on 0:18:48.480 --> 0:18:52.479 your air conditioner or failed to organize car pools instead 0:18:52.480 --> 0:18:57.720 of driving alone. I'd instead point my finger at political inertia, 0:18:57.920 --> 0:19:05.119 societal indifference, imperative of economic growth, and the human tendency 0:19:05.400 --> 0:19:09.840 to endure changes for the worse, rather than trying to 0:19:10.000 --> 0:19:14.520 remedy them. Not that these guys were saints, they most 0:19:14.520 --> 0:19:18.320 certainly were not. It's fair to say that most held 0:19:18.359 --> 0:19:21.720 the same prejudice views of Native people that were common 0:19:21.800 --> 0:19:24.560 at the time, and they did not keep those prejudice 0:19:24.640 --> 0:19:30.000 views to themselves either. Some of them were objectively villainous figures, 0:19:30.280 --> 0:19:33.840 and many had a real pensiant for violence. And I 0:19:33.880 --> 0:19:37.480 hope it's clear by now that I mourned the consequences 0:19:37.520 --> 0:19:41.240 of their actions. At the same time, to understand them 0:19:41.240 --> 0:19:46.760 as real people requires recognizing the larger systems and structures 0:19:46.800 --> 0:19:50.720 of which they were just one small part, and acknowledging 0:19:50.880 --> 0:19:56.120 that everyone has limited choices from which to choose. As 0:19:56.160 --> 0:19:59.080 the hide hunter, Frank Mayer said of his time shooting 0:19:59.119 --> 0:20:02.840 buffalo on the pl planes, he had a hide, the 0:20:02.960 --> 0:20:06.080 hide was worth money. I was young, twenty two. I 0:20:06.119 --> 0:20:09.320 could shoot. I'd like to hunt. Wouldn't you have done 0:20:09.320 --> 0:20:13.640 the same thing? If I'm answering that question honestly as 0:20:13.680 --> 0:20:16.720 your author sitting at a microphone, as a guy who 0:20:16.800 --> 0:20:20.240 lives for hunting and fishing, and I put myself back 0:20:20.280 --> 0:20:25.119 in Frank Mayer's shoes, I think the answer would be Yeah, 0:20:25.640 --> 0:20:29.280 I would have done the same damn thing. If you've 0:20:29.359 --> 0:20:33.280 never heard of Frank Mayor, you could forgive yourself to 0:20:33.359 --> 0:20:36.240 put a human face on old Frank. Here's a bit 0:20:36.400 --> 0:20:40.440 about him. Born in eighteen fifty, he was a thirteen 0:20:40.520 --> 0:20:44.120 year old drummer boy for his father's artillery unit when 0:20:44.119 --> 0:20:48.480 he witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, where one man 0:20:48.640 --> 0:20:53.720 died for about every ten seconds of fighting. From age 0:20:53.760 --> 0:20:57.000 twenty two to twenty eight, Mayor hunted buffalo on the 0:20:57.000 --> 0:21:02.400 plains of Kansas and Texas, killing thousands. By the time 0:21:02.480 --> 0:21:06.840 the old hide Hunter died on February twelve, nineteen fifty four, 0:21:07.480 --> 0:21:12.280 my own father was thirty years old, Hugh Hefner was 0:21:12.280 --> 0:21:18.280 publishing Playboy magazine, and the Korean War was over. Mayor 0:21:18.359 --> 0:21:21.480 had survived some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil 0:21:21.520 --> 0:21:26.480 War and lived into the age of nuclear submarines, Burger 0:21:26.560 --> 0:21:31.480 king and corvettes. Mayor is one of those hide hunters 0:21:31.520 --> 0:21:35.080 we know a lot about. There are some others, such 0:21:35.119 --> 0:21:39.440 as Charles Wrath and Jay Wright Moore. These guys were 0:21:39.560 --> 0:21:45.359 pioneers of the trade, recognized by their contemporaries as influential characters. 0:21:45.840 --> 0:21:49.200 If you read anything about this era, you'll run into 0:21:49.240 --> 0:21:53.399 their names again and again. They appear throughout the historical 0:21:53.480 --> 0:22:00.120 record in ledgers, diaries, receipts, newspaper articles, and legal documents 0:22:00.160 --> 0:22:05.320 related to their careers as hide hunters. Other hide hunters 0:22:05.359 --> 0:22:09.200 recorded their experiences in great detail later on in life, 0:22:09.640 --> 0:22:12.960 either for posterity's sake or to make a little money. 0:22:13.640 --> 0:22:17.239 Among those is John Cook, who published a memoir, The 0:22:17.320 --> 0:22:21.359 Border and the Buffalo in nineteen oh seven. During the 0:22:21.400 --> 0:22:25.080 Civil War, Cook fought for the Union along the bloody 0:22:25.200 --> 0:22:29.679 boundary between Missouri and Kansas, where gorilla forces committed some 0:22:29.720 --> 0:22:34.679 of the most gruesome atrocities of that conflict. Afterward, like 0:22:34.760 --> 0:22:38.679 many of his fellow veterans, he drifted westward. From the 0:22:38.720 --> 0:22:41.920 fall of eighteen seventy four until the spring of eighteen 0:22:42.040 --> 0:22:47.040 seventy eight, Cook hunted the Panhandle of Texas. His descriptions 0:22:47.080 --> 0:22:50.080 of the day to day business of hunting and skinning 0:22:50.440 --> 0:22:55.840 are vividly detailed. Many hide hunters, like George Reigard, were 0:22:55.880 --> 0:23:00.240 interviewed later in life by local reporters writing for readership's 0:23:00.320 --> 0:23:03.960 hungry for stories from the so called Old West. Re 0:23:03.960 --> 0:23:07.760 Reguard was born in Pennsylvania in eighteen forty seven and 0:23:07.920 --> 0:23:11.879 enlisted in the twenty second Cavalry one month after the 0:23:11.920 --> 0:23:16.520 Battle of Gettysburg at sixteen years of age. After being 0:23:16.560 --> 0:23:19.679 wounded and discharged from the army, he set out for 0:23:19.760 --> 0:23:23.720 western Kansas, where he drove freight wagons and marveled at 0:23:23.760 --> 0:23:28.280 his strange new surroundings before adopting the occupation of a 0:23:28.400 --> 0:23:32.440 hide hunter. Between eighteen seventy one and eighteen seventy three, 0:23:32.920 --> 0:23:37.960 Reguard killed more than five thousand animals. It was he 0:23:38.080 --> 0:23:46.200 recalled buffalo butchery by wholesale. What makes the story you're 0:23:46.240 --> 0:23:51.560 about to hear so historically significant and so viscerally tragic 0:23:52.200 --> 0:23:54.960 is that the hide hunters came at the end, or 0:23:55.080 --> 0:23:59.240 rather caused the end, of a long procession of buffalo 0:23:59.320 --> 0:24:02.680 hunters who'd been chasing the animals for more than ten 0:24:02.800 --> 0:24:06.639 thousand years across the landscapes that we now call the 0:24:06.760 --> 0:24:11.280 United States. Their actions closed out one of the longest 0:24:11.440 --> 0:24:15.920 running cultural and economic life ways that this planet has 0:24:16.000 --> 0:24:20.200 ever seen since the arrival of the very first humans 0:24:20.200 --> 0:24:24.320 in North America. Indigenous people nurtured a relationship with these 0:24:24.440 --> 0:24:28.359 animals that, while it took on different forms at different times. 0:24:28.880 --> 0:24:34.880 Is most remarkable for its sustainability. The first American buffalo 0:24:34.960 --> 0:24:39.240 hunters were ice age immigrants from Siberia who killed a 0:24:39.280 --> 0:24:43.760 somewhat longer horned variety on the grasslands of northern Alaska 0:24:44.040 --> 0:24:48.840 using adladdles. Later on, there were buffalo hunters who killed 0:24:48.920 --> 0:24:52.400 great quantities of the animals by driving them over cliffs 0:24:52.400 --> 0:24:56.760 and Alberta and Montana and even down into Texas. There 0:24:56.760 --> 0:25:00.199 were buffalo hunters in the Dakotas who crept up on 0:25:00.240 --> 0:25:05.560 the animals camouflaged beneath the skins of freshly killed buffalo calves, 0:25:05.960 --> 0:25:10.159 close enough to sink a carefully placed arrow into their 0:25:10.280 --> 0:25:14.840 rib cage. And with the spread of equestrian culture among 0:25:14.880 --> 0:25:19.520 the Planes tribes after the Spanish introduced horses into North America, 0:25:20.280 --> 0:25:24.600 we had buffalo hunters in western Kansas who chased buffalo 0:25:24.680 --> 0:25:28.080 down on horseback and got so close they could have 0:25:28.240 --> 0:25:32.680 jumped onto the buffalo's back, but instead held a smooth 0:25:32.760 --> 0:25:35.600 bore musket barrel right up to the crease behind the 0:25:35.600 --> 0:25:40.600 buffalo's shoulder in order to deliver a lead ball into 0:25:40.640 --> 0:25:45.119 the heart. Without a doubt, the story of each of 0:25:45.200 --> 0:25:49.400 those buffalo hunting cultures is worthy of a project like this. 0:25:50.160 --> 0:25:53.800 But this here is not a holistic analysis of the 0:25:53.840 --> 0:25:58.560 different ways that different people hunted buffalo, nor is this 0:25:58.640 --> 0:26:03.720 a comprehensive history of the destruction of the buffalo. That 0:26:03.880 --> 0:26:08.720 tale of shrinking range and collapsing numbers actually spans hundreds 0:26:08.760 --> 0:26:12.879 of years in a huge swath of the continent. For 0:26:13.000 --> 0:26:16.720 our journey ahead, though a quick overview of that will 0:26:16.760 --> 0:26:20.760 be helpful to you. When Europeans started penetrating into the 0:26:20.840 --> 0:26:24.320 various corners of North America over the sixteen hundreds and 0:26:24.400 --> 0:26:28.360 seventeen hundreds, they found scattered groups of buffalo and sometimes 0:26:28.400 --> 0:26:33.159 impressive herds in the woods of Pennsylvania and stands of 0:26:33.320 --> 0:26:37.399 cain along the Ohio River, along streams in what is 0:26:37.440 --> 0:26:41.919 now Nashville, Tennessee, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and 0:26:42.000 --> 0:26:45.480 in the rolling hills and tall grass prairies of Wisconsin 0:26:45.800 --> 0:26:51.480 and western Minnesota and Iowa. Daniel Boone frequently targeted them 0:26:51.520 --> 0:26:56.640 for meat in Kentucky. As Boone and his contemporaries spread 0:26:56.680 --> 0:27:00.760 out and pushed ever westward, those eastern buffalo herds were 0:27:00.840 --> 0:27:03.760 killed off one by one by pot hunters feeding their 0:27:03.840 --> 0:27:08.040 families and small scale market hunters looking to make a buck. 0:27:08.880 --> 0:27:13.280 The various states buffalo populations fell like European nations in 0:27:13.320 --> 0:27:17.560 the wake of the German Blitzkreek. Boone's own son, Nathan, 0:27:17.960 --> 0:27:22.240 killed the last buffalo in Virginia in seventeen ninety seven. 0:27:23.040 --> 0:27:27.119 North Carolina wiped out theirs in seventeen ninety nine, and 0:27:27.240 --> 0:27:32.200 Kentucky did the same one year later, Pennsylvania the year 0:27:32.320 --> 0:27:36.960 after that. Louisiana killed its last buffalo in eighteen oh three, 0:27:37.480 --> 0:27:41.280 and the last in Illinois and Ohio died in eighteen 0:27:41.320 --> 0:27:47.200 oh eight, Tennessee eighteen twenty three, West Virginia eighteen twenty five, 0:27:47.520 --> 0:27:52.080 Wisconsin eighteen thirty two. By the close of the Civil 0:27:52.119 --> 0:27:55.879 War in eighteen sixty five, which again begins the story 0:27:55.920 --> 0:27:57.720 of the hide hunters that I'm going to tell here, 0:27:58.359 --> 0:28:03.119 the animals were still mind blowingly abundant and what you 0:28:03.240 --> 0:28:06.520 might think of as the core of their historic range 0:28:07.040 --> 0:28:10.679 the American Great Plains and the inner mountain valleys of 0:28:10.760 --> 0:28:15.600 the Rockies. Buffalo were still in the Panhandle of North Texas. 0:28:16.080 --> 0:28:21.400 They were still in western Oklahoma, Western Kansas, western Nebraska. 0:28:21.960 --> 0:28:26.440 They were still in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, 0:28:26.520 --> 0:28:31.000 and Colorado were loaded, there were still buffalo in northern 0:28:31.040 --> 0:28:36.320 New Mexico. Admittedly, the best research out there today indicates 0:28:36.359 --> 0:28:39.240 that the herds wiped out by the hide hunters were 0:28:39.280 --> 0:28:44.440 already diminished by a host of factors. Besides bullets, a 0:28:44.480 --> 0:28:48.720 record drought between eighteen fifty six and eighteen sixty four 0:28:49.200 --> 0:28:54.440 helped the diminishment. Competition for grass from wild horses helped. 0:28:55.040 --> 0:29:00.520 Diseases like anthrax and bovine tuberculosis introduced by European cattle 0:29:00.840 --> 0:29:05.920 perhaps helped some. Added to that. Indigenous hunting pressure and 0:29:06.040 --> 0:29:12.000 harvest numbers certainly increased after the ascendancy of equestrian hunting culture, 0:29:12.480 --> 0:29:16.239