Michael Punke - Last Stand - George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

Published by The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by The Borough Press 2016

Originally published in 2007 by Collins and Smithsonian Books

Copyright © Michael Punke 2007

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Michael Punke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008189341

Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008189358

Version: 2016-02-18

For Sophie and Bo:

May your children’s children see wild buffalo on the plains.

Motionless, with head thrown back,

and in an attitude of attention,

he calmly inspected the vessel floating along below him;

so beautiful an object amid his wild surroundings,

and with his background of brilliant sky,

that no hand was stretched out for the rifle …

There is one spot left,

a single rock about which this tide will break,

and past which it will sweep, leaving it undefiled

by the unsightly traces of civilization.

George Bird Grinnell

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

MAPS

PROLOGUE: The Stand

One : “Wild and Wooly”

Two : “Self-Denial”

Three : “Barbarism Pure and Simple”

Four : “I Felled a Mighty Bison”

Five : “The Guns of Other Hunters”

Six : “That Will Mean an Indian War”

Seven : “Ere Long Exterminated”

Eight : “A Weekly Journal”

Nine : “No Longer a Place for Them”

Ten : “Blundering, Plundering”

Eleven : “The Meanest Work I Ever Did”

Twelve : “A Terror to Evil-Doers”

Thirteen : “A Single Rock”

Fourteen : “For All It Is Worth”

Fifteen : “Simple Majesty”

EPILOGUE: The Last Stand — “Something Unprecedented”

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY MICHAEL PUNKE

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The West of the Buffalo and George Bird Grinnell.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Yellowstone National Park, 1881

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

After placing about fifteen shots where they were most needed, I had the herd stopped, and the buffalo paid no attention to the subsequent shooting.

—VICTOR GRANT SMITH

Vic Smith, a hunter, lifted his head above a rise on the plains floor, peering down at several hundred buffalo in the valley of the Redwater River. The Montana winter of 1881 was frigid, all the more so because Smith lay prone in the snow, two Sharps buffalo rifles and several bandoleers of cartridges spread out on a tarp beside him. Smith was careful to stay downwind and wore a white sheet to conceal him from the nearest animals, three hundred yards away. For a while he just watched, his experienced eyes studying the herd—picking out the leaders, anticipating movements, carefully planning his first shot. It all looked perfect, the ideal stand.

Finally Smith reached for one of the Sharps, working the lever to chamber a four-inch brass shell. Supporting the stout barrel across his arm, Smith sighted carefully on the old cow that he knew led the herd. He aimed at a spot just in front of her hip, then fired.

The report of the big gun thundered across the wide plain, and a cloud of acrid smoke temporarily obscured the herd. Smith did not look to see if he had hit his target—he knew he had. Instead he set the smoking rifle on the tarp and loaded the second gun, then pulled it snug to his shoulder. He alternated rifles each shot; otherwise the barrels became so hot that they fouled. In Texas, he’d heard, buffalo hunters sometimes urinated on their guns to cool them, but in Montana, winter did the work.

The second Sharps ready, Smith looked up to find exactly what he expected. His first shot had found its precise target in front of the cow’s hip. When hit in that spot, Smith knew, the animal could not run off but instead would just stand there, “all humped up with pain.” As Smith intended, other members of the herd—the old cow’s “children, grandchildren, cousins, and aunts”—were already starting to mill about, confused, some sniffing at the blood that seeped from the cow.

Smith now sighted on another old cow on the opposite side of the herd, marking the same target in front of the hip. He fired again.

Smith worked deliberately, never rushing, a shot about once every thirty seconds. Every bullet was strategic. Most of the early targets were cows, though occasionally he picked off a skittish bull that looked ready to bolt. “After placing about fifteen shots where they were most needed,” he would later recall, “I had the herd stopped, and the buffalo paid no attention to the subsequent shooting.” Experienced hunters like Smith called it “tranquilizing” or “mesmerizing” the herd.

An hour later he was done. Below Vic Smith in the valley of the Redwater lay 107 dead buffalo. In the 1881 season he would kill 4,500. 1

THE STORY OF HOW THE BUFFALO WAS SAVED FROM EXTINCTION IS one of the great dramas of the Old West. More profoundly, it is a story of the transition from the Old West to the New—a transition whose battles are still fought bitterly to this day. The story is personified in a man, little known today, by the name of George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell was a scientist and a journalist, a hunter and a conservationist. In his remarkable life, Grinnell would live the adventures of the Old West even as he helped to shape the New.

The party started from New Haven late in June, bound for a West that was then really wild and wooly.