The southern buffalo herd had succumbed under great pressure from the swarms of hide hunters and homesteaders, both groups entirely dependent on the new railroads for profits and for attracting recruits. As long as the main southern herd was far from the shipping points, it survived, but once the rails cut into its range, the buffalo were doomed.
During the rapid destruction of the southern herd, the northern herd suffered very little in comparison. In 1870 it was distributed from central Dakota on the east to the Rockies, and from the Powder River Basin north into the prairie provinces of Canada. No important overland trail crossed the entire expanse in any direction, no railroad even approached its boundaries. The only important route for trade was by steamboat up the Missouri to Fort Benton, with a belt of rugged badlands along both banks from Fort Union to Fort Benton, making access to the buffalo plains slow and difficult.
Another important difference between conditions on the northern and the southern ranges was in the distribution of the Indian tribes. In the south the Indians lived away from the railroads and did not block the approach of the hunters to the herds. In the north a broad belt of land occupied by strong, rather hostile nomadic tribes protected the herd from the approach of white hunters from any direction. The Sioux, Assiniboin, Gros Ventre, Blackfoot, and Crow held an unbroken ring around the range.
Since the 1830's, the fur traders had shipped a large number of robes each year from the Fort Benton area, 15,000 a year at the start, and growing to 25,000 a year by 1875, with 75,000 green hides added. In addition, a substantial number came down from the Yellowstone posts.
Then in a few years the whole pattern changed drastically. Early in January 1870, Colonel E. M. Baker left Fort Shaw on the Sun River, Montana, to punish the marauding Blackfoot band led by Mountain Chief, but the guide led the soldiers to the friendly village under Chief Heavy Runner which was camped on the Marias River. At daylight on January 23, the troops surprised the village and killed 173 Indians of all ages and captured 140 women and children.
The Baker massacre crushed the fighting spirit of the Blackfeet. The hostile Sioux, meanwhile, were penned on their reservations by the army, and the Northern Pacific Railroad began inching its way westward across North Dakota from Bismarck to Dickinson, then to Miles City, Montana, bringing good transportation to the buffalo range.
With the Indians leaving and the railroad coming, the hunters flocked in by the thousands to repeat the pattern of slaughter that had been so effective in Kansas. At first they found very good hunting around Dickinson and on west to the Powder River. Here the herds were almost helpless in the severe winter storms when northern winds drove the fine snow and the temperature dropped well below zero. "Yellowstone" Kelly, frontiersman and army scout, mentioned finding a large herd huddled near the mouth of the Powder River so numbed with snow and cold they scarcely moved when he and his companions approached within a short distance and began shooting into them.
By 1880 the hunters were out in force north of the Yellowstone. In that high, dry, cold country the carcasses sometimes lay on the ground for months during the winter with very little spoilage, and by the next summer had become so desiccated they decomposed very slowly. In the spring of 1880 along Porcupine Creek a few miles north of the Yellowstone, carcasses littered the ground for miles. A similar condition was reported near Dickinson that same year.
About 1870 the Sweetgrass Hills on the Canadian border sixty-five miles north of Fort Benton were the central point of the range for a herd of several hundred thousand buffalo that wandered from the Marias River in Montana to the Bow River in Alberta, and eastward from the Rockies to the Cypress Hills. Most of the 100,000 hides shipped annually from Fort Benton came from this herd, with hired hunters from the fort supplementing the work of the Blackfeet and Gros Ventres. These tribes now lived north of the border most of the year, but they came south each summer to hunt and trade. The constant pressure exerted on the herd by these several thousand hunters in the course of a few years drove the herd across the Missouri and into the Judith Basin. A few small bands came back from time to time as hunters moved up from the south, but the good hunting around the Sweetgrass Hills was gone forever.
As a result of the combined attacks on the outlying bulges of the range, when the big rush of hide hunters arrived in 1880 they found the buffalo confined to a strip about 180 miles wide, extending from the Wyoming border north to the Missouri, and from the Little Belt Mountains in central Montana eastward into the Dakotas, with the heavy concentration in the triangle between the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.
At first the hunters concentrated on the herds nearest the shipping points, Dickinson and Miles City. Then as more outfits took to the plains, a cordon of camps formed along the northern border, attacking any herds moving toward Canada and burning off a wide belt to prevent the buffalo from straying out of the country. This intense activity to the north and west left a temporary gap to the southeast, and in the fall of 1880 a few thousand head broke through and moved off toward the Sioux reservations. As they approached the Cheyenne River reservation, the whole Indian population turned out for a big hunt. Off they went to the northwest, meeting the advance guard of the herd in October and finishing the kill about Christmas. They returned with 2,000 hides and hundreds of horses loaded with meat from this, their last, buffalo hunt.
Three years later a larger herd broke through to the southeast and wandered east of the Black Hills, about 10,000 head in all. Hunters both red and white flocked in as soon as the word went out of the herd's approach. About 9,000 hides were taken in a few weeks, and the remaining 1,000 head were annihilated in a grand two-day hunt staged by several hundred Sioux led by Sitting Bull and joined by a crowd of white hunters. This was the last big buffalo hunt staged by any of the Plains tribes.
While this herd was being wiped out in South Dakota, about 5,000 or more white hunters were at work on the Montana herd, estimated at about 75,000 animals. When the hunters had finished their work and moved out to market in the spring of 1884 with their hides, they left only a few hundred, widely scattered buffalo, most of them in small bands of five to ten animals, in the badlands of eastern Montana.
The hunters did not realize how few were left. They all outfitted again in the fall of 1884 and moved north to the grazing grounds, but found no buffalo. Assuring one another that the herd was out to the west, they kept moving in that direction for a couple of months, each day expecting to find buffalo, but by the time they reached the Little Belts they knew the worst: the buffalo were gone. With their season a total failure, and many of them deeply in debt for their outfits, the hunters went broke and moved on to other pursuits.
By this time even Congress had begun to take notice of the dwindling herds, but a large majority of the Congressmen approved of the situation. When the first restrictive measure was proposed, a government official pointed out, "There is no law which human hands can write, there is no law which a Congress of men can enact, that will stay the disappearance of these wild animals before civilization. They eat grass. They trample the plains. They are as uncivilized as the Indian."
One man favoring the legislation discussed the problem of the sportsmen, many of them foreigners. "I was told that they went to the plains and shot down these animals, not even desiring to take their tongues or their pelts…. We allow them to come here and kill the buffalo wantonly and wickedly, but at the same time we afford them the protection of our arms." And a colleague added, "Not only that; but they are furnished horses by the army to go out and kill the buffalo."