The Spring Buffalo Hunt

For the Indians of the central plains extending to the Rocky Mountains spring was an important time. Two big buffalo hunts happened each year one in September when the bison were fat and the tribes were beginning their preparation for winter. The other was about now, when the weather warmed around the first of April.

Unlike the movies where Buffalo were always over the next hill, tribes often traveled for great distances for these hunts. Traveling 300 miles for a hunt was not unusual and sometimes many more miles were traveled.

The hunt was so important that scouts were sent far ahead and when the herd was spotted camps were set up 10 to 20 miles away so as not to frighten the herd. Great care was taken to make sure that no hunter got in a hurry and went out before the main hunt. Hunters who did were punished and sent packing.

Hunts were often on horseback but Indians also used nature sometimes driving herds into box canyons or over cliffs, anything that worked to provide for the tribe. The hunter who made the kill was given the tongue and hide the rest was shared with the tribe after the butchers took their share.

How much of the animal was taken or used depended on the hunt. When a large supply of buffalo were taken only the best cuts were used: tongue, hump, ribs and hide and often organ meat. If times were tough nearly everything was taken and used, including hoofs and some entrails.

Meat was eaten in great feasts when the hunters arrived back home in their tribal camps. Camp activities, for the next few weeks, centered on preserving meat for a time when it might be needed for travel or in poor hunting times.  Native peoples made the first jerky and pemmican.

Pemmican was tried as a traveling food for American troops in WWI but it never caught on, at least here. German solders used pemmican in both WWI and WWII, and reportedly found it quite good.

Fort Laramie and the Plains Indian Culture

Until 1834 Americas vast buffalo plains were wild and untouched by eastern society and business. All that changed when William Sublette built the small, Fort William, on the Laramie and Platte Rivers of today’s Wyoming. Society and eastern business came west and stationed itself behind the 18 foot high stacked earth and cottonwood walls of the fort the trappers already called Laramie.

Much of the fur trade in America’s northwest and south were already controlled by far removed big business and now the great free trappers and traders of the plains and Rocky Mountains had eastern business in their midst.

White men had hunted and trapped this area for two decades, living, dressing, eating and hunting like their nomad brothers of the plains. Many married into the tribes, happy with the roaming freedom of the plains Indians.

Over the Laramie River from the Fort

With the building of Fort Laramie came a separation of cultures. The walls of the fort kept the Indians out and let the white men in. When allowed inside, Indians were treated more like intruders than guests, a most opposite approach from the tribes who had welcomed whites into their world a few years earlier.

Trapper and Trader at Fort Laramie

In the year 1834 and the west was going through a huge change, a change that would bring bloodshed to the plains for more than a half century. The east had come west.

Buffalo

By the middle of the 1700s the great herds of bison that roamed America were estimated to be at least 60 million, and possibly as many as 100 million. But in less than a century that number was reduced to a few hundred. Many causes can be found as to why the buffalo were nearly wiped out. Certainly, drought had much to do with it, and the hide hunters, and (sport?) hunters killed hundreds of thousands. But did you know?

Buffalo on the Spit

For more than a century Wyoming bison were killed by the tribes for many and in some cases most of their needs. When the mountain men/trappers brought European trade goods everything changed.  Indians started hunting buffalo as an economic benefit for themselves and their tribes. For the first time they began killing bison for their hides and tongues which they then exchanged for trade goods. By the 1840s, the number of hides prepared for trade was far more than could ever be used by the tribes.

 One estimate guesses that Native Indians were using/eating only four out of every 100 bison they were killing as more and more American and European trade goods reached the tribes. In 1839, the American Fur Company bought 45,000 buffalo robes and in 1840, 67,000 more. All of this was before the coming of the famous buffalo hunters of the plains that slaughtered the buffalo by the tens of thousands.

Thanks to a few forward looking people, starting in 1881, today there are nearly 400,000 bison, once again, in North American.

 

 Buffalo

They weigh around a ton

Stand 6 feet tall at the hump 

From nose to tail are about 11 feet long

They can run for short distances as fast as 35 Mph

Reach mature full size at about 7 years of age

Can live 30 years or more