WARREN, EDWARD ROYAL. The Mammals of Colorado, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1942. OP.
27. Buffaloes and Buffalo Hunters
THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called buffalo, is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence pertaining to the Plains Indians touches the animal. The relationship of the Indian to the buffalo has nowhere been better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides Memorial, edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at Standing Rock," a chapter in My Friend the Indian by James McLaughlin, sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding treatments of the buffalo in Indian books are to be found in Long Lance by Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance; Letters and Notes on... the North American Indians by George Catlin; Forty Years a Fur Trader by Charles Larpenteur. Floyd B. Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in Prairie Trails and Cow Towns lists twenty-five sources of information.
The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is in the book that supersedes all other books on the subject—Frank Gilbert Roe's The North American Buffalo. More about it in the list that follows.
Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill" buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers but seldom wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian hostility. Mountain men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa Fe traders, railroad builders, Indian fighters, settlers on the edge of the plains, European sportsmen, all slaughtered and slew. Some observed, but the average American hunter's observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the lockers of a packing house. Lawrence of Arabia won his name through knowledge and understanding of Arabian life and through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won his name through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man in the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.
{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes
It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds and of scientists and artists who hunted. Three examples are: The English Sportsman in the Western Prairies, by the Hon. Grantley F. Berkeley, London, 1861; Travels in the Interior of North America, 1833-1834, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843), included in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early eye-witnesses," Early Western Travels, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites; George Catlin's Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians, London, 1841.
Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great American animal; the interrelationship between Indian and buffalo; the white hunter—and exterminator.
ALLEN, J. A. The American Bison, Living and Extinct, Cambridge, Mass., 1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, Washington, 1877. Basic and rich work, much of it appropriated by Hornaday.