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Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to our latest bonus drop of the Meat Eater podcast. What you’re about to hear is a chapter from our new audio original, Meat Eater’s American History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three. If you like what you’re hearing, you can go find the complete work anywhere that you get your audio books. Again, Meat Eater’s American History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three.
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Speaker 2: And here’s a little taste called Ghosts. Chapter one. Ghosts. Let’s get something cleared up right away before we even begin this story. There is no difference between the animal known as the American buffalo and the animal known as a bison. Both names refer to the creature whose scientific name is bison bison. The confusion about this meaning, the confusion about whether you call them buffalo or bison, stems from the fact that Europeans who arrived in what is now America didn’t know what to make of these one thousand pound or even two thousand pound catile like creatures with sharply curved horns, hugely humped backs, wooly textured hides, and delicious meat at various times, various people called them cows, crook backed oxen, and leboeuf sauvage, which translates to wild beeves, but eventually they settled on buffalo because the animal did look a hell of a lot like its distant relatives, the cape buffalo of Africa and the water buffalo of Asia. Eventually, though, it began occurring to folks that similarities be damned, the animal wasn’t technically a buffalo. Species began to gradually shift to bison, and the bison adopters started to correct the buffalo users in classic no ith All fashion, usually by saying something like did you know that it’s actually called a bison. So if you are one of these folks who has to roll their eyes or feign confusion whenever you hear them called the buffalo, I’m sorry you are in for a rough ride on this story, because this is a story about buffalo American buffalo. If you know only one thing about these animals, it’s probably this. There used to be a hell of a lot of them, and now there aren’t that many. For most Americans, the buffalo doesn’t symbolize wild nature in the way that a wole for an elk or a mountain goat does. Instead, these massive creatures call to mind a lost world. When we look at the animals and the few places where they still exist as a wild creature, they bring to mind a sort of sadness or a sense of regret that things hadn’t gone differently for the species, and in a way differently for us as Americans who love wildlife as well. This here is the story of the men who brought that unfortunate reality into existence. They refer to themselves as buffalo hunters, but we know of them today as the hide hunters. In little more than a decade after the end of the Civil War, they wiped the Great Planes clear of their most stunning, most visible, and most important wildlife species, the American buffalo. In the eighteen seventies and early eighteen eighties, commercial demand for leather made from the skin of these animals allowed the hide hunters to make a living shooting and skinning them by the thousands individually and by the millions collectively. At the most basic level, hide hunters were market hunters, a term that refers to individuals who kill wild animals to sell their meat, skin, feathers, horns, or any other part of their bodies that has commercial value. Over the course of American history, there have been a number of market hunting booms, and it’s no coincidence that these eras have left us with some of our wildest tales of wilderness adventure. Daniel Boone was a market hunter who trafficked in white tailed deer skins in the mid to late seventeen hundreds. Davy Crockett was a market hunter who trafficked in bear meat and bear grease in the early eighteen hundreds. Jim Bridger and John Colter were market hunters who trafficked in beaver skins for a handful of decades, ending at around eighteen forty each of these generations. In each of these individuals pursued this unique existence for a variety of different reasons, but above all else, their primary motivation was financial. Whitetail hunting for Boone, beaver trapping for Bridger. Buffalo hunting for the hide hunters was a lifestyle, sure, but most importantly we need to understand it as a livelihood. These buffalo hide hunters did their work with ruthless efficiency, from the sweltering plains of Texas to the frozen planes of the Canadian border, armed with what we might call the next generation weapons of their day, high powered breech loading rifles, some with telescopic sights that could drop a two thousand pound bull buffalo at distances that most shooters today would have a hard time matching. Despite how foreign the actions of these men might seem to us in the twenty first century, this tragic, stunning, jaw dropping, awe inspiring saga took place in a world that is not so terribly distant from the one we live in now. In addition to shooting guns that fired brass casings, they read newspapers. They traveled by train, and they ordered some of the things they wanted, including sometimes their rifles, through the mail. Many of them, years after the slaughter, would flip light switches. Some would even drive cars. And yet they carried out a campaign of unintentional eradication that is unthinkable to us today. The hide hunters didn’t arrive in ships from across the ocean. They weren’t exploring places that had never been seen by a white man. They didn’t rack up a list of crazy firsts. The first person of European descent to reach the Texas Panhandle where a good hunk of this story takes place, got there three hundred and twenty four years before the start of this story. It was the Spanish Conquisodor Coronado, the first non indigenous people to cross the continent. The Lewis and Clark expedition had done so sixty years before the start of this story. There are no frontier luminaries in here. There are no Daniel Boons or Jim Bridges among the hide hunters. We’ve mythologized those hunters and trappers into honorary founding fathers. They star in countless films and TV shows and songs and campfire tales. But the hide hunters. They don’t make movies about them. Children don’t play games pretending to be them. Sure, a few of the hide hunters became well known for doing other stuff later on, like being gunfighters and ranchers and entertainers and conservationists, but their names as hide hunters are largely absent from the annals of history. There were maybe about five thousand of them in total, who worked as either a shooter, a skinner, or simply a hired hand. There were many colorful characters, some with quite descriptive nicknames. You had Charles, squirrel Eye, Emery soor Toed Joe, Limpy, Jim Smith. You had Snuffer, Soda water Jack, three Finger Foley, and Buffalo Jones. Dirty Face Jones got his name when a bullet intended to kill him missed his head, but his would be killer was so close that the burning flash of powder seared his cheeks and nose. You could be forgiven for confusing dirty Face Jones with powder Face Hudson, but his two different fellas Wrongwheeled Jones committed an innocent act of stupidity that he’d never lived down when he insisted to a group of his fellow hunters that it was impossible to replace a broken wheel on the right side of a wagon with a wheel from the left side. To illustrate the fraught nature of their work, considered us a few short things about skunks. The hide hunter Skunk Johnson is largely remembered for an episode when he was trapped inside his cave like shelter known as a dugout by a party of hostile Indians. The siege lasted fifteen days, during which time he only ate skunks. Another hunter, known as Kentuck, was bitten by a rabbit skunk, causing him to crawl underneath a railroad water tank in a delusional fit, where he died. A third hide hunter, whose name is lost to history, also suffered a bite from a rabbit skunk. When he felt the beginning of a spasm of hydrophobia, as the condition was known, he walked out behind a building and swallowed a gulp of strychnine, which the hide hunters used to protect their stack of buffalo skins from bugs, vermin, and other prairie scavengers, and also on occasion to poison wolves for a little side money that could be made from selling their hides. These were not wealthy or well connected men. They were as blue collar, working class as it gets. They were poor guys born in places like Pennsylvania and Georgia and Illinois to farmers and blacksmiths and barrel makers. A great many of the hide hunters had been tangled up in the horrors of the Civil War on both sides of that conflict. As fighting men, killing buffalo by the dozens and sometimes upwards of one hundred in a day per man, the hide hunters wrought perhaps the most egregious episode of natural resource over exploitation in the history of the United States, if not the world. We simply don’t have any other examples, at least in the historical era of a comparable, widely distributed wildlife species pushed to the brink of collapse so quickly by the hands of man. Whatever one thinks about the outcome of all that killing, and there’s really only one thing to think, which is what an incredible waste? You can’t escape from the reality that these guys were absolute masters of their craft. They were tough, They craved adventure, They had incredible endurance, They could think fast, they could shoot, they could fight. They were brave to the point that it resembles a suicidal recklessness. And man, they could work, like work harder than anyone you’re ever likely to encounter in your own life today. What made the era of the hide hunters possible was a combination of factors too big and complex for most of them to have fully comprehended. In hindsight, it look like a perfect storm. For one, consider the impact of the railroads. Long hunters like Daniel Boone and mountain men like Jim Bridger were distinctly pre industrial. They operated within the natural constraints of muscle and bone. The Great Bottleneck and their operations was the cold reality of needing to move goods deer skins and beaver pelts, respectively, to market on the backs of horses and mules. For Boone, this meant leading a small string of horses over rough trails through the Cumberland Gap and across the Appalachian Mountains. The mountain men who plied the streams of the Rockies in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties moved their furs via an annual pack train that took several weeks to cross the plains even in good weather. Their operations were fueled and limited in scale by equine conveys. For the hide hunters, the railroads transformed everything. The heavy, cumbersome, quite rigid hides of buffalo were shipped back to the tanneries of the East in such quantities that they could not possibly have been moved by wagon, train or horseback. The timeline alone reveals the connection with stunning clarity. It is no coincidence that the hunt in Kansas erupted in eighteen seventy two, the same year that the Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in Dodge City. It is no coincidence that the height of the killing in Texas followed the arrival of the railroad in Fort Worth on July fourth, eighteen seventy six. And once again it is no coincidence that the Northern herd was quickly wiped out following the extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Miles City in eighteen eighty one. At the same time, the proliferation of factory machines and the accelerating industrialization of the American economy created an insatiable demand for tough, elastic leather that could be used as drive belts as in factory belting. Picture for a moment. The timing belt in your car are in your snowmobile. It’s essentially a strap running around two wheels, so that when one wheel turns, typically powered by a motor, the wheel on the other end turns as well. Simply put, a belt transmits power from one place to another, and in the ever expanding industrial economy of the late eighteen hundreds, miles of belting were needed to apply power generated by steam or water wheels to looms, saws, lathes, and any number of applications where machines were doing work that was once done by hand. Buffalo leather, which compared to cattle leather, was more elastic, while also incredibly tough, served as an ideal material for machine belting, and at the very moment that transportation networks were able to deliver buffalo hides by the millions to eastern tanneries, and those eastern tanneries were able to sell unlimited quantities of those process hides. Advances and firearms technology accelerated by the Civil War made the American riflemen exponentially more effective than his predecessors of only a few decades before. Earlier breech loading rifles, to say nothing of the muzzleloaders that came before them, were too underpowered, too inaccurate, and too clumsy to reload to have been capable of the buffalo killing that the hide hunters unleashed on the planes. We’ll get into the specifics of those rifles later on, But just as our story would have been impossible without the railroad, it would have been impossible without the cutting edge firearms of the post Civil War era. The Civil War lurks in the background of this story as a sort of dark prequel in the title of this work, you’ll notice the date range eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three. Well, eighteen sixty five is the year the Civil War ended. The aftermath of that bloody war between the states pushed out westward a restless generation of men in search of work and opportunity. It pushed them away from the war ravaged cities and agricultural communities of southern reconstruction, away from the strictured discipline and meager rations of military service, away from the insecurity and claustrophobia of the family farm, way from the starvation wages of the northern factory floor. On the distant plains of the American West, they saw a new life of promise, adventure, and cash. A couple of years ago, I sat for a lengthy interview for a Ken Burns documentary on the history of the American buffalo, and during the editing process, I was invited to offer feedback. My primary concern with an early version of the series was that its short treatment of the subject of the hide hunters dehumanized them. It made it seem as though they were motivated by some sadistic desire to destroy American wildlife. It’s understandable how people would get that idea, but it’s naive. Rather than imagining the hide Hunters as soul as hell billies, it’s better to see them as the vanguard of industrial capitalism on the western planes. In today’s world, serious thinkers don’t personally blame an Appalachian born coal miner for air pollution. We don’t blame frontline soldiers for the conflicts they fight in, and we don’t blame the guys driving concrete trucks and hanging drywall for suburban sprawl. Now to that, you might say, well, the Buffalo Hunters knew what they were doing, and the collective consequences of their individual actions were incredibly costly. Well, if in fifty years all of the most apocalyptic predictions about global warming have come true, I’m not going to say that a guy making a living in a North Dakota oil field was a bad guy. And I’m not going to cite all of the times you turned on your air conditioner or failed to organize car pools instead of driving alone. I’d instead point my finger at political inertia, societal indifference, imperative of economic growth, and the human tendency to endure changes for the worse, rather than trying to remedy them. Not that these guys were saints, they most certainly were not. It’s fair to say that most held the same prejudice views of Native people that were common at the time, and they did not keep those prejudice views to themselves either. Some of them were objectively villainous figures, and many had a real pensiant for violence. And I hope it’s clear by now that I mourned the consequences of their actions. At the same time, to understand them as real people requires recognizing the larger systems and structures of which they were just one small part, and acknowledging that everyone has limited choices from which to choose. As the hide hunter, Frank Mayer said of his time shooting buffalo on the pl planes, he had a hide, the hide was worth money. I was young, twenty two. I could shoot. I’d like to hunt. Wouldn’t you have done the same thing? If I’m answering that question honestly as your author sitting at a microphone, as a guy who lives for hunting and fishing, and I put myself back in Frank Mayer’s shoes, I think the answer would be Yeah, I would have done the same damn thing. If you’ve never heard of Frank Mayor, you could forgive yourself to put a human face on old Frank. Here’s a bit about him. Born in eighteen fifty, he was a thirteen year old drummer boy for his father’s artillery unit when he witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, where one man died for about every ten seconds of fighting. From age twenty two to twenty eight, Mayor hunted buffalo on the plains of Kansas and Texas, killing thousands. By the time the old hide Hunter died on February twelve, nineteen fifty four, my own father was thirty years old, Hugh Hefner was publishing Playboy magazine, and the Korean War was over. Mayor had survived some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War and lived into the age of nuclear submarines, Burger king and corvettes. Mayor is one of those hide hunters we know a lot about. There are some others, such as Charles Wrath and Jay Wright Moore. These guys were pioneers of the trade, recognized by their contemporaries as influential characters. If you read anything about this era, you’ll run into their names again and again. They appear throughout the historical record in ledgers, diaries, receipts, newspaper articles, and legal documents related to their careers as hide hunters. Other hide hunters recorded their experiences in great detail later on in life, either for posterity’s sake or to make a little money. Among those is John Cook, who published a memoir, The Border and the Buffalo in nineteen oh seven. During the Civil War, Cook fought for the Union along the bloody boundary between Missouri and Kansas, where gorilla forces committed some of the most gruesome atrocities of that conflict. Afterward, like many of his fellow veterans, he drifted westward. From the fall of eighteen seventy four until the spring of eighteen seventy eight, Cook hunted the Panhandle of Texas. His descriptions of the day to day business of hunting and skinning are vividly detailed. Many hide hunters, like George Reigard, were interviewed later in life by local reporters writing for readership’s hungry for stories from the so called Old West. Re Reguard was born in Pennsylvania in eighteen forty seven and enlisted in the twenty second Cavalry one month after the Battle of Gettysburg at sixteen years of age. After being wounded and discharged from the army, he set out for western Kansas, where he drove freight wagons and marveled at his strange new surroundings before adopting the occupation of a hide hunter. Between eighteen seventy one and eighteen seventy three, Reguard killed more than five thousand animals. It was he recalled buffalo butchery by wholesale. What makes the story you’re about to hear so historically significant and so viscerally tragic is that the hide hunters came at the end, or rather caused the end, of a long procession of buffalo hunters who’d been chasing the animals for more than ten thousand years across the landscapes that we now call the United States. Their actions closed out one of the longest running cultural and economic life ways that this planet has ever seen since the arrival of the very first humans in North America. Indigenous people nurtured a relationship with these animals that, while it took on different forms at different times. Is most remarkable for its sustainability. The first American buffalo hunters were ice age immigrants from Siberia who killed a somewhat longer horned variety on the grasslands of northern Alaska using adladdles. Later on, there were buffalo hunters who killed great quantities of the animals by driving them over cliffs and Alberta and Montana and even down into Texas. There were buffalo hunters in the Dakotas who crept up on the animals camouflaged beneath the skins of freshly killed buffalo calves, close enough to sink a carefully placed arrow into their rib cage. And with the spread of equestrian culture among the Planes tribes after the Spanish introduced horses into North America, we had buffalo hunters in western Kansas who chased buffalo down on horseback and got so close they could have jumped onto the buffalo’s back, but instead held a smooth bore musket barrel right up to the crease behind the buffalo’s shoulder in order to deliver a lead ball into the heart. Without a doubt, the story of each of those buffalo hunting cultures is worthy of a project like this. But this here is not a holistic analysis of the different ways that different people hunted buffalo, nor is this a comprehensive history of the destruction of the buffalo. That tale of shrinking range and collapsing numbers actually spans hundreds of years in a huge swath of the continent. For our journey ahead, though a quick overview of that will be helpful to you. When Europeans started penetrating into the various corners of North America over the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds, they found scattered groups of buffalo and sometimes impressive herds in the woods of Pennsylvania and stands of cain along the Ohio River, along streams in what is now Nashville, Tennessee, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and in the rolling hills and tall grass prairies of Wisconsin and western Minnesota and Iowa. Daniel Boone frequently targeted them for meat in Kentucky. As Boone and his contemporaries spread out and pushed ever westward, those eastern buffalo herds were killed off one by one by pot hunters feeding their families and small scale market hunters looking to make a buck. The various states buffalo populations fell like European nations in the wake of the German Blitzkreek. Boone’s own son, Nathan, killed the last buffalo in Virginia in seventeen ninety seven. North Carolina wiped out theirs in seventeen ninety nine, and Kentucky did the same one year later, Pennsylvania the year after that. Louisiana killed its last buffalo in eighteen oh three, and the last in Illinois and Ohio died in eighteen oh eight, Tennessee eighteen twenty three, West Virginia eighteen twenty five, Wisconsin eighteen thirty two. By the close of the Civil War in eighteen sixty five, which again begins the story of the hide hunters that I’m going to tell here, the animals were still mind blowingly abundant and what you might think of as the core of their historic range the American Great Plains and the inner mountain valleys of the Rockies. Buffalo were still in the Panhandle of North Texas. They were still in western Oklahoma, Western Kansas, western Nebraska. They were still in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado were loaded, there were still buffalo in northern New Mexico. Admittedly, the best research out there today indicates that the herds wiped out by the hide hunters were already diminished by a host of factors. Besides bullets, a record drought between eighteen fifty six and eighteen sixty four helped the diminishment. Competition for grass from wild horses helped. Diseases like anthrax and bovine tuberculosis introduced by European cattle perhaps helped some. Added to that. Indigenous hunting pressure and harvest numbers certainly increased after the ascendancy of equestrian hunting culture, which inspired many tribes to move onto the plains in pursuit of meat for their families and buffalo robes to be sold to American traders. So, in terms of what the hide hunters destroyed after the Civil War, how many buffalo exactly are we talking about? Historians and ecologists are still fighting about that today. A total population of around fifteen million is a safe, currently fashionable number. Compare that to the estimated population size in the year eighteen eighty three, the end date used in the title of this work. At that point eighteen eighty three, the number of buffalo that were still left alive in the unit United States was less than one thousand, Or put another way, it was ninety nine zero point nine to nine percent fewer than at the close of the Civil War. Here’s a thing we ought to clear up before we get too far along. Common American history lessons about the destruction of the herds like to include sordid details about the gross excesses of Western travelers and tourists gunning down buffalo from moving trains or shooting them simply to see how many they could get. Sir George Gore, an Irish nobleman, famously took a multi year safari in Wyoming’s Powder River country in the mid eighteen fifties. Accompanied by a small army of servants, a selection of fine wines, and a French carpet for the floor of his tent. Gore killed some two thousand bison using seventy five different rifles he brought along. He’s one of the most obnoxious, reviled characters of the American West, and there’s no doubt there were a lot of buffalo killed just for the sport of it. But was it enough to wipe them off the face of the continent hardly. Another frequently repeated claim is that the US Army deliberately exterminated the buffalo in order to starve the tribes of the plans and force them onto reservations. To be fair, there is some anecdotal evidence of individual officers and units targeting local buffalo herds in a scorched Earth style tactic, and some hide hunters fought side by side with army units, including African American units known as Buffalo Soldiers, during periods of hostility, especially on the southern plains. But was there an actual policy or a broader military strategy targeting the buffalo. The most frequently cited evidence of anything resembling that General Phillip Sheridan’s address to the Texas Legislature in eighteen seventy five has been thoroughly debunked as a hoax invented later in life by a hide hunter who wanted to drape the shame of his younger years in the flag of patriotic duty. If you start reading a lot about the history of the buffalo, you’ll encounter that mention of Sheridan’s speech again and again. It’s bs and In truth, all the train shooting and army shooting didn’t even matter biologically. It was inconsequential. Today, driving across certain stretches of the Great Plains, say Interstate ninety between Billings and Miles City, Montana, Interstate seventy from Abilene, Kansas, all the way to Colorado, or Interstate forty from Oklahoma City across the Texas Panhandle, will feel the hide Hunter’s legacy in your bones, that haunting emptiness where millions of Buffalo should be grazing. This story is an effort to resurrect those men who last experienced the Great Herds, those men who lived and hunted among them and who destroyed them. It’s an effort to bring them forward, to summon them so we can ask them some questions. Where did you come from, How exactly did you do what you did, what did it cost you, what did you gain in return? And why did you do it? We will ask those questions and seek their answers in the coming chapters. Here’s a rough idea of how it will go. We’ll begin by establishing some essential context for the Hide Hunter story, a deep time history of people in Buffalo on the Great Plains, in the emergence of the first market for buffalo skins in the form of the robe trade. Here you’ll get a sense of the significance of the animal to the original inhabitants of the American West and the pre industrial constraints on its commodification. From there, we’ll jump to the aftermath of the Civil War, in which a generation of displaced veterans looked westward for new opportunities at the same time that the transcontinental railroads connected the resources of the Great Plains with the industrial East. Ground zero for this explosive new economy was Dodge City, Kansas, the subject of chapter four. It was in this upstart railroad town where the business of the hide hunt took on its characteristic form and its impact on the resource was almost immediately made clear. From there will follow the hide hunters as they push into bloody Texas and violation of treaties signed between native tribes and the US government. The second phase showcases the speed and thoroughness of the slaughter, as well as the dangers faced by hide hunters as they endured unforgiving landscapes and the ever present potential for hostility. Then finally, we’ll head north to the plains and bad lands of eastern Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas, where the Hide Hunters endured brutal cold as they finished off the last remaining herds of the Great Plains. Along the way, we’ll discuss the weapons and tactics that made the hide Hunters such effective killers. We’ll explore how a camp full of these rugged characters undertook their day to day work, and how they passed a little bit of free time when they weren’t engaged in shooting and skinning. Will also give you an in depth examination of how they processed buffalo for the market and what happened to those hides once they were loaded onto eastbound trains. And lastly, we’ll dive into the scene that faced the hide Hunters when their grizzly work was done and the planes had been emptied of herds that once numbered in the tens of millions. Throughout this story, you’ll come to see the Hide Hunters not as larger than life characters or storybook villains, but as historical actors faced with a certain set of choices, and you’ll see how their story shaped our contemporary understandings of environmental degradation, commercial exploitation, and the mythology of the American West. Throughout, we’ll point to the facts of how we know what we know, so you understand the sources and research that went into this in case you want to do some follow up reading on your own. As for the sources, it would be a sin if I did not acknowledge the work of three historians, Miles Gilbert, Leo Ramager, and Sharon Cunningham, who have published two initial volumes A through D and E through K of an ambitious encyclopedia of Buffalo hunters and skinners. It’s the most comprehensive resource out there for researchers who want to track down the names of hide hunters and figure out what published and archival materials might exist in order to better tell their story. Trust me when I say that our telling of the hide hunter story would be missing some choice details and incredible anecdotes if it weren’t for these unique works. Now, let’s get on with our story.
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