On the following morning we went out upon the plains to get the lassoed buffalo and found that in his efforts to break away he had broken one of his legs. We were confronted with the question whether we should let the animal loose upon the prairies in his crippled condition or whether it would be a more merciful thing to shoot him and put him out of his pain and suffering. Buffalo Bill solved the vexatious problem by concluding to lead the crippled animal over to the ranchman's house and there he obtained such instruments as he could, including a butcher knife, a hand-saw, and a bar of iron. He amputated the limb of the buffalo above the point of the break in the bone and seared it over with a hot iron to close the artery and prevent the animal from bleeding to death. The surgical operation thus rudely performed upon this big, robust wild animal of the prairie seemed to be quite well and successfully performed. The buffalo was then left in the ranchman's corral with the understanding that he would see it was well fed and watered.
We were now quite a way from civilization and near the Colorado border line, and notwithstanding our subsequent riding over the hills and uplands during the following day we did not discover any other buffalo and those which had gotten away from us on the preceding day could not be found. During that day we turned northward, and I can remember that about noon we came to a cattleman's ranch where for the first time since our start on the journey we sat down to a wooden table in a log cabin for our noonday meal. During the afternoon we traveled northward as rapidly as our horses could carry us but night came on when we were twenty miles or more southwest of Fort McPherson and we found it again necessary to go into camp for the night, sleeping in the little army tents which we carried along with us in the commissary wagon.
Colonel Cody on this journey had been riding his own private horse—a beautiful animal, capable of great speed. I can remember quite well that Mr. Cody said that he never slept out at night when within twenty miles of his own home. He declined to go into camp with us but turned his horse to the northward and gave him the full rein and started off at a rapid gallop over the plains, expecting to reach his home before the hour of midnight. It seemed to us that it would be a desolate, dreary, lonesome and perilous ride over the solitude of that waste of country, without roads, without lights, without sign boards or guides, but Buffalo Bill said he knew the direction from the stars and that he would trust his good horse to safely carry him over depressions and ravines notwithstanding the darkness of the night. So on he sped northward toward his home.
On the next day we amateur buffalo hunters rode on to Fort McPherson and thence to North Platte where we returned our army horses to the military post with a debt of gratitude to Lieutenant Schwatka, who at all times had been generous, courteous, and polite to us, as well as an interesting social companion.
So ended the last romantic and rather unsuccessful buffalo hunt over the western plains of the state of Nebraska—a region then desolate, arid, barren, and almost totally uninhabited, but today a wealthy and productive part of our state.
The story of the buffalo hunt in and of itself is not an incident of much importance but it furnishes the material for a most remarkable contrast of development within a period of a generation. The wild buffalo has gone. The aboriginal red man of the plains has disappeared. The white man with the new civilization has stepped into their places. It all seems to have been a part of Nature's great plan. Out of the desolation of the past there has come the new life with the new civilization, just as new worlds and their satellites have been created out of the dust of dead worlds.
There was a glory of the wilderness but it has gone. There was a mystery that haunted all those barren plains but that too has gone. Now there are fields and houses and schools and groves of forest trees and villages and towns, all prosperous under the same warm sunshine as of a generation ago when the buffalo grazed on the meadow lands and the aboriginal Indians hunted over the plains.
Mrs. Charles H. Aull Twelfth State Regent, Nebraska Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. 1915-1916