Just then all hell broke loose as 700 painted braves charged in a yelling mass straight for the little post, capturing or killing all the horses and carving up two teamsters who had slept in their wagons out by the corral. The rest of the men quickly holed up in the blacksmith shop, the store, and the saloon, some barefooted and in their underwear, too rushed to bother with clothes. Instead, their first grabs were for guns and ammunition, and they had no time for seconds.
By the time the charging Indians had crossed the open ground and reached the post, a matter of perhaps ninety seconds, several of the rifles were ready and took their toll, each shot downing a brave or a horse. This immediate strong resistance took the attackers by surprise. Their great medicine man had convinced them that his spells would keep all the whites in a deep sleep and permit them to be killed before they could move. Also he had charmed most of the warriors, at a price, so that no bullets could harm them. Neither the medicine man nor the warriors knew in time that one of the allies, not realizing the enormity of his deed at such a time, had killed a skunk just before dawn, thus ruining all the magic and bringing death to several men.
Skunk or no skunk, the brash warriors could not withstand those one-ounce slugs designed to drop a buffalo bull. They paid with their lives for their boldness and their belief in their invulnerability, their broken bodies littering the hard-packed earth, almost touching the muzzles of the smoking buffalo guns. Then their comrades were shot down as they tried desperately to retrieve the bodies, until the attack was blunted and the disheartened, disillusioned survivors rode sadly away. Their bold, well-planned attack against a force they outnumbered twenty-five to one killed only the two men caught in the wagons and one other.
After the Indians left, the post was cleared of the dead men and horses. In a few days the hunters returned to their camps for more hides, and when they returned from Dodge City the next spring they had large reinforcements anxious to help wipe out the remaining herds. For the next four years the hide wagons, loaded to the top, rolled out on their way to market, many of them now going to a new shipping point, Fort Worth.
There was much bitter fighting with the Indians for years, full of gore and glory for both sides, but the continued attacks could not keep the hunters out. By 1880 the southern Indians had lost all their buffalo and the plains lay open to the cattlemen.
23. Gleaning the Leavings
During the years of the great slaughter the wolves and coyotes prospered greatly. They never needed to hunt, or to go hungry. Instead, when they heard the buffalo guns booming, they gathered at a safe distance and waited for the skinners to finish their task, then they moved in to the prepared feast. Even when there were skinned carcasses lying all about, the predators would usually tear open any animal left unskinned, for they liked the warm entrails. As the hunters increased the number of their kills, the food supply became much greater than the capacity of the distended stomachs of the scavengers, and much of the meat rotted, fouling the air for miles around.
With an abundance of food, the wolves and coyotes multiplied rapidly. What would this savage horde do for food once all the buffalo had been killed and starvation stalked the plains? This never became a serious question, for the wolves and coyotes vanished with the buffalo, but not as completely. Each animal had a hide worth a dollar or two in cash at the nearest trader's station, enough to attract a new breed of hunters, the wolfers, whom the buffalo hunters considered a dirty, drunken mess, much lower than themselves on the social scaleand the buffalo hunters had been characterized by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who knew them well, as ''fearless as a Bayard, unsavory as a skunk."
A wolfer could manage with just a pack horse, a gun, a bedroll, and a bottle of strychnine crystals, but more often he had two pack horses, or a team pulling a small cart or wagon. He followed after the buffalo hunters, and at each kill poisoned every carcass within a mile or so of his central point. Then he went away for a few days to let the wolves and coyotes have plenty of time to eat their fill and die. He then came back and collected the skins, but if a cold spell came along, he might have to pile up the bodies and wait for the next thaw before skinning them out. He made no fortune at this work, and he was looked down on by everyone else, but wolfing provided a living of a sort for several hundred men, and kept the predator population on the ranges within bounds.
When the wolfer had gone and the last vestiges of decayed meat had fallen from the bones, storms washed the skeletons until they gleamed clean and white in the fresh, uncropped grass. Then came the bone pickers for the final harvest.
Homesteaders in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas had a tough time just staying alive on their claims during the mid-1870's. The Panic of 1873 and the resulting hard times drove many prospective homesteaders west with very little money or supplies. Money was tight, especially in the debt-ridden west, while hail, drought, and grasshoppers laid waste the grain fields. To get any money at all for a little food for the winter, these men turned to the buffalo ranges.
In the early 1870's the homesteaders could still go out with their wagons in the fall, expecting to come back with a full load of buffalo meat in a week or two, but by the fall of 1873 the range was empty. Then they turned to gathering bones, after they learned that buyers would take all they could haul to the railroad shipping point and would pay good cash money, $4 to $12 a ton. And when drought, hail, or grasshoppers struck, the time allotted for harvesting went for gathering bones instead of grain.
Many of the seminomadic Indians along the farming frontier also turned to gathering bones when they could no longer deliver any buffalo robes to the traders. Freighters returning from some distant point after delivering supplies to an army post or a small settlement found it profitable to pause and load their wagons with bones, thus adding to their profits, for hauling empty wagons back for a hundred miles or so resulted in nothing but a dead loss. From all these sources the bones poured into the shipping points by millions of pounds a year, to be shipped to the eastern sugar refineries or fertilizer plants. Some of them ended up in bone-chian dishes for the carriage trade.
Thus for about two decades the bone market was an important factor in the plains economic structure, supplying work for the destitute and ready cash to a debt-ridden economy. A few statistics help round out the picture. In 1872 the Santa Fe Railroad shipped over 1 million pounds of bones; in 1873, 2,740,000 pounds; and in 1874, over 7 million pounds. Other railroads were also hauling vast amounts of bones during this period.
Bones exposed to the dry air of the high plains remained in good condition for commercial use for twenty years or more unless damaged by a grass fire. This gave the bone pickers plenty of time to complete the harvest, which finally ended about 1890 in western Dakota and eastern Montana, where both the end of the buffalo and the arrival of the railroads lagged about a decade behind that combination of events in Kansas. One of the Montana bone buyers found out toward the end of the harvest that he could increase his profits by grinding the bones and shipping them east in sacks for $18 a ton, whereas the whole bones were selling for $12. This was the delivered price in the east, not the price paid to pickers at the Montana buying point.