You got to consider them things before you get to blaming us hunters, the way I see it. We was just trying to make a living, and all we cared about was the market price of hides. Sometimes you get the idea from accounts of this enterprise, wrote by men who wasn’t there, that the great army of hunters went out to exterminate every bison on the continent so as to clean up the range for cattle grazing, or to whip the Indians by destroying their source of wild food. These things happened, of course, but it wasn’t by our plan. We was just a bunch of fellows carrying Sharps rifles, and if you ever topped a rise and seen a gigantic ocean of sheer buffalo covering maybe twenty miles, you couldn’t believe the day would come when a few thousand of us had caused them millions to vanish utterly.
Still, having said that, I admit it now seems a pity. But we done it, and here’s how: in late August and early September, the hunters would go up to Nebraska, make contact with the herds and follow them southwards down to Texas as it growed colder, killing as they went, and the hunt would generally extend until March of the next year. Then in spring the hunters closed up operations and went to K.C. as we have seen, for their vacation, while the buffalo was shedding on their summer plod back north.
You didn’t use a horse in this type of hunting. You moved by foot as close as you could get to one of the little bunches that a herd divided into while grazing, you set up your crossed-stick shooting rest, laid the long barrel of the Sharps into it, and picked off animals one by one around the edge of the bunch. Now, done right, you could get away with this for quite a spell before the buffalo got wise, for they never cared about the sounds of firing nor did the others worry when their comrades dropped roundabout. The only thing that spooked them was the smell of blood.
If the wind stayed favorable, you could drop upwards of thirty animals with the remainder still grazing quietly, but much beyond that number and one bull would get a whiff of blood and stir and paw the ground, and then another animal smelled it and would bellow, which panicked the bunch and so on to the whole herd spread across five square mile of prairie, and within a minute or so you saw the tails of a monstrous stampede. Or, as happened once in a while, for there might well be other hunters a-working the far side of the same herd, the stampede would come in your direction and you’d see a remarkable horizon of horns just before you was trampled to death.
But usually that never happened, and when the herd was gone, your skinner would come up with the wagon, which had been kept back until then, and get to work on the fallen animals: cut a few slits, lash a rope around the gathered neck-skin, hitch the other end to a horse and lead him away, peeling off the whole hide. Back at camp the skins was pegged out to cure and stacked when that was done to await the buyers, who sent wagons around from time to time to all the hunting parties.
Well sir, that is about the size of what occupied me in the winter of 1871–72, and me and my skinner ended up the season down below the Canadian River, in the Texas Panhandle. In late March we come back up to Caldwell and tallied up with the hide buyers and received around six thousand dollars for that winter’s work, which meant I alone killed over twenty-five hundred buffalo my first time out. Old hands like Billy Dixon and Old Man Keeler done better than that.
Still, it seemed like there hadn’t been a dent made in the buffalo population. Near Prairie Dog Creek below the Canadian, me and the skinner come up over a rise and seen the entire world carpeted with brown hair. I reckon you could see twenty-five mile across the prairie, for the day was clear. Now, sweeping your extended arm from left to right across the horizon, you would have pointed, in so doing, at a million buffalo.
At Caldwell me and my partner split the take, and after settling up my obligations with the outfitters, I still had several thousand dollars, and I headed back to Kansas City to see how Amelia was making out.
Before I get to that, though, I ought to mention a kind of coincidence that I experienced. Remember that fellow with the funny name what had preceded me as mule driver on the run from San Pedro to Prescott, Arizona? Wyatt Earp? Well, I had a run-in with him down on the buffalo range, and I’m going to tell you about it.
CHAPTER 23
WE WAS DOWN on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River at the time. At night after the day’s shooting, the buffalo hunters in the area would collect at one of the larger camps for sociable drinking and poker. The source of liquor was the peddlers who come out with wagonloads of barrels. No place was too remote for them fellows. There was a good many spots on the prairie where you might have died for want of water, but you could get a drink of whiskey most everywhere.
