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Buffalo
slaughter had benefits
Animals' remains provided needed items
for early settlers by
Delbert Trew | |
The
whys and wherefores of the near-extinction of the buffalo will be debated from
now on with no clear conclusions accepted by all. Most writings of the time dwell
on the waste and carnage and many western films show the prairies covered with
the carcasses of slain animals.
There was waste and carnage beyond doubt
but a close study shows not all was wasted. Many a carnivore and hungry predator
made a good living following the hunters. Buffalo beef built railroads, mined
gold and silver, fed tribes, armies, explorers, wagon trains and early settlers.
Buffalo hides made robes and commercial belting to drive the machines of manufacturing
in the east. Buffalo horns and hooves produced glue, and the hair of the beasts
stuffed the furniture of the time.
Before, during and for a short time
after the Big Hunt Period, everyone living on or traveling the Great Plains burned
buffalo chips for both heat and cooking. Settler women and children dragged wash
tubs across the surrounding prairie gathering buffalo chips for this crude but
economical fuel.
As the buffalo herds diminished and weather took its
toll, the buffalo chip was replaced by the longhorn chip as the Texas cattle herds
began moving north. About this time, the bleached bones of the buffalo, lying
almost everywhere on the prairie, began selling by the ton to be made into fertilizer
and livestock feed additives. In reality, it was a godsend.
Settler families,
hard-pressed for cash, switched from gathering chips to gathering bones. This
chore not only provided much-needed income it also cleared the grassland for plowing.
The freighters distributing supplies throughout the West began stopping at settler's
homes, purchasing the piles of buffalo bones and hauling them to the nearest rail-loading
facility for profit.
Kansas history records one freighter who hauled two
wagon loads of barbed wire to Quitaque
for Charles Goodnight as saying, "I made more profit on the back-haul of gathered
buffalo bones than I did on hauling the original cargo of barbed wire."
The
bulk of buffalo bones were ground by machines, sacked and sold back to the settlers
for fertilizer. Later, ground bones were added to livestock feeds to provide much
needed calcium. It was believed bone meal mixed with ground oyster shells made
stronger egg shells for poultry.
Major machinery companies sold large
volume bone grinders while Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward sold small bone chippers,
nippers and grinders for small farm processing.
There are many early day
photographs of itinerant wanderers-of-the-prairie pushing wheelbarrows gathering
buffalo bones and piling them into huge ricks. By writing their names on a buffalo
skull, the ownership of the rick was established. When the surrounding area was
picked clean, they contacted a freighter who hauled the bones to the nearest railhead
loading station for shipment to a fertilizer plant. It provided a good living
as long as it lasted.
Interestingly, the legal description for the original
town plat for McLean begins
with the sentence, "Starting at a pile of buffalo bones, thence south ..." I wonder
how many legal descriptions throughout the West begin in this manner.
© Delbert Trew
"It's All Trew"
July 3,
2007 Column
E-mail: trewblue@centramedia.net.
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