Mr. Hornaday's War (5 page)

The Secretary of the Interior himself, a man named Columbus Delano, was in full-throated agreement with the views of Sherman, Sheridan, and the general public. “I would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western plains, in its effect upon the Indians,” Delano wrote in his department's annual report in 1873.
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Delano, who had been appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant, was a peculiarly apt spokesperson for Western civilization. He had flinty, glittering eyes overshadowed by preposterously huge eyebrows, a lipless mouth set in an inverted
U
of permanent disapproval, and a slab-like beard, similar in size and shape to the tablet of the Ten Commandments.

“In our intercourse with the Indians it must always be borne in mind that we are the most powerful party. . . . We are assuming, and I think with propriety, that our civilization ought to take the place of their barbarous habits,” Delano wrote. Later the next year, in testimony before Congress, he repeated these convictions: “I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them onto reservations, and compelling them to begin adopting the habits of civilization.”

Although he tended to thunder like an Old Testament prophet, Delano was simply giving voice to the will of the commander-in-chief and, by extension, the views of a majority of the nation's God-fearing populace. In truth, the plains peoples of the Western wilderness had provided people like Columbus Delano with plenty of ammunition. Sensing their own impending extinction along with the buffalo's, the Blackfoot, the Sioux, and the Cheyenne were fighting back with such grim savagery that even a glancing description of their atrocities was enough to turn the stomach.

If destroying the buffalo was the final solution to the “problem” of the Indian, so be it. The vast majority of Americans had never even laid eyes on an Indian, a buffalo, or the West, and never would, so there was little they would miss. They got most of their information about what was happening out there from the newspapers, which had come to treat the slaughter of the buffalo as something of a joke. A
June 6, 1874, edition
of Harper's Weekly
featured a cover cartoon of a buffalo removing its own skin and handing it to a white man, with the caption, “Don't shoot, my good fellow! Here, take my robe, save your ammunition, and go in peace.”
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Even so, not everyone in America was as intent on waging a holy war against the buffalo as Columbus Delano. There were a few angry and despairing voices being raised in the animal's defense, though not nearly enough to constitute a movement. “Conservation,” whether of the buffalo or any other natural resource in America, was not a word that had yet come into popular usage.

In the years to come, the loudest, most persistent, and most authoritative voice in opposition to the slaughter of the buffalo would be that of the U.S. National Museum's chief taxidermist, William Temple Hornaday.

There were so many buffalo in the West, of course, that their numbers appeared to be inexhaustible. Stripping the Indian of his food supply would be an enormous, perhaps impossible task. At one time, bison herds had roamed north from northern Mexico across the Great Plains all the way to the shores of the Great Slave Lake, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. They extended west to the Sierra Nevadas, in California, and in the late 1700s, Daniel Boone had found vast herds of buffalo as far east as eastern Tennessee. The herds were so enormous that there were dozens of documented incidents in which trains, brought to a complete standstill by migrating herds, were actually knocked off the tracks. In 1868, a man named William Blackmore reported riding 120 miles from Ellsworth to Sheridan, Wyoming, and passing through an almost unbroken herd of buffalo the entire way. In another case, a herd was reported to take five days to pass a given point.
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Fortunately, there were plenty of people hard at work at the task of destroying them for the benefit of civilization. The Indians had started the work in ancient times by forcing herds over cliffs into “buffalo jumps” and killing them by the thousands. One buffalo jump near Sundance, Wyoming, was thought to contain the bones of twenty thousand animals.
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The whites vastly accelerated the massacre beginning around 1820, and what later came to be called “The Great Slaughter” steadily gained momentum until it peaked around 1880, culminating in one of the greatest animal bloodbaths in history.

A few buffalo were killed to feed settlers' families or provision workers building the Union Pacific railroad line, the first to cross the West. Huge numbers also were killed for their luxurious pelts, used as carriage blankets, fashionable “buffalo robes,” or coats. The American market alone absorbed more than 200,000 buffalo robes a year.
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But many also were killed in a great American extravaganza of waste—hunters killed buffalo simply for their tongues or their humps, which were considered delicacies, leaving the slaughtered bulls, calves, and cows to rot. Even if the hides were harvested (and later sold for about fifty cents apiece), the rest of the animal was left for the vultures, coyotes, and the desert sun. But the herds were so vast that people crossing the Western territories on the Union Pacific line would simply fire their Sharps rifles out the train windows for sport. It wasn't much sport: it would take more skill to miss a buffalo than to hit one. The sport hunters didn't even take the tongue; they simply discarded the entire animal and took only the thrill of the kill.

Still, much work remained if the Indian were to be stripped of all sustenance and exterminated once and for all. When the Union Pacific Railroad was built from Omaha to Cheyenne in 1866 and 1867, it not only opened up the West, it also split the vast buffalo herd into a “southern herd” and a “northern herd.”
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Hunters got to work on the southern herd, and it was destroyed completely within about three years. Then they moved north from Texas to the Montana Territory and started in on the northern herd, which was said to be twenty times larger. At one point, there were said to be 5,000 buffalo hunters and skinners permanently encamped on the plains of the Montana Territory. In 1871, a new process for tanning buffalo hides made it possible to use buffalo leather for industrial uses, such as engine belts, and the speed with which the last herds were disappearing accelerated yet again.

Unfortunately, the Indian wars were not going as well as the war against the buffalo. In the summer of 1876, when word of the massacre of Custer and his men reached the cities of the East, Sherman, Sheridan, and most of the rest of the country were as shocked as they were angry. It seemed impossible that this gallant, well-known officer—and 268 of his men, no less!—could have been destroyed by what was supposed to be a weakened, desperate enemy.

The Indians, and the buffalo, would need to be wiped out once and for all.

Hornaday, Hedley, and young Forney arrived in Miles City just after dawn on the morning of May 10, 1886, leaving a small tip for George the porter in the green-velvet Pullman car.
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When they tumbled out of the train into the awakening town, they were surprised to discover that the little settlement had a few substantial, false-fronted brick buildings, and the shop windows were stocked with fancy goods, including parasols and ladies' gloves, as well as a huge assortment of fine leather saddles, bridles, spurs, and chaps. Although it would be three more years before the Montana Territory became a state, Miles City seemed on its way to becoming a real, bona-fide “city” in more than name only.

The three men found a place to stay in an incongruously well appointed hotel called the Drover House. Miles City was the northern terminus of the Old Western Trail, the longest of the cattle trails out of Texas, and “drovers” were the lean, hard men who drove the great herds of longhorns north—the original cowboys. Men who had not slept in a bed in six months and had just gotten paid came to the Drover House to live in the lap of luxury. To them, it must have seemed like heaven, with its brass spittoons, hanging lamps, and embossed tin ceilings.
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Hornaday noted in his journal that as he strolled through the town that first morning, almost every door on the side streets seemed to open into a cheap saloon, and the town was overrun with soldiers, Indian scouts, bullwhackers, cowboys, and idle, underdressed women.
In 1880, a local doctor had boasted of Miles City in the
Yellowstone Journal:
“We have twenty-three saloons in our town and they all do a good business; we are going to have one church soon.”
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The tiny town was tossed about like a fallen speck into the windy immensity of the northern Great Plains, and there seemed to be no place in the town to escape the wind and dust. Proper women sewed small weights into the hems of their long skirts to keep a frisky gust from revealing their ankles.

Miles City, on the Tongue River, was a bustling shipping center for the open-range cattle industry, and the place where beef cattle were loaded onto trains for shipment to the slaughterhouses of Chicago.
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A huge annual meeting of the Montana Stockmen's Association had just taken place, and young Theodore Roosevelt, a member of the executive committee and a man who seemed to be everywhere, had been in town for the event. Wherever Hornaday walked in town, the smell of cattle manure hung in the air like wood smoke, an ever-present reminder that the cattle industry was rapidly putting an end to the day of the buffalo.

Not wanting to waste a single moment, Hornaday, Hedley, and Forney decided to walk the two miles down the railroad tracks to Fort Keogh in the early afternoon of that first day they arrived in Miles City. Spencer Fullerton Baird, the Smithsonian director, had informed Hornaday that he would contact Secretary of War William C. Endicott about the Smithsonian party expedition. Baird promised that he'd ask the secretary to direct the commander of the post at Fort Keogh to provide a military escort into what might well turn out to be hostile territory. There was good reason to worry: Fort Keogh had been built only ten years earlier, shortly after Custer's massacre on the Little Bighorn, about a hundred miles southwest of Miles City. The fort was now garrisoned by a part of the Fifth Infantry and the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's old regiment.

When Hornaday and his companions arrived at the fort, they found little more than a forlorn collection of rough buildings at the edge of the sagebrush flats and tethered saddle horses, their heads hanging down in the midday heat. When Hornaday and his companions were ushered in to see the commander of the post, Hornaday informed him that they were there on behalf of the Smithsonian Instutition, in Washington, D.C., and that their intention was to collect museum specimens of the American bison. The commander could
scarcely contain his amusement:
Buffalo? Mister Hornaday, you're joking. You'll never find any around here, and I don't think anybody in this post would disagree.

Hornaday and his companions walked disconsolately back up the railroad tracks to their hotel, more like downcast boys than members of the vaunted Smithsonian Expedition of 1886. Over the next several days, Hornaday worked the telegraph office, trying to get the Secretary of War in Washington to authorize a military escort out of Fort Keogh. He also began making inquiries among local ranchers, stockmen, and landowners about where (if anywhere) he stood a chance of finding buffalo. Eventually, he began to tire of the inevitable letdown:

There's no buffalo anymore, and you can't get any anywhere.
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Finally, he got some encouraging news. J. C. Merrill, the army doctor whom he'd corresponded with earlier, left a letter for Hornaday at Fort Keogh emphasizing his conviction that buffalo still could be found along Big Dry Creek, a tributary of the Missouri.
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Merill's opinion was clearly the minority view, however—other people Hornaday spoke with told him, emphatically, that there were no buffalo left on the Big Dry, nor were there any left in the Powder River country of Wyoming, or the Judith Basin in Montana. Apparently, all three of the locations Dr. Merrill had thought likely hiding places for buffalo were “shot out.”

The third night after arriving in Miles City, though, Hornaday's fortunes seemed to shift. He happened to fall into conversation with a rancher named Henry Phillips, of the LU-Bar Ranch, who was broad as a barn door but oddly soft-spoken and polite. The LU-Bar was up on Little Dry Creek, about eighty miles northwest of Miles City, Phillips explained. This region, in a desolate triangle formed by the Yellowstone, Missouri, and Musselshell rivers, had once been a favorite of the hide-hunters, where there were rumored to have been as many as a quarter-million buffalo only a few years earlier. In a “quiet but mighty convincing way,” Hornaday later said, Phillips told him that he knew there were at least a few buffalo in the rugged badlands west of the LU-Bar Ranch. In fact, one of his men had killed a cow on Sand Creek just a few days earlier. The cowboys said they'd seen about thirty-five head altogether, Phillips told Hornaday. If he hunted up in the Sand Creek area, and stuck to it, he was sure Hornaday would get some in the end.

Hornaday had struck on some more good news. He decided to
take the museum party north, toward the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide, and explore the badlands around the headwaters of the Little Dry Creek, Big Dry Creek, and Sand Creek, the place that had been mentioned by two different people so far as the place the last remaining buffalo in the West might be hiding.

Once the Secretary of War finally made contact with Fort Keogh, the Smithsonian party had been provided by the quartermaster with camp equipment, field transportation, a lumbering wagon pulled by six mules, and a small military escort of five soldiers from the Fifth Infantry.
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(The very fact that only five soldiers were considered sufficient for a journey through Indian country showed how weakened the tribes had become, their strength and numbers diminishing with the disappearance of the great herds.) Still, it was a measure of safety for a journey through country still shadowed by Sioux, Crow, and Blackfoot, and by outlaws and rustlers.