Heads, Hides and Horns: The Complete Buffalo Book

Collecting for Posterity

"... when we have fitted the buffaw to its proper sphere, it is the chief of all ruminants. I will chain him and domesticate a race of cattle equal to, if not superior to, all ruminants heretofore known. I will attire myself in cwthing made from the products of the buffaw; even the buttons of my cwthes shall be made of horns and hoofs of that wonderful animal. I will not rely on the ravens for my food and raiment, and all may rest assured that I will never suffer from the howling blizzards, nor for meat go hungry. " BUFFALO JONES'S VOW "I had killed buffaw by the thousands for their skins and had vowed someday to capture and domesticate enough to attone for my cussedness. " BUFFALO JONES 13 UFFALO had been a staple of the expanding , young United States democracy for its first hundred years-more than a staple, one of its few luxuries. They had afforded penniless settlers choice cuts of meat: steaks, roasts, liver and kidney. They had provided tongue by the barrelfull to eastern cities. Now we had emptied this seeming inexhaustible, natural larder. One of the men who vowed to fill it again was C. J. "Buffalo" Jones, ex-hide hunter, who said he vowed his vow in 1886 (in his later days he was a great one for vowing vows that might read well). Jones in his flamboyant way contended that the slaughter for hides had sickened him. He said that as hunter he had sworn off many a time, determined to break his gun over a wagonwheel when he got back to camp, but had put it off. And when next morning guns sounded, he couldn't resist the excitement. Certainly he was one of the most publicized men to try to perpetuate the buffalo species-C. J. Jones of Kansas, mostly known as Buffalo Jones and sometimes called Colonel. Jones, it appears, would have liked as much fame as Buffalo Bill Cody-and he partially achieved it: Emerson Hough, magazine writer and novelist-to-be who accompanied him to Texas on an expedition to capture buffalo calves, wrote of him, "There is no man in Kansas so well known, perhaps no private citizen better, in the entire United States."l Hough knew him in 1887 at a time when he was flush with money made from real estate in the town he fathered, Garden City, Kansas, a time when he had just built a $100,000 marble-faced hotel in the little prairie town (the Buffalo Hotel), and had built a part of the Nickel Plate Railroad, a time when he could write a check for $100,000, a time when he could vote as a member of the state legislature. A long time before he died in poverty. Before he died, Buffalo Jones did far more than the renowned Buffalo Bill toward preserving buffalo. He loved adventure and notoriety, dreamed impossible dreams, yet attempted to establish a practical, profitable buffalo ranch. By establishing his ranch, he felt he had reformed and was doing penance. It may have salved the Colonel's conscience to believe this, but another buffalo-lover saw a Jones who "had visions of big game hunters coming to his ranch and Collecting for Posterity Buffalo Jones. Frederic Remington, Harper's Weekly, July 12. 1890. Courtesy Amon Carler Museum. Fort Warlh. Texas. paying him important money to ride and shoot in a buffalo hunt." 1 And a glimpse of his more practical reason may be seen in a phrase about a buffalo calf which almost escaped him: "What should I do?There was a calf worth a thousand dollars, and all that I had to do was catch ir." J Whatever his reasons, Buffalo Jones caught sixtysix calves on four different hunts (sixty-six more or less-some say fifty-nine and Jones's different accounts arrive at different tOtals). trailed them the many miles to his ranch , and raised them to adulrhOCKi; he preserved enough buffalo so that, in the 1890$. 500 buffalo living around the world were offspring of the calves raised on his Kansas ranch." In Emerson Hough's magazine articles about the ISS7 calf-capturing trip, Jones's dash and determination measure up to some of his brag. Hough and his partner, artist A. J. Ricker, bullied their way into this second expedition to the Texas Panhandle. Jones, fearing that such greenhorns might frighten the buffalo away, refused to take them. But when they threatened...