Mr. Hornaday's War (6 page)

Hornaday also had arranged to hire a guide through this unfamiliar country—a Cheyenne Indian called White Dog, who showed up wearing, absurdly, a pair of red overalls. White Dog turned out to be not only utterly worthless as a guide, but also a lazy crybaby who would pretend to be sick when there was any work to be done (according to Hornaday's account). Far more helpful were the two rangy cowboys who'd also signed on for the trip. The cowboys were not the picturesque cowpunchers of lore, but polite young men in their twenties, many of whom had come west for adventure. They were not so much the mythological embodiment of the West as young wayfarers who had come in search of it.
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Nevertheless, they'd all spent so much time riding the wide stock saddles favored by cowboys that they'd become bowlegged—one cowboy's legs were so wide “he could have thrown a cat between them, with perfect safety—to the cat,” Hornaday said. They all wore battered cowboy hats, leather chaps, and high-heeled riding boots, and carried six-chambered .45-caliber revolvers, with ammo belts full of cartridges. They used their guns for only two reasons, Hornaday found out—to shoot game on the range and to shoot out the lights at the local saloon, when they'd been paid a year's wages and were in the process of wasting every bit of it on whiskey, women, and cards.

Even so, he found these young cowboys to be the hardest-working
men he'd ever known, and also the most generous, loyal, and sweet-tempered. They were also among the most poorly paid. One of them, a young man who had been working as a store clerk in Chicago making twenty dollars a week, had come West to become a cowboy and was now working “sixteen hours a day in all kinds of weather, and without any of the comforts of life, at thirty dollars a month.” This, Hornaday said, was “pitiful,” although most of the cowboys seemed happy enough to be living this rough outdoor life under the boundless Montana sky. Still, more than one confided to him, “I'm sick of cowpunchin,' and I'm going to quit it forever this fall.”
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The party crossed the Yellowstone River just outside Miles City on an old ferry, then began to rumble slowly northward on the Sunday Creek Trail, a famous cattle trail along Sunday Creek known variously as the Texas, Montana, or Northern Trail, and along which generations of cattle were driven north from Texas into the Missouri River country.
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A couple of the soldiers generally rode the buckboard of the clattering six-mule wagon, which was loaded to the wagonbows like a floundering ark. Along with Forney, Hedley and Hornaday usually rode their own mounts alongside the wagon. Hornaday, easy in the saddle and often wearing his Norfolk hunting jacket and low-brimmed Western hat, kept a constant eye on the party like a mother hen. White Dog trotted along on his Indian pony, along with the other soldiers and cowpokes, some on horseback, some on foot. Together, this motley museum party made its way into the “Big Dry country” of the badlands.

They reached the big divide between the Yellowstone and the Missouri rivers, a high, bare promontory that allowed them to gaze out across this sunbaked, godforsaken country, with its distant flat-topped buttes, unending sky, and vast canyons. They were searching for buffalo, or perhaps only buffalo ghosts. They scanned the horizon with a glass, but they spotted no life larger than a pronghorn antelope or a kettle of turkey vultures spiralling into the heat-hazy Western sky.

“What a prospect!” Hornaday scribbled in his journal of one of these surveys. “In every direction the view swept over from ten to twenty-five miles of wild, rugged country, composed of buttes, divides, coulies, wash-outs, and rugged ravines and creeks—nothing but badlands. But the view was truly grand, and impressive. We seemed to be looking over the whole of Montana, indeed.”

Now, as the lurching wagon, mules, and horses of Hornaday's Smithsonian party crossed the desolate headland of the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide and began descending the north side, they found themselves entering a world that had been dramatically, and tragically, changed since the days when the plains peoples lived and flourished here. Now they were entering a vast sepulchre of death.

There, along the Sunday Creek Trail, sprawled in the prairie grass, lay the skeletonized carcass of an enormous buffalo bull, completely stripped of its hide like a dead chicken. The great head, fierce as a tribal mask with its muddy, lionlike mane and beard, had been left unskinned. The bull lay precisely as it had fallen, its head stretched far forward, as though at full gallop, its legs scattered behind it as though straining to escape. Moments later, Hornaday saw another of these “ghastly monuments of slaughter,” as he later described them, then another, and another, until the party found itself passing through a hushed battlefield that stretched to the far distance, where crumpled corpses appeared as little more than dark specks. It was as if, far out of sight of almost everyone in America, a second Civil War had been raging for decades, with such grievous losses, there was nothing left but silence and bones.
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Most of the men were wearing scarves over their mouths and noses, like rustlers, to keep the akali dust out of their throats. But the scarves also kept them from speaking in this lonesome place, where words meant nothing. It was a country almost completely bare of trees in every direction except for a few aspen and cottonwoods in the rugged brakes along the creek bottoms. It was also almost emptied of game. During the first two days of travel north of Miles City, in a country that was custom-made for pronghorn antelope, they did not see a single one; the only living creatures they saw were prairie dogs, rabbits, and turkey vultures, wheeling high overhead as if scouting for the last meal in Montana. It was forlorn, abandoned country, a country of great absences, which had once been filled by the dust and noise and dung of one of the planet's greatest zoological spectacles but now was almost completely silent.

This area, they'd been told, was once a famous buffalo range. But now, to Hornaday's infinite sorrow, it was a place whose name was desolation, the place, he wrote later, “where the millions had gone.” On either side of the wagon trail lay the bleaching skeletons of a great buffalo slaughter, from huge bull skeletons sprawled close beside the
trail to those scattered into the distance like dark stars. Many of the skeletons were not even skinned, with hides baked hard as wood by the desert heat and wind. Sometimes there were forty or fifty skeletons in sight at one time. The killing-ground appeared to be frozen in the moment the animals had fallen, what Hornaday estimated to be about four years earlier, “except that the flesh was no longer upon them.”

The emotional burden of these terrible sights, in this terrible place, was something that would change Hornaday's life forever. “It was impossible to look at one without a sigh,” he wrote, “and each group of skeletons brought back the old thoughts, ‘What a pity!' ‘What a pity!' ”

The blast furnace of the desert heat and wind had stripped the flesh from the bones, which were bleached white as porcelain. Some of the enormous skeletons were perfectly preserved, the rib cages held together like strung bows with dried bits of ligament, and even the tiny carpal and tarsal bones, the size of hazelnuts, were preserved so fastidiously that it was as if the buffalo had been preserved for some far-off, fairer afterlife, like Egyptian pharaohs.

The Smithsonian museum party, with its rattling six-mule wagon and assortment of Indian ponies and saddle horses, soldiers, hunters, and taxidermists, carefully trundled their way down the dusty switchbacks on the north scarp of the divide, which opened out across a world so vast it appeared to reveal the curvature of the earth. When they reached the bottom, they found Little Dry Creek, a small tributary of the Missouri which, despite its name, had a faint ribbon of muddy water coursing through it. The water was foul-tasting and, because of the alkali, slightly soapy to the touch. The party followed the creek twelve miles, through copses of aspen and cottonwood along the bottom, to the LU-Bar Ranch. The ranch had a lonesome, slapped-together appearance—it was really just a stone and adobe shack with a few outbuildings—with saddle horses tethered to the porch rail and a spindle of smoke trailing up out of the cookhouse into the big sky.
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The place was deserted except for a young cowboy named Irwin Boyd, who'd been left in charge of the ranch while the other cowboys were at a roundup on the west branch of Sunday Creek. Boyd, glad for the company, welcomed the museum party heartily and asked them to spend the night. Hornaday and Hedley rode onto the range on their Indian ponies before nightfall, scouting the territory and looking for game, and when they returned, Boyd had a hot supper ready. That night, Hornaday jotted in his journal, the soldiers and taxidermists crowded inside, sheltered from a light rain, and “there was lots of talk in the shack by candlelight about bad cowpunchers and good ones, deperadoes, fights, outrages, capers, etc.”

The next morning, they continued north for eight more miles, where they found a clear spring and stopped to set up the expedition's permanent camp, on Phillips Creek, about eighty miles north of Miles City. They unpacked the wagon, which could go no further in this rugged country, and sent the mule team back to Fort Keogh with a drover. Then Hornaday and George Hedley set about trying to hunt buffalo, if they could find any.

Hornaday and Hedley began scouting the country in a systematic way. They would saddle up the packhorses, load rifles, blankets, and rations for two to four days, and set out in a vast circuit through new territory, covering as much ground as possible each day and making camp under the immense stars wherever night overtook them. Despite the sorrow of their task, Hornaday could not help but feel exultant, spreading out his bedroll in the sagebrush with no sound but the wind around them and the happy crackle of a little campfire. There was no place he felt more at home than out here.

After several unsuccessful forays like this, Hornaday and Hedley went out one day with Boyd and a private from Fort Keogh named Moran, who was riding an Army mule. In the early afternoon, they came trotting over a hill and saw, to their utter astonishment, a bull buffalo calf, cowering in a barren hollow between two high buttes, “as lonesome-looking a waif as ever was left to the mercies of a cold world.” He appeared to be only a few weeks old and was wobbly legged as a fawn.
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Moments later, they caught a fleeting glimpse of three adults, apparently cows, tearing away over the hilltop. For whatever reason, the little bull had been abandoned by its mother. When the calf saw the two men on horseback approaching, he tried to run, but before he'd gone a hundred yards, they'd caught up to him. Hedley and Hornaday leaped off their horses and tried to grab the calf with their outstretched arms, but he head-butted each of them in turn. Then he kicked the mule that Private Moran was riding. So Boyd threw a lasso around the little rascal and hauled him in. He struggled and kicked, but he was so thin and so weak that his efforts to resist were futile. Hornaday laughed in amazement and delight at the endearing pluckiness of the little calf, who fought at all odds to go his own way. He reminded him of himself.

To all of them, the buffalo calf was “a genuine curiosity.” Most buffaloes over a year old are dusty brown, but this one was a “perfect blonde, with coarse, woolly sandy-red hair.” Hornaday named him
“Sandy” on the spot. They tied him to a clump of sagebrush and went galloping off after the three adult buffalo that they'd seen running off, but it was too late; the adults, apparently including the calf's mother, seemed to have vanished, as if they'd only been ghosts. Returning to the tethered calf, Hornaday hoisted him onto his horse, with his legs dangling down on either side and a look of wary surprise in his eyes, and carried him back to camp. The next night, Hornaday and Hedley returned to the place where the calf was found and camped there, hoping that the mother would return for her baby. They listened for the sound of buffalo hooves all night, but all they heard was “the occasional chirp of a sparrow breaking the silence” of the moonlit night.

Ten days after they captured Sandy, Hornaday and Hedley finally spooked a couple of adult bulls out of the tree cover along the Little Dry, about fifteen miles from the LU-Bar Ranch.
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One got away, but Hornaday managed to chase down the other and shoot him from horseback. Once he got his experienced taxidermist's hands on the hide of this animal, which was a large one, standing five feet four inches at the shoulder—the first time he'd ever touched an adult in the wild—he could see right away that the shedding of his winter coat was in progress. A rich mantle of new hair, three to six inches long and of a “peculiar bluish–gray appearance,” was coming in over most parts of his body while its old hair, brown, weather-beaten and matted with mud and dung, was being shed. The new hair was coming in unevenly, though: on parts of the bull's hindquarters, there were patches of skin that were perfectly bare, and in other places, only patches of shaggy, old, brown hair, giving the animal a ragged, seedy appearance.

The capture of the little calf and the death of the bull proved beyond a doubt that there were still a few wild buffalo in this region. But Hornaday worried that, given cowboys' penchant for killing game simply for sport, it was “absolutely certain” that within a short time, perhaps even a few months, all the members of this embattled little band of bison would be killed. Nevertheless, he and Hedley decided that the best thing to do was to wait until autumn, when the buffalo's hides would be glossy with new growth and suitable for mounting at the museum, and then return to this same area with enough men and provisions for an extended hunt.

On the way back to Miles City, they stopped to camp at a bleak outpost near a place called Red Buttes, along the Sunday Creek
Trail. That night, by lantern-light, Hornaday was skinning a coyote, a pronghorn antelope, and a couple of sage grouse that the party had shot that day when a lonely looking man driving a horse-drawn buckboard appeared in the circle of lantern-light. The grizzled old man introduced himself as “Doc” Zahl. He seemed to want company, so Hornaday invited him to throw down his bedroll and spend the night with them. The old man happily obliged, and while Hornaday continued his work, Zahl unburdened himself of his story.
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