The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi

By Ted Franklin Belue

Folklore, archaeological data, and first-person narratives contrast the wanton destruction of the eastern buffalo with the spirit and heroism of the early frontier.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stackpole Books
• Release date: Oct 1, 1996
• ISBN: 9780811741040

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The Long Hunt

The Long Hunt

Death of the Buffalo

East of the Mississippi

Ted Franklin Belue

STACKPOLE

BOOKS

Copyright © 1996 by Stackpole Books

Published by

Stackpole Books

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Mechanicsburg, PA 17055

www.stackpolebooks.com

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Stackpole Books, 5067 Ritter Road, Mechanics-burg, PA 17055.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Belue, Ted Franklin.

The long hunt : death of the buffalo east of the Mississippi / Ted Franklin Belue.—1st ed.

               p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-8117-0968-X

1. American bison hunting—East (U.S.)—History. 2. East (U.S.)—History. I. Title.

   SK297.B45 1996

eISBN: 9780811741040

To my father, Frank Owens Belue, and my mother, Myra Janell

Contents

Acknowledgments

IN THE FIVE YEARS SPENT LABORING ON THE LONG HUNT MANY A DEBT was incurred and many thanks are due, the first to Larry Doyle, of Murray, Kentucky, who suggested the topic. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which manages the largest buffalo herd on public land east of the Mississippi—nearly ninety head—at TVA’s Land Between the Lakes, a 170,000-acre tract spanning western Tennessee and Kentucky, funded a portion of the work.

H. David Wright of Gray Stone Press, a native Kentuckian, modern-day Long Hunter, and artist of remarkable sensitivity, provided his friendship, insights into eighteenth-century life, and art. Neal O. Hammon, historian and author on the Commonwealth, gave vital commentary on early forays into Kentucky. Charles E. Hanson, Jr., Director of the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska, offered kind words in the compilation of the bibliography. Laura Herrington granted access to the Loren Herrington Collection of Indian artifacts. Michael J. Taylor, a virtuoso artisan of eighteenth-century Indian wares, supplied information about Woodland Indians. Stephanie Zebrowski, of Zebrowski Publishing, steered me from grievous errors with her incisive research on buffalo in Pennsylvania. Her wit was an added boon.

At Murray State University, in Murray, Kentucky, much appreciation is due to the staff at the Forrest C. Pogue Special Collections Library and at the Harry Lee Waterfield Library. Dr. Kenneth C. Carstens, of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, provided unpublished data on George Rogers Clark’s 1780-81 Fort Jefferson occupation. English professor Dr. Jerry A. Herndon bore countless manuscript rewrites with fortitude. Hal Rice at the Faculty Resource Center helped with illustrations.

Others who provided advice, assistance, and encouragement include Dr. Charles J. Balesi, Evanston, Illinois; Win Blevins, Bozeman, Montana; Dr. Joan G. Caldwell, Tulane University Art Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana; Gwyneth Campling, James L. Jackson, and Liz Turner, Royal Collection Enterprises Limited, Windsor Castle, Berkshire, England; Dr. Kenneth Cherry, University Press of Kentucky; Dr. Thomas D. Clark, Lexington, Kentucky; Marcus Cope, Land Between the Lakes, Tennessee Valley Authority; Randy Corse, Osage Beach, Missouri; Sharon Cunningham, Union City, Tennessee; Dr. Nelson L. Dawson, The Filson Club; Tony Gerard, Shawnee Community College; Dr. Josephine L. Harper, Joanne Hohler, and Harold Miller of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; Randy Martin, Martin and Company Advertising, White’s Creek, Tennessee; Peter Matthiessen, Sagaponack, New York; Dr. Timothy C. Nichols, Albertville, Alabama; Palle Ring-sted, The Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark; Daniel J. J. Ross, University of Nebraska Press; William H. Scurlock, Scurlock Publishing; Jean Sherrill, Orlando, Florida; Robert and Margaret Sisk, Skiatook, Oklahoma; Sherry Stribling and George Butch Winter, Pioneer Press; Dr. Richard Taylor, Kentucky State University; and Jack Turbeville, Shepherdsville, Kentucky.

The greatest thanks go to my wife, Lavina Turbeville, for her abiding love and patience, and for keeping hearth and home intact during the onslaught of the buffalo.

Introduction

THE HISTORY OF THE BUFFALO IS A TRAGIC ONE, YET THE TELLING OF that tale is curiously unbalanced. Most buffalo books spend the opening chapter citing obscure reports of buffalo east of the Mississippi River, then focus on the huge western herds, their relationship to the Plains Indians, and the buffalo’s near extinction.

Few people realize the killing of the buffalo began in the East, not in the West. And it began long before the brief era of the coming of the railroad, the .40-90 Sharps rifle, and Buffalo Bill Cody.

The story must be told. Yet to tell it by omitting the beginnings of America presents a fragmented history. Reducing the slaughter to an exercise in horn counting and ignoring the Spanish, French, and English intruders, the New Orleans buffalo tongue markets, the French and Indian War, Richard Henderson’s 1775 Sycamore Shoals Treaty, and the invasion of the Long Hunters into the Cumberland Valley distorts the picture. Such events devastated the buffalo.

In 1991 Larry Doyle, then Manager of Land Stewardship at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Land Between the Lakes, and Marcus Cope, biologist and buffalo herdsman for the TVA-LBL, suggested writing a booklet on the eastern buffalo. A sea of unused material was left after the project, and it seemed a shame not to finish this heretofore unwritten chapter in American history. The Long Hunt: Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi is the result.

This is not a book on the natural history or life cycle of the buffalo—although to establish context, chapter 1 gives a glimpse of buffalo pre -history. Nor is it an analysis of the ecological changes that swept the land with the coming of Anglo settlers. Rather, the intent is to tell the true story of buffalo hunting east of the Mississippi, with emphasis on hunters and their skills, and to place that saga in the larger setting of the exploration and settling of eastern North America.

There are two reasons why the buffalo in the East vanished: Over-hunting wiped out their ranks, and destruction of their habitat destroyed their range. Simon Girty, an adopted Seneca, American-turned-Tory, and buffalo hunter in the 1760s for the Philadelphia-based trading firm of Baynton,Wharton, and Morgan, framed both issues perfectly in 1782 in a terse speech to a pan-Indian war council at Wapakoneta, Ohio. The Long Knives have overrun your country, Girty declared. They have destroyed the cane—trodden down the clover—killed the deer and the buffaloes.

Indians, conquistadors, Jesuits, voyageurs, European explorers, and American frontiersmen kept few tallies of buffalo kills; many such folk thought no more of shooting a buffalo for its tongue than a modern-day plinker thinks of shooting a beer can. Market hunters did not keep methodical records of buffalo kills until the nineteenth-century western slaughter for meat and hides. Such data, where supplied, has been included.

Regarding terminology, the American buffalo is not a true buffalo, like the African Cape buffalo or the Asian water buffalo, but is closer kin to the European wisent, Bison bonasus, and is more accurately a bison. American colonists adopted the French terms of bufflo and buffelo to describe the beast. Father Louis Hennepin, a Récollet friar who spent two years in New France and wrote about his travels, introduced the term buffalo to European readers in 1683. John Lawson, who trudged through the Carolina Piedmont for fifty-nine days in 1700 to 1701, used buffalo in his book, The New Voyage to Carolina, published in England in 1709. Lawson’s work went through six reprints, including two German editions, before the term buffalo appeared in 1743 in Mark Catesby’s A Natural History of Carolina. As in those early works, this book refers to bison as buffalo.

Biologists generally agree that the historic buffalo east of the Mississippi was the Plains buffalo, Bison bison bison, noting that the buffalo arrived late, probably crossing the Mississippi by the late 1500s. Compared with the truly huge trans-Mississippian herds, droves in the East were small, rarely numbering more than five hundred head. When travelers across the Blue Ridge reported seeing vast buffalo herds, such herds often numbered fifty to one hundred head or less.

There is a well-known dissenting voice in such matters. In A Pennsylvania Bison Hunt, published 1915, Henry W. Shoemaker, an ex-ambassador to Bulgaria, Pennsylvania newspaper mogul, and self-published writer who specialized in werewolves and bawdy tales, contended that Pennsylvania buffalo—which, he said, numbered twelve thousand—were wood bison, basing his words on those of Jacob Quiggle (1821–1911). Jacob, at age eighty-nine, told Shoemaker that his grandfather Philip Quigley (1745–?) said the Pennsylvania buffalo was Like the Wood bison . . . of the Rocky Mountains and Canada Northwest. There is no evidence to corroborate such third-hand speculations. Yet spinners of buffalo lore have so canonized Shoemaker’s tales that The Long Hunt would be incomplete without mention of them.

This book places emphasis on Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the southern frontier. The reason is simple: Many naturalists, explorers, hunters, and surveyors who crossed the Appalachians wrote vivid descriptions about buffalo in their narratives, memoirs, diaries, and journals. Earlier reliable accounts are rare; in some, buffalo are confused with elk, moose, and deer. Even more bewildering, sometimes buffalolike terms appearing in the earliest journals are used interchangeably to describe all four animals. It is hard to make a historical case on such convoluted testimony.

Native Americans are important to this work, but its narrow scope did not allow for a historiographic digression about eastern Indian culture, which is more befitting a doctoral dissertation. Nor is this a forum to debate contentions by revisionist historians, ethnologists, and their academic kinsmen over the relevance of terms such as race, frontier, tribe, primitive, prehistory, and culture. Readers curious about such matters are referred to works cited in the references.

One last word: It is easy to moralize about the killing that led to the buffalo’s near extinction. But before casting blame, it is humbling to wonder how this generation will be judged by those inheriting its legacy of acid rain, oil and chemical spills, the disappearance of many plants and animals, overpopulation, toxic waste, pollution, poaching, and the spoliation of the world’s great forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers, and oceans.

Should we not be held to an equal—if not greater—degree of ecological stewardship than our forebears, who, in their limited vision, saw the wealth of buffalo beef, tongues, tallow, and hides as inexhaustible? It is hoped that the lessons learned from this tale of the killing of the buffalo east of the Mississippi will help stop further abuse of the earth and its resources.

The buffaloes were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant, of the violence of man. Sometimes we saw hundreds in a drove, and the numbers about the salt springs were amazing.

Daniel Boone    

Kentucky, 1769

We found it very difficult at first and indeed yet, to stop the great waste in killing meat. Many men were ignorant of the woods, and not skilled in hunting . . . would shoot, cripple and scare the game without being able to get much. . . . Others of wicked and wanton dispositions, would kill three, four, five or a half a dozen buffaloes, and not take a half horse load from them all.

Richard Henderson                 

Boonesborough, May 9, 1775

The Wild Cattle

of North America

BERINGIA. MISTS OF DARK HAZE HUNG IN THE SKY OVER THE SOGGY tundra mat of grass, moss, lichen, and dwarf shrubs. Above, a swirling void of cloud, ice, and fog stretched long and far, as if beckoning one to the earthen abyss below that led to an unseen land.

Subterranean tremors tossed and churned ice floes thousands of feet thick, jolting the huge plates girding the earth. Melting glacial sheets spanning continents moved slower than eye could see, carving up the bone and marrow of creation on sea and on land. Beringia marked an era of rising mountains, of pluvial lakes and seas, and of freezes and thaws that forever altered the firmament above and below the endless Oceania. As the deep basins froze at the northwestern apex of North America, the waters receded, giving way to the chiseled borders of a subcontinent. So rose the jut of rock, marsh, and bayou linking Siberia to Alaska across the Bering and Chukchi Seas. More a part of Asia than North America, Beringia appeared and vanished throughout the millennia of the Ice Age until it sank forever to rest beneath three hundred feet of ocean.

Historians and their academic kinsmen describe Beringia as a land bridge—the link of silt and rock bridged expanses of terra firma and opened stretches of tundra for man and beast. But the term is misleading. Beringia was one thousand miles wide and fifty-five miles long, an earthen thoroughfare between vistas of white, green, and brown that during thaws was coaxed to life by gusts from warm climes.

Migrating from Asia to North America during one of the Ice Age’s last interglaciations came the herbivores of the tundra—mammoths, mastodons, musk oxen, sloths, and caribou. Deer, sheep, and moose—prey for panthers and jaguars that tracked the ungulates across continents—trailed along with the herds. Bison priscus, the Holarctic wild cow, itself having migrated to the Asian steppes, joined this caravan of antler and hoof. Late in the Wisconsin Age of the Pleistocene Era—between 25,000 and 40,000 years ago—came Llano man.

Man was an adept bison hunter and may even have held the wild cow sacred. Millennia before mammals trekked across Beringia, paleo artists sketched Bison priscus on the smoke-patinaed walls of caverns in France and Spain. The steppe bison—or, more accurately, wisent—depicted in this petroglyphic line art are big, hump-backed creatures. Paleo man killed the woolly bovine with spears tipped with slivers of sharply knapped flint or quartz. Atlatls launched spears and darts with greater velocity, giving hunters more power to kill and keep their distance from dangerous prey.

Hunters on the Great Plains—a veldt extending from Canada to the Rio Grande and from the Rocky Mountains east to the Mississippi—found seas of buffalo grass, needle grass and protein-rich grama grass, a diverse array of forbs, bushes, trees, and a myriad of rivers and streams yielding browse, graze, and water. Arroyos, buttes, mountain breaks, passes, gaps, and gulches gave protection. There was food and shelter for both man and beast.

Reconstructing what happened at this critical hub and explaining how and why it happened are matters of interpretation. Because bulls, scientists say, were easier to hunt than cows, their skeletons appear frequently in dig sites. Fossil clues are based largely upon the skulls of male bison, focusing mostly on horn size. But within a species, horn size varies depending on age and genetics, and the horn sheaths encasing the fossilized cores are usually absent. Thus extrapolations about the speciation of prehistoric buffalo are educated guesses.

Scientists theorize that some mammals adapted to the climatic demands of North America but others became extinct. Huge consumers—the mammoths, mastodons, tapirs, and giant sloths—vanished, only their bones remaining as evidence that they once roamed the Great Plains and well past the Mississippi. As Bison priscus died out, other wild cows, most notably Bison latifrons, emerged.

Twice the size of the modern plains bison, and bearing a set of horns that measured nine feet from tip to tip, Bison latifrons was a formidable brute. The extent of its migratory range is a matter of dispute, but skeletal remains from this hulk of muscle and horn have been unearthed on the plains of Kansas and as far east as Ohio. According to the successive wave theory of bison evolution, smaller, more compact bovine stock with smaller horns, Bison alleni, came in the wake of Bison latifrons. Remains of Bison alleni have been identified in Kansas and Idaho. Either Bison alleni or Bison latifrons may have been a distant progenitor of a later species, Bison antiquus.

Folsom man hunted Bison antiquus (figginsi) about 9,000 years ago. Warriors cloaked in deer or wolf skins approached the beasts downwind, crawling on all fours. When they closed in, the hunters rose to hurl their spears into the hearts and lungs of the animals. Archaeological evidence shows that hunters ran herds into box canyons, trapped them in chutes built of stones and trees, or stampeded them off cliffs. Indians spotting a drove near a fall surrounded them at the rear and flank. A warrior disguised in a bison robe would near the herd, making sure the animals saw him. On signal, the hidden warriors closed in, spooking the bison into flight. As the decoy warrior bolted, the beasts followed him to the drop, galloping to their doom. In 1957 archaeologists discovered the remains of 193 Bison antiquus at a Colorado chute with bits of Folsom man’s spear points embedded in the bones.

Yet despite its mortality at the hand of Folsom man, Bison antiquus thrived from the Pacific Ocean to Kentucky and from the upper Missouri River drainage south to Mexico. Bison antiquus, unlike Bison lati-frons, had no horns, though Bison antiquus did sport a thick mane. But a contemporary of Bison antiquus from the Arctic, Bison occidentalis, was horned and bore a mane. Bison occidentalis, which died out perhaps 6,000 years ago, is an important link in the history of the North American wild cow. Some taxonomists believe that Bison occidentalis is the ancestor of the modern plains bison, Bison bison bison; the Canadian wood bison, Bison athabascae; and the European wisent, Bison bonasus.

All three of these ruminant subspecies still exist. Of the three, the wisent, which is smaller, leggier, and more streamlined than the Great Plains bison, is most in danger of extinction. Threatening wisent herds—already precariously low—are unstable wildlife policies, civil unrest, poaching, pollution, and habitat destruction. Currently about one thousand wisent roam what is left of the animal’s dwindling range, which is now restricted to the haphazardly managed state forests of Russia and Poland. The wisent of the Bialowieza Forest of Poland are perhaps the best-known and least endangered Old World bison.

Canadian wood bison, which are larger, darker, and hairier than the Great Plains bison and carry a higher, more defined hump, roam Wood Buffalo Park on the Alberta border, straddling the Northwest Territories, and on Elk Island, near Edmonton. Because of mismanaged wildlife relocation policies in the 1920s that resulted in accidental cross-breeding between Bison bison bison and Bison athabascae, however, by the 1950s many wood bison in Wood Buffalo Park shared the genes and morphological characteristics from both subspecies; in areas of such tainted gene pools, genetically pure Bison athabascae are rare. Even worse, diseases once unknown among bison, such as anthrax, brucellosis, and tuberculosis, ravage bison populations on several Canadian game preserves. Despite this situation, the official status of Bison athabascae was upgraded in 1989 from endangered to threatened.

But the North American bison—the buffalo—is the focus of this work. Tough, long-lived, prolific, able to take extreme cold or heat, swifter than a mustang at full gallop, and having few predators, the Great Plains buffalo seemed as many as the stars in the sky by the time of the coming of the white invaders.¹

June is bellowing time. Grunts rumbling like low-lying thunder-heads are heard for miles, resonating loudly in badger holes. Older buffalo bulls are restless, agitated, and wary, fending off younger rivals with impressive display: wagging black horns, posturing defiantly, abrupt side-long lunges, head butts, gorings. In early summer—June, actually—mature bulls feel the call to rut. Tension to mate builds slowly, but by July and August, the cows are fully in their two-day heat. Mountings are frequent, unions swift. The bull dismounts but lingers around the cow, eyeing his rivals. If the bull’s seed does not bring the cow’s womb to life, in three weeks the cow will again come into estrus. Courtship will begin anew. By September rut has ended. Gestation is just over nine months.

Winds blow chilly. By early autumn, a new wool pelage of auburn and brown sprouts from humps to forelocks, from nose to tail, as buffalo robes turn prime. Beards twelve inches long dangle from bulls. Graze sprouts after the rains of late summer and the buffalo feed, adding fat to insulate their taut bodies before winter.

Snow and ice hardly faze the beasts. The old and infirm succumb to plummeting temperatures, and a few weakened buffalo are picked off by grizzlies or cougars or, more likely, by one of the wolf packs that loll around the herds. But the first frosts cause the wild cows to buck and caper, seemingly frolicking in celebration that the heat is gone and, with it, the flies, gnats, and mosquitoes whose bites itch the buffalo’s bald flanks of summer.

King of the blizzard is what one herdsman dubbed the buffalo.² The animals stoically endure lashing sleet and puffballs of snow that pile in drifts higher than a first-year aspen. Herds seek cover in woodlands that circle the pockets of their range. Deep snow is a nuisance but seldom fatal. The beasts’ hairy muzzles allow them to plow with impunity through the layers of hoary crust to munch half-frozen flora below it. Gulps of snow stave off thirst when creeks ice over. Dominant cows seek sunny spots to bask and will stay in them even to the point of starving or being nipped by timber wolves that themselves feel winter’s pangs.

By February, robes look grizzled. Snowmelt begins by March, but food is sparse and buffalo begin to become gaunt. Calves—one to a cow, rarely twins—are dropped in April and May. By then the tattered coats shed in frayed, knotted hanks. The animals’ naked flanks twitch and shudder as hordes of ravenous insects seek their first blood. And at last comes rain, torrents of it—rain, sun, warmth; rivers swell, the land awakens and shimmers anew, and the buffalo gorge themselves in preparation for the next cycle of rut.

Indians were the true conquerors of the wilderness. By the time of the historic period, the first Americans—who peopled the land from the rim of the Arctic Circle to the tip of Tierra del Fuego—were far from a homogeneous lot. Native-built metropolises featuring sprawling estates, temple pyramids, centralized governments, and armies of foot soldiers thrived in Mexico. Indian cities rose high on sugarloaf mounds erected on the Illinois prairie bordering the banks of the Mississippi and north and south of its drainage. Historian Francis Jennings contends that the population of North American Indians may have numbered ten million to twelve million north of the Rio Grande.³

Seventeenth-century life was a golden age for many Plains Indians. By the 1600s, the Navajos, Athapascan horticulturists who made their log and adobe homes in that region, began to count Spanish horses—either stolen or traded—as part of their wealth. By the time of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 or a decade thereafter, there was a lively equine trade on the Great Plains.

Horses exerted a profound impact on native culture. Equipped with horses and dogs outfitted with travois poles, families and tribes became mobile. The Dakota used horses so much that their mode of subsistence became nomadic. Horses allowed more settled Siouans—like the Omaha, Iowa, Ponca, Osage, Oto, Mandan, and Missouri—to hunt buffalo, although such tribes did not become as nomadic as the Dakota. Soon Caddoan speakers—the Wichita, Pawnee, and Arikara—and the western Algonquins—Cheyenne, Blackfeet, and Arapaho—began to use mustangs to pursue buffalo herds. By the 1800s, Comanche hunters, who acquired horses from the Utes by 1700, dominated the Southern Plains of Texas and New Mexico.⁴ Until about 1880, for perhaps three dozen Plains groups the buffalo was a commissary on hooves.

Indians found wild beef rich and sustaining. A wet bull skin—thick, tough, and hard to tan—laced on a hardwood hoop dried into a rawhide shield. They fleshed cow hides, rubbed in glops of brains, then whipped the dank skins across a rawhide thong to break down the tough fibers to knead them into robes. Such coverings, soft and supple, wore like iron and lasted for years. Robes decorated with dyed porcupine quills and painted with red and yellow ocher mixed with fat became heirlooms.⁵

Leg and back sinews were stronger for sewing than thread from nettle fibers and easier to prepare. Arrows fired from sinew-backed hard-wood bows rocketed with startling velocity. Bladders and scrotums became pouches. The stomach lining was an edible stewpot: Native cooks would hang them on a tripod, fill them with water and meat, and toss in red-hot rocks to make the water boil. After the meat was served, the gut bag was eaten.

Coracles made from green (untanned) buffalo hides laced over a wattle of white oak, willow, or hickory strips, were buoyant, stable, and tough. The hair side was to the inside; the part that lay in the water, the skin side, was sun-baked drum hard, and the sinew and rawhide-stitched seams were caulked with tallow and ashes. Sticks piled in the craft’s bottom kept furs, food, and weapons dry. After a day on the river, the boats grew soggy and hard to steer. Early in the day, hide boats drew three to four inches of water; by afternoon they drew twice that. Indians poled the craft to shore at dusk to check for leaks and recaulk the seams for the next day’s trip. Pulled up on the bank, flipped over and propped up to dry, a buffalo hide boat became a shelter.⁶

Indians shaved summer hides clean of the sparse wool with a sharply honed elk rib bone and tanned the hide or used it as rawhide and sewed it into sundry items. They wove wool into cordage,