American Buffalo (31 page)

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There are several competing theories about the origin of the Tongue River’s name: (1) the river is crooked like a white man’s tongue; (2) there’s a tongue-shaped formation of trees and rocks near the head of the river, in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming; (3) Indians called it the Talking River, and whites mistranslated it as the Tongue River; and (4) someone killed a bunch of buffalo along the river and only kept the tongues.
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Chapter 7

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McJunkin’s books, fossils, telescope, and an old Indian skull that he found were all destroyed when a lightning bolt struck his shack and burned it down. He aged fast, and when he started to slow down he moved into the Folsom Hotel. When he could no longer get out of bed, he drank bootleg whiskey through a hose. He died broke. Allegedly his final words were “I’m going where all good niggers go.” His original wooden tombstone was last known to reside in a small museum in Portales, New Mexico. His current tombstone, the one I saw, was purchased by the kids who taught him to read. (As is the case with just about everything having to do with old buffalo-related stuff, these details are conjectural.)
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“Fluting” thinned the point and probably aided in the process of hafting it to a spear shaft. It is such an inefficient and technically demanding process that anthropologists believe it may have had religious as well as functional significance. The archaeologist Bruce Bradley has likened the fluting process to a football player crossing himself before a field goal attempt.
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Ancient quarries for tool-grade stones were sometimes quite large. Archaeologists have recorded pits measuring nine feet deep and trenches measuring six feet in width and eighty feet in length. Settlers in the American Southwest sometimes mistook these pits for the old gold-mining operations of wandering Spaniards, because only Europeans would have the work ethic to dig so much. One such flint quarry in Wyoming was named Spanish Point, even though the place was littered with bone and antler digging tools. An interesting tidbit is that it’s possible to tell whether a Folsom hunter was left- or right-handed. Sometimes the hunters would re-sharpen spear points that were mounted to the spear shaft. They’d only sharpen one face on each edge of the point; looking at re-sharpened points, you can tell whether the hunter was holding the spear shaft in his right or left hand. Folsom hunters were basically like us; about 30 percent were lefties.
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Clovis points are extraordinarily valuable. Recently, a well-known collection of thirteen Clovis points, dubbed the Fenn Cache, was sold from one private collector to another for a rumored one-million-plus dollars. Single Clovis points fetch up to $60,000. Folsom points are significantly less valuable, but still nothing to laugh at. A broken Folsom point of uncertain authenticity and questionable provenance might sell for around $3,000. A pedigreed Folsom point, of undisputed authenticity, will fetch ten times that amount. As with all antiquities, though, the establishment of a projectile point’s authenticity is troublesome. Today, an estimated five thousand recreational flint knappers produce 1.5 million arrowheads and flint tools annually. Through accident and ill intention, some of these points inevitably get circulated as authentic archaeological specimens.
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“Paleo-” is of Greek origin and means, simply, “old.” My use of the word “cultures” in this context is imperfect, but it’s the best word we’ve got to describe the various groups of Paleo-Indians. They were marked by different technological systems and the occupation of different habitats, and it’s not unreasonable to think that they had varying lifestyles and belief systems. Whether they were actually “culturally distinct” by today’s standards (whatever those are) is unknown.
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This is assuming that the elephant seal is an aquatic mammal; it births on dry land but spends up to 80 percent of its life in the ocean.
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Chapter 8

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The world of humans is much more colorful in the daytime and much darker at night than the world of buffalo. The retina of an eye contains two types of photoreceptors, rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive than cones, and much better in low-light conditions, but they don’t detect colors. Perhaps because buffalo are active at night (and because their predators are active at night), they have a much higher percentage of rods to cones than humans. As for low-light vision, human eyeballs have a density of cones in the center and a greater abundance of rods toward the periphery. When you’re messing around with something in the dark and can’t quite see it, try looking at it out of the corner of your eye. You’ll see it more clearly.
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Chapter 9

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Pioneers crossing the Great Plains would string blankets beneath their Conestoga wagons and fill the blankets with buffalo chips as they traveled along. Conestoga wagons were manufactured in the Conestoga River valley of Pennsylvania. People used to call the wagons Stogies for short. Nowadays, people call cigars stogies. If you read about this sort of thing much, you’ll come across a lot of reasons why: that cigars look like wagon spokes; that the drivers of Conestoga wagons liked to breathe through lit cigars to filter out trail dust; that tobacco farmers in Virginia used Conestoga wagons to haul their crops to market. None of those reasons are true. Instead, stogies are stogies because the first cigar producer in Pennsylvania set up shop in the Conestoga valley and he produced good, cheap cigars. The name stuck.
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†Sometimes a whole pack will howl together, on and on. Biologists believe that this type of group howling could be a form of entertainment, or a moment of bonding. But the dominant wolves in a pack will often bite less-dominant wolves if they join in the chorus. If the howling doesn’t mean anything, I wonder, why would they care?
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Chapter 10

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These hunters, variously called “buffalo callers,” “bringers-in,” or “bringers of plenty,” held a position of religious significance in their clans and tribes. One bringer-in refused to eat any buffalo that he lured to its death, for fear that he’d lose his abilities. Instead, he ate buffalo that were killed by others out on the open ground.
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Earp was a participant in the shoot-out at the OK Corral. The actuality of his career as a buffalo hunter is sometimes challenged. A man by his name was arrested several times on prostitution charges in Peoria, Illinois, at a time that Wyatt Earp later claimed to be buffalo hunting in Kansas. Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid, a.k.a. Henry McCarty, William Antrim, and William Harrison Bonney. Tom Nixon was killed by Deputy Sheriff Mysterious Dave Mather, a sometime buffalo hunter who was rumored to be an ancestor of the Puritan writer Cotton Mather, who played an influential role in the Salem witch trials. Buckshot Roberts was killed by Billy the Kid’s gang, the Regulators. California Joe was killed by the Sioux.
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†Lonesome Charley died with Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Legend has it, he had a premonition of his own death the night before he was killed and gave away all of his belongings.
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††Jack McCall sometimes went by Billy Sutherland and Billy Barnes. Oddly, Billy Barnes was a name used on occasion by both Wild Bill Hickok and his brother. After Wild Bill’s death, there was confusion about who killed whom. Some thought he’d been gunned down by his own kin.
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Tom Nixon used two rifles to kill 120 buffalo in forty minutes. In Montana, a hundred miles northeast of Miles City, Vic Smith killed 107 without moving. A Dodge City resident “known for his truthfulness” killed 250 in a single day by making several consecutive stands. Colonel Dodge saw where a hunter killed 112 buffalo in forty-five minutes, dropping the animals within a semicircle of two hundred yards. Charlie Hart, a survivor of the Confederate prison at Andersonville, had several such days. He once killed 63 in two hours; another time he killed 171 in a single day; yet another time he downed 203 on ten acres of ground. Brick Bond killed 250 in a single day. A hunter named John R. Cook once killed 88 in a stand, and later admitted that the sight of them made him feel sick.
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Buffalo tongues were prepared for shipment in a variety of ways. They were packed fresh into wooden barrels between layers of salt; they were brined in a mixture of water, sugar, and salt, then smoked like bacon and packed into barrels; and they were air-dried with salt and then submerged in barrels full of brine. A popular brine recipe, for a nineteen-gallon barrel, was water, two pounds of sugar, and a tablespoon of saltpeter, or potassium nitrate. As a food additive, saltpeter inhibits some bacterial growth and gives meat a reddish color. (It is also a principal component of gunpowder.) In the days of eating buffalo tongues, saltpeter was produced from various forms of decomposing organic matter, such as stale urine, pigeon shit, or bat guano. Now it’s produced through the Haber process, which uses atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia and, in turn, saltpeter. Despite its more appetizing modern production method, the use of saltpeter in food has waned in recent decades thanks to health concerns—it’s been linked to kidney disease, anemia, and heart problems. I only recently quit adding the substance to my own home-smoked hams and tongues, and then only because I learned that it diminishes the male libido. There’s no direct proof of this particular health effect, though prison officials used to add saltpeter to prison food in order to chill the inmates’ sexual frustrations.
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Marshall Sewall carried a three-pronged tripod, or “rest stick,” to support the barrel of his rifle while he shot buffalo. His killers poked two of the tripod’s prongs into his temples, the third in his navel. Other hunters had their heads opened and their brains scooped out. Indians also liked to move the dead hunters’ scrotums from their groins to the insides of their mouths. Sometimes the hunters’ abdomens were opened and packed with hot coals.
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Chapter 11

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Buffalo wallows often collect standing water in the spring, providing a valuable type of wildlife habitat known to ecologists as ephemeral aquatic ecosystems. Because they eventually dry up, fish cannot live in them. This makes buffalo wallows popular places for frogs and aquatic insects to lay their eggs, because there’s nothing in them that can eat their tadpoles and larvae. When the buffalo were removed from the West and replaced by people, the people weren’t as happy with the wallows as the frogs had been. In fact, homesteaders thought that wallows were a tremendous nuisance because cattle didn’t use them and no grass grew there. The farmers struggled to get rid of them. The mud in the wallows was loaded with water-soluble salts, and they called it alkali mud. It dried like concrete. People who lived in sod houses would collect the mud from the wallows and use it to cover their roofs, and then they’d fill the wallows with sand, dirt, or manure until they started to sprout grass. Now ecologists have begun to wonder what we lost when we destroyed thousands upon thousands of small ephemeral ponds. For instance, researchers studying western chorus frogs in Kansas have been trying to understand the frog’s historic relationship to buffalo wallows. One thing they’ve found is that tadpoles hatched in buffalo wallows will develop differently from tadpoles hatched in streams. Also, they’ll have different responses to environmental variables such as water acidity and ammonium concentrations. This is particularly interesting at a time when frogs are vanishing from North America at an alarming rate.
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Chapter 13

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The fuzzy, tangled hair on the buffalo’s forehead was used as stuffing in commercially manufactured pillows as well. Because hide hunters didn’t usually skin the buffalo’s heads, people would sometimes follow in their wake to shave the hair away and collect it in sacks to sell by the pound.
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The same set of methods works for aging horses. That’s where the old saying “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” comes from. To do so is like asking how much a present cost.
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Chapter 14

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Today, there’s a much higher percentage of white buffalo than there was in historic times. Many of the “sacred white buffalo,” a fixture of Western tourist traps, are the result of crossbreeding between buffalo and white breeds of cattle.
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†It’s been reported that the Crows feared and respected white buffalo hides, but would not use or touch them. Hunters from tribes that did not consider the white buffalo sacred, such as the Cree and Assiniboin, would attempt to kill white buffalo in order to sell the hide to a tribe that did.
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Legend has it that the Cheyenne chief Roman Nose rode into battle dressed in a white buffalo robe. This is probably not true, as it stems from a completely fanciful narrative written by a relatively unknown U.S. Army general by the last name of Fry. Of Roman Nose, Fry writes, “The shock of battles and scenes of carnage and cruelty were as of the breath of his nostrils . . . with a single eagle feather in his scalp-lock, and with the rarest of robes, a white buffalo, beautifully tanned, and soft as cashmere, thrown over his naked shoulders, he stood forth the war chief of the Cheyennes.” The rumor of Roman Nose’s white buffalo robe has been perpetuated by the circumstances of his death. He was gunned down while leading a daylight charge against a heavily armed contingent of U.S. soldiers who were dug in on Beecher Island, along the Arikaree River in eastern Colorado. The charge was brazen, almost suicidal in a kamikaze sense of the word. Apparently, Roman Nose made the fatal mistake of believing that he had magical protection from bullets. Some say that this belief stemmed from his own good looks; his enemies were so stunned by Roman Nose’s appearance that they couldn’t concentrate on shooting him. Others have suggested that Roman Nose’s protection came from the white buffalo robe as described by General Fry. The most provocative version of events is that Roman Nose was assured of his protection from bullets by a medicine man named White Bull, who gave Roman Nose an elaborate headpiece. As a condition of ownership for the headpiece and its protection, Roman Nose was forbidden to use the white man’s cooking implements. The day before his death, he made the mistake of eating a piece of meat that a woman had poked with an iron fork.
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