Railroad lines, laying mile upon mile of tracks across the plains, hired "buffalo runners" to hunt the animals for meat to feed the railway crews. Buffalo Bill Cody, certainly the most famous of the buffalo runners, claimed to have killed 4,280 buffalo in a year and a half. The tracks dissected the buffalo's migratory paths, and the animals split into the northern and southern herds.
Stories of the great numbers of buffalo in the West captured the imagination of the world, and many came to see for themselves. European nobility traveled to the Great Plains for grand buffalo-hunting expeditions. In 1854, Sir Saint George Gore, an Irish lord, embarked on a hunt that lasted almost three years. He took seventy saddle horses, forty servants, and thirty wagons to carry supplies. At night he sipped on vintage wine and slept in a brass bed. The expedition cost some $500,000 and brought down two thousand buffalo.
Sport hunting became the rage. Buffalo Bill guided eastern millionaires as well as the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia. Low-priced excursions were promoted by the railroads. Trains would chug alongside the herds while passengers simply lowered the windows to take aim. Rarely did the trains stop to harvest the kills; the carcasses were left to rot on the plains. The "sport" in this hunting was often called into question, for great beasts simply stood there, picked off en masse by the hunters.
Hunting for sport and meat took a toll on the herds, but it didn't begin to compare to the slaughter that began in the 1870s. A new tanning method had been developed, creating numerous new uses for buffalo. Hides with hair were still used for robes, but hides could be processed into a high-quality, flexible leather that was used for cushions and the tops of carriages and sleighs. Tooled and textured, it was used to panel the walls of dens and libraries in the homes of the wealthy, as was the fashion of the day. The English army replaced many of its standard-issue cowhide items with buffalo leather because it was highly durable. There was also a large market for buffalo leather in industry, where it was sliced into belts that ran the machinery of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution.
With this new demand for buffalo hides, droves of hunters headed west to make their fortune. The nation was suffering a depression, and many young men saw opportunity on the Great Plains. It was relatively easy to get started: All a man needed was a gun and a horse. The professional hide hunters took teams of tanners with them. The overkill was wanton, as the hunters sometimes downed as many as four animals for every hide harvested. Sometimes they only cut out the tongues, for smoked buffalo tongue was a delicacy in fancy New York restaurants. The plains were littered with rotting carcasses.
The slaughter was staggering. In 1872, the Topeka newspaper reported:
Few persons probably know how rapidly the American bison is disappearing from the Western plains. Some idea of the extent of the ruthless slaughter may be formed from the fact that twenty-five thousand bison were killed during the month of May south of the Kansas Pacific Railroad for the sake of their hides alone, which are sold at the paltry price of two dollars each on delivery, for shipment to the eastern market. Add to this five thousand a small estimate shot by tourists and killed by the Indians to supply meat to the people on the frontier, and we have a sum total of thirty thousand as the victims for a single month.
That was thirty thousand hides for one month, from one depot, in one state. Estimates were based on train manifests, multiplied by the amount of hides that filled a railway car. The numbers were probably a fairly accurate measure of the killing that was taking place all across the plains, from Montana to Texas. By 1874, the southern herd had been decimated. The hide hunters looked north.
A few voices were raised against the slaughter and several laws were proposed, but little progress was made. The government, viewing the extermination of the buffalo as the solution to the Indian problem, chose a path of inaction.
In 1874, two federal bills to save the buffalo were put before the United States Congress; one to protect the buffalo, the other to tax the hides. The proposed hide tax was killed in committee, but the buffalo protection bill actually made it through Congress and was passed by both the House and the Senate. It then went to President Ulysses S. Grant, who pigeonholed the bill on the advice of his western generals. After a year, the unsigned bill became a pocket veto.
The government had decided to starve out the Indians by allowing the slaughter to continue. In fact, it was tacitly encouraged, as army forts gave out free ammunition to the hide hunters. At a joint meeting of the Texas legislature in 1875, General Philip Sheridan was reported to have said: "[The hide hunters] have done more in the last two years and will do more in the next year to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indian's commissary, and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage. Send them powder and lead, if you will; for the sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated."
It was estimated that some five thousand hunters spread across the northern plains, sending train load after train load of hides back east. By the 1880s the northern herd had been killed off as well. No one believed that this could have happened, for the numbers of bison had been so large. Even the hide hunters didn't believe it; they thought the buffalo had simply migrated elsewhere, perhaps crossing the border into Canada. But the Canadian herds were gone too. Of the forty million buffalo that had roamed the Great Plains, fewer than a thousand animals remained in the late 1880s. And of those remaining animals, most belonged to private herds; fewer than forty animals could be found in the wild.
A small group of conservationists worked diligently to save the remaining buffalo. Reduced to 0.000025 percent of its original population, the buffalo was snatched from the brink of extinction. The gene pool very nearly evaporated. The few animals left at the end of the century carried the genes for all future bison.
Genetic data on the great herds do not exist, and the only way to judge the diversity of those herds is through historical accounts. Scientists and explorers of the last century recognized differences in the size, conformation, and color of buffalo, and they used these variables to name subspecies.
A broad generalization can be made that buffalo are usually some shade of brown: Usually a mantle of long, curly, very dark brown or black hair covers the head and front legs; tan or light brown, long, woolly hair covers the hump; and short, dark brown fur covers the rear portion of the animal. In fact, bison exhibit a wide range of colors, from black, red, yellow, pied, and white to combinations thereof (Color Plate 3). Within the original buffalo herds, this wide range of colors and patterns most likely indicated a genetically diverse population. Fur color is not a conservative trait, which means that it changes more rapidly through genetic combinations than do the shapes of bones or teeth. If scientists had been able to study the bison herds of a century ago, they may well have noticed subtle variations in fur color between the southern and northern herds.