Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

According to this belief, nature, and the western United States in particular, was an untapped land of Goshen, a collection of unbounded resources to be developed and exploited for the betterment of humankind. A generation of early western settlers, and then their children in the Gilded Age, drew inspiration from writings such as Lansford W. Hastings’s The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California in 1844:

I can not but believe, that the time is not distant, when those wild forests, trackless plains, untrodden valleys, and the unbounded ocean, will present one grand scene, of continuous improvements, universal enterprise, and unparalleled commerce: when those vast forests, shall have disappeared, before the hardy pioneer; those extensive plains, shall abound with innumerable herds, of domestic animals; those fertile valleys, shall groan under the immense weight of their abundant products; when those numerous rivers shall teem with countless steam-boats, steam-ships, ships, barques and brigs; when the entire country, will be everywhere intersected, with turnpike roads, rail-roads and canals; and when, all the vastly numerous, and rich resources, of that now, almost unknown region, will be fully and advantageously developed.

Hastings’s vision of complete human conquest provides a stark counterpoint to Grinnell’s celebration of the wild Green River landscape created by “the hand of a greater being than man.”

Grinnell’s first reactions to the West were more visceral than intellectual—but they were not superficial. He craved the adventure and was deeply affected by the beauty of what he saw. In an 1873 article in Forest and Stream magazine, Grinnell would write of the Green River Valley that “the sportsman or naturalist will find here much to attract and delight him. And perhaps he will even be tempted, as I once was, to sever for a time the ties that bind him to his eastern home.”

Far from severing his ties to the East, though, Grinnell was about to secure them. In the contest between Lucy Audubon and Cornelius Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt appeared to have won.

Less than a month after his return to New York, remembered Grinnell, “I entered my father’s office at 36 Broad Street, as a clerk without pay.” His father, by 1870, was Vanderbilt’s principal Wall Street agent. His father’s business partner was Horace F. Clark, Vanderbilt’s son-in-law. George Bird Grinnell, it appeared, would follow in his father’s footsteps. “[O]n talking it over with my father I found that he was anxious to have me go into business, to relieve him, and ultimately to take his place. This seemed the proper thing to do.”

The Marsh expedition had awakened in Grinnell a deep passion, but for the time being anyway, he would cede to the wishes of his father. The great engine of the Gilded Age was barreling forward, and instead of jumping off, Grinnell was climbing aboard. As for pursuit of his western dreams, “the knowledge of the grief this would give my parents pulled me back again.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_5c55a375-d393-56b2-bd22-625cc0cdc43b)

“Barbarism Pure and Simple” (#ulink_f34f20f4-3f95-5c63-9a6f-c44a76a6f09a)

Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.

—GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, July 1872

I had always had a settled dislike for the business,” was George Bird Grinnell’s understated summary of his time at his father’s firm, Geo. B. Grinnell and Company.

After the adventure and excitement of five months in the wild and wooly West, Grinnell settled in, as best he could, to his new life as a Wall Street broker. With his father as tutor, he learned the basics of buying and selling stocks. There were also more complicated lessons, including the high-stakes transactions of purchasing stocks—especially railroad stocks—“on a margin.” The risks of such deals would later become painfully apparent. But in the exuberance of the early 1870s, Grinnell remembered that there was no thought but that prices “would go much higher.”

Grinnell, eager to please his parents, kept his nose to the grindstone during the long and tedious days at the brokerage house. His escape came in the evenings, when he retreated to Audubon Park, there to pursue his love for the outdoors through various vicarious activities. One outlet was a continuing relationship with Professor O.C. Marsh. Marsh had asked Grinnell to keep his eye out for the fossils and osteological materials that were “constantly coming into the menageries and taxidermists’ shops in New York.” When Grinnell found interesting pieces, he secured them for Marsh. Grinnell also took up a hobby popular among hunters and anglers of the day, taxidermy, with birds as his particular focus. Most nights, Grinnell wrote, he would spend “two or three hours of the evening down in the cellar, where I had an excellent outfit for mounting birds.”

None of these activities, though, sufficed to fill the void he felt for true adventure. “In the summer of 1872 I was anxious again to go out West.” In particular, Grinnell wanted to undertake the quintessential western activity of the day—the buffalo hunt. “[T]hese hunts of the Indians [had] been described to me with a graphic eloquence that filled me with enthusiasm as I listened to the recital, and I had determined that if ever the opportunity offered I would take part in one.” With the assistance of Major Frank North (who had guided the Marsh expedition up the Loup River), Grinnell arranged for a hunt, and not just any hunt. Grinnell, guided by Frank North’s younger brother, Luther “Lute” North, would accompany an entire tribe of Pawnee Indians on their annual foray in the wild Republican River Valley of western Kansas.

THE BUFFALO THAT GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, AT AGE 22, SOUGHT TO kill, had been a fixture on the Great Plains of North American for thousands of generations.

Ancestors of the modern buffalo walked across the Bering Land Bridge from Siberia sometime between 300,000 and 600,000 years ago. One of these ancestors, Bison latifrons, was 20 percent larger than a modern buffalo and carried an intimidating rack of horns spreading seven feet. Bison latifrons shared the Great Plains with a number of the animals whose fossils Grinnell had dug up during the Marsh expedition, including miniature horses, mammoths, camels, and mastodons. These grazing animals were hunted by fierce predators, now extinct, including several species of saber-toothed tigers and the dire wolf, a larger version of its modern descendant.

It is not clear exactly when humans first appeared on the Great Plains, though we do know that by at least 12,000 years ago, human hunters were among the predators stalking bison. We also know that around the same time, most of the large mammals of the plains became extinct. It is unknown whether they died because of human hunters, the climate change that followed the last ice age, or some combination of the two. Whatever the cause, a few resilient survivors were able to adapt to their rapidly changing world. One was mankind. Another was the modern wolf. Another was a new species of bison that zoologists would one day name Bison bison—the modern buffalo. Bison bison had at least one advantage that helped it survive against primitive human hunters. More ancient species of buffalo, with their gigantic horns, defended themselves by standing and fighting. Armed with a long spear, a hunter could defeat this strategy. Bison bison had a different defense, one more difficult for man to overcome. Instead of fighting, Bison bison ran away.

The modern buffalo, winner of a brutal contest that wiped out hundreds of other species, is a survivor of stunning physical attributes. Though its ultimate defense is to run away, the buffalo projects a physical presence that is intimidating to most predators. Bulls can weigh more than a ton, with thickly furred heads and leg pantaloons that make them look larger still. Both male and female buffalo have hooked horns, far smaller than those of their ancient ancestors but still plenty potent. With powerful neck muscles to support their massive heads, a buffalo can throw a wolf thirty feet. In breeding season, a male buffalo can kill a rival with one goring stab of his horns. Indeed about 5 percent of mature bulls die each year from wounds they receive in battle with their peers.

Having survived both the Ice Age and its aftermath, buffalo can thrive in a remarkable range of climates, from 110 degrees Fahrenheit on the deserts of Mexico (or Nebraska) to –50 degrees Fahrenheit on the windswept plains of Canada. A buffalo’s thick coat has ten times more hairs per square inch than the hide of a domestic cow. Yet in the summer, the buffalo sheds down to a thin coat as sleek as a lamb, newly shorn for the county fair.

The buffalo and its relatives (including deer, elk, antelope, and the domestic cow) are ruminants, with digestive systems well attuned to subsist on the grasses of the Great Plains. Humans can’t eat grass because we can’t digest cellulose. Buffalo can because the first chamber of their alimentary canal—the rumen—is a sort of vat in which colonies of bacteria help to break down cellulose into usable carbohydrates. To further promote the process, ruminants chew their food twice: once before swallowing and a second time after fist-sized portions—the cud—are regurgitated and then chewed again.

The buffalo’s gigantic head serves a purpose beyond intimidation. In the winter, it becomes a powerful plow to push snow away from buried grass. Cattle, by contrast, have no such ability to dig for food. If not fed by ranchers during an extended period of heavy snow, cattle die.

Buffalo reproduce in prodigious numbers, at least by comparison with other large mammals. Buffalo cows drop their first calf at age 3, and in domesticated herds they have been bred beyond age 30. If a herd is well nourished, 85 to 90 percent of mature cows become pregnant and give birth each year. Farmers of modern dairy cattle, by contrast, using high-tech, artificial insemination, might achieve a birth rate of only 50 percent.

Buffalo calves are born ready to run. Within two minutes of birth, a buffalo calf tries to raise itself. Within seven minutes, it is standing. Within an hour, a buffalo calf can run after the herd.

In a domesticated herd, a newborn calf was once herded sixty-six miles, through deep snow, in its first two days of life, with no apparent ill effects.

Such early skill and endurance is vital, since running—and the herd itself—are a buffalo’s primary defenses.

Despite the buffalo’s plodding, cumbersome appearance, it is shockingly fast and agile. An adult buffalo is as fleet as some racehorses in the quarter mile, but unlike a horse, a frightened buffalo can run across the prairie for miles without stopping. A nineteenth-century scientific expedition once required a relay of three fresh horses to run down a buffalo cow, covering twenty-five miles in the chase. As for agility, a biologist at the National Bison Range in Montana once observed a 2,000-pound bull leap up a six-foot embankment from a standing start!

The buffalo’s skill at running away is enhanced by the collective power of the herd to tell it when to run away. The phrase “herd mentality” may carry a pejorative connotation for humans, but not so the buffalo: Hundreds (or thousands) of pairs of eyes, scanning the broad horizon. Hundreds of noses, sniffing for foreign scent. And then, at the first sign of danger, a powerful instinct to follow after the fleet, fleeing mass. When pursued, the herd protects its members through sheer numbers. A buffalo doesn’t need to be faster than predators; it just needs to be faster than a few of the other buffalo.

Against the buffalo herd, even a predator as effective as the wolf represents little risk except to the young, the old, and the injured or sick.

Healthy adult buffalo (not including cows with calves) pay little attention to wolves. Indeed Indian hunters sometimes cloaked themselves in wolf skins in order to crawl within easy shooting distance. The power of the herd (especially its size) even insulated the buffalo against its most effective predator—humans.

The question of how many buffalo walked the North American continent before the arrival of Europeans is a source of considerable disagreement. Sixty million has been a common number cited, and some estimates are as high as 100 million. The late Dale Lott, a biologist at the University of California, Davis, and a leading expert on the buffalo, studied these higher numbers and made a persuasive case as to why the number of 30 million—though still an educated guess—is the better estimate based on the continent’s carrying capacity.

Still, 30 million is an enormous number.

Equally impressive is the range that these buffalo covered. The fact that buffalo inhabited the Great Plains from Mexico to Canada is commonly known. Less well known is the fact that at the time the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, some 2 million to 4 million buffalo lived east of the Mississippi—in every future state but the northeast cluster of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

The buffalo, in short, was a remarkable survivor. It had prevailed through prehistoric episodes that forced hundreds of other mammals into extinction. It thrived in climates ranging from subtropic Mexico to subarctic Canada. It could defend itself against the relentless attacks of the most deadly predators in its environment, including packs of wolves and prehistoric humans. The buffalo, it seemed, was perfect.

BY JULY OF 1872, GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL AND THREE COMPANIONS were crossing into northern Kansas on horseback, hurrying to catch up with a tribe of 4,000 Pawnee Indians. Relations between whites and Pawnees were peaceful, in part because the Pawnee ceded their traditional Kansas and Nebraska lands early. The Pawnee were enemies of the Sioux and the Cheyenne and often served as guides to U.S. Army soldiers during the wars with those tribes.

In 1872, the Pawnee were confined to a small reservation along Nebraska’s Loup River. Twice a year, though, the army allowed the tribe to travel south to hunt buffalo in their historic Kansas hunting grounds. “[F]or a little while,” wrote Grinnell, “they returned to the old free life of earlier years, when the land had been all their own, and they had wandered at will over the broad expanse of the rolling prairie.”

The tribe left the reservation two weeks before Grinnell arrived in Nebraska, so now Grinnell and his companions hurried to catch up. Their guide was Lute North, who, like his brother, was an experienced young army officer. Lute spoke fluent Pawnee and was known and respected by the tribe.

After a few days they overtook the Pawnee, cresting a butte to find 200 lodges, an entire village, spread across the prairie. The head chief, Peta-la-shar, received them warmly, referring to Lute as “my son.” Peta-la-shar reported that the hunt, so far, had not been successful. “But tomorrow,” he promised, “a grand surround will be made.” His young scouts had reported a large herd about twenty miles to the south.

THE OLDEST CONFIRMED WEAPON FOUND IN NORTH AMERICA—A STONE spearhead—was discovered by archaeologists near Folsom, New Mexico, in 1927. Stone cannot be carbon-dated, but the material with which the famous “Folsom point” was discovered could be. The point was imbedded in bone—a 10,000-year-old bone of Bison antiquus, an extinct ancestor of the modern buffalo.

Humans have been hunting buffalo for a long time. Indeed, in twenty-seven of thirty-five key North American archaeological sites revealing the story of early North American human activity, buffalo bones outnumber those of any other animal.

By 9,000 years ago, Folsom Man was using many of the same strategies and techniques that American Indians would later use when hunting buffalo on foot. The foundation of these strategies was an intimate understanding of buffalo behavior. Humans could not outrun the buffalo, but they could turn the defenses of the herd against itself.

Many hunting strategies involved sophisticated team efforts to move the herd to a killing zone. This did not, as a general matter, mean frightening the herd into a full-fledged stampede—at least not at first. Hunters, for example, might use the smell of distant smoke to steer the herd. Sometimes a skillful hunter draped in a buffalo skin could decoy a herd, actually leading it in the chosen direction. Once moving, a herd could sometimes be steered into giant V’s formed by stacked stones, mounds of dung, or, in winter, by a line marked in the snow.

Ancient humans, and later Indians on foot, used different types of killing zones. The most famous is the buffalo jump, or pishkun. Meriwether Lewis described the critical moment: “The disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently nigh the buffaloe to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speede to the precipice … the (Indian) decoy in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranney or crevice of the clift.”

The buffalo, pushed by their own frantic mass, tumbled to their deaths. At one Colorado site, 193 buffalo were killed in a single hunt that took place 8,500 years ago. In Montana alone, there are more than 300 pishkun sites. Along a one-mile stretch at one of them, Ulm Pishkun, the buffalo bones are thirteen feet deep.

Hunters on foot also killed buffalo by driving them into box canyons or giant corrals. In the winter, hunters wearing snowshoes ran down buffalo as they floundered in deep snow. Other herds were steered onto ice, where their hooved feet could find no traction.

At some point, probably around 1,500 years ago, Plains Indians began to use the bow and arrow. This development increased the range at which buffalo could be killed but not the basic hunting techniques. As a general matter, at the time Europeans arrived in North America, Plains Indians were hunting the buffalo in ways that differed little from earlier humans, thousands of years before them. In the seventeenth century, a French fur trader named Pierre Esprit Radisson was impressed by the ability of the Sioux Indians—then inhabitants of Minnesota—to hunt the buffalo on foot.

The horse changed everything.

The prototypical image of the Plains Indian is the mounted hunter-warrior, and indeed, Plains Indians were among the greatest horsemen in history. But the history of Plains Indians on horseback is surprisingly short. It was not until the 1600s that Indians of the Southern Plains first acquired horses—from Spanish remudas brought up through Mexico. And it was not until the 1700s that horses were in widespread use by Indians of the Northern Plains.

The horse, in a literal way, expanded the horizon of the Native Americans. A tribe on foot might travel five or six miles in a day. A mounted tribe could easily cover twenty. Increased mobility made it easier to follow the buffalo herd and gave Indians more choice about where to live. When the tribe needed to move, the horse’s ability to carry more weight also meant that more food could be preserved and transported, which in turn decreased the risk of starvation in the winter.

There were downsides to this increased mobility. More traveling meant more trespassing, and Indians fought other Indians more frequently as they defended their traditional territory. The advent of the horse also increased the dependence of Indians on the buffalo. With the ability to follow the herd and the vast food supply it represented, there was little incentive to farm—or even to hunt other types of game. Some tribes, such as the Cheyenne and the Crow, abandoned farming when they came into possession of the horse. Increased dependence on the buffalo, of course, increased the risk of starvation if the buffalo should become scarce.