Powder River Let 'er Buck

(Maxwell), Struthers Burt who grew up in Philadelphia and was a graduate of Princeton seems an unlikely person to have brought attention to Wyoming with his writings of the west. In his book, Powder River, Let ‘er Buck, Burt explains how grass made Wyoming.  First by feeding the Bison which brought native peoples. Later it brought the cowboy and cattle along with the sheepherder and his flocks.

He calls the Powder River, ugly, and unproductive and laments the fact that it runs the wrong way. Yet it was along this river that Wyoming history was made. It was here where the Indian was forced to give up the last of their open hunting area to the influx of whites from the east. It was here that the cattlemen fought the nester- homesteaders, and it was the scene of countless fights between the sheep and cattle people.

Burt said the well-known Wyoming phrase, and now a football and basketball cheer for the University of Wyoming Cowboys and Cowgirls, Powder River, Let ‘er Buck, refers to a secret. Something great – so great, in fact, that only the initiated, those who live there would understand, at its essence it refers to everything Wyoming.

Wyoming people get it, we live in a wonderful area of fast moving streams, breathtaking mountain beauty and an abundance of wildlife seen nowhere else on earth. It is indeed, to the initiated – Wyoming.

Powder River Let ‘er Buck!

Where Did All The Buffalo Go ?

The great era of the mountain man lasted for twenty years. The two decades from 1820 to 1840 opened much of the west and all of Wyoming.  But what did the mountain men do after 1840, the price of fur was down, down so low it wasn’t worth their time to trap. Many turned to the vast buffalo herds of the plains and foothills, either leading hunters to them or hunting themselves.

In the 1840s there were a reported 30 million buffalo and maybe as many as 60 million – by 1882 there were less than one thousand. Theses beasts had roamed America for hundreds of centuries sustaining cultures that dated back to nearly the Stone Age. So what happened? We hunted them to near extinction. They were easy prey, hunted for food to feed railroad workers, shot for sport by hunters from all over the world. Later thousands were killed for their tongue and hump steaks. And then the hide hunters came. $3.00 a hide when a dollar a day was a decent wage. Many hunters employed full time skinners, cooks, teamsters and general help. A good hunter killed hundreds and sometimes thousands in a year.

 

So how did this happen, sadly, government policy? Kill the food source and the Indian problem would go away, at least that was the theory, and it seemed to work. The United States government encouraged the hunting of buffalo to extension. By 1890 the Indian Wars were over and the buffalo were nearly gone.

 

Today the Buffalo are making a strong comeback thanks to a few pure strain herds like the one in Yellowstone. I took these photos on a trip in the Laramie Range (30 miles away) last week end. These buffalo are on a huge ranch on open, unfenced range. They look pretty happy to me.