The killing of buffalo, as described, was in no sense sport; instead, it was work of the hardest kind. The swift ride over the dry plains through the clouds of dust, the killing of the buffalo, and finally the cutting up of the animals was physical labor far harder than most of that performed by civilized man. Usually, the buffalo were killed far from water, and the severe work that the man had been doing and the summer heat made him very thirsty. It is not strange, then, that he slaked his thirst by devouring the liver, sprinkled with gall, or by eating raw the gelatinous nose of the buffalo.
The description of a butchering, given by Audubon in his “Missouri River Journal,” is very graphic, and is worth quoting here:—
“The moment that the buffalo is dead, three or four hunters, their faces and hands often covered with gunpowder, and with pipes lighted, place the animal on its belly, and, by drawing out each fore and hind leg, fix the body so that it cannot fall again; an incision is made near the root of the tail, immediately above the root in fact, and the skin cut to the neck, and taken off in the roughest manner imaginable, downward and on both sides at the same time. The knives are going in all directions, and many wounds occur in the hands and fingers, but are rarely attended to at this time. The pipe of one man has perhaps given out, and with his bloody hands he takes the one of his nearest companion, who has his own hands equally bloody. Now one breaks in the skull of the bull, and with bloody fingers draws out the hot brains and swallows them with peculiar zest; another has now reached the liver, and is gobbling down enormous pieces of it; while perhaps a third, who has come to the paunch, is feeding luxuriously on some—to me—disgusting-looking offal. But the main business proceeds. The flesh is taken off from the sides of the boss, or hump bones, from where these bones begin to the very neck, and the hump itself is thus destroyed. The hunters gave the name of ‘hump’ to the mere bones when slightly covered by flesh; and it is cooked, and is very good when fat, young, and well broiled. The pieces of flesh taken from the sides of these bones are called filets, and are the best portion of the animal when properly cooked. The forequarters, or shoulders, are taken off, as well as the hind ones, and the sides, covered by a thin portion of flesh, called the dépouillé, are taken out. Then the ribs are broken off at the vertebræ, as well as the boss bones. The marrow-bones, which are those of the fore and hind legs only, are cut out last. The feet usually remain attached to these; the paunch is stripped of its covering of layers of fat, the head and backbone are left to the wolves. The pipes are all emptied, the hands, faces, and clothes all bloody, and now a glass of grog is often enjoyed, as the stripping off the skin and flesh of three or four animals is truly very hard work.… When the wind is high, and the buffaloes run toward it, the hunters’ guns often snap, and it is during their exertions to replenish their pans that the powder flies and sticks to the moisture every moment accumulating on their faces; but nothing stops these daring and usually powerful men, who, the moment the chase is ended, leap from their horses, let them graze, and begin their butcher-like work.”
The Indian and the half-breed killed the buffalo for their support,—for food, clothing, shelter, and many of their implements. The civilized buffalo skinner exterminated it for its hides. There was another class which did something toward wiping out the buffalo, yet the numbers killed by them were inconsiderable in comparison with those killed for commercial purposes. This class comprised those who ran buffalo for sport. Buffalo-running was not a difficult art, nor especially exciting, except so far as it is exciting to chase and overtake some creature that is trying to escape. Provided a man had a good horse and was fairly accustomed to riding, there was little difficulty and little danger in the buffalo chase. At the same time, the combination of the swift ride, the rough country, the dust and dirt thrown up by the flying herd, and the close proximity of the great beasts have reduced many a buffalo runner on his first chase to a pitch of nervousness which made him do precisely the wrong thing. There have been cases, not a few, where riders, trying to kill buffalo with a pistol, have shot their own horses instead of the buffalo; and at least one case came to my knowledge where the excited hunter, riding up on the right instead of the left side of the bull, and shooting across his own body, managed to shoot himself in the left arm.
There was something rather exhilarating in the headlong ride after buffalo, a game not unlike “follow my leader,” which boys play, where the leader chooses the roughest and most difficult ground over which he can pass, and the follower is obliged to take the same route. But buffalo-hunting is now a sport of the distant past, and it is needless to speak of it at any length.
In the days of its abundance the buffalo was a most impressive species, and their enormous numbers have been a theme on which many writers have delighted to linger. Adjectives have failed them to describe the multitudes of buffalo seen, and it was not unusual for men to travel long distances among great herds, which made slow way for them as they passed along. Many calculations have been made of the numbers of buffalo seen at one time; but, after all, these can be little more than guesswork. Terms like thousands and millions, so commonly used, have little or no meaning, for we have no standard of comparison by which to measure them. All the earlier writers, however graphic their descriptions of their numbers, fail to impress the reader, because no one could comprehend such numbers except by seeing them. Dr. Allen, Mr. Hornaday, Colonel Dodge, and many of the old explorers, give much matter bearing on this subject. A few lines from the Journal of Alexander Henry give some idea of their numbers on the Red River. He says, under date of September 18, 1800: “I took my usual morning view from the top of my oak, and saw more buffalo than ever. They formed one body, commencing about half a mile from camp, whence the plain was covered on the west side of the river as far as the eye could reach. They were moving slowly southward, and the meadow seemed as if in motion. This afternoon I rode a few miles up Park River. The few spots of wood along it have been ravaged by buffalo; none but the large trees are standing, the barks of which are rubbed perfectly smooth, and heaps of wool and hair lie at the foot of the trees. The small wood and brush are entirely destroyed, and even the grass is not permitted to grow in the points of the wood. The bare ground is more trampled by these cattle than the gate of the farm yard.”
Even in recent times one might journey for days at a time through herds, which to the eye seemed absolutely to cover a blackened prairie, and I myself have travelled for weeks through the Northwest without, at any time during the day, being out of sight of buffalo. How many millions there were in the great herds through which we used to pass, it is useless now to compute. They have all gone. But over a vast extent of the western country they have left memorials still visible and long to endure in the deep trails which furrow the prairie in all directions.
Other mementos still to be seen, and stirring the heart of the old-timer, though to the man of to-day they are without a meaning, are the huge erratic boulders which lie here and there over the prairie where they were dropped by the great ice mass in its passage down from the highland. Against such boulders the buffalo used to rub their bodies, and such masses of granite or of flinty quartzite, polished and with their sharp angles worn away by the rubbing against them of the tough hides, may often be seen. About such a rock, deep worn in the ground, is the trench, where the bulls and the cows and the younger animals once marched as they pushed their sides against the hard rock, their hoofs cutting the soil into fine dust to be blown away by the wind. The angles of these old rubbing-stones are still discolored by the grease left on them from the buffalo’s skins, and looking at them, one might fancy that they had been used only yesterday.
Here, then, are monuments of imperishable granite, fashioned by a race of dumb creatures, and telling to him who can read their sculpturing a long story of life and power and multitude forever gone. From earliest time man has set up all over the earth his enduring memorials to hold the wonder of later ages; but of the races of the beasts, which one has done this, save only the bison?