CHAPTER 1
"... the earth is covered with their Horns." FATHER HENNEPIN
"For three or four days the soil has been absolutely manured with the dung of buffalo." SIR GEORGE SIMPSON
"... you might travel for days and weeks and not see one of them. But their tracks were everywhere." REV. DR. JOHN MCDOUGALL
One morning in July 1966, a lone buffalo bull grazed near the highway on the mountain between Virginia City and Ennis, Montana, unmindful of the click of camera shutters or the rustle of hesitant tourists getting in and out of automobiles. Nor did his tail rise and kink at carloads of miners and cowboys and storeowners and the rest of us, come up from the towns below. After awhile he crossed the highway, stopping on it just long enough to pose for the picture that appeared in Virginia City's weekly newspaper, The Madisonian, showing him astraddle the center line. He was a bachelor bull, alone in the way of bachelor bulls for ever and ever, roaming a range which 100 years ago had held so many buffalo that the valleys below stank of them. Today he roamed the thousands of acres of forest, unaware in his typical bachelor solitude that he was one of the few buffalo on earth—and lucky to be here at that, a curiosity. Big, tough, sure that nothing could harm him, he fled from men in nylon sport shirts no more than he had from early Spaniards in iron breastplates ("they remained quiet and did not flee," reported one of the Conquistadores).
Undoubtedly he belonged in Yellowstone Park, but just like his great-grandparents he grazed where he pleased, moving unpredictably from range to range across wide expanses of country and showing up where least expected.
Later in the day the bull moved along the ridge as sure of himself as if he still owned the millions of acres from which he had been dispossessed.
Something about the cry "Buffalo nigh!" always has pulled men out for a look-see. One Sunday in 1835, in the country south of the Tetons, the cry stole a congregation of mountain men from the Reverend Samuel Parker's preaching. And such a cry startled greenhorns along the Platte into realizing that those brown shapes they saw ahead in a valley were buffalo, not brown bushes. It brought' 49ers tumbling out of Conestoga wagons for a go at a buffalo run. The same cry had brought us, miner and storekeeper, tourist and cowboy, actor and reporter, to gawk at a real, live, wild buffalo on the highway.
A gawk at a live buffalo was what every pilgrim of '49 and '63 wanted, but often the herds grazed far from the wagon trails, avoiding white guns. They were either hidden by Indian buffalo herders or wandering erratically into the wind. Nary a buffalo in buffalo land, but a man could see the buffalo lived there—buffalo sign filled the country.
The herds marked their territory with trails, thousands of them, some shallow traces, some eight-to ten-inch trenches, others "so deep that the animal's sides would rub the embankments." Millions of buffalo in thousands of years, buffalo feeding in the hills, walking down slopes to valley water, and crossing ridges in search of new pasture, produced trail crossing trail. They abandoned deep ones for shallow new ones until the paths led in any direction a man might go. They created mazes that frustrated prairie travelers. As Henry Kelsey, wandering Canadian plains in 1691, wrote, "by reason of so many beaten paths w[hich] y[e] Buffillo makes we lost y[e] track." One hundred fifty years later, Zebulon Pike, when lost on the plains, tried to follow the trail of Spaniards, who, he felt, had good guides and would know where to find wood and water, but he lost their trail, it "being so much blended with the traces of the buffalo," and couldn't find it again "owing to the many buffalo roads." An Oregon-bound emigrant of the 1850s wrote, "It is astonishing to see the ground stamped, worn, hoofed & trod upon by these old fellows." Often, a wagon train traveling west along the Platte was forced to stop and repair wheels loosened by the constant thumping from crossing buffalo trails leading out of the river toward grass in the hills. Emigrants who had been forewarned would stow away extra tire irons and felloes to repair this damage from buffalo trails.
But sometimes the trails were more help than hindrance. Buffalo had nosed into most every place a man wanted to go. If he wanted to ride through seemingly impenetrable canebrake in bottoms east of the Mississippi, he usually found a buffalo trail going his way. Mountain men like Zenas Leonard, weak and fighting deep snow, came upon trails broken for them by the buffalo (and were further saved when they shot the buffalo who had made the trails). Traders on the snow-drifted Canadian prairie saved their horses' strength by following the winding buffalo paths. Indians dragged travois in the convenient trails. Wagons followed paths beaten wide through the wilderness. Artist George Catlin, riding alone and chartless across the plains, did as many other wanderers: he looked to cross rivers where a buffalo trail broke steep cutbank into a slope his horse could manage. Sometimes these travelers found buffalo hooves had squished such a crossing into quagmire, though at other times they had pounded it pavement-hard; often a hoped-for spring had been worked "into a loblolly of mud."
Trails led out of creek bottoms toward feeding grounds, forking, curlycueing across the grass in patterns as erratic as the whimsies of the beast. As many as twenty paths together crossed benches and saddles, going over them a couple of feet apart "like old corn rows but not so wide." (Men still run upon such trails in these low crossing places.) Father Hennepin noted, "Their ways are as beaten as our great Roads, and no Herb grows therein." The trails eroded hillsides, left ridges barren and washing away, made gullies down steep coulees and clay cutbanks. In wet weather 200 buffalo would wear an instant muddy trail in one crossing of a meadow. Where the buffalo fed, men found footprints "cloven, and bigger than the feete of Camels" running "in all directions"; where the tracks lay thick, men found soil so "absolutely manured with dung of buffalo" it appeared as "a stallyard." Some places were covered with hundreds of skeletons, horns, and rotting carcasses.
Between the trails, tufts of buffalo hair fluttered amongst the grass; bits of it waved in the breeze from thorn-apple spikes and from lodgepole bark, a Spanish moss of the sagebrush country. If a man found a red squirrel's nest or a bird's nest he likely found it lined with buffalo hair.
Sign of elk, deer, antelope also imprinted itself on the land, but the prairie traveler's journal mostly noted buffalo sign. Like the beast itself, the quantity of sign outdid anything a woodsman or hunter had seen before ... an animal bigger than an ox wandering seemingly as thick as the prairie dog, the pigeon, or the mosquito.
Buffalo dimpled the range with thousands of wallows, shallow dusty saucers horned and pawed in the bunch grass. At sunset and sunrise, when the wallows threw long, crescent shadows, the landscape looked pocked like the moon. These hollows stood brimful of rainwater in the spring, the "innumerable ponds which bespeckle the plains, and kept us at least well supplied with water," but by May were "thick and yellow with buffalo offal"—watering holes for buffalo only; buffalo could stomach anything. In late spring such manure and moisture produced a rank growth of grass, circular growths all about the prairie. By midsummer they dried completely, the grass disappeared under wallowings, and the soil became sifted by constant horning and pawing.
Although a man could easily pile the soft soil of the ubiquitous buffalo wallow into a hasty breastwork for protection from Indian attack, the wallows usually proved a nuisance. They forced wagons to wind amongst them, and, in the buffalo chase, caused steeplechase jumps across or wild springings to the side. And the homesteader found some of them almost impossible to plow because "down in the bottom of each of them wallows was a thick alkali deposit ... the only way Father could handle them wallows when it came to farming was to haul in wagonloads of sand and dump them in to sort of loosen the ground up." (Homesteaders were still plowing around buffalo wallows in Montana in 1910.) In barren sand spots wallows grew to cover an acre or more.
Wet, spring months filled prairie swales with water, creating large ponds which filled with tall June grass—hay lakes, old-timers called them. Each seemed a green oasis until a man walked between stinking, brown buffalo carcasses and scattered white bones, a flotsam ringing the shore, the remnants of the old and sick—the weak—who had died or been wolf-killed. Buffalo drank and wallowed here in the spring and caked themselves with mud; when they moved they left behind a hummocky, boggy place, a nasty place to cross, another place for a man to detour ... but a sanctuary for birds and amphibious wild life (pelicans waded them, evidently in search of food).
"The trees, also, furnished their evidence and every low limb was worn by the Buffaloe, while scratching his skin, after coming out of his mud or sand bath," wrote a tenderfoot, wide-eyed about buffalo doings; but such doings could make experienced North-West Company fur trader Alexander Henry (the elder) equally wide-eyed: "Buffalo have ravaged this small island; nothing remains but the large elms and oaks, whose bark has been polished to the height of the buffalo by their perpetual rubbing. Brush and grass are not to be seen in this little wood."
A man walking near buffalo had to watch his step as in a cattle yard because of the dung. But on last year's grazing ground the droppings sometimes dried "hard as a clamshell," reached the color of a weathered cardboard carton, and became an odorless, papery disc, about 12 inches in diameter, drilled by hundreds of tiny insect holes. It made a perch for meadowlarks to sing from; it made a home for beetles and flies.
As everyone knows, buffalo chips burned: somewhat after six months drying but very well indeed after a full year or more. They were a traditional fuel; Coronado had found Indians enjoying such fires.
These chips were the "bois de vache," often the only "wood" available. Forty-niners on the Platte traveling one 160-mile section on the Oregon Trail found "no place in the whole distance where timber enough could be got on ten miles square to fence ten acres" but chips enough lay about "sufficient for any to cook by." When a wagonmaster decided on a stopping place he searched first for a chip and water supply.
Men walking beside their lumbering Conestoga wagons drew "their ramrods, not to ram home cartridges but to stick it through the largest chip they could find and string them on ... like so many pancakes." When a ramrod filled, a man slid the cakes into one of the chip sacks that swung underneath the wagon bed, out of the reach of a sudden shower. Children ran extra miles gathering them, men gathered the "scutters" from where they hung on grass or sagebrush; they used sleeping blankets as chip hods. Women out for a stroll returned to the wagons with aprons full of the nasty burnables ... all the nastier for the insects which scuttled about on the underside when a person picked one up. (The chips made homes for millions of insects. And burrowing owls, nesting in prairie dog holes, used the material to line their nests.) At first a woman hated to touch the things while cooking. She began by handling the chips with two sticks, progressed to a rag, then to a corner of the apron until, as a seasoned chip handler, "Now it is out of the bread, into the chips and back again—and not even a dust of the hands!"
Expert chip users (one became expert in one crossing of the plains—perhaps three hundred chip fires) claimed the chip made a better fire than the dead cottonwood that they occasionally found, for it "ignited quickly; a mass of them made solid but almost transparent coals, which glowed with intense heat." A wonderful fuel, they claimed, that hardened every year until a man found it difficult to cut its surface with a knife, a fuel that the "snows of winter" didn't change and the spring rains dampened only a sixteenth of an inch or so. Others, less smitten by the plains, wrote, "Our Buffalo Chips are of no account when it rains, and but little when dry...." They gathered chips "before it began to rain." Lucky men found "some scrawly timber ... good ... after nothing but buffalo chips to burn for three nights." Alexander Henry, after trying to barbecue buffalo steak in the smudge of wet chips, decided he wanted no more "buffalo dung steaks." Major Stephen H. Long's 1819 expedition to the Rockies experienced a cloudburst that washed "cow dung" into the water hole and turned it mustard color; they boiled meat in this effluent, creating a soup with the gagging flavor of a cowyard.
Some men threw on buffalo tallow to make the buffalo chip burn—"a rather hard matter that the Buffalo should furnish the meat and then the fuel to cook it." Without the tallow, a fire of chips was small comfort against the cold, but chips heaped up under ribs on a spit during the night cooked breakfast, often making a morning fire unnecessary.
Mountain men tossed buffalo liver directly on the burning dung and popped it in their mouths when done, pausing only to dust off the thickest of the manure ash. Or if a hunk of roast rib snatched from the spit burned fingers, they would pop it onto a chip as a makeshift plate. A common joke on the plains was that steak cooked over buffalo chips needed no pepper.
Coronado's men, fearful of losing themselves on the bare plains, piled "heapes of oxe-dung" to blaze the trail. A man having to sleep on the snowy prairie arranged buffalo chips in layers to insulate himself from the ground (and threw a buffalo robe over himself). Homesteaders burned them in their soddies for winter heat; Father Gregory Mengarini at St. Mary's Mission, plagued with mosquitoes, drove them from his cabin with a buffalo chip smudge. Marksmen piled them up as gun rests. The buffalo chip was almost as handy as the buffalo himself.
In some spots on the grassland men found big, mysterious rings of verdant grass that they laid to buffalo doings. Not gouged out like the wallows, these looked like the mushroom-inspired rings called fairy rings (and many undoubtedly were), so they too became fairy rings. Some men claimed that buffalo bulls, trudging around calves and cows to protect them from the wolves, had scuffed out the rings in which later the grass grew tall—one man swore he'd seen bulls trudging in such a circle around calves. In 1956 another man, observing old, horseshoe-shaped fairy rings on sidehills, reasoned that "The calf if born on a side hill, the cow would face the wolf which would stay on the upper side and try to make a downhill run to get the calf. The cow would make the half circle run and back until it wore a deep rut." Other men thought the cows, bedded down in a circle about the calves, dropped seeds from their shaggy manes which later sprouted to form the rings. Some Indians laid the rings to the wear caused by dances of the buffalo, large circles caused by large buffalo, small circles by small buffalo; some white men laid the rings to the wear caused by dancing Indians. Iowa pioneers were sure that buffalo standing in a ring with their heads together stamped their feet until the grass wore away, allowing weeds to grow up. And Dewey Soper, a Canadian biologist, thought the fairy rings on the Wood Buffalo range in Canada came about through the "normal action of parents circling about and licking the calf during its first three or four rather helpless days." None of these explanations seem as good as the one given in the 1830s by George Catlin for the non-fungous rings. He surmised the rank, circular growth occurred in old wallows that had filled partially with "vegetable deposits" and soil.
Buffalo changed the grasslands as no other beast: they made trails down hillsides into deep, eroded trenches, they bared the ridges even as their droppings fertilized them (certainly any favorite place of theirs became well-fertilized as well as denuded). They smashed down the alder and quaking aspen; they often denuded areas of grass (one buffalo eats as much as two elk or four deer). Men continually ran across places where the grass "was eaten to the earth, as if the place had been devastated by locusts." Journal after journal complains of such a shortage: "The grass would be rather long were it not for the buffalo," "our horses are starving," "they ate up all the grass, it looked as though fire had burned the prairies ... I lost all my cattle," "the teams began to grow weak and thin in flesh." The herds ate themselves out of forage: "The front herds swallow every herb and leaf. The rear masses now get nothing and they die like the forests strewn by the summer thunder." A large herd moved likewise through water holes, leaving no water for horses; even if water remained, likely as not a man had to chuck rocks at buffalo to drive them out of the water. But the erratic herds moved continually and travelers soon found that "Outside the buffalo runs, the grass was fine" and the water untouched.
