Harmon’s Histories: Buffalo hunters wiped out 2 immense Montana herds

Jim Harmon

My favorite Montana historian, K. Ross Toole, in one of his videotaped lectures at the University of Montana back in the 1980s, remarked, “There were about 30 million to 80 million buffalo (in Montana in the 1800s).”

“They were divided into two great herds, the northern herd and the southern." Then with a bit of a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I don't know who counted them but there were an awful lot of buffalo.”

Today, very few bison remain. In a way, you could blame the fur traders who decimated the populations of mink, beaver and otter, causing a shift to buffalo pelts to make stylish clothing for the eastern population.

It wasn’t really “hunting,” as much as it was “slaughtering.”

Toole described it this way: “Two or three men would go out. They had a forked stick. They used a Sharps rifle with a leather-padded handle, because the guns got so hot. They had spare guns.”

“The buffalo was a dumb animal, with very poor eyesight. They couldn’t smell worth a damn, so that you could come up on a buffalo herd and start shooting and as each buffalo dropped the rest of the herd continued to graze and paid no attention to the whole business.”

In 1857, as many as 35,000 buffalo skins were brought in to Fort Benton.

The arrival of the railroad in the 1880s marked the end of the native population of buffalo in the United States.

In 1884, “Hunters would sit on top of the train shooting buffalo as fast as they possibly could. Then they skinned them very very quickly with a horse.”

“They made the appropriate cuts in the fur and pulled the skin off in one swoop. It took about 30 to 60 seconds to skin a buffalo that way. But, they did not use the meat at all!”

“Occasionally, since the hump was considered a delicacy, they'd stop and fry a little fat, but they left the carcass there. As a consequence of this, the prairies of Montana and elsewhere were dotted as far as the eye could see with the skinned carcasses of buffalo.”

That created what was to become a century-long issue: wolves.

As Toole put it, the wolves no longer had to hunt. “All they had to do was eat those carcasses.”

All that remained, then, from this massive slaughter were the bones, documented in photographs, huge piles left alongside the railroad track, where they could be picked up as free fertilizer.