The Border and the Buffalo: An Untold Story of the Southwest Plains / The Bloody Border of Missouri and Kansas. The Story of the Slaughter of the Buffalo. Westward among the Big Game and Wild Tribes. A Story of Mountain and Plain

by John R. Cook

But all was not wasted. When the army of hunters had annihilated those massive, sturdy creatures, the hair and bone scavengers followed them up with four- and six-horse, mule, or ox teams. They gathered up and hauled to the nearest railroad station every vestige of buffalo hair and bones that could be found.

I saw in 1874, the year before the great buffalo slaughter began in earnest, a rick of buffalo bones, on the Santa Fe railroad right-of-way, and twenty miles ahead of the track from Granada, Colorado, piled twelve feet high, nearly that wide at the base, and one-half mile long. Seven, eight, nine, and ten dollars per ton was realized from them alone.

So, friend Hickey, after all it was not all waste. It was claimed that during the year 1876 one hundred and fifty-five thousand hides went down the Missouri river on steamboats from Montana; that one hundred and seventy thousand went East over the Santa Fe, and that two hundred thousand were shipped from Fort Worth, Texas.

Now I do not vouch for the accuracy of these figures; but I believe the shipping bills from all these points for that year would be but little short of that number, and might exceed it.

I do know from personal observation that for every hide they got to a market one and a half hides were destroyed on the range from various causes. Some of the inexperienced hunters failed to poison their buffalo-hides in summer and they were rendered unmarketable by the hide-bugs, which soon made them worthless.

All hunters agree that a large percentage of all buffaloes were badly wounded, and walked from the field of slaughter to some isolated ravine, or brush thicket, and died a lingering death. And when found, if they were, the hide was unsalable. Go to Laguna Sabinas, Laguna Plata, Double Lakes, Mustang Lake, on the Staked Plains, and note the tens of thousands of buffaloes that were mired down and perished in a miry, muddy loblolly, to say nothing of the many thousands quicksanded in the Canadian, North and South Red rivers, the Pease, and the many tributaries of the Brazos river.

And the reason so many perished in this way was because for the last few years of their existence, there were multiplied numbers of big and little outfits camped at the most available fresh-water places, ready to bombard them wherever and whenever they came in sight. They were kept on the go; and when they would find a place that was free from a fusillade of lead from the big long-range guns, they would rush and crowd in pell-mell, crowding, jamming, and trampling down both the weak and the strong, to quench a burning thirst. Many of them were rendered insane from their intolerable, unbearable thirst.

Mr. Hickey arrived at our camp late in the afternoon, and found everybody present. Not a buffalo had been seen that day.

The next morning Charley and Hickey went to the first camp. Mr. Hickey made some little examination of the hides, and they returned. A satisfactory deal had been made between them. He gave Charlie a check for two thousand dollars, and agreed to pay the balance as soon as the hides reached Fort Griffin. It was agreed that each was to bear equally the expense of keeping a man to watch the hides until Hickey could get a freight train to come and get them.