buffaloâmaybe thirty or forty millionâdisappeared up the tracks like water up a straw.
Not that any industry was crying out for buffalo products at the time. Fresh buffalo meat was hard to ship, because it would not travel except in the cold months. Buffalo hams and tongues were complicated to smoke or salt. The easiest part of the buffalo to move was the hide. All you had to do was shoot the buffalo, skin it, scrape the flesh from the hide, and peg the hide out on the ground to dry. You were left with a hard, flat thing with hair on one side, a thing which could be stacked and bailed and loaded in freight cars. When these hides (called flint hides) arrived in the East, they proved more difficult than cowhide to tan commercially. But since the hides were cheap, tanners soon solved the problem. Tanned buffalo leather is too soft and pliant to use for shoes or belts or harnesses, but it makes excellent buffing rags. Tanneries eventually bought hides by the millions. In New York, the price of a buffalo hide went from $1.25 to $3.50 in just a few years. From the railheads, professional buffalo hunters fanned out across the plains.
These hunters preferred to be called âbuffalo runners,â but they did not chase buffalo and shoot them from horseback. Once they found a herd, they sneaked up to within rifle range on foot. Some wore kneepads to help them crawl. Then they set their sixteen-pound guns on a rest of crossed hardwood sticks and shot buffalo one after another with bullets an inch long and half an inch across. Many buffalo hunters used the fifty-caliber Sharps buffalo rifle, which could kill a buffalo bull at six hundred yards and a man at up to a mile. The hunters tried to kill as many animals as possible in one spot, for the convenience of their partners who did the skinning. Buffalo hunters usually worked in parties of four, with one shooter, two skinners, and one hide stretcher and cook. Everybody wanted to be the shooter. On a busy day, the guns heated up quickly. If the hunter had no water to pour on the barrel, he might urinate on it. Many skinners used mules to pull the hides off. At night, the men sometimes got out a fiddle and pegged down a dry buffalo hide and danced on it. They wore heavy clothes which they seldom changed. Dried blood caked in their beards. When a group of them walked up to a bar, they would reach into their clothes, and the last one to catch a louse had to buy. The prostitutes who catered to them were a special type.
The years when railroads first crossed the plains are when most Western novels and movies and TV shows take place. Those years are what people mean when they talk about the Wild West. The Army was fighting the Indians winter and summer, trying to force them onto reservations, and eventually it more or less succeeded. The buffalo were disappearing, and buffalo hunters had millions of dollars to spend. General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Armyâs Department of the Southwest, applauded the hunters for âdestroying the Indiansâ commissary.â He said, âLet them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.â Newspaper editors in the new towns along the cattle trails got a kick out of the phrase âthe festive cowboy,â and used it often in their accounts of shootings and brawls. Even before the buffalo were gone, cowboys were driving thousands of cattle north from Texas to railroad shipping points, or to summer ranges, or to Indian agencies. By 1880, the thousands had become hundreds of thousands. Most of the cattle were Texas longhorns, a breed descended from cattle brought to the New World by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The longhornsâ ancestors were runaways who grew up wild in the brushy bottoms of south Texas. In just a few centuries they evolved horns up to four feet long and an uncowlike fierceness. Texans and Indians hunted
Not that any industry was crying out for buffalo products at the time. Fresh buffalo meat was hard to ship, because it would not travel except in the cold months. Buffalo hams and tongues were complicated to smoke or salt. The easiest part of the buffalo to move was the hide. All you had to do was shoot the buffalo, skin it, scrape the flesh from the hide, and peg the hide out on the ground to dry. You were left with a hard, flat thing with hair on one side, a thing which could be stacked and bailed and loaded in freight cars. When these hides (called flint hides) arrived in the East, they proved more difficult than cowhide to tan commercially. But since the hides were cheap, tanners soon solved the problem. Tanned buffalo leather is too soft and pliant to use for shoes or belts or harnesses, but it makes excellent buffing rags. Tanneries eventually bought hides by the millions. In New York, the price of a buffalo hide went from $1.25 to $3.50 in just a few years. From the railheads, professional buffalo hunters fanned out across the plains.
These hunters preferred to be called âbuffalo runners,â but they did not chase buffalo and shoot them from horseback. Once they found a herd, they sneaked up to within rifle range on foot. Some wore kneepads to help them crawl. Then they set their sixteen-pound guns on a rest of crossed hardwood sticks and shot buffalo one after another with bullets an inch long and half an inch across. Many buffalo hunters used the fifty-caliber Sharps buffalo rifle, which could kill a buffalo bull at six hundred yards and a man at up to a mile. The hunters tried to kill as many animals as possible in one spot, for the convenience of their partners who did the skinning. Buffalo hunters usually worked in parties of four, with one shooter, two skinners, and one hide stretcher and cook. Everybody wanted to be the shooter. On a busy day, the guns heated up quickly. If the hunter had no water to pour on the barrel, he might urinate on it. Many skinners used mules to pull the hides off. At night, the men sometimes got out a fiddle and pegged down a dry buffalo hide and danced on it. They wore heavy clothes which they seldom changed. Dried blood caked in their beards. When a group of them walked up to a bar, they would reach into their clothes, and the last one to catch a louse had to buy. The prostitutes who catered to them were a special type.
The years when railroads first crossed the plains are when most Western novels and movies and TV shows take place. Those years are what people mean when they talk about the Wild West. The Army was fighting the Indians winter and summer, trying to force them onto reservations, and eventually it more or less succeeded. The buffalo were disappearing, and buffalo hunters had millions of dollars to spend. General Phil Sheridan, commander of the Armyâs Department of the Southwest, applauded the hunters for âdestroying the Indiansâ commissary.â He said, âLet them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.â Newspaper editors in the new towns along the cattle trails got a kick out of the phrase âthe festive cowboy,â and used it often in their accounts of shootings and brawls. Even before the buffalo were gone, cowboys were driving thousands of cattle north from Texas to railroad shipping points, or to summer ranges, or to Indian agencies. By 1880, the thousands had become hundreds of thousands. Most of the cattle were Texas longhorns, a breed descended from cattle brought to the New World by the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The longhornsâ ancestors were runaways who grew up wild in the brushy bottoms of south Texas. In just a few centuries they evolved horns up to four feet long and an uncowlike fierceness. Texans and Indians hunted
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