USA > Oklahoma > A standard history of Oklahoma; an authentic narrative of its development from the date of the first European exploration down to the present time, including accounts of the Indian tribes, both civilized and wild, of the cattle range, of the land openings and the achievements of the most recent period, Vol. II > Part 8
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"To the northwest, toward the head of the Limestone, for about twelve or fifteen miles, west across that valley to Oak creek, about the same distance, away to the southwest to the forks of the Solo- mon, past where Cawker City is now located, about twenty-five miles south to the Solomon River, and southeast toward where Beloit is now situated, say fifteen or twenty miles, and away across the Solomon River as far as the field-glasses would carry the vision, toward the Blue Hills, there was a moving, black mass of buffalo, all traveling slowly to the northwest at a rate of about one or two miles an hour. The northeast side of the line was about one mile from us; all other sides, beginning and ending, were undefined. They were moving deliberately and undisturbed, which told us that no Indians were in the vicinity. We marched down and into
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them. A few shots were fired. The herd opened as we passed through and closed up behind us, while those to the windward ran away. That night we camped behind a sheltered bend and bluff of one of the branches of the Limestone. The advance had killed several fine animals, which were dressed and loaded into the wagons for our meat rations. All night the buffalo were passing, with a continual roar; guards were doubled and every precaution taken to prevent them from running over the camp. The next morning we turned our course, marching north toward White Rock creek, and about noon passed out of the herd. Looking back from the high bluffs we gazed long at the black mass still moving northwest.
"Many times has the question come to my mind, How many buffaloes were in that herd? And the answer, no one could tell. The herd was not less than twenty miles in width-we never saw the other side-at least sixty miles in length, may be much longer; two counties of buffaloes! There might have been 100,000 or 1,000,000 or 100,000,000. I don't know. In the cowboy days in Western Kansas we saw 7,000 head of cattle in one round-up. After gazing at them a few moments our thoughts turned to that buffalo herd. For a comparison, imagine a large pail of water; take from it or add to it a drop, and there you have it. Seven thousand head of cattle was not a drop in the bucket compared with that herd of buffalo. Seeing them, a person would have said there would be plenty of buffalo a hundred years to come, or even longer. Just think, that ten years later there was scarcely a buffalo on the continent. That vast herd and the many other herds had been exterminated by the ruthless slaughter of the hide-hunters, who left the meat to rot on the plains as food for the coyotes and carrion crows, taking only the hides, which were hauled away in the wagons to the Union Pacific Railroad, and shipped in train- loads East.
"In a few years the bleaching bones were gathered up by the bone-pickers, stacked in great ricks at the railroad stations, and later shipped East, to become fertilizer for worn-out Eastern farms. Sold for a price of six to ten dollars per ton, bone-picking enabled many a homesteader to buy the provisions to take his family through the winter and until he could raise another crop. The hides sold from $1 to $4 each, with a probable average of $2.75. The robe hides, those killed late in the fall and early winter, being best, brought better prices-sometimes as high as five dollars each. Small fortunes were made by the hide-buyers and traders who furnished the supplies for the hunters. Usually the hunters had little to show
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for their labor, privations and dangers. We have no word to say against the killers; we were one of them. The government should have passed laws to protect and restrict the killing of buffalo. The danger of extermination was not realized until too late; or, as the Indians would say in lamentation and sorrow, 'Buffalo all gone.' "' 3
The buffalo, or bison, was a hardy beast, inured to extremes of heat and cold and apparently thriving upon scant pasturage. They were reputed to live to the age of thirty years and, though the rate of increase was not perhaps equal to that of domestic cattle, yet it was sufficient in the aggregate, had the killing been limited to the needs of settlers and Indians, to have perpetuated vast herds many years longer than they were actually permitted to exist. The west- ward extension of the settlements in Texas, Kansas, and Nebraska had the effect of pushing the limits of the buffalo range slowly westward, but it seems probable that this agency of itself would not have caused the extinction of the buffalo herds on the Great Plains in fifty years, whereas, they were practically blotted out of existence in a small fraction of that time.
The factors which entered most largely into the extermination of the millions of buffalo were the railroads and the high-power repeating rifles which came into use just about the time the rail- roads began to penetrate the buffalo range. So long as the products of the buffalo hunt-hides, tanned robes, dried meat and tongues- had to be transported hundreds of miles by wagon to the Missouri River for shipment, the buffalo herds were free from danger of immediate extermination, even though each succeeding year saw their ranges slightly narrowed by reason of the extension of the settlements. But the seven years between 1866, when the Union Pacific Railway first pushed up the Platte Valley, to 1873, when the line of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe was completed into Colorado, saw the buffalo range traversed by three lines of railway, each of which offered a convenient and comparatively cheap means of transporting the products of the buffalo hunt to markets that had hitherto been out of reach. At the same time, as if to put a premium on human cupidity and to make possible the whole- sale slaughtering of the buffalo, high-power, breach-loading maga- zine rifles of long range were invented and brought out for the purpose of making the killing of buffalo easy and expeditious.
The killing of buffalo for their hides became a systematically
3 William D. Street, in Kansas Historical Society Collections, Vol. IX, pp. 42-4.
Vol. II- 6
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organized business with a well defined division of labor, one man of each hunting outfit being an expert marksman, whose skill lay in "getting a stand" on a bunch of buffalo and killing them at long range, while others gave their whole time to skinning the animals which had thus been killed and another followed with a team and wagon to gather up the skins and haul them to camp, where each was stretched to dry in the sun. During the early '70s, the business of buying buffalo skins and hides for shipment was one which reached very large proportions at a number of places on the first railways which were built across the Great Plains.
The news items in the frontier press of the day give some idea of the prowess of some of the buffalo hunters, as evidenced by the following :
"Dickinson County has a buffalo hunter by the name of War- nock, who has killed as high as 658 in one winter .- Edwards County (Kansas) Leader."
"O dear, what a mighty hunter! Ford County has twenty men who each have killed five times that many in one winter. The best on record, however, is that of Tom Nickson, who killed 120 at one stand in forty minutes, and who, from the 15th of September to the 20th of October, killed 2,173 buffaloes. Come on with some more big hunters if you have any .- Dodge City Times, August 18, 1877."
The buffalo of the region south of the Platte River were com- monly referred to as the southern herds, as they commonly ranged northward to Nebraska in the spring and southward toward Texas in the autumn. Consequently, the killing of the buffalo herds in Kansas or Texas directly affected the supply of that sort of game in the western part of the Indian Territory. The slaughter of the buffalo herds went on, not only in Kansas and in the Texas Pan- handle region but also in that part of Texas which lay to the south of the Upper Red River.
"The town of Griffin is supported by buffalo hunters and is their general rendezvous in this section. The number of hunters on the ranges this season is estimated at 1,500. We saw at Griffin a plat of ground of about four acres covered with buffalo hides spread out to dry, besides a large quantity piled up for shipment. These hides are worth in this place from $1.00 to $1.60 each. The generally accepted idea of the exciting chase in buffalo hunting is not the plan pursued by the men who make it a regular business. They use the needle gun with telescope, buy powder by the keg, their lead in bulk and the shells and make their own cartridges.
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The guns in a party of hunters are used by only one or two men, who say they usually kill a drove of thirty or forty buffaloes on one or two acres of ground. As soon as one is killed the whole herd, smelling the blood, collect around the dead body, snuffing and paw- ing up the ground and uttering a singular noise. The hunter continues to shoot them down as long as he can remain concealed or until the last animal 'bites the dust.' The buffalo pays no attention to the report of the gun, and flees only at the sight or scent of his enemy. The others of the party then occupy them- selves in 'peeling.' Some of these have become so skillful' they
BUFFALO ON THE GREAT PLAINS
offer to bet they can skin a five- or six-year-old bull in five minutes. The meat is also saved and sent to market and commands a good price .- Shackleford County (Texas) Letter to the Galveston News. "
The buffalo bone gathering industry has already been alluded to by one of the writers quoted. Few people have any idea of the magnitude of this peculiar business. Buffalo bones were to be seen stacked up for shipment at some points along the line of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway, in Western Kansas and Eastern Colorado, as late as the autumn of 1886-fully ten years after the bulk of the great herds of the Southern Plains had been killed almost to the point of extermination. The late Robert M. Wright told of the buffalo bone industry of his town as follows:
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"One of Dodge City's great industries was the bone trade. It certainly was immense. There were great stacks of bones, piled up by the railroad track-hundreds of tons of them. It was a sight to see them. They were stacked up away above the tops of the box cars and often there were not sufficient cars to move them. Dodge excelled in bones, as she did in buffalo hides, for there were more than ten times the number of carloads shipped out of Dodge than out of any other town in the state, and that is saying a great deal, for there was a vast amount shipped from every little town in Western Kansas.
"The bones were a godsend to the early settler, for they were his main stock in trade for a long, long time; and, if it had not been for the bone industry, many poor families would have suffered for the very necessaries of life. It looked like a wise dispensation of Providence. Many poor emigrants and settlers came to Kansas with nothing but an old wagon and a worse span of horses, a large family of helpless children and a few dogs-nothing else. No money, no work of any kind whatever to be had, when, by gather- ing buffalo bones, they could make a living or get a start. Game was all killed off and starvation staring them in the face; bones were their only salvation and this industry saved them. They gathered and piled them up in large piles, during the winter, and hauled them to Dodge at times when they had nothing else to do, when they always demanded a good price. This industry kept us for many years and gave the settler a start, making it possible for him to break the ground from which he now raises such large crops of wheat, making him rich and happy. Yes, indeed! Many of our rich farmers of today, once were poor bone pickers, but if they hear this, it don't go. Certainly this was a great business, as well as a godsend, coming at a time when the settlers most needed help. All this added to the wealth and prosperity of Dodge and added to its fame. 'Buffalo bones are legal tender in Dodge City,' was the strolling paragraph in all the Kansas exchanges." 4
Although the railroad was a long way from the border of the old buffalo range in the western part of the Indian Territory, yet many a wagon load of bones of the vanished wild herds were hauled to Wichita from the northern part of the present Oklahoma. Freighters returning with empty wagons after having hauled loads of merchandise or supplies for the military posts or Indian agencies
4 "Dodge City, the Cowboy Capital," pp. 156-7.
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along the line of the old Chisholm Trail, were wont to stop in the valleys of the Cimarron or the Salt Fork (Nescatunga) and load up with buffalo bones for which they found a ready market at $7.00 per ton when they reached the end of the railroad at Wichita; of course it was a long haul but, as the journey had to be made anyway, it was so much added to the proceeds of the round trip. The bone picker even has a place in the literature of Oklahoma, Scott Cummins ("The Pilgrim Bard") 5 having indicted six pathetic verses entitled "The Song of the Bone Pilgrim," while gathering buffalo bones in the valley of Eagle Chief Creek, within the limits of the present Woods County, in September, 1879. The verses were originally written with a bullet on the bleached shoulder blade of a buffalo. Two of them are here quoted :
I pass by the home of the wealthy, And I pass by the hut of the poor, But none care for me When my cargo they see, And no one will open the door. O think of the poor bone Pilgrim, Ye who are safely at home; No one to pity me, no one to cheer me, As o'er the lone prairie I roam.
5 Scott Cummins was born in Ohio in 1846. When he was two years old his parents migrated to the frontier of Iowa, where his early life was spent with but meagre educational advantages. At the outbreak of the Civil war, though not yet fifteen years old, he enlisted in the volunteer military service and served until the end of that conflict. He moved to Kansas in 1870 and, a couple of years later, settled in the wilderness of Barber County, where he followed the occupation of buffalo hunter in Southwestern Kansas and Northwestern Oklahoma as long as the buffalo remained. When the great herds had vanished, he gathered and hauled their bones to market at Wichita, which was then the nearest railway. station. He continued to live in Barber County, Kansas, until September, 1893, when the Cherokee Strip was opened to settle- ment, since which he has been a resident of Woods County, Okla- homa. He has been a prolific writer of verse, a volume of his poems, entitled "Musings of the Pilgrim Bard," having been published in 1903. He is a rustic philosopher who has read the book of nature as he has lived his life in the open. He is peculiarly a poet of the short grass plains, the gypsum canyons and the sand dunes of the Southwest. His writings are distinguished for their grasp of the humble phases of the life of his time and environ- ment and for a spirit of broadest charity and catholicity.
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There's a place, as we journey to market, Where the Ninnescah River doth flow; There we camp on the strand And fill each skull with sand To make up for shrinkage, you know.
O think of the poor bone Pilgrim, Ye who are safely at home;
No one to pity mne, no one to cheer me, As o'er the lone prairie I roam.
The last buffalo in Oklahoma County was killed in March, 1876, and the animals were rarely seen east of the Chisholm Trail after that time. During the autumn of 1876 and the succeeding winter, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians secured 7,000 buffalo robes, for which they received an average of $5.00 each in trade. They also tanned 15,000 robes for the traders, who had secured them from white hunters, and for which process they were paid $2.00 each." They suffered severe losses during the course of their buffalo hunt by reason of the incursions of white horse-thieves. The Indians of the Wichita Agency secured about 5,000 buffalo robes during the same season. The Indians of all tribes were quite as anxious to save the meat as well as the robes. A herd of buffalo estimated to contain 40,000 animals, was on the North Canadian between Camp Supply and the site of Woodward, late in July, 1877. Although that was not the season to kill for robes, the herd was even then surrounded by white hunters and the Indians of several tribes, all engaged in killing buffalo.
The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Comanches, Kiowas and Plains Apaches hunted buffalo in the western part of the Territory again during the following season but the results were meagre. The Cheyennes and Arapahoes had only 219 robes to trade as the result of the hunt.7 The next season (1878-9) the buffalo hunt was practically a failure, the Indians returning with few robes and little meat, and that was the last general buffalo hunt on the part of the Indians of the Southern Plains region.8
A few small bands of buffalo continued to roam in the Texas Panhandle and in No-Mans-Land for some years after the business
6 Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1877, pp. 80 and 113.
7 Ibid., pp. 55 and 60.
8 Ibid., pp. 58 and 64.
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of hunting them ceased. Indeed, they were so few and so wary, that it was scarcely worth while to hunt them. A small herd was reported to have wintered in the valley of the Cimarron, in Morton County, Kansas, in 1885-6. Early in the following spring the carcasses of two buffalo which had been killed in No-Mans-Land were hauled by wagon to Pueblo, Colorado, where they were sold to a meat market. In the summer of 1888, "Buffalo" Jones, who had been one of the pioneers in the endeavor to domesticate the buffalo, tried to round up and capture what was supposed to be the last remnants of the great southern herd of buffalo, but, even with the aid of his domesticated herd, he was utterly unable to capture them alive. The last wild buffalo in Oklahoma, a lonely old bull, was killed at Cold Springs, in Beaver (now Cimarron) County, in October, 1890.
There can be no doubt but that the means and methods of the hide hunters were extremely wasteful in that the meat of the greater part of the slaughtered millions was left to feed the vul- tures and wolves, if not to decay. Humane sentiment and sound policy would have been on the side of the preservation of these splendid game animals. But, regardless of sentiment or policy, the fact remains that the extermination of the buffalo was the one thing needful to persuade the restless Indians to settle down on their reservations and cease from roaming at large. In the wake of the slaughtered herds, two or three years later, came the gleaners of this harvest of blood and death, to gather up the bleach- ing bones to be shipped to the East for the manufacture of fertil- izers. On the virgin sod of the Great Plains, the paths made by the buffalo, in going to and from their drinking places, are still visible; and their circular wallows, like indelible autographs that they are, will still be in evidence a century hence, if the implements of husbandry do not obliterate them.
Fortunately for the perpetuation of the species, a few small herds of domesticated buffalo were established by catching the young calves and rearing them like domestic cattle. Two of the earliest of these were those of Charles Goodnight, of Palo Duro Canyon, in the Texas Panhandle, and W. C. ("Buffalo") Jones, of Garden City, Kansas. At one time the total number of living animals of the species had been reduced to about 1,000, but in recent years the increase has been such as to more than treble that number. There are now three herds of buffalo in Oklahoma, namely, the herd maintained by the Government on the Wichita
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Mountain Forest Reserve; the one owned by the 101 Ranch, in Kay County, and the one owned by Maj. Gordon W. Lillie (Pawnee Bill), in Pawnee County. All of these are increasing, the one on the Forest Reserve having grown from twelve animals in 1907 to over fifty in 1915.
CHAPTER LIV
THE RANGE CATTLE INDUSTRY
That the Indian Territory was well adapted to the live stock industry seemed to be conclusively proven by the number of cattle that were stolen and confiscated during the Civil war. The end of the war found one-half of the state still in the buffalo range and the Indians of that region so hostile that the possibility of establishing the live stock industry in that part of the country was scarcely to be thought of as yet. With the opening of the cattle trail from Texas to the shipping points in Kansas, in 1867, the men engaged in driving herds through the central part of the Indian Territory had an opportunity to observe the character and quality of the soil, the water supply and the grasses and herbage suitable for grazing. As the years went by, the ranges of the five civilized were partially restocked with cattle. The number ·of cattle driven across the Indian Territory from Texas to Kansas for shipment increased each year also until it was averaging a third of a million each year.
There had been a measure of risk in driving cattle northward to Kansas in the beginning as was evidenced by the fact that the trail kept to the eastward of the Kiowa-Comanche and Cheyenne- Arapaho reservations. After the end of the outbreak of 1874, however, there was less apprehension of danger from those sources and, moreover, the buffalo had practically disappeared from the lands lying east of the cattle trail. Most of the Unassigned Lands lay to the east of the main cattle trail also. When the buffalo were gone the grass still grew as luxuriantly as before but, aside from the meagre amount of pasturage required by the scattering bands of deer and antelope, they remained ungrazed. Surely here was an opportunity which could not long remain unnoticed and unap- propriated. So, within a year after the end of the last general Indian war on the Southern Plains, the range cattle industry was planted in the central and western parts of the Indian Territory. Herds were driven in, mostly from Texas, ranges were occupied, ranch buildings and corrals were built and a new era in the history
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of Oklahoma was begun without ceremony or announcement. The buffalo hunter had had his day and was gone and in his stead had come the herdsman with herds that were only less wild than the buffalo. Though this era of the range cattle industry in Okla- homa was not destined to be a long one, it was as distinctive and as picturesque as any period in the history of the state. The first cattle ranges thus selected were on the Unassigned Lands and on the unoccupied lands of the Cherokee Strip. The cattlemen quietly drove their herds in and turned them loose on the range without asking permission to do so, just as unoccupied lands of the public domain of the United States in other states and territories were likewise occupied by stock ranches at that period.
Except for the fact that the buffalo were gone and that the region was comparatively free from intrusion by the Indians, the lands upon which the cattle ranches were established were still in the condition of a primitive wilderness. Many of the smaller streams were as yet unnamed and the names by which they are now designated on the map are suggestive of the mental traits and terse language of the cattle range. As an instance of the informal and ofttimes accidental circumstances under which some of the smaller streams came to receive their names, there may be mentioned two small tributaries of the North Canadian River, in Oklalioma County :
"Early in the summer of 1876, Mr. L. C. Wantland, who is now a banker at Purcell, having just completed his education, returned home to the ranch of his father, which was located in the Chickasaw Nation, near where Purcell has since been built. After due consultation, it was decided that, in order to give the son a chance to operate on his own account, a new ranch should be established in the unoccupied district known as the Unassigned Lands, at a point about thirty miles north of the Canadian River at Purcell. Choosing his foreman and several men, he first made a prospecting trip for the purpose of locating the site for the headquarters of the new ranch. Pursuing their way northward along the line of the Arbuckle Trail, they finally halted on the prairie at a point several miles southeast of the site of Oklahoma City. There it was agreed that young Wantland should explore the country to the east, while his foreman should ride over the country immediately west of the halting place, each making a care- ful examination of the topography, timber and water supply with a view to selecting the most advantageous site for the headquarters of the new ranch. In due time each returned to the rendezvous
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