Heads, Hides and Horns: The Complete Buffalo Book

Buffalo as Surplus

"It thrilled me no end to read of those intrepid archers risking their lives against those ferocious, bw.:ket~fed buffalo. " DENVER POST "The bison ofAmerica are not. . . on the verge ofextinction . the American Bison Society . . . have done so well. . . that last year 1,400 surplus buffalo had to be killed. It would almost seem that they have overshot their mark. . it is rather a tough fate for a member of a proud breed, who thought he was being saved from extinction, to find himself being slaughtered to make room for others coming in. " ROBERT BENCHLEY N I923, letters began filling the IN basket on the desk of Horace Albright, Superintendent of Yellowstone Park. Now that 600 buffalo lived in the Park-600 that had to be fed in the winter or starve-Albright announced that the Park had buffalo to give away. The letters in his basket came from people who thought they'd enjoy a buffalo as a pet. A little girl's letter asked for a "cute, gentle little buffalo to play with," a mother and father asked for a buffalo to amuse their children who had tired of playing with cats and dogs. One man complained that he had to cancel his order for a pair of buffalo because his wife "is afraid the buffaloes might hurt the children." Other people complained that the buffalo they received were too big-they'd wanted a smaller size. Albright refused many requests, explaining to people that buffalo didn't belong in back yards. l Their size and wildness had always made buffalo undesirable as pets. Owners had captured them as calves, played with them while their butting couldn't hurt, scampered out of their way as horns began to sprout, but penned the full-size pet or slaughtered him. In the I870S, the sutler at Fort Hays had kept a calf that learned the cute trick of drinking beer. But as a not-so-cute, drunken two-year-old he could clear out the Officer's Club in one alcoholic charge, and, from the top of the billiard table, dare anyone to return . Sometimes he staggered part way upstairs only to lose his nerve and have to be blindfolded and backed down the steps. As his horns curved and pointed the Club game grew more Pamplonian; fortunately he soon died a dissolute death. Wagon trains along the Platte picked up orphaned calves as pets, a trouble to feed but a pleasure to tease. The calves tagged along during the day, then chased amongst the children, bucked and raced about the encampment circle in the dusk, butting at favorite targets . The two pets of the I834 Nathaniel Wyeth train chose John K. Townsend, the famous naturalist, to bedevil. Most every frontier fort mingled a few buffalo with its milk cows. Keepers of stage stations along the Overland Route penned some to play with until a barbecue date was set; Mounties at Fort Walsh, Canada, broke the boredom of outpost life by keeping buffalo pets. In the I840S, Uncle Dick Wootton captured about forty head near Bent's Fort on the Santa Fe Trail and put them up for sale; when no buyers arrived, he drove them east along the Trail, all the way to Independence . Farmers on the frontier often captured calves to take a stab at buffalo raising. In Iowa, in Buffalo as Surplus Rose Wentworth's famous buffalo, the Calgary Stampede, 1912. Note the nose rings. The "trained" buffalo were led rather than driven along the parade route. Courtesy G1enbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta. 1847, some of them hauled crated calves captured in northern Iowa to a pasture near Vinton. Another Iowa herd, raised from captured calves, lived forty years near Merrimac. l Most buffalo-raisers considered the beast domesticated if he would stay in pasture. For a beast to hitch to wagon or plow, they broke domestic oxen, rather than wasting their few spare moments breaking intractable buffalo. But those who had more time occasionally trained and yoked buffalo. In Texas some of the ciboleros, the Mexican horseback hunters, came north across the Rio Grande in wagons drawn by mixed oxen and buffalo teams. And in Montana, in r878, robe trader Andrew Garcia was visited by six squawking Red River carts, one drawn by "four buffalo hooked up to his carr; buffalo was not so hard to domesticate if they were captured when calves-and to capture them was no hard job." 3 Uncle Dick Wootton claimed...