CHAPTER 1
"... the earth is covered with their Horns." FATHER HENNEPIN
"For three or four days the soil has been absolutely manured with the dung of buffalo." SIR GEORGE SIMPSON
"... you might travel for days and weeks and not see one of them. But their tracks were everywhere." REV. DR. JOHN MCDOUGALL
One morning in July 1966, a lone buffalo bull grazed near the highway on the mountain between Virginia City and Ennis, Montana, unmindful of the click of camera shutters or the rustle of hesitant tourists getting in and out of automobiles. Nor did his tail rise and kink at carloads of miners and cowboys and storeowners and the rest of us, come up from the towns below. After awhile he crossed the highway, stopping on it just long enough to pose for the picture that appeared in Virginia City's weekly newspaper, The Madisonian, showing him astraddle the center line. He was a bachelor bull, alone in the way of bachelor bulls for ever and ever, roaming a range which 100 years ago had held so many buffalo that the valleys below stank of them. Today he roamed the thousands of acres of forest, unaware in his typical bachelor solitude that he was one of the few buffalo on earth—and lucky to be here at that, a curiosity. Big, tough, sure that nothing could harm him, he fled from men in nylon sport shirts no more than he had from early Spaniards in iron breastplates ("they remained quiet and did not flee," reported one of the Conquistadores).
Undoubtedly he belonged in Yellowstone Park, but just like his great-grandparents he grazed where he pleased, moving unpredictably from range to range across wide expanses of country and showing up where least expected.
Later in the day the bull moved along the ridge as sure of himself as if he still owned the millions of acres from which he had been dispossessed.
Something about the cry "Buffalo nigh!" always has pulled men out for a look-see. One Sunday in 1835, in the country south of the Tetons, the cry stole a congregation of mountain men from the Reverend Samuel Parker's preaching. And such a cry startled greenhorns along the Platte into realizing that those brown shapes they saw ahead in a valley were buffalo, not brown bushes. It brought' 49ers tumbling out of Conestoga wagons for a go at a buffalo run. The same cry had brought us, miner and storekeeper, tourist and cowboy, actor and reporter, to gawk at a real, live, wild buffalo on the highway.
A gawk at a live buffalo was what every pilgrim of '49 and '63 wanted, but often the herds grazed far from the wagon trails, avoiding white guns. They were either hidden by Indian buffalo herders or wandering erratically into the wind. Nary a buffalo in buffalo land, but a man could see the buffalo lived there—buffalo sign filled the country.
The herds marked their territory with trails, thousands of them, some shallow traces, some eight-to ten-inch trenches, others "so deep that the animal's sides would rub the embankments." Millions of buffalo in thousands of years, buffalo feeding in the hills, walking down slopes to valley water, and crossing ridges in search of new pasture, produced trail crossing trail. They abandoned deep ones for shallow new ones until the paths led in any direction a man might go. They created mazes that frustrated prairie travelers. As Henry Kelsey, wandering Canadian plains in 1691, wrote, "by reason of so many beaten paths w[hich] y[e] Buffillo makes we lost y[e] track." One hundred fifty years later, Zebulon Pike, when lost on the plains, tried to follow the trail of Spaniards, who, he felt, had good guides and would know where to find wood and water, but he lost their trail, it "being so much blended with the traces of the buffalo," and couldn't find it again "owing to the many buffalo roads." An Oregon-bound emigrant of the 1850s wrote, "It is astonishing to see the ground stamped, worn, hoofed & trod upon by these old fellows." Often, a wagon train traveling west along the Platte was forced to stop and repair wheels loosened by the constant thumping from crossing buffalo trails leading out of the river toward grass in the hills. Emigrants who had been forewarned would stow away extra tire irons and felloes to repair this damage from buffalo trails.
But sometimes the trails were more help than hindrance. Buffalo had nosed into most every place a man wanted to go. If he wanted to ride through seemingly impenetrable canebrake in bottoms east of the Mississippi, he usually found a buffalo trail going his way. Mountain men like Zenas Leonard, weak and fighting deep snow, came upon trails broken for them by the buffalo (and were further saved when they shot the buffalo who had made the trails). Traders on the snow-drifted Canadian prairie saved their horses' strength by following the winding buffalo paths. Indians dragged travois in the convenient trails. Wagons followed paths beaten wide through the wilderness. Artist George Catlin, riding alone and chartless across the plains, did as many other wanderers: he looked to cross rivers where a buffalo trail broke steep cutbank into a slope his horse could manage. Sometimes these travelers found buffalo hooves had squished such a crossing into quagmire, though at other times they had pounded it pavement-hard; often a hoped-for spring had been worked "into a loblolly of mud."
Trails led out of creek bottoms toward feeding grounds, forking, curlycueing across the grass in patterns as erratic as the whimsies of the beast. As many as twenty paths together crossed benches and saddles, going over them a couple of feet apart "like old corn rows but not so wide." (Men still run upon such trails in these low crossing places.) Father Hennepin noted, "Their ways are as beaten as our great Roads, and no Herb grows therein." The trails eroded hillsides, left ridges barren and washing away, made gullies down steep coulees and clay cutbanks. In wet weather 200 buffalo would wear an instant muddy trail in one crossing of a meadow. Where the buffalo fed, men found footprints "cloven, and bigger than the feete of Camels" running "in all directions"; where the tracks lay thick, men found soil so "absolutely manured with dung of buffalo" it appeared as "a stallyard." Some places were covered with hundreds of skeletons, horns, and rotting carcasses.
Between the trails, tufts of buffalo hair fluttered amongst the grass; bits of it waved in the breeze from thorn-apple spikes and from lodgepole bark, a Spanish moss of the sagebrush country. If a man found a red squirrel's nest or a bird's nest he likely found it lined with buffalo hair.
Sign...
