Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West. Michael Punke

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СКАЧАТЬ spread across the prairie. The head chief, Peta-la-shar, received them warmly, referring to Lute as “my son.” Peta-la-shar reported that the hunt, so far, had not been successful. “But tomorrow,” he promised, “a grand surround will be made.” His young scouts had reported a large herd about twenty miles to the south.¹⁹

      THE OLDEST CONFIRMED WEAPON FOUND IN NORTH AMERICA—A STONE spearhead—was discovered by archaeologists near Folsom, New Mexico, in 1927. Stone cannot be carbon-dated, but the material with which the famous “Folsom point” was discovered could be. The point was imbedded in bone—a 10,000-year-old bone of Bison antiquus, an extinct ancestor of the modern buffalo.²⁰ Humans have been hunting buffalo for a long time. Indeed, in twenty-seven of thirty-five key North American archaeological sites revealing the story of early North American human activity, buffalo bones outnumber those of any other animal.²¹

      By 9,000 years ago, Folsom Man was using many of the same strategies and techniques that American Indians would later use when hunting buffalo on foot. The foundation of these strategies was an intimate understanding of buffalo behavior. Humans could not outrun the buffalo, but they could turn the defenses of the herd against itself.²²

      Many hunting strategies involved sophisticated team efforts to move the herd to a killing zone. This did not, as a general matter, mean frightening the herd into a full-fledged stampede—at least not at first. Hunters, for example, might use the smell of distant smoke to steer the herd. Sometimes a skillful hunter draped in a buffalo skin could decoy a herd, actually leading it in the chosen direction. Once moving, a herd could sometimes be steered into giant V’s formed by stacked stones, mounds of dung, or, in winter, by a line marked in the snow.²³

      Ancient humans, and later Indians on foot, used different types of killing zones. The most famous is the buffalo jump, or pishkun. Meriwether Lewis described the critical moment: “The disguised Indian or decoy has taken care to place himself sufficiently nigh the buffaloe to be noticed by them when they take to flight and running before them they follow him in full speede to the precipice … the (Indian) decoy in the mean time has taken care to secure himself in some cranney or crevice of the clift.”²⁴ The buffalo, pushed by their own frantic mass, tumbled to their deaths. At one Colorado site, 193 buffalo were killed in a single hunt that took place 8,500 years ago. In Montana alone, there are more than 300 pishkun sites. Along a one-mile stretch at one of them, Ulm Pishkun, the buffalo bones are thirteen feet deep.

      Hunters on foot also killed buffalo by driving them into box canyons or giant corrals. In the winter, hunters wearing snowshoes ran down buffalo as they floundered in deep snow. Other herds were steered onto ice, where their hooved feet could find no traction.

      At some point, probably around 1,500 years ago, Plains Indians began to use the bow and arrow. This development increased the range at which buffalo could be killed but not the basic hunting techniques. As a general matter, at the time Europeans arrived in North America, Plains Indians were hunting the buffalo in ways that differed little from earlier humans, thousands of years before them. In the seventeenth century, a French fur trader named Pierre Esprit Radisson was impressed by the ability of the Sioux Indians—then inhabitants of Minnesota—to hunt the buffalo on foot.²⁵

      The horse changed everything.

      The prototypical image of the Plains Indian is the mounted hunter-warrior, and indeed, Plains Indians were among the greatest horsemen in history. But the history of Plains Indians on horseback is surprisingly short. It was not until the 1600s that Indians of the Southern Plains first acquired horses—from Spanish remudas brought up through Mexico. And it was not until the 1700s that horses were in widespread use by Indians of the Northern Plains.²⁶

      The horse, in a literal way, expanded the horizon of the Native Americans. A tribe on foot might travel five or six miles in a day. A mounted tribe could easily cover twenty. Increased mobility made it easier to follow the buffalo herd and gave Indians more choice about where to live. When the tribe needed to move, the horse’s ability to carry more weight also meant that more food could be preserved and transported, which in turn decreased the risk of starvation in the winter.

      There were downsides to this increased mobility. More traveling meant more trespassing, and Indians fought other Indians more frequently as they defended their traditional territory. The advent of the horse also increased the dependence of Indians on the buffalo. With the ability to follow the herd and the vast food supply it represented, there was little incentive to farm—or even to hunt other types of game. Some tribes, such as the Cheyenne and the Crow, abandoned farming when they came into possession of the horse. Increased dependence on the buffalo, of course, increased the risk of starvation if the buffalo should become scarce.²⁷

      PAWNEE CHIEF PETA-LA-SHAR MADE GOOD ON HIS PROMISE TO GRINNELL. The day after arriving at the Pawnee camp, the young stockbroker would hunt buffalo in a classic surround. Just as significant, he would witness the rituals of the traditional Pawnee hunt.

      The entire 4,000-member tribe embarked in an early morning mist, having broken camp and loaded their horses in a matter of minutes. Grinnell described the grand procession, led by “eight men, each carrying a long pole wrapped round with red and blue cloth and fantastically ornamented with feathers, which fluttered in the breeze as they were borne along.” These were “buffalo sticks,” treated with reverence by the tribe because “the success of the hunt was supposed to depend largely upon the respect shown to them.” Behind the buffalo sticks rode thirty or forty of the tribe’s most important men, “mounted on superb ponies.” Grinnell was given the honor of riding in this lead group, much of the time next to Chief Peta-la-shar. Finally came the great mass of women, children, and men of lower station.²⁸

      Grinnell was surprised to see many men on foot, sometimes leading multiple ponies. Lute North explained that they were saving their horses “so that they might be fresh when they needed them to run buffalo.”

      The Pawnee had stopped at a new campsite when Grinnell noticed “a sudden bustle among the Indians.” On a horizon marked by distant bluffs, a horseman appeared, riding hard toward the camp. When he arrived, the rider reported quickly to the chiefs. A large herd had been spotted, only ten miles away.

      Wild excitement now filled the camp. Women began immediately to break down teepees for transportation closer to the kill site. Men, meanwhile, stripped themselves and their ponies of all superfluous weight. Grinnell quickly prepared his own horse and weapons, mounting up to regard the stunning human vista of which he was privileged to be a part:

      The scene that we now beheld was such as might have been witnessed here a hundred years ago. It is one that can never be seen again. Here were eight hundred warriors, stark naked, and mounted on naked animals. A strip of rawhide, or a lariat, knotted about the lower jaw, was all their horses’ furniture. Among all these men there was not a gun nor a pistol, nor any indication that they had ever met with the white men … Their bows and arrows they held in their hands. Armed with these ancestral weapons, they had become once more the simple children of the plains, about to slay the wild cattle that Ti-rá wa had given them for food. Here was barbarism pure and simple. Here was nature.²⁹

      Grinnell and 800 hunters now thundered across the Kansas plains. Some of the Pawnee rode one horse while leading another, saving their best mount for the chase. The less prosperous rode double, pulling two mounts along behind. Grinnell marveled at the skill of the bareback riders, so perfectly attuned to their horses, he remembered, that the plains appeared to be “peopled with Centaurs.”

      Despite the excitement of the hunters, tight discipline governed their advance. At regular intervals in the front of the procession rode the “Pawnee Police,” whose authority during the hunt was absolute. They set the pace, ensuring that no one dashed ahead and scared the herd. A hunter who disregarded СКАЧАТЬ