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Get Breaking News on your cellExcerpt from 'Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West'
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February 2008
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Excerpt from Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West by Michael Punke. Used by permission of HarperCollins. J. Wright Mooar, a young man from Vermont, traveled south and west with a fellow hunter until, in the Panhandle of Texas, they found their buffalo, “millions upon millions.” “For five days,” remembered Mooar, “we had ridden through and camped in a mobile sea of living buffalo.” But as Mooar was well aware, there was an irksome hitch. Mooar’s “sea of living buffalo” lay squarely within the lands set aside for Indians by the terms of the Medicine Lodge Treaty. Back in Kansas to report his findings, Mooar and his fellow hunters “held a council” to determine their next step. Ultimately, they decided to seek official advice, selecting Mooar and a man named Frazier to act as their envoys to Fort Dodge. The major in command of Fort Dodge, as Mooar described him, was a gracious host. They talked at length about the buffalo trade before Mooar finally got down to business. The major’s response was gracious indeed. “Boys,” he declared, “if I were a buffalo hunter, I would hunt buffalo where the buffalo are.” “That,” remembered Mooar, “settled the question.” Economics alone would have been wholly sufficient to doom the buffalo. During the 1870s, however, a powerful strategic rationale would also come into play: that the destruction of the buffalo was necessary if the nation were to prevail in the intensifying war with the Indian. Grinnell would be there as it happened, history unfurling on all sides around him. |
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