American Hunter by Willie Robertson

Author:Willie Robertson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howard Books

As another hunter, William “Billy” Dixon wrote, “It was deadly business, without sentiment; it was dollars against tender-heartedness, and dollars won.” Congress passed a measure in 1874 to place limits on buffalo killing, but President Grant wouldn’t sign it into law. The killing continued and kept growing.

As he sat on the plain and squinted through his scope, Frank Mayer was riding the crest of a tidal wave of buffalo hunting that engulfed the Old West from the 1840s to the 1890s and reshaped the foundations of America. In a sense, such a huge slaughter may have been inevitable as white settlers pushed west, but it was a hunt that eventually grew completely out of control.

For the buffaloes, one of the most tragic things about the hunt was their simple brain. When buffaloes were being shot at from a few hundred yards by an assailant they couldn’t clearly see, they just didn’t process the fact that they should skedaddle.

Instead, they milled around the dead or wounded fellow buffaloes, especially if one was the “boss cow,” the female leader of the herd, hypnotized by the smell of her blood. This allowed Mayer, a skilled market hunter, to slowly work his way through the herd one by one, aiming for the heart or neck, maybe two shots per minute, switching rifles to avoid overheating, and easily hit his quota of fifty buffaloes a day, the maximum number of hides his crew could process in the field. Mayer explained, “We based it really on the overwhelming stupidity of the buffalo, unquestionably the stupidest game animal in the world. Nature provided the buffalo with almost no protective equipment. His eyesight was poor. His hearing was not much better.” He added, “He would not or could not fight, and all the pictures you see of a buffalo turning on the hunter are pure bunk.”

The Sharps rifle could kill at such a long range that Native Americans called it the weapon that “shoots today, kills tomorrow.” In one buffalo stand, Mayer killed 269 buffaloes with three hundred cartridges at a range of three hundred yards. Another hunter by the name of Orlando A. Brown dropped 5,855 buffaloes in two months in 1876, for an average kill of 97 per day. He went deaf in one ear from the constant blasting of his Sharps Big 50. The record for speed was claimed by Tom Nixon in 1873, when he made a stand on the headwaters of Bluff Creek, south of Dodge City, and killed 120 buffaloes in forty minutes, in front of witnesses no less.

By the 1870s, railroads were hauling 250,000 hides per year to the East Coast, where they were fashioned into hats, coats, and industrial products of all kinds. Additionally, buffalo meat was shipped around regionally to feed soldiers at army outposts and railroad workers helping push civilization westward.

By 1873, witnesses said you could leap on buffalo carcasses along the banks of the Arkansas River for a half mile without touching the ground. At dusk, they said, multitudes of skinned corpses glowed in the fading sun like the lights of a big city.

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