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Relics: Buffalo Bones and Starving Indians
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"Whenever civilized man has met with the larger mammalia in abundance. . . the temptation to slaughter for the mere sake of killing seems rarely to be resisted. " JOEL ALLEN N 1884, editors wrote scathingly of the men who had all but exterminated the buffalo, the hide hunters. The editors seemed surprised that the Missouri River Valley held no buffalo where only a couple of years ago a million or two had roamed. They bemoaned the absence of herds along the Platte and the Arkansas and the Cimarron. They spoke of the terrible waste and of the wantonness of those who had worn out guns shooting buffalo for their hides only. They seemed surprised that, in spite of their good intentions , without warning, bad men, behind their backs, had suddenly done away with the buffalo. But men had been prophesying the buffalo's disappearance for years. As early as 1776, Bernard Romans, a traveler in the United States, worried over their continual destruction for their tongues only. John D. Hunter, raised by Indians, in a book about his experiences spoke his disgust with Manuel Lisa on the Kansas River about 1815, when he saw for the first time the "wide and wanton destruction of game, merely to procure the skins" and the "buffalo carcasses strewed over the ground in a half putrified state." I Game had disappeared so fast along the eastern seaboard that colonial lawmakers had decided to protect it. Georgia's House of Commons had made it illegal to I}} hunt buffalo in certain areas in 1759,2 a law as effective as the twentieth century's Prohibition Act-the buffalo disappeared from Georgia about 177}. Hunters had killed all the buffalo in Illinois about 1800 and in West Virginia about 1825. They had slaughtered those in Kentucky by 1800 and in Tennessee by 1810. Men settling in eastern Iowa in 1825 found almost no buffalo. The last buffalo living east of the Mississippi were killed off about 18}2-by Sioux Indians. Major Stephen Long's 1819-20 expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains noted that "all the herds of these animals appear to have deserted the country east of Council Bluffs" and found no big herds east of the Little Arkansas' mouth. The report said the nation needed a law to protect the buffalo against mere wantonness. George Catlin, watching and painting the killing along the Missouri in the 18}os, believed that the buffalo would disappear in eight or ten years; Maximilian, observing the west about the same time, wrote of "a very great decrease" in their numbers. In the same year, Josiah Gregg, traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, wrote: The vast extent of the prairies upon which they now pasture is no argument against the prospect of their total extinction, when we take into consideration the Heads, Hides & Horns extent of the country from which they have already disappeared. . . they were nearly as abundant east of the Mississippi as they now are upon the western prairies . . . they are rarely seen within two hundred miles of the frontier. Indeed, upon the high plains they have sensibly decreased within the last ten years. 1 In 1841, John B. Newhall reported none surveyed in Iowa and that "Even the Indians on our border have to go fifteen or twenty days' hunt before they can find this animal." 4 That same year the Osages could find no buffalo on the former prime range near the junction of the Canadian and Arkansas. Their agent reported them traveling farther west for each annual hunt. 5 In the 1850S, Alexander Ross, writing of the buffalo of the Red River country in Canada, had said, "They are now like a ball between two players. The Americans are driving them north, the British south. The west alone will furnish them a last and temporary retreat ."6 In 1855, Indian Agent John Whitfield reported the Comanches, Kiowas, Kiowa-Apaches, Arapahoes and Cheyennes forced to eat mules and horses because they could find no buffalo. In 1857, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs said that many Indians now lived by plunder because the buffalo were gone. 7 In 1868, General W. F. Raynolds, explorer of Yellowstone country, some of which would become the National Park, said he believed the buffalo would be extinct in "another generation." In 1876, Joel A. Allen, in his monograph "History of the American Bison," concluded that "While the range seems not to have been as yet very materially circumscribed during the last...