Their faces are short and narrow between the eyes, the forehead two spans wide. Their eyes bulge on the side, so that when they run they can see anyone who follows them. They are bearded like large goats, and when they run they carry their heads low, their beards touching the ground. From the middle of the body toward the rear they are covered with very fine wooly hair like that of a coarse sheep, and from the belly forward they have thick hair like the mane of a wild lion. They have a hump larger than that of a camel, and their horns, which barely show through the hair, are short and thick. During May they shed their hair on the rear half of the body, and then look exactly like a lion. To remove their hair they lean against small trees found in some of the gorges and rub against them until they shed the wool, as a snake sheds its skin. They have a short tail with a small bunch of hair at the end, and when they run they carry it erect like a scorpion. One peculiar thing is that when they are calves they are reddish like ours, but in time, as they become older, they change color and appearance. Excellent garments could be made from their wool, but not bright colored ones, because the wool itself is a dark red.
The buffalo appears to be an ungainly animal, with an enormous head, heavy high shoulders, and skimpy hindquarters. Actually, the thick growth of long, curly hair over the head, neck, and shoulders makes them appear more massive than they are, while the rear half of the animal has very short hair. The true shape can be observed on an animal with the skin removed and on a six-month-old calf, which has grown its hump but which still has short hair over the whole body.
A full-grown bull may measure as much as 6.5 feet to the top of the hump, and in good condition will weigh over 2,000 pounds, but the average height of the adult bull is about 6 feet, and its weight 1,600 pounds. An average bull will measure 12 feet from the tip of the nose to the root of the tail. He will usually reach his full size at six or seven years of age.
The cow is definitely smaller, with a height of 5 feet, a length of 7 feet, and will weigh from 700 to 1,200 pounds. She produces her first calf at the age of three or four.
All adult buffalo have dark brown, almost black, hair on the foreparts. The shorter hair on the hindquarters varies in color from a brown in the fall to a washed-out brownish yellow, almost a buckskin, in the spring.
The calves during the first few months look very much like those of domestic red breeds, but darken over the next two years, when the hindquarters fade to the adult color.
A buffalo will dress out about the same as domestic beef, with a trimmed carcass at about 50 percent of the live weight. An early fur trader who each year bought about 150 cows and many bulls and calves kept records of the average weights: usable meat from a large bull in good condition, 800 pounds; average cow, 400 pounds; two-year-old heifers, 200 pounds; yearlings (killed in the winter, these would be long yearlings, 18 to 20 months old), 110 pounds.
The breeding season for buffalo extends from about mid-July to the end of August, and the gestation period is about nine and a half months. In Texas calves start arriving in early April, while in Canada they come two or three weeks later. Calves are nursed for nearly a year, the mothers weaning the young in the spring about the time the next calf is due. Buffalo milk is rich in butterfat, just the supplementary nourishment needed in the cold winter on the plains by calves too young to store up an ample supply of body fat of their own.
Buffalo are considered as adults in their fourth year, but they continue to grow for the next two or three years. They live to about twenty years of age in protected pastures, with some living more than thirty years.
Buffalo never learned to paw the snow away to expose grass for winter feed as range horses do. Perhaps their split hooves hinder such pawing. When the snow is light and fluffy, the buffalo can nose it away, but when a crust of ice forms or the snow packs, the animal soon gets its nose all raw and bloody in attempting to feed. Fortunately on the plains the wind usually keeps a good deal of the high ground blown bare.
Before the buffalo were driven back from the marginal ranges of their domain, they had occupied about a third of all North America, adapting themselves to a wide range of climate and terrain, but they always needed good grass for pasture. They preferred the Great Plains, where they could find excellent grass the year around, with some shelter from winter storms in the valleys and in the narrow belts of timber along the streams. They did quite well in the prairie country too, and in open woodlands of either scattered pines or deciduous trees with patches of grass. They avoided the dense coniferous forests with their heavy duff of decaying needles and heavy underbrush. Such places had no food for the buffalo, which is not a browsing animal.
The heavy coniferous forests of Canada limited the northern range. Along the foothills of the Rockies, where the timber was more open, small herds lived to the northern limits of Alberta. On the south was another vegetation barrier, the chaparral thickets of southern and southwestern Texas, which were as effective in stopping the spread of the herds as any mountain barrier. The eastern limit was the tidewater of the Atlantic Ocean, while on the west the many ridges of the Rocky Mountains loomed as a formidable wall, breached in only two places: at South Pass in southern Wyoming, and along the upper Yellowstone and Missouri rivers in southwestern Montana.
Buffalo found a rather easy passage up the Yellowstone and across Bozeman Pass into the Three Forks country of Montana. From there they could go north to Clarks Fork of the Columbia River, but they were commonly found only as far as the western end of Deer Lodge Valley. Small bands did penetrate farther downstream into Bitterroot Valley; their bones have been found there, and local Indians tell stories of them. There has been but one recorded kill of a buffalo beyond Deer Lodge Valley, a stray bull at Horse Plains in 1853, 150 miles down Clarks Fork.
In prehistoric times some buffalo penetrated the mountains and reached the Columbia Basin, and possibly as far west as the mouth of the Snake River. The herds were not able to establish themselves permanently, and were killed off by hunters.
From the upper Missouri drainage, at the head of the Madison and Beaverhead rivers, wide passes enabled the herds to cross the continental divide with no trouble. These passes led the animals into the upper Snake Valley in southeastern Idaho, where their westward movement was blocked by desert scrub, recent lava flows, and deep canyons. One small gap between the mountains and the lava flows could be passed under favorable conditions. That some buffalo did pass through here is evident from their presence in southeastern Oregon at two different periods, perhaps 3,000 years apart. Skulls of the more recent herd have been found in the mud at Harney Lake, where they were seen in 1826 by Peter Skeene Ogden, a factor for the Hudson's Bay Company. There is no evidence that either of these herds lived more than a few years in the Oregon country.
Buffalo from the upper Snake Valley and from South Pass filled the valley of the Bear River and spread south between the Wasatch Range and Great Salt Lake. There they were hemmed in on the west by the desert, on the south by canyons, and on the east by the Colorado mountain mass, but they were in good range country in the valleys around Grand Junction, Colorado, and to the north. This herd became established and lasted until the late nineteenth century.
From Minnesota eastward the northern boundary of the buffalo range was approximately a line from the Falls of St. Anthony to the southern tip of Lake Michigan, then following a small northern bulge into Michigan between Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, then along the southern shore of Lake Erie, the Niagara River, and Lake Ontario about to Oswego, New York. The line then went south to the mountains and followed the main ridge of the Alleghenies into West Virginia and eastward to the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.