Mr. Hornaday's War (11 page)

But they did not find a single living animal.

In the months after Hornaday returned from the Montana Territory, “dazed and stunned,” he was like a man possessed. What he had witnessed on the frontier frightened him to the marrow. No one back East seemed to grasp the magnitude of the slaughter; no one could hear the implacable silence or see that windswept ocean of bones where once had roamed numberless herds of a species that had once been the undisputed lord of the great plains. What was worse, almost no one besides himself seemed to care that the slaughter was happening.

Now, in addition to his work on the monumental six-figure bison group, the formation of the American Bison Society, and his first attempts to create a national zoo in Washington, he sat down to write a book that one historian later called “the most forceful protest ever written against the criminal matter in which the buffalo were nearly exterminated.”
1

Professor G. Brown Goode, Hornaday's boss at the National Museum, had given him permission to write his book, but only after working hours. Night after night, month after month, Hornaday labored away on his manuscript, no longer crouched in the lantern-light of a remote Western hunting camp or jungle outpost, but in an upstairs study in the small rented house he shared with Josephine. He wrote like a man on fire, convinced that this could be the last written record of a species that soon would vanish from the earth. He had decided to call his book
The Extermination of the American Bison,
as if the saddest possible outcome had already occurred.

Because he intended for this book to be not just a raging polemic but also a serious scientific monograph, Hornaday began by describing the nature and range of the species, making the point that the bison had been very likely the most abundant quadruped that ever lived on the planet. He moved on to the more subjective judgment that, in his view,
Bison americanus
was also arguably the most magnificent ruminant in the world. The only other animals that came close were the Indian bison, or gaur
(Bos gaurus);
the European bison (also known as the
wisent);
and the aurochs, an extinct ancestor of domestic cattle. But the gaur seemed “more like a huge ox running wild,” and the auroch, though taller than an American bison, was also leaner and leggier, and it lacked the bison's lionlike pelage, or mane. Its hair was sparse and thin, completely unlike “the magnificent dark brown frontlet and beard of the buffalo, the shaggy coat of hair upon the neck, hump, and shoulders, terminating at the knees in a thick mass of luxuriant black locks.” All things considered, the American bison had a “grandeur and nobility of presence which are beyond all comparison amongst ruminants.”
2

In the following pages of his book, Hornaday laid out the biology and habits of the species. In addition, in melancholy detail, he described the story of the slaughter, the numbers killed, the methods used, the steady disappearance of the great herds, and the approaching end.

“There is no reason to hope that a single wild and unprotected individual [buffalo] will remain alive in ten years hence,” Hornaday wrote at the conclusion of his book, dated May 1, 1889. A buffalo, he said, “is now so rare a prize, and by the ignorant is considered so great an honor (!) to kill one, that extraordinary exertions will be made to find and shoot down without mercy the ‘last buffalo.' ”
3

In fact, he was off by only a couple of years.

One deadly problem for the species, he explained, was that a buffalo “would very often stand quietly and see two or three score, or even a hundred, of his relatives and companions shot down before his eyes, with no other feeling than of stupid wonder and curiosity.”
4
The bison's apparently dim intelligence made possible one of the easiest and deadliest forms of hunting, that of the still-hunt, and “of all the methods that were unsportsmanlike, unfair, ignoble, and utterly reprehensible, this was in every respect the lowest and the worst.” Hunting buffalo from horseback was difficult and dangerous; it required too much skill and too much time. (William F. Cody, or “Buffalo Bill,”
was one of the few white hunters who had the skill to hunt from horseback, claiming to have brought down 4,280 buffaloes in eighteen months during 1867–68.)
5
Most of the buffalo hunters in the West were not only without skill, they were also both greedy and lazy, Hornaday wrote, and “if they could have obtained Gatling guns with which to mow down a whole herd at a time, beyond a doubt they would have gladly used them.”
6

During the years 1871 to 1873, when still-hunting (or “sneak-hunting”) was at its worst, all a hunter had to do was get up at daylight in his camp on the range and walk to the nearest buffalo herd, usually less than three miles. He'd be well-armed, usually with a huge breech-loading Sharps rifle weighing almost twenty pounds, and with 75 to 100 loaded cartridges in his ammunition belt or his pockets. Then he'd creep up on the herd, keeping low and out of sight—some still-hunters wore gunny sacks with holes cut out for eyes and arms—and once he'd gotten to within 100 to 250 yards, he'd settle into a comfortable position. If the herd was moving, the animal in the lead would be the first one shot; if the herd was at rest, the oldest cow was generally the leader, and she'd go down first. She would stagger, blood pouring from her nose, fall to her knees, and then drop. The others would gather around her, bawling plaintively, confused and frightened. But they wouldn't run. The hunter would wait, perhaps a full minute—the trick was not to fire too rapidly—and then blast another animal, and another. Sometimes the rifle would get too hot to use, and the hunter would have to wait for it to cool off.
7

In this way, even the laziest, stupidest hunter—even a drunk one—would find himself surrounded by mounds of corpses within a half-hour's time. Then all he had to do was start skinning or, better yet, hire somebody else to do the skinning. Such was the slaughter that was taking place in the West. In eight years, between 1876 and 1884, a dealer in New York City called Mssrs. J. & A. Boskowitz reported handling 246,175 buffalo skins, Hornaday reported. And that was just one middling dealer. By Hornaday's count, if you totaled up all the buffalo hides shipped by all the railroads between 1872 and 1874, the total number of buffaloes slaughtered by whites added up to 3,158,730. Perhaps most appalling of all, more than half of these animals—1,780,481—were simply killed and left to rot; the blood-tide ran so high and so fast that hunters and skinners were unable to keep up with the overwhelming task of harvesting all those hides, tongues,
and meat. The absolute extermination of the buffalo was inevitable, and in an astonishingly brief period of time. In some ways, the near-extermination of the buffalo can be thought of as a failure of the national imagination: they were at one time so unimaginably abundant that almost no one could conceive of a day when they had vanished entirely. Yet that day very nearly arrived.
8

In Hornaday's telling of this tragic, epic story, whites were almost completely to blame. The Plains Indians had a much thriftier and more sustainable relationship with the buffalo, using the meat for food; hides for warmth and trade; skins for teepees; stomach and intestines for containers for cooking, storage, and transport; and dung for fuel. Even the way they hunted the buffalo—generally on horseback, wading into the undulating herds with nothing but bow and arrow—seemed to demonstrate honor and respect for the animal, in contrast to the grim, meaningless carnage of blasting away from a hidden location with a large-bore rifle. “It was the buffalo that undergirt the economy [of Indian life] and mightily influenced society, religion, and warfare,” one historian wrote.
9

Even so, the native peoples got their share of blame. They, too, sometimes got so carried away by the buffalo's multitudes that they became participants in the slaughter. In his book, Hornaday retold a story from George Catlin, who told of arriving at the mouth of the Teton River, in the Dakotas, in 1832. He saw that “an immense herd of buffaloes had showed themselves on the opposite side of the river.” Shortly afterwards, a party of 500 or 600 Sioux warriors forded the river on horseback and set about decimating the herd. They came back about sunset with 1,400 fresh buffalo tongues, which they sold to white soldiers for a couple of gallons of whiskey. (Arguably, these Sioux were red men who had been corrupted by the white man's liquor.) “Not a skin or a pound of meat, other than the tongues, was saved after this awful slaughter,” Catlin wrote. The destruction of the buffalo was not so much a white man's crime as a human crime.
10

During the terrible winter of 1886–87, some Indian tribes in the Northwest Territory that had once lived on the buffalo were so destitute, and so close to starvation, that some Cree resorted to cannibalism. But Hornaday pointed out that, like the white man, many tribes had been reckless and foolish with the buffalo, and now they were paying the price for the wanton slaughter. “The buffalo is his own avenger, to an extent his remorseless slayers little dreamed he
ever could be.”
11

Among the people who actually cared, blame was almost universally heaped upon the government for allowing the slaughter to happen on public lands. In fact, between 1871 and 1876, various laws were introduced in Congress to protect the buffalo, but all of them, to one degree or another, failed.

In his book, Hornaday briefly summarized the tragicomic fate of one bill, H.R. 921, which was introduced in the House by Mr. Fort of Illinois on January 5, 1874. The bill was simple, making it unlawful for any person who was not an Indian to kill or wound any female buffalo within the boundaries of any of the territories of the United States. Violations would result in a fine of $100; and second violations, a jail sentence of not more than 30 days.

S. S. Cox, the gentleman from New York, stood to object that old hunters said it was impossible to tell the sex of a buffalo while it was running, and also that the bill gave preference to the Indians. (Years afterward, Hornaday commented that “I know of no greater affront . . . to the intelligence of a genuine buffalo hunter than to accuse him of not knowing enough to tell the sex of a buffalo ‘on the run' by its form alone.”)
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Fort replied that he had been told that it was possible to distinguish the sexes, and the point of the bill was to the stop the wanton slaughter, in which thousands of buffalo were being taken simply to cut out their tongues.

Cox persisted, stating that he wanted the clause excepting the Indians removed. He pointed out that the secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano, had already told the House that “the civilization of the Indian was impossible while the buffalo remained on the plains.”

Mr. B. C. McCormick, of Arizona, read into the record an article from the
Santa Fe New Mexican,
which called the buffalo slaughter “wantonly wicked, and should be stopped by the most stringent enactments and vigilant enforcements of the law. . . . One party of sixteen hunters report having killed twenty-eight thousand buffaloes during the past summer. It seems to us there is quite as much reason why the Government should protect the buffaloes as the Indians.”

McCormick went on to say, “It would have been well both for the Indians and the white man if an enactment of this kind had been placed on our statute-books years ago. . . . I know of no one act that would gratify the red man more.”

Charles Eldredge, of Wisconsin, offered that “there would be just as much propriety in killing the fish in our rivers as in destroying the buffalo in order to compel the Indians to become civilized.”

Mr. Conger said, “As a matter of fact, every man knows the range of the buffalo had grown more and more confined year after year; that they have been driven westward before advancing civilization. . . . There is no law that Congress can pass that will prevent the buffalo from disappearing before the march of civilization . . . They eat the grass. They trample upon the plains upon which our settlers desire to herd their cattle and their sheep. They are as uncivilized as the Indian.”

Despite all the debate and recriminations, in the end, H.R. 921 passed the House.

In the Senate, there was some haggling about the clause “who is not an Indian,” with some senators arguing that it showed favoritism to the red man, but ultimately, it passed the Senate after a third reading. Then it went to the desk of President Ulysses S. Grant, that dear old friend of William Tecumseh Sherman. And there the bill was “pocket-vetoed”—it died simply by being ignored. Inaction became action. In despair, Hornaday realized that the enemy's power extended all the way to the very pinnacle of the U.S. government, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself.

It revealed worlds about Hornaday that, observing the ineffectualness of Congress and the indifference of the president, he concluded that the problem was democracy itself. “The necessary act of Congress was so hedged in and beset by obstacles that it never became an accomplished fact,” he wrote. If this had been a monarchy—if, for instance, William Temple Hornaday had been king—a reasonable law to protect the buffalo would have been created within the hour. The fear and sorrow of the approaching extermination made him long for unlimited power to change the world. But he didn't have that power. And the slaughter went on.

A few of the Western states and territories passed vague, feeble laws attempting to protect the buffalo, but like most other game laws in the West, they amounted to nothing at all. “I have never been able to learn of a single case, save in the Yellowstone Park, wherein a western hunter was prevented by so simple and innocuous a thing as a
game law from killing game,”
13
Hornaday wrote. The Western “ethic” of hunting was, essentially, to kill as much as you could before the other man did, and do so quickly before your game was all killed off.