Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to use material from the following sources:
Columbia University Press, New York.
Gold Rush, by J. Goldsborough Bruff, edited by Georgia W. Read and Ruth Gaines, 1949, pp. 17, 18, and 25.
William W. Whitney, California Historical Society,
The Journal of Madison Berryman Moorman, edited by Irene D. Paden, 1948.
Pictures were obtained through the courtesy of the following:
Mary K. Dempsy, Montana Historical Society, furnished photographs of Montana Buffalo.
Beatrice Boone, Office of Conservation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, sent the pictures of the modern herds.
Mary S. McLanahan, The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, supplied photographs of the paintings of Alfred Jacob Miller.
John C. Ewers and William Truettner, of the Smithsonian Institution, furnished the photographs of the pictures by George Catlin.
(U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries & Wildlife)
Foreword
When this book first appeared, in 1970, no other book devoted to the buffalo had been published for more than ten years. The resurgence of interest in wildlife and the back-to-nature movement that started on college campuses during the late 1960s may have been responsible, in part, for the renewed interest in the American bison, commonly called the buffalo. That interest continues today with people seeking knowledge about this truly American animal. Such a curiosity was not strong, however, during the first sixty years of the nineteenth century. The educated remained chairbound in the East, content to accept as final the stories, legends, and tales of the frontiersmen. Unfortunately, most frontiersmen were not well educated and possessed little scientific training. Often their stories contained more fiction than fact.
George Vasey, an Englishman, relied heavily on such accounts in his book, The Natural History of Bulls, Bisons, and Buffaloes (London, 1851), one of the earliest books examining the American buffalo. It was twenty-four years later before Joel A. Allen published the first serious study of the buffalo in the United States, The American Bisons, Living and Extinct (Harvard College, Cambridge, 1876). Eleven years later, William T. Hornaday published "The Extermination of the American Bison" in the Smithsonian Institution's Annual Report of 1887. By then the buffalo had been nearly exterminated.
Although a few territories and states passed laws to protect buffalo Idaho was the first, in 1864 the laws were difficult to enforce. Not until 1894 did the federal government pass a buffalo protection law. Early efforts to save the buffalo from extinction were made by private citizens, each working independently. The stories of several of these people are related in chapter 26.
Since the publication of Joel A. Allen and William T. Hornaday's books, many other serious books have been written and published about the buffalo. Some have been scholarly: others have been popular treatments. The most significant books, in order of publication, are Henry Inman's Buffalo Jones' Forty Years of Adventure (Topeka: Crane and Co., 1899), which related Charles J. Jones's efforts to save the buffalo. Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep and Goat (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1904), by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen Sister, contains much good material on the history of buffalo. John R. Cook's The Border and the Buffalo (Topeka: Crane and Co., 1907) relates Cook's experiences during the slaughter of buffalo on the southern Plains. Lincoln Ellsworth's The Last Wild Buffalo Hunt (N.Y.: privately published, 1916) views what purported to be the last hunt. E. Douglas Branch's The Hunting of the Buffalo (N.Y.: D. Appleton and Co., 1929) covers the great slaughter of the shaggies, and Ernest Thompson Seton's Lives of Game Animals (N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929) contains a wealth of information about how buffalo lived. Martin Garretson's The American Bison (New York Zoological Society, 1938), a fine popular treatment of the animal's history, relies heavily on the wealth of information accumulated thus far. In 1951, Frank Gilbert Roe published The North American Buffalo (Univ. of Toronto Press), an exhaustive critical study of the animal through history.
A more personal account of the killing of buffalo is Charles B. Roth's The Buffalo Harvest (Denver: Sage Books, 1958). It tells the story through the recollections of buffalo hunter Frank H. Mayer. In The Great Buffalo Hunt (N.Y.: Knopf, 1959), Wayne Gard examined the slaughter from Texas to Canada during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Then, on March 30, 1970, Francis Haines published The Buffalo with Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Haines was seventy years old when The Buffalo appeared. Born at Buckhannon, West Virginia, June 3, 1899, he moved with his parents to Montana as a boy. There he saw firsthand the fading remnants of the Old WestIndians, cowboys, and their horsesand became interested in the history of the American West. He married Plesah Macdonald in 1922 at Bozeman, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from Montana State College the following year. He taught in public schools before returning to college to receive his M.A. degree in education in 1932 from Montana State University, Missoula. Six years later he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. Haines went on to teach at various institutions, including a junior college at Boise, Idaho, the Northern Idaho College of Education, and finally the Oregon College of Education, where he served as chair of the Department of Social Science until his retirement. Francis Haines died June 11, 1988, at Sun City, Arizona, eighteen years after The Buffalo was published.
Of the nearly dozen books written by Haines, five emphasize two subjects closely related to the history of the buffalo Indians and horses. These are Red Eagles of the Northwest: The Story of Chief Joseph and His People (Portland, Ore.: Scholastic Press, 1939); The Nez Percés: Tribesmen of the Columbia Plateau (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1955); Appaloosa: The Spotted Horse in Art and History (Univ. of Texas Press, 1963); Horses in America (N.Y.: Crowell, 1971); and The Plains Indians (N.Y.: Crowell, 1976). Indians and horses are strong themes in The Buffalo, and the strengths of this book are in Haines's descriptions of the role buffalo played in the daily lives of the Plains Indians. He describes in detail how the buffalo served as their principal source of food as well as providing clothing, bedding, and various tools. He explains how the Indians hunted buffalo before and after they acquired horses, and how the buffalo influenced Indians who followed the migrations of the shaggies to survive.
The buffalo even surpassed the mustang and the longhorn in importance. As a social factor, the buffalo's influence on Indian and white man alike was tremendous. Economically, its impact exceeded that of the beaver and the whale.
This book is not the last word on the history of the American buffalo, but it contributes much to the literature of this most important animal on the western plains and prairies. Interested people may find buffalo today in nearly every state (see state-by-state listings in the appendix). It is hoped that publication of this reprint edition will contribute to the renewed interest in the American buffalo.
DAVID DARY
NORMAN, OKLAHOMA
1995
During the 1800's, George Catlin traveled in the West and devoted his talents to recording on canvas the dress, features, and customs of the Indians. Here, he shows a winter buffalo chase. (Oil on canvas By George Catlin, Smithsonian Institution)