Mr. Hornaday's War (7 page)

He had been a buffalo hunter himself, Zahl said—one of the most celebrated in the territories, in fact. He once killed 120 buffalo in a little over an hour, methodically firing and reloading his Sharps .40–120 buffalo rifle almost continuously, so the barrel got so hot it would sear his skin if he touched it. Zahl had started out on the immense southern herd, down in Texas, but once that was all shot out, he moved north into the Montana Territory and got to work on the northern herd. He was one of the five thousand hunters and skinners who had camped permanently on the Montana plains during the bloody years of 1882 and 1883, finishing off the work in the northern territories. All that killing was hard work, and hard on a man, he said—brutal labor on your back, shoulders, hands, and arms, and months or years sleeping on the cold ground didn't help much, either.

Now that that herd was gone, he and his brother had started a business hauling out buffalo bones by wagon, taking them down to the Missouri and loading them on river steamers. It was lonesome but profitable work, he said; the bones fetched twenty-eight dollars a ton once they were shipped to dealers in St. Louis and elsewhere, where they were crushed up and sold as fertilizer for suburban lawns and gardens—something as unimaginable as heaven out here in this vast, godforsaken emptiness. Zahl said that he and his brother had sold two hundred tons the previous year. He related all this utterly without sorrow or awareness of his own role in the destruction of the buffalo.

When Hornaday told him that he thought that the buffalo was near extinction, Zahl snorted in disbelief. Just a few years earlier, back around 1883, Zahl said, a herd of something like fifty thousand buffalo had crossed the Yellowstone and headed north, up across the Canadian border. They were still up there, hiding out, and they'd come back someday, Zahl said. There were also at least five thousand wild buffalo down in the territories, in little bands here and there. The buffalo
weren't gone—there were too many of them to be gone.

Referring to Zahl's numbers, Hornaday commented to his dog-eared journal later that night, “This is a great mistake.” From his extensive correspondence, he had learned that in fact, a large herd had crossed the Yellowstone a few years earlier, but they never made it to Canada. Hide-hunters, Indians, and settlers had decimated the herd before they got there. The scattered reports of small droves here and there in the Montana Territory were all that remained. The great ghostly herd, spirited away to Canada, which would return someday to replenish the lost millions, was just a reassuring fantasy, particularly cherished by the hunters who were responsible for the buffalo's destruction.

The spindly legged, sandy-blonde buffalo calf, Sandy, rode in a railroad baggage car when Hornaday, Hedley, and Forney returned to Washington. Hornaday tenderly raised him on cow's milk through that spring and summer of 1886, but one day in July, Sandy ate an enormous amount of damp clover, and before anyone discovered it, he had curled up on the ground and died. Hornaday was anguished by the calf's death. The only hopeful note in this sad end was that at the time of his death, Sandy was three months old, weighed 120 pounds, and stood two feet nine inches high at the shoulder. He'd at least been nurtured, in captivity, past infancy. In letters to friends, Hornaday expressed so much sorrow over the death of Sandy that at least one historian has suggested that the death of the little calf may have inspired one of his greatest creations: the National Zoo at the Smithsonian. If Hornaday could not save the untold millions that were already gone, at least he might be able to preserve the legacy of one small, frightened foundling.
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It was late September of 1886, and along the Yellowstone River outside Miles City, Montana, the shimmering aspen leaves were just beginning to turn, like cascades of tiny golden coins. Four months after his first, exploratory expedition into the territories, Hornaday had once again boarded a westbound train in Washington, but this time he was prepared for an organized, extended hunt. He also was returning with a much better feel for the lay of the land in the rugged coulee country north of the Yellowstone, and of the habits of the few remaining buffalo who remained alive there—if it was not already too late.

This time, he knew almost for certain that there were at least a few animals hiding out in the headwaters of Sand Creek and the Little and Big Dry creeks, probably tucked away up in the heads of the ravines. His great hope was to secure twenty specimens and get back over the Yellowstone within two months, “before the terrors of a Montana winter should catch us afield.”
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Secretary Spencer Baird had asked that Hornaday attempt to secure that many animals because if he was successful, the skins and skeletons could be distributed to other museums, which were as bereft of decent specimens as the National Museum. This expedition was to become the last organized buffalo hunt in Montana, and one of the last in the United States. Hornaday was not unaware of the profound melancholy that hung over the whole affair, like the faint odor of something beginning to go bad.

In his autobiography, written forty-eight years after these events
had faded into memory, Hornaday acknowledged his own misgivings over what the museum party was about to do—and begged the forgiveness of future generations for what could arguably be called a crime. But to Hornaday's way of thinking, he was there only to
remedy
the atrocities committed by a criminal enterprise—the million individual crimes of the buffalo-killing industry that grew up in the West in the mid- to late 1800s, and the “criminal indifference” of the government that allowed it to happen.
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“If the reader now should feel doubtful about the ethical propriety of our last buffalo hunt, and the killing that we had to do in order that our National Museum might secure a few good wild skins out of the wreck of the millions, let him feel assured that our task was by no means a pleasant one,” he wrote, continuing,

At the same time, remember that the author has made atonement to
Bison americanus
by the efforts that he put forth since 1889 for the saving and the restoration of that species. Never since Juan Cabeza de Vaca killed the first buffalo on the Texas plains did any man ever set forth bison hunting with a heart as heavy, or as much oppressed by doubt, as that carried westward by the writer in 1886.
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On this “last buffalo hunt,” Hornaday had engaged the services of Irwin Boyd as guide, hunter, and foreman, and Boyd had hired on two veteran Montana cowboys, Jim McNaney and L.S. “Russ” Russell. McNaney was not only a crack shot and champion rider, but he also had a reputation for playing the meanest firelight mouth-organ in all of Montana. He was a former hide-hunter who claimed to have brought down 3,300 buffalo in his day, but he knew the Missouri-Yellowstone Divide as well as anybody, and if anyone could find buffalo in it, it was McNaney. For the buffalo, it was the end of days, and Hornaday could see no way forward but to shake hands with the devil.

Hornaday also brought with him a twenty-four-year-old senior at the University of Kansas named Harvey Brown, whose university had been promised a couple of specimens in exchange for Brown's time, and who proved to be unfailingly cheerful and resourceful on what was probably the most memorable adventure of his life. Hornaday and Brown arrived at the Drover House in Miles City at two in
the morning on September 24. The hotel was so crowded that Brown had to finish out the night on the puncheon floor of the barroom, wakened periodically by tipsy cowboys stomping into the bar for a drink, and also by the seemingly indefatigable Hornaday, who stayed up into the wee hours “gassing” with an old fur dealer about buffalo hunting. (Hornaday may have to talked to excess, but he didn't drink that way—he was a teetotaler.)
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Again, the quartermaster at Fort Keogh had supplied a six-mule wagon, a Sibley tent and stove, cooking utensils, commissary stores, and even a grizzled old camp cook named McCanna, known as “Mac.” The next day, Hornaday bought two months' supplies of commissary stores, a team, and two saddle-horses, and he hired three more horses and a set of double harness. All the cowboys came with their own horses, so that in the whole outfit, there were ten horses, a team, and two good saddle-horses for each hunter, plus a light ranch wagon that could go anywhere, the ATV of its day. The worst of it was that they had to haul 2,000 pounds of oats into buffalo country to feed all those horses, and even that probably wouldn't last the whole trip.

The soldiers of the Fifth Infantry arrived in Miles City to help pack up the wagons on the day of departure, but by mid-afternoon, they were all uproariously drunk, waving whiskey bottles overhead as the team, wagon, and horses made their way out of town. Three miles out of town, on a steep hill, the wagon tipped over and 4,000 pounds of food and supplies went clattering down the hill. McCanna and the driver, who with Hornaday were the only sober passengers, had to supervise reloading the wagon, and they were far from happy about it. By the time they got to Chapman's ranch and set up camp that first night, the soldiers were too “shiftless and drunk” even to put up their tents, so they slept in the open. Hornaday, meanwhile, had the runs. It was an inglorious start for the last buffalo hunt.

By September 29, they had reached the HV Ranch, as desolate and half-finished-looking as the LU-Bar, on Big Dry Creek, about 90 miles from Miles City. Here, they unloaded the provisions from the six-mule wagon, loaded up the wagon with bleached-white skeletons and skulls of buffalo which they'd picked up along the way, and sent the wagon back to Fort Keogh. The cowboys, with their penchant for nicknaming everything for which they felt affection, were by now calling Brown “Browney” or “Flapjack Bill” (after he was discovered secretly making himself a stack of pancakes one morning).
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In the following days, Hornaday, Hedley, and the cowboys scoured this difficult country, full of wild and rugged buttes, steep-sided ravines, and badlands, without finding any sign at all of buffalo. But it was the sort of country in which embattled game loved to hide, and on October 13, after almost three weeks in the field, one of the cowboys, Russ Russell, got lucky. In the late afternoon, he came across seven buffalo lying up in the shadows at the head of a deep ravine. As they stumbled to their feet and took off at a dead run, Russell got off a few shots from horseback, but he missed, and they all went thundering away. He chased them for two or three miles, but his horse was tired and the buffalo escaped, heading due south.
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Russell brought this great news back to the rest of the hunters at the camp on Big Dry Creek. Hornaday concluded that the cowboy's discovery must mean the buffalo were in the habit of hiding in the shady coolness at the head of these ravines whenever they were disturbed on their favorite feeding grounds further south. The next morning at first light, Hornaday and three cowboys, mounted on fresh horses, returned to Russell's ravine and picked up the trail of the seven buffalo. They followed the trail into the devilishly difficult country that the cowboys called “gumbo ground,” where the soil was loose and crumbly, like ashes, and the horses' hooves sank halfway to the fetlocks with each step; where the ground was overrun with deep seams and cracks that could easily turn a horse's ankle or even break a leg; and where the whole confounded mess was interspersed with sagebrush and greasewood. Crossing twelve miles of this in pursuit of the buffalo, Hornaday wrote, was “killing work” and very slow. The ashy soil had one big advantage, though: tracking was easy.
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Finally, the animals left the gumbo ground and passed into grassy country near a small stream called Taylor Creek, where tracking was practically impossible. Around noon, the hunters rode up onto high ground and Hornaday surveyed the windswept, treeless countryside with binoculars. About two miles away, resting on the level summit of a small butte, he spotted the buffalo; the original drove of seven had been joined by seven more. Although it was a fragment of the once-mighty multitudes, nevertheless it was the biggest herd Hornaday had ever seen in the wild. The hunters crept up to within 200 yards of the animals and, on a signal, they all began to fire. The buffalo leaped to their feet, unharmed, and bounded away at breathtaking speed, heading for the shelter of the ravines.

Hornaday and the cowboys leaped back in the saddle and took off at a mad gallop, this time directly through a vast prairie dog town, even worse than gumbo ground, which could have snapped a horse's leg should it slip down into a hole at top speed. But none of the horses were injured, and once they'd caught up to the fleeing buffalo, McNaney killed a fine old bull and a beautiful two-year-old or “spike” bull. Hornaday brought down a cow and another large old bull. It was a fine day of hunting, even shot through with the aftertaste of remorse as it was.

For the rest of October, as the aspen leaves turned and then began to fall, the museum party focused their hunt on the heads of the ravines, the buffalo's secret hideouts. By the end of the month, they had taken a total of twelve specimens, with Hornaday, by firelight, spending his evenings painstakingly preparing the skins and skeletons for museum mounting. He cut “SIBO” into the thin, cutaneous muscle that lined the inside of the buffalo hide, a brand which stood for “Smithsonian Institution Buffalo Outfit,” the official name of the expedition. It was just the way the old buffalo hunters used to mark their hides in the days of the great slaughter.
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Most of the buffalo meat was consumed by Hornaday's hunting party or given to cowboys and soldiers they encountered along the way. Almost all the work of skinning out and skeletonizing the buffalo was done by Hornaday, with help from Harvey Brown, the young student. It was brutal work. “Brown and I worked all day on the buffalo skins, fleshing, washing out blood, etc.” Hornaday noted in his journal on October 20. “It is a fearful job to wash the blood out of a skin, a long, cold, tiresome job, freezing to the hands, breaking to the back. Worked all day on 2 skins.”
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