FIRST WATCH 3 A.
M. VEIL
AMERICAN BLACK BISON – 1825
Bison bison pennsylvanicus
Hernando Cortez – 1581
De Solis: History of Conquest
, Mexico
In the second Square of the same House were the Wild Beasts, captured by Montezuma’s Hunters, in strong Cages of Timber, ranged in good Order, and under Cover: Lions, Tygers, Bears, and all others of the savage Kind which New-Spain produced; among which the greatest Rarity was the Mexican Bull; a wonderful composition of divers animals. It has crooked Shoulders, with a Bunch on its Back like a Camel; its Flanks dry, its Tail large, and its Neck covered with Hair like a Lion. It is cloven footed, its Head armed like that of a Bull, which it resembles in Fierceness, with no less strength and Agility.
Hernando Cortez’s 1521 sighting of the Bison – or American Buffalo – in Montezuma’s menagerie is the first by a European as recorded by the historian De Solis in 1724. It was probably captured in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, some 500 miles north of Montezuma’s palace in what is now Mexico City. In 1530, another Spaniard, Alvar Nunez Cabeza, was wrecked on the Gulf coast, west of the Mississippi delta, from whence he wandered westward into what is now Texas. He appears to be the first European to sight bison herds in their wild state.
In 1542, the conquistador Coronado was the third European to record the sighting of American Buffalo. In the region of the Texas panhandle he saw for the first time what he described as “crooked-backed oxen.” It was also a notable first encounter between bison and horses. The event is described by one of Coronado’s soldiers, Castenada: “The first time we encountered these beasts, all the horses took to flight on seeing them, for they were a horrible sight. They have a broad and short face, eyes two palms from each other, and projecting in such a manner sideways that they can see a pursuer. Their beard is like that of goats, and so long that it drags the ground when they lower the head. They have, on the anterior portion of the body, a frizzled hair like sheep’s wool; it is very fine upon the croup, and sleek like a lion’s mane. Their horns are very short and thick, and can scarcely be seen through the hair. They always change their hair in May, and at this season they really resemble lions. Their tail is very short, and terminates in a great tuft. When they run they carry it in the air like scorpions.”
Samuell Argoll – 1612
Voyage to the New World
, Virginia Colony
And then marching into the Countrie, I found great store of Cattle as big as Kine, of which the Indians that were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meate, and are very easie to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts of the wilderness.
The English navigator Samuell Argoll wrote of this encounter with an Eastern bison that saved his party from starvation. It is the earliest recorded sighting of the Eastern Black Bison and took place in 1612 on the banks of the Potomac River, near the present-day site of America’s capitol, Washington, D. C.
There were once four subspecies of Bison or American Buffalo which numbered in the hundreds of millions. The tallest and largest was the now extinct Black Bison (Bison bison pennsylvanicus). Found in all the American states east of the Mississippi River, it was the first to be hunted to extinction by 1825. The second species to suffer extinction was the far western Oregon Bison (Bison bison oreganos) around 1850 – shortly after the Lewis and Clark expedition established the Oregon Trail, and opened the region (Oregon to California) west of the Rocky Mountains for settlement. The two other races, the Great Plains Bison (Bison bison bison) of America and the Wood Bison (Bison bison athabasca) of Canada, would certainly have been entirely extinguished by 1890 had it not been for an 11th hour rescue effort by the American and Canadian governments at the instigation of the handful of influential conservationists who formed the American Bison Society.
Colonel Daniel Boone – 1770
Frontier Journals
, Kentucky
Vast herds grazed over these lands. The buffaloes were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browzing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage of those extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw thousands in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing. Their ways are as beaten as our great roads, and no herb grows therein.
The wildlife artist James Audubon wrote of the Black Bison of the Eastern American states in his Quadrupeds of North America: “In the days of our boyhood and youth, Buffaloes roamed over the small and beautiful prairies of Indiana and Illinois, and herds of them stalked through the open woods of Kentucky and Tennessee; but they had dwindled down to a few stragglers, which resorted chiefly to the ‘Barrens’, towards the years 1808 and 1809, and soon after entirely disappeared.
“Their range has since that period gradually tended westward, and now you must direct your steps ‘to the Indian country’, and travel many hundreds of miles beyond the fair valleys of the Ohio, towards the great rocky chain of mountains that forms the backbone of North America, before you can reach the Buffalo, and see him roving in his sturdy independence upon the vast elevated plains, which extend to the base of the Rocky Mountains.”
Another contemporary account of the hunting of the Eastern Black Bison by M. Ashe records the obvious reason for their demise: “The carnage of these beasts was everywhere the same. I met with a man who had killed two thousand buffaloes with his own hand, and others no doubt have done the same thing. In consequence of such proceedings not one buffalo is at this time to be found east of the Mississippi.”
Colonel Richard Irving Dodge – 1871
Plains of the Great West,
Arkansas
In May of 1871, I drove a light wagon from Old Fort Zara to Fort Larned, on the Arkansas. At least 25 miles of this distance was through one immense herd, composed of countless smaller herds of buffalo. The whole country appeared one great mass of buffalo, moving slowly to the northward. When I had reached a point where the hills were no longer more than a mile from the road, the buffalo on the hills, turned, stared an instant, then started at full speed directly towards me, stampeding and bringing with them the numberless herds through which they passed, and pouring down upon me all the herds, in one immense compact mass of plunging animals, mad with fright, and as irresistible as an avalanche. This situation was by no means pleasant.
In later years, Colonel Dodge reflected on the reasons for the rapid extinction of those vast migrating herds: “It was, then, the hide-hunters, who wiped out the great southern herd in four short years. The prices received for hides varied considerably, according to circumstances, but for the green or undressed article it usually ranged from 50 cents for the skins of calves to $1.25 for those of adult animals in good condition. Such prices seem ridiculously small, but when it is remembered that, when buffaloes were plentiful it was no uncommon thing for a hunter to kill from forty to sixty head a day, it will readily be seen that the chances of making very handsome profits were sufficient to tempt hunters to make extraordinary exertions.
“Moreover, even when the buffalo were nearly gone, the country was overrun with men who had absolutely nothing else to look as a means of livelihood, and so, no matter whether the profits were great or small, so long as enough buffaloes remained to make it possible to get a living by their pursuit, they were hunted down with the most determined persistency and pertinacity.”
Colonel Dodge’s estimate of buffalo slaughtered in southern herd for the years 1872 to 1874 was 3,698,730 (of which more than half were killed and wasted, without taking hides or meat). By 1875, less than 10,000 survived, and these were soon gone.
General Philip H. Sheridan – 1878
Sheridan’s Memoirs
, Indian Territories
The Buffalo Hunters have done more in the last two years to settle the vexed Indian Question than the entire regular army in the last thirty years. They have destroyed the Indian’s commissary. Send them powder and lead, if you will, and let them kill, skin and sell until they have exterminated the buffalo.
General Sheridan voices the deliberate policy of the American military and government of promoting the extermination of the buffalo herds of the west as a means of starving the native Indian tribes into submission.
Congressman McCormick wrote in The New Mexican newspaper in Santa Fe that a United States federal surveying commission kept careful records of the slaughter and reported that there were two thousand hunters on the plains killing these animals for their hides. One party of sixteen hunters was reported having killed twenty-eight thousand buffaloes in the summer of 1872 in supposedly Indian Territories.
Sheridan absolutely encouraged the poaching of buffalo and the invasion of the Indian Territories. He suggested Congress mint a medal of honour for the hunters with a dead buffalo on one side and a depressed looking Indian on the other. He was widely attributed with the saying, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
The other ex-Civil War soldier assigned to oversee Indian Affairs policy was General William Tecumseh Sherman. In a letter to President Grant, Sherman wrote: “We are not going to let a few thieving Indians check or stop progress. We must act with vindictive earnest against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children.” Sherman also saw killing off the buffalo as the means of starving Indians into submission.
CITIES OF GOLD
American Black Bison – 1825
Coronado searching for the Seven Cities of Gold
Marched through Arizona and New Mexico
Seeking the legendary Cibolo
With its streets and roofs of gold
Its walls studded with gems
Discovered instead Zuni and Pueblo
Villages of rough-cut stone and adobe
Embittered and raging with greed
Coronado waded across the Rio Grande
Stubbed his steel toe on the Grand Canyon
Butchered and burned his way across Texas
Dodging Apache and Comanche arrows
The Spaniard stamped on into Kansas
In his relentless quest for Gran Quivera
That other chimeric promised land
With its mother lode of fabled gold
Coronado looking for shining spires
Found instead a vast plain crowded with beasts
“Horned, huge and monstrously ugly”
A dark satanic host – the very scent
Of which terrorized his horses
Denied the spectacular glory
Of Aztec gold, of Inca silver
Bloodied Coronado limped home in shame
With a wagon train heaped with the skins
Of those “crook-backed oxen”
Those same buffalo robes that were to become
The true currency of the wilderness
Triggering a stampede into the long darkness
That would eclipse all life on that great wide plain
And from the bones of those millions and millions
Sown like dragons teeth into the parched earth
There arose seven cities; and seven cities more
Richer than the greediest dreams
Of Coronado’s conquistadors
These Cities of Gold, these New Eldorados
Shimmer in the sun
And yet, when darkness falls
On the empty plains beyond city lights
For some, there is this lingering memory
Of the distant thunder of those endless herds
And the last of the Ghost Dancers
Dressed in buffalo robes, chanting:
Nothing lives forever
Nothing lives forever
Except the earth and the sky
Nothing lives forever