Heads, Hides and Horns: The Complete Buffalo Book

Poachers

"It is supposed by many that the game in YeUowstone Park is preserved; but reliable accounts assert that it is not. " THE BAD LANDS COWBOY I884 L HE SOUTHERN herd and northern herd disappeared, but a few hundred buffalo wandered unmolested through the sulphur smell of geysers surrounding Yellowstone Lake. This high mountain prairie was too scary for the Indian hunter who saw the steaming mud pots and the spouting waters as signs of evil spirits; he followed no escaping animals here. And this land lay too far from the railroad for the hide hunter, so, although he slaughtered all the buffalo on the lower Yellowstone River, he left several hundred living undisturbed on its headwaters, especially the Pelican Creek and Lamar Valleys. After 1872 the boundaries of the newly formed Yellowstone Park supposedly protected these for all time. But by 1890 the poachers surrounding the infant park, voracious for the $200 to $500 per head a foray into the park might bring, put them in jeopardy. The poachers especially loved the high country's winters , when deep snow sometimes drove the starving animals across the western park line or trapped them in Pelican Valley, easy victims, heads and hides easily tobogganed out. Everything favored the poachers in winter. The pelt was prime, and snow made the park "fifty times larger": park protection was difficult, even negligible because of understaffing. Things were about as favorable in the spring. One May, a poacher made it out of the park with two newborn calves crammed into beer boxes on mule back; of course they died of the treatment. Yet when the poachers brought down park buffalo, they merely followed the example of tourists, local residents, and concessionaires who treated the park as an exclusive shooting range. Many visitors lived off the land. Although the original Yellowstone Park Act had specified that the Secretary of the Interior "shall provide against the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within said park," park regulations permitted hunting for recreation or for use. Hotels loaded their tables with park game. Some visiting dignitaries trophy-hunted as if the government had set aside a private estate for them. A national park had been boundaried, but as yet the nation little understood what to do with its contents -many people yet scoffed at this notion of private public land, of wild animals owned by the public. Much of the formation of the park had come about only as a boundary establishment. The founders felt they needed only to reserve the land and thought little about forests and game. Congress remained unperturbed by reports of hunters killing game. Congressmen, like all Americans, Poachers found it difficult to conceive of not shooting any animal that moved into rifle range. Thus they sat complacently by, ignoring the slaughter of 2000 elk for their skins near Mammoth Hot Springs during the winter of 1874. Eleven years later they paid no attention to Superintendent D. W. Wear's pleas for game laws and his suggestion that they ban all shooting and hunting in the park. In 1881, Harry Yount, resigning as first park game keeper after one year on the job, had suggested that more men be added to protect game as well as suppress fires and enforce other regulations. Congress ignored his suggestions. Earlier, Superintendent Philetus W. Norris (who "protected the wonders [geyser formations] by breaking them off with axe and crowbar, and shipping them by the carload to Washington and elsewhere") 1 had suggested that Congress pay ranchers then living in the park a stipend if they would "domesticate" wild animals on their ranches. Congress did nothing. Norris assumed his administration had stopped the shooting of buffalo, an entirely erroneous assumption as it turned out. Superintendent Nathaniel Langford thought to oversee the park through giving hotel and other concessions to private citizens, thinking they might do the government's overseeing for it and cut vandalism2 (hacking of souvenir sinter from geyser cones and chiseling names in the cones) as well as poaching. The concessionaires proved uninterested, so much so that Captain William Ludlow of the United States Army visiting Yellowstone in 1875 reported great destruction of game and continual vandalism (he saw a woman with axe about to split a geyser cone). He suggested protection of the park by the Army; no one but the Secretary of War, who seconded it, heeded his suggestion. 3 In 1884 Congressmen at last realized that all that made the park unique would be...