The first thing he noticed was the frost on the barrel of his rifle. Not the cold, and not the ache in his knees from lying slowly behind that low rise of dry grass. It was the frost, a thin white layer clinging to the octagonal steel of his Sharps rifle, catching the pink light of a November sunrise over the Kansas plains in 1873. Behind him, two skinners were still asleep in the wagon, wrapped in wool and smelling of tallow.
Ahead, about 400 yards away, a herd of roughly 600 buffalo moved slowly over the pale grass, their breath steaming in the still air. He counted his ammunition without looking. Twenty-three rounds on his belt, another sixteen in the pouch at his hip. He needed to drop at least forty animals before noon for the day to be worthwhile.
He had thirty-nine bullets. He decided to go ahead anyway. Before the sun rose more than a hand’s width above the horizon, sixty-eight buffalo would lie in a semicircle around him. He would already be reloading the brass by feel because his fingers had gone numb.
He was not the fastest hunter on the plains that year, and he was not the most famous. His name is not in any book you can buy. That is precisely the point of this story. Because the men who destroyed the great herds were, for the most part, not legends.
They were quiet, methodical men with dirty clothes and cold hands who knew twenty things about buffalo hunting that almost no one remembers today. Twenty small skills, twenty simple habits. Put them all together, and in twelve years they emptied an entire continent. To understand how twenty skills could kill thirty million animals, you have to understand what the country looked like in 1870.
According to army estimates of the time, there were between thirty and fifty million buffalo standing on the American plains. One herd moving north to south along the hundredth meridian could take three days to cross a single fixed point. A soldier at Fort Hays wrote in his diary that he rode his horse for two full days through what he called an unbroken sea of black. Not scattered animals.
A sea. Thirteen years later, in 1883, when the last commercial hunting expedition returned to Dickinson in Dakota Territory, it carried the hides of one small herd. After that year, the trade was finished. In 1882, 200,000 hides were shipped from Dakota alone.
The following year, 40,000. The year after that, just one railroad car. That collapse did not happen because the buffalo migrated somewhere else. It happened because a small group of men, fewer than 2,000 at the height of the trade, learned to do their work with quiet and appalling efficiency.
The first skill they learned had nothing to do with the rifle. Skill number one was learning to read the wind. Old hunters used to say that a buffalo could smell a man at three miles if the wind was wrong, see him at a mile if the sun was behind him, and hear him at a quarter mile in still air. Only one of those three senses would ruin your approach every time: their nose.
So the first thing a hunter did every morning, before he saddled his horse and before he ate anything, was walk twenty steps away from his fire, wet his fingertip with his tongue, and hold it up. Whichever side of his finger felt cold first was the direction the wind came from. That was the direction the buffalo needed to be. If the herd was to the north and the wind blew from the south, his scent was carried straight to them, and his day was over before it began.
So he would move, sometimes ten miles, sometimes farther. Frank Mayer, who hunted in Colorado and Texas and lived to be 104, later wrote that a good hunter does not chase buffalo. A good hunter chases the wind. On days when the wind was fickle, hunters carried a small bag of coal dust and sprinkled a little into the air from time to time to watch which way it drifted.
That black dust falling sideways across a cold prairie morning was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the end for the buffalo of North America. Because once you could read the direction of the wind, you could approach. And once you could approach, everything else became a matter of mathematics. The second skill was the approach itself, and it was slower and more patient than anyone today would imagine.
Charging on horseback, hunting buffalo at a gallop, firing a revolver into the herd, that was the Indian style and the style of sportsmen who came on special trains on the Kansas Pacific to shoot from the windows. But the professional, the hide hunter, the man who made this his living, did not ride into the herd. He crawled. He would leave his horse tied a mile away, walk in a wide circle to get downwind, and then, when he was about 800 yards out, he would drop to his belly.
From there, he moved on his elbows and knees, using every fold in the ground, every clump of prairie grass, every dry creek bed and prairie dog mound. A skilled hunter could cover the final 400 yards in about forty minutes without ever showing the herd a straight line of his body. He did not raise his head to look. He glanced sideways, one eye at a time, through the grass, so the round shape of a human head never broke the horizon.
John R. Cook, who hunted the southern herd in the mid-1870s and later wrote a book about it, described an approach in which he lay motionless for nearly an hour waiting for a young bull to move his head three feet to the left, because the animal was standing between him and the cow he wanted to shoot first. He did not shoot the bull. He waited.
That kind of patience is almost impossible for people to imagine today, but it was the skill that made everything else possible. The third skill was choosing which animal to kill first. This was exactly where the profession divided the men who made money from those who came home empty-handed. If you shot the wrong buffalo, the herd ran, and a running herd meant a lost day of work, sometimes a lost week.
So the hunter’s eyes swept the herd looking for one specific animal. Not the biggest bull, not the nearest cow, but the leader. The leader of nearly every herd was an old cow, usually gray around the muzzle, standing a little apart from the rest, usually the first to raise her head at any change. She was the one everyone watched.
If she grazed, they grazed with her. If she ran, they ran behind her. The first shot, the most important shot of all, was aimed at her, placed low behind the front leg, into the lungs. Not the heart, because a buffalo hit in the heart often runs half a mile before dying, and one running buffalo was enough to take the whole herd with it.
A buffalo hit in the lungs bleeds internally, coughs, stumbles a few steps, and lies down. Then comes the strange and quiet part. When the leader lies down, the rest of the buffalo do not run. They move closer.
They walk toward her. They sniff her. They stand around her with their heads lowered in confusion. That, hard as it is to believe, is when the killing really begins.
The fourth skill was accuracy, and it was more precise than the rifle caliber might suggest. The Sharps . 50 firing a 550-grain lead bullet over 90 grains of black powder is, by any measure, destructive ammunition. It penetrates the thickest bull hides, breaks ribs on the far side, and keeps going into the ground behind.
But that raw power was not what killed buffalo cleanly. It was aim. The hunter was looking for what the old men called the pocket, a spot about the size of a saucer, located a hand’s width above and behind the elbow of the front leg. A bullet placed there goes through both lungs.
The animal, again, does not run. It stands with its head lowered, then after thirty or forty seconds of blood filling the chest cavity, it staggers and lies down. If the hunter shot too high, he hit the spine and dropped the animal instantly, which sounds perfect, but a 2,000-pound bull hitting the ground with that sudden, unnatural sound could panic the rest. If he shot too low, he hit the chest and shoulder muscles, wounding the animal, which ran off to die miles away, unfound, its value and hide lost.
So the skilled hunter aimed only for the pocket, and he did it two hundred times a day. Frank Mayer later said that after 10,000 shots, aiming became something his hand did on its own. His conscious mind, he said, was somewhere else entirely. That, more than any rifle, is what destroyed the great herds.
Muscle memory and dirty men in cold grass, thirty million times. The fifth skill was choosing your rifle and learning its language. Not every hunter carried the same gun, and the choice mattered. By the mid-1870s, most professionals had settled on one of three types.
The Sharps was the favorite. The Remington Rolling Block came second. The old Springfield . 50 was the poor man’s choice.
For the Sharps, there were two cartridges men swore by. The . 50-70, older and cheaper, and the . 50-90, known to everyone on the plains simply as the Big Fifty.
The Comanche and Kiowa had a name for it too. They called it the far-shooting gun, and in the words of one old warrior later at Fort Sill, the gun that shoots today and kills tomorrow. It launched a bullet the size of a man’s thumb more than half a mile with enough energy to kill on impact. Frank Mayer eventually settled on a slightly different piece, a Sharps .
45 fitted with a 2 and 7/8 inch cartridge loaded with 120 grains of powder behind a 550-grain lead bullet, with a German-made 10-power scope mounted on the barrel. That rifle, in Mayer’s hands, killed animals at distances the plains tribes had never seen anyone kill anything from before. Not because he was a magician, but because he understood the other half of the skill: knowing the language of the rifle. Every Sharps had its own personality, the powder charge it preferred, the bullet weight it liked, and its peculiar habit of shooting a little high or a little left when the barrel got hot.
A hunter would spend his first month with a new rifle just learning how to talk to it. Once he did, that rifle became an extension of his nervous system. On the plains in the 1870s, they simply called it a good gun and a man who knew it. Skill number six was the crossed sticks.
If you have ever seen an old photograph of a hunter kneeling behind two long wooden poles crossed in an X, that was not for decoration. That is the platform that made the entire trade possible. A Sharps . 50 weighs between ten and sixteen pounds, and the heavy octagonal barrel out front is impossible to hold steady by hand for the kind of precise shooting the profession required.
So the hunter carried two pieces of hardwood, usually oak or hickory, about four feet long, sharpened at one end, and tied loosely together with a leather thong six inches from the top. When he reached his shooting position, he drove those two sticks into the ground in front of him at an angle, and the V-shaped opening where they crossed became his rest. The rifle sat in that opening, steady as if on a table. The hunter sat behind it cross-legged, elbows on knees, and from that position he could hold his sights on a two-inch target at 400 yards for as long as his lungs allowed.
The crossed sticks are what made that stance possible. Without them, no hunter could have killed sixty, or eighty, or, in some accounts, 120 animals from a single position. Two pieces of wood and a strip of leather. That was one of the small invisible skills that killed the buffalo.
Skill number seven was reloading brass cases in the field. Here is the real hardship of this profession. A professional hunter fired more ammunition in one week than most soldiers fired in an entire year. Factory ammunition existed and was used, but it was expensive and heavy, and often not available in the calibers hunters preferred.
So most professionals reloaded their own cartridges in camp every night. The reloading tools were small and portable. A hand loading tool, a bullet mold, a small tin of black powder, primers in a paper wrapper, and a pot of melted lead over the campfire. After supper, the hunter sat with a wooden box between his knees, removing the spent primer, resizing the brass case, seating a new primer, measuring 90 or 120 grains of powder into a brass thimble, pouring it into the case, seating a freshly cast bullet, and setting the finished cartridge in a wooden tray.
A skilled hunter could turn out about forty complete cartridges an hour by firelight. The lead came from bars bought at Dodge City or Fort Griffin general stores. The molds produced a bullet weighing to within a grain or two. Here is the strange, small detail Frank Mayer swore to.
He said no mold ever cast a perfectly round bullet, and an imperfect bullet drifts off course after 300 yards. So after every bullet left the mold, he placed it between two pieces of aged maple and rolled it in a slow circle under light pressure, shaping the bullet until it was perfectly symmetrical. He claimed that added 100 yards to his effective range. Whether that was true or just hunter exaggeration, we cannot say with certainty.
What we know is he regularly killed animals at 800 yards, farther than anyone else on the plains, so perhaps it was true. Skill number eight was cooling the rifle without damaging it. A Sharps used heavily in the middle of a hunt could fire fifty or sixty rounds an hour, and after that many shots the barrel got hot enough to burn the skin off your hand. Hot barrels make shots drift high, sometimes six or eight inches at 300 yards, and they can warp with continued fire, ruining the rifle completely.
So every professional hunter carried at least two rifles to the field, often three. He would shoot one until the barrel was too hot to touch, then set it in the grass to cool and pick up the next. In winter on the Dakota plains, men would plunge the hot barrel directly into a snowbank, removing the heat in about a minute, though it risked cracking the steel. In summer on the southern range where there was no snow, hunters used what they had.
Often it was their own urine, poured on a cloth and wiped the length of the barrel. Not glamorous. Cooling the rifle was just part of the day’s routine, and every minute a hunter spent cooling his rifles was another minute the herd stood still, not fleeing, dropping dead. Skill number nine was the art of the stand itself, the one that people find hardest to believe when they hear about it now.
A stand was a session in which a hunter stayed in one spot after killing the leader, with the herd remaining, and continued shooting buffalo one after another until the herd panicked and fled, or he ran out of ammunition, or the barrels got too hot even with rotation. During a successful stand, herds wandered around the dead, sniffing them, some lowing quietly, some pawing the ground. The hunter selected the next animal, took his shot, watched it stagger and fall, and moved on. The black powder smoke from the Sharps formed a gray-white cloud hanging slowly.
Because black powder makes a dull thunder sound rather than the sharp crack of modern smokeless powder, the buffalo did not connect the sound with danger. On the plains, thunder was a familiar sound. It came from the sky, and it killed one or two now and then. To them, it was just weather.
There is one account from a hunter named Vic Smith, working the northern range in 1881, of a stand in which he dropped 107 animals from a single position in about three-quarters of an hour without ever getting up. Another hunter, a man named Frank Collinson, claimed his best stand was 121 buffalo from a little over 300 shots. Whether those numbers were slightly exaggerated, and hunters loved to tell tall tales, the general truth is what matters. A skilled man with a Sharps and a pair of crossed sticks could kill fifty to a hundred animals from one spot in a single morning.
That is the number that mattered. That is the number that emptied the plains. Skill number ten was reading the herd to know when it was about to break. Even in the middle of a good stand, there always came a moment when the buffalo suddenly, without any clear signal, raised their heads all at once, snorted, and ran.
The hunter who did not anticipate that would waste his last shot in the air. The signs, according to hunters who later wrote about them, were small. A young bull starting to walk in tight little circles. A cow at the edge of the herd beginning to swing her head side to side.
A calf bleating and being struck by its mother, which meant she already felt danger. When a hunter saw those signs building, he would fire one last carefully aimed shot, hoping to drop a good bull for its hide, then set his rifle butt in the dirt and let them go. Chasing them was pointless. A buffalo can run about 35 miles per hour in short bursts, and once panicked, it might run twenty miles before slowing.
Good hunters accepted this. Bad hunters cursed and fired at fleeing animals, wounding them and losing them, and the wolves ate the wounded that same night. The difference between the two kinds of hunters at year’s end was often the difference between 1,000 hides and 3,000. Skill number eleven was judging distance without a rangefinder.
This skill is almost entirely lost today, but on the plains in the 1870s, it was the difference between a clean kill and a lost shot. Sharps rifles carried what was called a tang sight or vernier sight, a small folding steel piece with a precise peephole and a slide that could be adjusted in fine screw increments. The slide was calibrated in yards. If the hunter knew the buffalo was 300 yards away, he set the slide at the 300 mark, and the rifle would hit point of aim at that range, accounting for the looping arc of the heavy lead bullet as it dropped through space.
But how did he know it was 300 yards and not 250 or 350? Men used tricks. They knew a full-grown buffalo stood about five and a half feet from hoof to hump. So if the animal, through the peephole or the telescope reticle, filled a certain portion of the field of view, that meant a certain range.
Half that portion meant twice that range. They knew that at 100 yards they could see a buffalo’s eye. At 200 yards they could no longer see the eye but could still see the black of the muzzle. At 300 yards, the black of the muzzle blended into the shaggy head, but they could see the animal’s horns clearly.
At 400 yards, the horns became a single dark shape. At 500 yards, the whole animal was just an approximate silhouette. None of this was written in any manual. It was passed from hunter to hunter, camp to camp, and every skilled hunter had it in his eye by his first full season.
Without it, the big . 50 was just a heavy weapon. Skill number twelve was the reloading strategy, which was different from the technical reloading discussed earlier. This was the tactical side.
How much ammunition did you carry to the field, how did you carry it, and in what order did you use it? A hunter going out for a full day carried sixty to a hundred loaded cartridges. He kept the ammunition he trusted most, the ones he had carefully reloaded himself with his best cast bullets, in a leather belt worn over his shoulder, reachable without looking. He kept the second-grade ammunition, factory-loaded or lightly reloaded rounds, in a leather pouch at his hip.
And here is the small detail that all hunters on Comanche and Kiowa land agreed on. He kept the last ten cartridges set aside in a separate pocket, and he never touched them for buffalo. Those ten rounds were what hunters called Indian ammunition. Not because they held any grudge against the plains tribes, whom most hunters respected as fighters, but because the Comanche and Kiowa, whose lands the hunters were slowly stripping, had every reason to attack.
When they did, a hunter with an empty rifle was a hunter with about ninety seconds left to live. So he always kept ten rounds. He would rather lose a good hunting position than lose those ten rounds. That habit, which seems so simple, saved dozens of lives during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875.
Skill number thirteen was skinning. This is where the hunter’s job ended and the skinner’s job began. In the typical outfit, the shooter was just one man. The rest, two or three skinners, a wagon driver, and a cook, made up the crew.
The skinners went out after the shooting was done, and their work was fast, brutal, and technical. Each man carried two knives in his belt, one for slitting and one for skinning. The slitting knife was long, narrow, and sharp on both sides. The skinning knife was shorter, slightly curved, with a rounded belly that slid under the hide without cutting it.
The skinner approached the carcass, which always lay on its side because that is the position a buffalo falls in when hit fatally, and drove the slitting knife up the belly from throat to tail in one long, clean cut. Then he worked along the legs, opening the hide around the joints. Then he switched knives and began the scraping process. A skilled skinner could skin a buffalo cow in about ten minutes.
A bull, with its thicker, tougher hide, could take twenty minutes. A skinner’s daily rate was between twenty and twenty-five hides. Some men, according to Frank Collinson, claimed to skin forty hides a day, but Collinson said he never met one, only heard of them, which was probably a hunter’s way of saying it was a lie. Skill number fourteen was using the wagon as a tool, one of the small innovations that made the industry expand.
Once the belly was opened and the legs skinned, the hide had to be removed from the upper side of the carcass. Separating a fresh 200-pound hide from a 2,000-pound carcass is brutally hard physical work. So the skinners invented a special system. A rope was tied to a slit cut in the hide near the neck.
The other end was tied to the rear axle of the transport wagon. The driver drove the wagon forward slowly, and the hide peeled off the carcass like a heavy blanket pulled off a bed. Sometimes, in the second half, they turned the carcass by tying the rope to a leg instead, letting the wagon drag the whole body so they could work on the other side. It was crude, but it worked.
On good days, a team of skinners and one wagon could process the hides of eighty buffalo before sunset. Without the wagon, that number would have been twenty. Multiply that difference by 2,000 hunters over twelve years and you get one of those small, obvious reasons the herds ended. Skill number fifteen was staking out the hides, quieter work done in camp, usually after supper.
A fresh hide, if left folded, rotted within three days. If left flat without tension, it shrank and wrinkled and became useless for tanning. So every hide had to be spread flat, flesh side down on the ground, and staked out to dry. The stakes were made from tree branches, about a foot long, pointed at one end and notched at the other.
An average hide needed sixteen stakes, two for each foreleg, two for each hind leg, four at the shoulders, and four at the rump. The skinners drove the stakes through slits in the edge of the hide, stretching it tight, until it dried flat and stiff. The camps of the big trading companies, seen from a rise, looked like a patchwork quilt laid across the prairie. Two hundred hides, three hundred, sometimes a thousand, staked in rows like fields of giant playing cards.
The sun dried them. The wind dried them. Within three to five days they were stiff as boards. Then the stakes were pulled, the hides turned, and left a day or two to finish.
Then they were sorted into piles of four types: bull hides, cow hides, the valuable winter fur hides for robes and coats, and kip hides, the smaller, thinner hides of young animals. Each pile had a different price. In 1873, a good bull hide sold for two dollars at the wagon. A cow hide went for a dollar and twenty-five cents.
A prime fur hide brought three dollars and fifty cents. Nothing was wasted, or almost nothing. Skill number sixteen was turning. It may sound simple, but it made the difference between a good pile of hides and a ruined one.
After a hide dried for three days flesh side down, a hide left untended would begin to rot on the underside, where the sun did not reach and the ground kept it damp. So on the third day, every hide had to be pulled, turned, and staked again with the flesh side up. Then after one day, it was turned again, and then turned again. In hot weather during a rainy summer, the turning process could go on for a full week.
If a crew missed a single day, an entire batch of hides spoiled. There is a note in a hunter’s diary from the summer of 1877 near the Brazos River in Texas about a group that lost 400 hides in a single week because heavy rain hit them during processing and the men could not turn them fast enough. Four hundred hides at two dollars each, a loss of 800 dollars, more than most workers earned in a full year in 1877. So turning mattered.
The men who understood it made a living. The men who did not went home broke. Either way, the buffalo were dead. Skill number seventeen was preserving the meat.
This is where the stereotype starts to break down. Most people today believe the hide hunters killed buffalo and left the carcasses to rot on the prairie. In some cases in the later years of the trade, when the market was flooded and the herds were in terrible shape, that did happen. But in the middle years, at the industry’s peak between 1872 and 1877, the hunters kept a great deal of meat because meat was also money.
The hindquarters were the most valuable part. A young cow’s thigh wrapped in its cured hide would keep for weeks in cold weather. The skinners or the cook would cut off the hindquarters, pack them in wooden boxes with a thick layer of coarse salt, and stack the boxes in freight wagons beside the hides. Colonel Richard Dodge, commander of Fort Dodge in those years, wrote that hundreds of thousands of pounds of buffalo meat were shipped east on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad every winter, selling in eastern cities for between one and three cents a pound.
Then there were the tongues. The salted, smoked buffalo tongue became a fashionable delicacy in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Bob Wright of Dodge City and his partner Charles Rath shipped 200,000 hides and two railroad cars full of tongues in a single winter, along with 200 wagonloads of hindquarters. The tongues, if treated properly, would keep for months.
They came out of the barrel dark red, almost black, and were served sliced thin over toast in restaurants whose customers had no idea which plains had been emptied for their lunch. That too was one of the skills: salt, barrels, and timing. Small things, but their total weight on the prairie was staggering. Skill number eighteen was the hardest to look at, then and now: poisoning wolves.
Every buffalo carcass, after the skinners were done with it, still represented a great deal of meat lying on the open ground. Within hours, wolves and coyotes came to it, sometimes in packs of a dozen or more. Wolf hides in the 1870s were worth about a dollar and a half each, not as valuable as a buffalo hide, but not worthless either. So many hide companies ran a side business called wolfing.
Before they left any carcass, they would take a small tin of strychnine crystals from the wagon and sprinkle a precise amount inside the exposed entrails and the fat around the ribs. The wolves came at dusk, ate what they needed, and died within an hour, usually a few hundred yards from the carcass. In the morning, the skinners rode the wagon out and collected the hides. It was, by any measure, a cruel way to make money, and even by the standards of the men doing it, many hunters spoke of wolfing with a kind of silent disgust in their later memoirs.
Frank Mayer said he did it and wished he had not. Indian camp dogs, wandering far in search of food, sometimes ate from the same carcasses and died the same way. There is an account from a Cheyenne elder in the 1890s, remembering a winter camp on the Powder River where seven dogs died in a single night and the children could not understand why. That too was part of the machine.
That was one of the twenty skills. Skill number nineteen was defending the camp. This brings us to what happened at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle in the summer of 1874, because that is where the buffalo hunters came, almost for the first and only time, face to face with the people whose world they were destroying. In the spring of that year, a group of hide hunters and traders from Dodge City, about 175 miles to the north, established a small trading camp near the ruins of an old adobe site on the South Canadian River.
There were two stores, a saloon, and a blacksmith shop built of wood frames with walls and roofs covered in layers of grass and dirt. There were nearly 200 to 300 hunters working the surrounding country that spring. The Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who had lived on that land for generations, watched what was happening. By early summer, under the leadership of a young Comanche war chief named Quanah Parker and a medicine man of the Quahadi band named Isatai, they decided to attack.
At dawn on June 27, about 700 warriors struck the small settlement of Adobe Walls. Inside were twenty-eight men and one woman, the cook’s wife. Two men sleeping in a wagon outside the buildings were killed almost immediately. The rest, most of them awake because they had spent the night repairing a broken roof beam in the saloon, grabbed their Sharps rifles and took cover behind the sod walls.
Here the defensive skill appeared. Every hunter, before coming to that camp, had grown used to keeping ten cartridges reserved for just this moment. They had grown used to reloading their cartridges by firelight for years, and they knew every detail of their rifles. In that first assault, the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne warriors got close enough to beat on the doors with their rifle butts.
The fighting inside the walls was with pistols, Henrys, and Winchesters at very close range. But once the initial assault was repelled and the warriors fell back a few hundred yards to regroup, the Sharps came into play. The range at which those rifles killed was far beyond what any weapon on the other side could answer effectively. Over three days, the warriors fired long-range shots at the buildings from the surrounding hills, and the hunters answered with accurate fire that demoralized the war party.
On the second day, from a distance of approximately 1,538 yards, according to measurements later made by US Army surveyors, a hunter named Billy Dixon fired a single shot from a borrowed . 50-90 Sharps toward a group of warriors and chiefs conferring on a distant hill. The bullet took a full four seconds to reach its target. When it arrived, it knocked a warrior from his horse.
The distance was nearly nine-tenths of a mile. Dixon refused for the rest of his life to take personal credit, calling it a random shot and insisting he had been lucky. Quanah Parker, who lived to become the last great Comanche chief and a friend of Theodore Roosevelt in his later years, said the war party lost heart after that shot. Not because one man had been killed, but because the medicine man Isatai had promised the warriors that the hide hunters’ bullets would fall to the ground harmless.
But the bullets did not fall harmless. They killed a man from nearly a mile away. The siege ended, the war party withdrew, and the hide hunters went back to killing buffalo, this time backed by the full weight of the United States Army moving behind them. Skill number twenty, the last one, and in many ways the greatest, was the ability to read the land.
Not just the wind, not just the range, but the whole country. Where would the buffalo be in this particular week, this particular season, this particular year? A skilled hunter leaving Dodge City or Fort Griffin in the spring could tell from the color of the grass how heavy the winter rains had been, and therefore where the herds would move to feed. He could look at the direction of buffalo wallows, shallow depressions of dirt where animals rolled, and know how recently a herd had passed.
He could read the dryness of buffalo droppings on the ground, whether it was two days or two weeks or two months old, and know whether to camp there or push on. He knew the water crossings, the small springs, the rocky outcroppings where water stayed in shaded pools even in August. He knew where the herds would drop their calves in April and where they would move for the mating season in July. That knowledge came only from years of moving across this land with your eyes open.
It was knowledge the Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho had possessed for centuries before the hide merchants arrived. The hide merchants learned it in a decade. And once they had it, they used it to systematically empty the land of the animal on which life depended. That is the last skill, and it makes everything else make sense.
Because if you could read the land, you did not have to search for the buffalo. You knew exactly where they would be tomorrow morning. And when you knew exactly where they would be, and you could crawl through the wind, and hit the lead cow in the lungs, and hold your stand for an hour without the herd fleeing, and turn the hides on the third day, and defend your camp against 700 warriors, and do that every day for twelve years alongside 2,000 other men doing the same thing, then the great herds never had a chance. And they did not survive.
By the summer of 1878, four years after Adobe Walls, the southern herds were effectively gone. A cattleman named Charles Goodnight, driving cattle through the Texas Panhandle that year, said he walked 200 miles and saw no living buffalo, only bones. The bones themselves became the last commodity of the trade. Men called bone pickers, some of them the same hunters who had killed the animals a few years earlier, scoured the plains with wagons collecting skulls, thigh bones, and ribs, which were shipped east at eight to ten dollars a ton to be ground into fertilizer or china.
There is a photograph taken in Detroit in the mid-1880s of a pile of buffalo skulls the size of a three-story building, with men in wool suits standing atop it to show its enormous size. That pile came from the southern plains. The northern herd in Dakota and Montana lasted a few years longer, but the same skills moved north along the same railroads and did the same work. In 1882, 200,000 hides were shipped from Dakota Territory.
In 1883, 40,000 hides. In 1884, a single railroad car. Then silence. In 1889, when naturalist William Temple Hornaday attempted to count what remained, he found about 85 wild buffalo in the entire United States, down from 30 million within twelve years.
The men who did the killing, when you read their memoirs, do not sound triumphant. Frank Mayer, in an interview given at age 103, said he thought about it every day of his life. He said he and his comrades thought the buffalo would last forever, and when they finally realized the herds were finished, they could not quite believe what they had been part of. John R.
Cook, who wrote the book The Border and the Buffalo in 1907, said his last stand was in the spring of 1878 in the Texas Panhandle, where he killed 42 animals. When he stood and looked at them, he sat back down and did not shoot anything for the rest of that day. He did not shoot much of anything after that year either. He wrote that the country felt strange to him and he could not put into words what he meant.
But perhaps you can put it into words. You could say that a man who lives every day killing one animal, day after day, for a decade, becomes attached to that animal in a way he does not fully realize. And when the animal disappears, something inside the man disappears too. The plains tribes understood this truth from the beginning.
They said the buffalo and the people were one being. The hide hunters only realized it at the end. And by then, there was no one left to tell. There is one detail from all of this that deserves attention.
When Quanah Parker made peace and moved his people to the reservation in Oklahoma in 1875, he asked the US government for one thing beyond the treaty terms. He asked to keep a small herd of buffalo on Comanche land. His request was refused at first. But he kept asking.
He eventually persuaded cattlemen, Charles Goodnight and later Theodore Roosevelt, to help him, and by 1905 a small herd of buffalo was living again on the southern plains, on Comanche land, protected by the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, the woman kidnapped as a girl in a raid and raised among the Comanche. Some of the buffalo living in North America today, the ones you can see if you drive through the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma, descend from that herd. Quanah Parker accomplished that, a man whose grandfather’s world was ended by twenty skills practiced by 2,000 men over twelve years. The frost was still on the rifle barrel that November morning in 1873, and the young hunter at the start of this story did not know what would happen later.
He only knew he had 23 rounds on his belt and sixteen more in his pouch, and a herd of 600 animals 400 yards out in the cold grass, and he needed the day to pay. He rested on his elbows and fixed his shooting sticks. He picked out an old gray cow at the far end of the herd. He aimed at the pocket, a hand’s width above and behind the elbow of her front leg.
He waited until his breathing steadied. He squeezed the trigger. The rifle shot rolled like thunder across the plain, and that day, and everything that followed it, began. CONTENT:
The first thing he noticed was the frost on the rifle barrel.
Not the cold, and not the ache in his knees from lying slowly behind that low rise of dry grass. It was the frost, a thin white layer clinging to the octagonal steel of his Sharps rifle, catching the pink light of a November sunrise over the Kansas plains in 1873. Behind him, two skinners were still asleep in the wagon, wrapped in wool and smelling of tallow. Ahead, about 400 yards away, a herd of roughly 600 buffalo moved slowly across the pale grass, their breath steaming in the still air.
He counted his ammunition without looking. Twenty-three rounds on his belt, another sixteen in the pouch at his hip. He needed to drop at least forty animals before noon for the day to pay. He had thirty-nine bullets.
He decided to go ahead anyway. Before the sun rose more than a hand’s width above the horizon, sixty-eight buffalo would lie in a semicircle around him. He would already be reloading the brass by feel because his fingers had gone numb. He was not the fastest hunter on the plains that year, and he was not the most famous.
His name appears in no book you can buy. That is exactly the point of this story. The men who destroyed the great herds were, for the most part, not legends. They were quiet, methodical men with dirty clothes and cold hands who knew twenty things about buffalo hunting that almost no one remembers today.
Twenty small skills and twenty simple habits. Put them together, and in twelve years they emptied an entire continent. To understand how twenty skills could kill thirty million animals, you have to understand what the country looked like in 1870. According to army estimates of the time, between thirty and fifty million buffalo stood on the American plains.
One herd moving north to south along the hundredth meridian could take three days to cross a single fixed point. A soldier at Fort Hays wrote in his diary that he rode for two full days through what he called an unbroken sea of black. Not scattered animals. A sea.
Thirteen years later, in 1883, when the last commercial hunting expedition returned to Dickinson in Dakota Territory, it carried the hides of one small herd. After that year, the trade was finished. In 1882, 200,000 hides were shipped from Dakota alone. The following year, 40,000.
The year after that, just one railroad car. That collapse did not happen because the buffalo migrated elsewhere. It happened because a small group of men, fewer than 2,000 at the height of the trade, learned to do their work with quiet and appalling efficiency. The first skill they learned had nothing to do with the rifle.
Skill number one was learning to read the wind. Old hunters said a buffalo could smell a man at three miles if the wind was wrong, see him at a mile if the sun was behind him, and hear him at a quarter mile in still air. Only one of those three senses would ruin an approach every time: their nose. So the first thing a hunter did each morning, before he saddled his horse and before he ate, was walk twenty steps from his fire, wet his fingertip, and hold it up.
Whichever side felt colder first was the direction the wind came from. That was the direction the buffalo needed to be. If the herd was north and the wind blew from the south, his scent was carried straight to them and his day was over before it began. So he would move, sometimes ten miles, sometimes farther.
Frank Mayer, who hunted in Colorado and Texas and lived to be 104, later wrote that a good hunter does not chase buffalo. A good hunter chases the wind. On days when the wind was fickle, hunters carried a small bag of coal dust and sprinkled it into the air to watch which way it drifted. That black dust falling sideways across a cold prairie morning was, in a very real sense, the beginning of the end for the buffalo of North America.
Once you could read the wind, you could approach. Once you could approach, everything else became mathematics. The second skill was the approach itself, and it was slower and more patient than anyone today would imagine. Charging on horseback, firing a revolver into the herd, that was the Indian style and the style of sportsmen who came on special trains on the Kansas Pacific to shoot from the windows.
But the professional, the hide hunter, the man who made this his living, did not ride into the herd. He crawled. He would leave his horse tied a mile away, walk a wide circle to get downwind, then drop to his belly at about 800 yards. From there he moved on his elbows and knees, using every fold in the ground, every clump of prairie grass, every dry creek bed and prairie dog mound.
A skilled hunter could cover the final 400 yards in about forty minutes without ever showing the herd a straight line of his body. He never raised his head to look. He glanced sideways, one eye at a time, through the grass, so the round shape of a human head never broke the horizon. John R.
Cook, who hunted the southern herd in the mid-1870s and later wrote a book about it, described an approach in which he lay motionless for nearly an hour waiting for a young bull to move his head three feet to the left, because the animal was standing between him and the cow he wanted to shoot first. He did not shoot the bull. He waited. That patience is almost impossible to imagine today, but it was the skill that made everything else possible.
The third skill was choosing which animal to kill first. If you shot the wrong buffalo, the herd ran, and a running herd meant a lost day of work, sometimes a lost week. So the hunter’s eyes swept the herd looking for one specific animal. Not the biggest bull, not the nearest cow, but the leader.
The leader of nearly every herd was an old cow, usually gray around the muzzle, standing a little apart from the rest, the first to raise her head at any change. She was the one everyone watched. If she grazed, they grazed. If she ran, they ran behind her.
The first shot, the most important of all, was aimed at her, placed low behind the front leg into the lungs. Not the heart, because a buffalo hit in the heart often runs half a mile before dying, and one running buffalo was enough to take the herd with it. A buffalo hit in the lungs bleeds internally, coughs, stumbles a few steps, and lies down. Then comes the strange and quiet part.
When the leader lies down, the rest do not run. They move closer. They walk toward her. They sniff her.
They stand around her with heads lowered in confusion. That, hard as it is to believe, is when the killing really begins. The fourth skill was accuracy, and it was more precise than the rifle caliber might suggest. The Sharps .
50, firing a 550-grain lead bullet over 90 grains of black powder, is destructive ammunition by any measure. It pierces the thickest bull hides, breaks ribs on the far side, and keeps going into the ground. But that raw power was not what killed buffalo cleanly. It was aim.
The hunter was looking for what the old men called the pocket, a spot about the size of a saucer, a hand’s width above and behind the elbow of the front leg. A bullet placed there goes through both lungs. The animal, again, does not run. It stands with head lowered, then after thirty or forty seconds of blood filling the chest cavity, it staggers and lies down.
If the hunter shot too high, he hit the spine and dropped the animal instantly, but a 2,000-pound bull hitting the ground with that sudden, unnatural sound could panic the rest. If he shot too low, he hit the chest and shoulder muscles, wounding the animal, which ran off to die miles away, unfound, its hide lost. So the skilled hunter aimed only for the pocket, and did it two hundred times a day. Frank Mayer later said that after 10,000 shots, aiming became something his hand did on its own.
His conscious mind, he said, was somewhere else entirely. That, more than any rifle, is what destroyed the great herds. Muscle memory and dirty men in cold grass, thirty million times. The fifth skill was choosing your rifle and learning its language.
Not every hunter carried the same gun. By the mid-1870s, most professionals had settled on one of three. The Sharps was the favorite. The Remington Rolling Block came second.
The old Springfield . 50 was the poor man’s choice. For the Sharps, men swore by two cartridges. The .
50-70, older and cheaper, and the . 50-90, known on the plains simply as the Big Fifty. The Comanche and Kiowa had a name for it too. They called it the far-shooting gun, and in the words of one old warrior later at Fort Sill, the gun that shoots today and kills tomorrow.
It launched a bullet the size of a man’s thumb more than half a mile with enough energy to kill on impact. Frank Mayer eventually settled on a different piece, a Sharps . 45 with a 2 and 7/8 inch cartridge loaded with 120 grains of powder behind a 550-grain lead bullet, with a German-made 10-power scope mounted on the barrel. That rifle, in Mayer’s hands, killed animals at distances the plains tribes had never seen anyone shoot from before.
Not because he was a magician, but because he understood the other half of the skill: the language of the rifle. Every Sharps had its own personality, the powder charge it preferred, the bullet weight it liked, its habit of shooting a little high or a little left when the barrel heated. A hunter would spend his first month with a new rifle just learning to talk to it. Once he did, it became an extension of his nervous system.
On the plains in the 1870s, they simply called it a good gun and a man who knew it. Skill number six was the crossed sticks. If you have ever seen an old photograph of a hunter kneeling behind two long wooden poles crossed in an X, that was not for decoration. It is the platform that made the entire trade possible.
A Sharps . 50 weighs between ten and sixteen pounds, and the heavy octagonal barrel out front is impossible to hold steady by hand for the precise shooting the profession required. So the hunter carried two pieces of hardwood, usually oak or hickory, about four feet long, sharpened at one end, tied loosely together with a leather thong six inches from the top. When he reached his shooting position, he drove the two sticks into the ground at an angle, and the V-shaped opening where they crossed became his rest.
The rifle sat in it, steady as if on a table. The hunter sat cross-legged behind it, elbows on knees, and from that position he could hold his sights on a two-inch target at 400 yards for as long as his lungs allowed. The crossed sticks are what made that stance possible. Without them, no hunter could have killed sixty, eighty, or in some accounts 120 animals from one position.
Two pieces of wood and a strip of leather. That was one of the small invisible skills that killed the buffalo. Skill number seven was reloading brass cases in the field. This is where the real hardship of the profession lay.
A professional hunter fired more ammunition in one week than most soldiers fired in a year. Factory ammunition existed, but it was expensive, heavy, and often unavailable in the calibers hunters preferred. So most professionals reloaded their own cartridges in camp every night. The tools were small and portable: a hand loading tool, a bullet mold, a small tin of black powder, primers in a paper wrapper, and a pot of melted lead over the campfire.
After supper, the hunter sat with a wooden box between his knees, removing the spent primer, resizing the brass case, seating a new primer, measuring 90 or 120 grains of powder into a brass thimble, pouring it into the case, seating a freshly cast bullet, and setting the finished cartridge in a wooden tray. A skilled hunter could make about forty complete cartridges an hour by firelight. The lead came from bars bought at Dodge City or Fort Griffin general stores. The molds produced a bullet weighing to within a grain or two.
Here is the strange small detail Frank Mayer swore to. He said no mold ever cast a perfectly round bullet, and an imperfect bullet drifts off course after 300 yards. So after every bullet left the mold, he placed it between two pieces of aged maple and rolled it in a slow circle under light pressure, shaping it until it was perfectly symmetrical. He claimed that added 100 yards to his effective range.
Whether that was true or just hunter exaggeration cannot be confirmed. What is known is he regularly killed animals at 800 yards, farther than anyone else on the plains. Skill number eight was cooling the rifle without damaging it. A Sharps used hard in the middle of a hunt could fire fifty or sixty rounds an hour, and after that many shots the barrel got hot enough to burn skin.
Hot barrels make shots drift high, sometimes six or eight inches at 300 yards, and they can warp with continued fire, ruining the rifle. So every professional hunter carried at least two rifles to the field, often three. He shot one until the barrel was too hot to touch, set it in the grass to cool, and picked up the next. In winter on the Dakota plains, men plunged the hot barrel into a snowbank, removing the heat in about a minute, though it risked cracking the steel.
In summer on the southern range, hunters used what they had, often their own urine, poured on a cloth and wiped the length of the barrel. Cooling the rifle was just part of the day’s routine. And every minute a hunter spent cooling his rifles was another minute the herd stood still, not fleeing, dropping dead. Skill number nine was the art of the stand itself, the one that people find hardest to believe today.
A stand was a session in which a hunter stayed in one spot after killing the leader, with the herd remaining, and continued shooting buffalo one after another until the herd panicked and fled, or he ran out of ammunition, or the barrels got too hot even with rotation. During a successful stand, the herds wandered around the dead, sniffing them, some lowing quietly, some pawing the ground. The hunter selected the next animal, took his shot, watched it stagger and fall, and moved on. The black powder smoke from the Sharps formed a gray-white cloud that hung slowly in the air.
Because black powder makes a dull thunder sound rather than the sharp crack of modern smokeless powder, the buffalo did not connect the sound with danger. On the plains, thunder was familiar. It came from the sky, and it killed one or two now and then. To them, it was just weather.
One account comes from a hunter named Vic Smith, working the northern range in 1881, of a stand in which he dropped 107 animals from a single position in about three-quarters of an hour without ever getting up. Another hunter, Frank Collinson, claimed his best stand was 121 buffalo from a little over 300 shots. Whether those numbers were slightly exaggerated, and hunters loved to tell tall tales, the general truth is what matters. A skilled man with a Sharps and a pair of crossed sticks could kill fifty to a hundred animals from one spot in a single morning.
That is the number that mattered. That is the number that emptied the plains. Skill number ten was reading the herd to know when it was about to break. Even in the middle of a good stand, there always came a moment when the buffalo suddenly raised their heads all at once, snorted, and ran.
A hunter who did not anticipate it would waste his last shot in the air. The signs, according to hunters who later wrote about them, were small. A young bull walking in tight little circles. A cow at the herd’s edge swinging her head side to side.
A calf bleating and being struck by its mother, which meant she already felt danger. When a hunter saw those signs building, he fired one last carefully aimed shot, hoping to drop a good bull for its hide, then set his rifle butt in the dirt and let them go. Chasing them was pointless. A buffalo can run about 35 miles per hour in short bursts, and once panicked, it might run twenty miles before slowing.
Good hunters accepted this. Bad hunters cursed and fired at fleeing animals, wounding and losing them, and the wolves ate the wounded that night. The difference between the two kinds of hunters at year’s end was often the difference between 1,000 hides and 3,000. Skill number eleven was judging distance without a rangefinder.
It is almost entirely lost today, but on the plains in the 1870s it was the difference between a clean kill and a lost shot. Sharps rifles carried what was called a tang sight or vernier sight, a small folding steel piece with a precise peephole and a slide adjustable in fine screw increments. The slide was calibrated in yards. If the hunter knew the buffalo was 300 yards away, he set the slide at the 300 mark, and the rifle would hit point of aim at that range, accounting for the looping arc of the heavy lead bullet.
But how did he know it was 300 yards and not 250 or 350? Men used tricks. They knew a full-grown buffalo stood about five and a half feet from hoof to hump. So if the animal filled a certain portion of the field of view, that meant a certain range.
Half that portion meant twice that range. They knew that at 100 yards they could see a buffalo’s eye. At 200 yards they lost the eye but still saw the black of the muzzle. At 300 yards the muzzle blended into the shaggy head, but they could see the horns clearly.
At 400 yards the horns became one dark shape. At 500 yards the animal was just an approximate silhouette. None of this was written in any manual. It passed from hunter to hunter, camp to camp, and every skilled hunter had it in his eye by his first full season.
Without it, the big . 50 was just a heavy weapon. Skill number twelve was the reloading strategy, the tactical side of ammunition. How much did you carry to the field, how did you carry it, and in what order did you use it?
A hunter going out for a full day carried sixty to a hundred loaded cartridges. He kept the ammunition he trusted most, the ones he had carefully reloaded himself with his best cast bullets, in a leather belt worn over the shoulder, reachable without looking. He kept second-grade ammunition, factory-loaded or lightly reloaded rounds, in a pouch at his hip. Then there is the detail all hunters on Comanche and Kiowa land agreed on.
He kept the last ten cartridges set aside in a separate pocket, and he never touched them for buffalo. Those ten rounds were what hunters called Indian ammunition, not because they held any grudge against the plains tribes, whom most hunters respected as fighters, but because the Comanche and Kiowa, whose lands the hunters were slowly stripping, had every reason to attack. When they did, a hunter with an empty rifle was a hunter with about ninety seconds left to live. So he always kept ten rounds.
He would rather lose a good hunting position than lose those ten rounds. That simple habit saved dozens of lives during the Red River War of 1874 and 1875. Skill number thirteen was skinning, where the hunter’s job ended and the skinner’s began. In the typical outfit, the shooter was just one man.
The rest, two or three skinners, a wagon driver, and a cook, made up the crew. The skinners came out after the shooting, and their work was fast, brutal, and technical. Each man carried two knives in his belt, one for slitting and one for skinning. The slitting knife was long, narrow, and sharp on both sides.
The skinning knife was shorter and slightly curved, with a rounded belly that slid under the hide without cutting it. The skinner approached the carcass, which always lay on its side because that is the position a buffalo falls in when hit fatally, and drove the slitting knife up the belly from throat to tail in one long clean cut. Then he worked along the legs, opening the hide around the joints. Then he switched knives and began scraping.
A skilled skinner could skin a buffalo cow in about ten minutes. A bull, with its thicker, tougher hide, could take twenty minutes. A skinner’s daily rate was between twenty and twenty-five hides. Some men, according to Frank Collinson, claimed to skin forty hides a day, but Collinson said he never met one, only heard of them, probably a hunter’s way of saying it was a lie.
Skill number fourteen was using the wagon as a tool, one of the small innovations that made the industry grow. Once the belly was opened and the legs skinned, the hide had to be removed from the upper side of the carcass. Separating a fresh 200-pound hide from a 2,000-pound carcass is brutally hard physical work. So the skinners invented a system.
A rope was tied to a slit in the hide near the neck. The other end was tied to the rear axle of the transport wagon. The driver drove forward slowly, and the hide peeled off the carcass like a heavy blanket pulled off a bed. Sometimes they turned the carcass by tying the rope to a leg, letting the wagon drag the whole body so they could work the other side.
It was crude, but it worked. On good days, a team of skinners and one wagon could process the hides of eighty buffalo before sunset. Without the wagon, the number would have been twenty. Multiply that difference by 2,000 hunters over twelve years and you get one of the small, obvious reasons the herds ended.
Skill number fifteen was staking out the hides, quieter work done in camp, usually after supper. A fresh hide, if left folded, rotted within three days. If left flat without tension, it shrank and wrinkled and became useless for tanning. So every hide had to be spread flat, flesh side down, and staked to dry.
The stakes were branches about a foot long, pointed at one end and notched at the other. An average hide needed sixteen stakes, two for each leg, four at the shoulders, four at the rump. The skinners drove them through slits in the edge of the hide, stretching it tight until it dried flat and stiff. The camps of the big trading companies, seen from a rise, looked like a patchwork quilt laid across the prairie.
Two hundred hides, three hundred, sometimes a thousand, staked in rows like fields of giant playing cards. The sun dried them. The wind dried them. Within three to five days they were stiff as boards.
Then the stakes were pulled, the hides turned, and left a day or two to finish. Then they were sorted into piles of four types: bull hides, cow hides, the valuable winter fur hides for robes and coats, and kip hides, the smaller, thinner hides of young animals. Each pile had a different price. In 1873, a good bull hide sold for two dollars at the wagon.
A cow hide went for a dollar and twenty-five cents. A prime fur hide brought three dollars and fifty cents. Nothing was wasted, or almost nothing. Skill number sixteen was turning.
It may sound simple, but it made the difference between a good pile of hides and a ruined one. After a hide dried for three days flesh side down, the underside began to rot where the sun did not reach. So on the third day, every hide had to be pulled, turned, and staked again with the flesh side up. After one day it was turned again, and then again.
In hot weather during a rainy summer, the turning could go on for a full week. If a crew missed a single day, an entire batch spoiled. There is a note in a hunter’s diary from the summer of 1877 near the Brazos River in Texas about a group that lost 400 hides in a single week because heavy rain hit during processing and the men could not turn them fast enough. Four hundred hides at two dollars each, a loss of 800 dollars, more than most workers earned in a full year in 1877.
The men who understood turning made a living. The men who did not went home broke. Either way, the buffalo were dead. Skill number seventeen was preserving the meat.
Most people today believe the hide hunters killed buffalo and left the carcasses to rot. In some cases in the later years of the trade, when the market was flooded and the herds were in terrible shape, that did happen. But in the middle years, at the industry’s peak between 1872 and 1877, the hunters kept a great deal of meat because meat was also money. The hindquarters were the most valuable part.
A young cow’s thigh wrapped in its cured hide would keep for weeks in cold weather. The skinners or cook cut off the hindquarters, packed them in wooden boxes with a thick layer of coarse salt, and stacked the boxes in freight wagons beside the hides. Colonel Richard Dodge, commander of Fort Dodge in those years, wrote that hundreds of thousands of pounds of buffalo meat were shipped east on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad every winter, selling in eastern cities for between one and three cents a pound. The tongues became a fashionable delicacy in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia.
Bob Wright of Dodge City and his partner Charles Rath shipped 200,000 hides and two railroad cars full of tongues in a single winter, along with 200 wagonloads of hindquarters. The tongues, if treated properly, would keep for months. They came out of the barrel dark red, almost black, and were served sliced thin over toast in restaurants whose customers had no idea which plains had been emptied for their lunch. That too was one of the skills: salt, barrels, and timing.
Small things, but their total weight on the prairie was staggering. Skill number eighteen was the hardest to look at, then and now: poisoning wolves. Every buffalo carcass, after the skinners finished, still represented a great deal of meat lying on open ground. Within hours, wolves and coyotes came, sometimes in packs of a dozen or more.
Wolf hides in the 1870s were worth about a dollar and a half each, not as valuable as a buffalo hide, but not worthless. So many hide companies ran a side business called wolfing. Before they left any carcass, they took a small tin of strychnine crystals from the wagon and sprinkled a precise amount inside the exposed entrails and the fat around the ribs. The wolves came at dusk, ate, and died within an hour, usually a few hundred yards away.
In the morning, the skinners rode out and collected the hides. It was, by any measure, a cruel way to make money, and even by the standards of the men doing it, many hunters spoke of wolfing with a kind of silent disgust in their later memoirs. Frank Mayer said he did it and wished he had not. Indian camp dogs, wandering far in search of food, sometimes ate from the same carcasses and died the same way.
There is an account from a Cheyenne elder in the 1890s of a winter camp on the Powder River where seven dogs died in a single night and the children could not understand why. That too was part of the machine. That was one of the twenty skills. Skill number nineteen was defending the camp.
This is what happened at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle in the summer of 1874, where the buffalo hunters came, almost for the first and only time, face to face with the people whose world they were destroying. In the spring of that year, a group of hide hunters and traders from Dodge City established a small trading camp near the ruins of an old adobe site on the South Canadian River. There were two stores, a saloon, and a blacksmith shop built of wood frames with walls and roofs covered in layers of grass and dirt. Nearly 200 to 300 hunters worked the surrounding country that spring.
The Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, who had lived on that land for generations, watched what was happening. By early summer, under the leadership of a young Comanche war chief named Quanah Parker and a medicine man of the Quahadi band named Isatai, they decided to attack. At dawn on June 27, about 700 warriors struck the small settlement. Inside were twenty-eight men and one woman, the cook’s wife.
Two men sleeping in a wagon outside the buildings were killed almost immediately. The rest, most of them awake because they had spent the night repairing a broken roof beam in the saloon, grabbed their Sharps rifles and took cover behind the sod walls. Here the defensive skill appeared. Every hunter had grown used to keeping ten cartridges reserved for just this moment.
In that first assault, the warriors got close enough to beat on the doors with their rifle butts. The fighting inside the walls was with pistols and Henrys and Winchesters at very close range. But once the initial assault was repelled and the warriors fell back to regroup, the Sharps came into play. The range at which those rifles killed was far beyond what any weapon on the other side could answer.
Over three days, the warriors fired long-range shots at the buildings from the surrounding hills, and the hunters answered with accurate fire that demoralized the war party. On the second day, from a distance of approximately 1,538 yards, according to measurements later made by US Army surveyors, a hunter named Billy Dixon fired a single shot from a borrowed . 50-90 Sharps toward a group of warriors and chiefs conferring on a distant hill. The bullet took four seconds to reach its target.
When it arrived, it knocked a warrior from his horse. The distance was nearly nine-tenths of a mile. Dixon refused for the rest of his life to take personal credit, calling it a random shot and insisting he had been lucky. Quanah Parker, who later became the last great Comanche chief and a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, said the war party lost heart after that shot.
Not because one man had been killed, but because Isatai had promised the warriors that the hide hunters’ bullets would fall to the ground harmless. But the bullets did not fall harmless. They killed a man from nearly a mile away. The siege ended, the war party withdrew, and the hide hunters went back to killing buffalo, this time backed by the full weight of the United States Army moving behind them.
Skill number twenty, the last and in many ways the greatest, was the ability to read the land. Not just the wind, not just the range, but the whole country. Where would the buffalo be in this particular week, this particular season, this particular year? A skilled hunter leaving Dodge City or Fort Griffin in the spring could tell from the color of the grass how heavy the winter rains had been, and therefore where the herds would move to feed.
He could look at the direction of buffalo wallows and know how recently a herd had passed. He could read the dryness of buffalo droppings, whether two days or two weeks old, and know whether to camp or push on. He knew the water crossings, the small springs, the rocky outcroppings where water stayed in shaded pools even in August. He knew where the herds would drop their calves in April and where they would move for the mating season in July.
That knowledge came only from years of moving across the land with open eyes. It was knowledge the Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho had possessed for centuries. The hide merchants learned it in a decade. Once they had it, they used it to systematically empty the land of the animal on which life depended.
If you could read the land, you did not have to search for the buffalo. You knew exactly where they would be tomorrow morning. When you knew where they would be, and you could crawl through the wind, and hit the lead cow in the lungs, and hold your stand for an hour without the herd fleeing, and turn the hides on the third day, and defend your camp against 700 warriors, and do that every day for twelve years alongside 2,000 other men, then the great herds never had a chance. They did not survive.
By the summer of 1878, four years after Adobe Walls, the southern herds were effectively gone. A cattleman named Charles Goodnight, driving cattle through the Texas Panhandle that year, said he walked 200 miles and saw no living buffalo, only bones. The bones themselves became the last commodity of the trade. Men called bone pickers, some of them the same hunters who had killed the animals years earlier, scoured the plains with wagons collecting skulls and thigh bones and ribs, shipped east at eight to ten dollars a ton to be ground into fertilizer or china.
There is a photograph taken in Detroit in the mid-1880s of a pile of buffalo skulls the size of a three-story building, with men in wool suits standing on top to show its size. That pile came from the southern plains. The northern herd in Dakota and Montana lasted a few years longer, but the same skills moved north and did the same work. In 1882, 200,000 hides shipped from Dakota Territory.
In 1883, 40,000. In 1884, a single railroad car. Then silence. In 1889, when naturalist William Temple Hornaday attempted to count what remained, he found about 85 wild buffalo in the entire United States, down from 30 million within twelve years.
The men who did the killing, when you read their memoirs, do not sound triumphant. Frank Mayer, in an interview given at age 103, said he thought about it every day of his life. He said he and his comrades thought the buffalo would last forever, and when they finally realized the herds were finished, they could not quite believe what they had been part of. John R.
Cook, who wrote the book The Border and the Buffalo in 1907, said his last stand was in the spring of 1878 in the Texas Panhandle, where he killed 42 animals. When he stood and looked at them, he sat back down and did not shoot anything for the rest of the day. He did not shoot much after that year either. He wrote that the country felt strange to him and he could not put into words what he meant.
A man who lives every day killing one animal, day after day, for a decade, becomes attached to that animal in a way he does not fully realize. When the animal disappears, something inside the man disappears too. The plains tribes understood this from the beginning. They said the buffalo and the people were one being.
The hide hunters only realized it at the end. And by then, there was no one left to tell. There is one detail worth noting. When Quanah Parker made peace and moved his people to the reservation in Oklahoma in 1875, he asked the US government for one thing beyond the treaty terms.
He asked to keep a small herd of buffalo on Comanche land. His request was refused at first. But he kept asking. He eventually persuaded cattleman Charles Goodnight and later Theodore Roosevelt to help him, and by 1905 a small herd of buffalo lived again on the southern plains, on Comanche land, protected by the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, the woman kidnapped as a girl in a raid and raised among the Comanche.
Some of the buffalo living in North America today, the ones you can see if you drive through the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma, descend from that herd. Quanah Parker accomplished that, a man whose grandfather’s world was ended by twenty skills practiced by 2,000 men over twelve years. The frost was still on the rifle barrel that November morning in 1873, and the young hunter at the start of this story did not know what would happen later. He only knew he had 23 rounds on his belt and sixteen more in his pouch, and a herd of 600 animals 400 yards out in the cold grass, and he needed the day to pay.
He rested on his elbows and fixed his shooting sticks. He picked out an old gray cow at the far end of the herd. He aimed at the pocket, a hand’s width above and behind the elbow of her front leg. He waited until his breathing steadied.
He squeezed the trigger. The rifle shot rolled like thunder across the plain, and that day, and everything that followed it, began.