October 16, 2025 • 38 mins
Here's a sneak peak of our newest audio original, MeatEater's American History: The Hide Hunters (1865-1883).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Thanks for listening to our latest bonus drop of the
Meat Eater podcast. What you're about to hear is a
chapter from our new audio original, Meat Eater's American History,
The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three.
If you like what you're hearing, you can go find
the complete work anywhere that you get your audio books. Again,
(00:24):
Meat Eater's American History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five
to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
And here's a little taste called Ghosts. Chapter one. Ghosts.
Let's get something cleared up right away before we even
begin this story. There is no difference between the animal
known as the American buffalo and the animal known as
(00:54):
a bison. Both names refer to the creature whose scientific
name is bison bison. The confusion about this meaning, the
confusion about whether you call them buffalo or bison, stems
from the fact that Europeans who arrived in what is
now America didn't know what to make of these one
thousand pound or even two thousand pound catile like creatures
(01:19):
with sharply curved horns, hugely humped backs, wooly textured hides,
and delicious meat at various times, various people called them cows,
crook backed oxen, and leboeuf sauvage, which translates to wild beeves,
(01:40):
but eventually they settled on buffalo because the animal did
look a hell of a lot like its distant relatives,
the cape buffalo of Africa and the water buffalo of Asia. Eventually, though,
it began occurring to folks that similarities be damned, the
animal wasn't technically a buffalo. Species began to gradually shift
(02:02):
to bison, and the bison adopters started to correct the
buffalo users in classic no ith All fashion, usually by
saying something like did you know that it's actually called
a bison. So if you are one of these folks
who has to roll their eyes or feign confusion whenever
you hear them called the buffalo, I'm sorry you are
(02:23):
in for a rough ride on this story, because this
is a story about buffalo American buffalo. If you know
only one thing about these animals, it's probably this. There
used to be a hell of a lot of them,
and now there aren't that many. For most Americans, the
buffalo doesn't symbolize wild nature in the way that a
(02:46):
wole for an elk or a mountain goat does. Instead,
these massive creatures call to mind a lost world. When
we look at the animals and the few places where
they still exist as a wild creature, they bring to
mind a sort of sadness or a sense of regret
that things hadn't gone differently for the species, and in
(03:07):
a way differently for us as Americans who love wildlife
as well. This here is the story of the men
who brought that unfortunate reality into existence. They refer to
themselves as buffalo hunters, but we know of them today
as the hide hunters. In little more than a decade
(03:28):
after the end of the Civil War, they wiped the
Great Planes clear of their most stunning, most visible, and
most important wildlife species, the American buffalo. In the eighteen
seventies and early eighteen eighties, commercial demand for leather made
from the skin of these animals allowed the hide hunters
(03:48):
to make a living shooting and skinning them by the
thousands individually and by the millions collectively. At the most
basic level, hide hunters were market hunters, a term that
refers to individuals who kill wild animals to sell their meat, skin, feathers, horns,
or any other part of their bodies that has commercial value.
(04:12):
Over the course of American history, there have been a
number of market hunting booms, and it's no coincidence that
these eras have left us with some of our wildest
tales of wilderness adventure. Daniel Boone was a market hunter
who trafficked in white tailed deer skins in the mid
to late seventeen hundreds. Davy Crockett was a market hunter
(04:36):
who trafficked in bear meat and bear grease in the
early eighteen hundreds. Jim Bridger and John Colter were market
hunters who trafficked in beaver skins for a handful of decades,
ending at around eighteen forty each of these generations. In
each of these individuals pursued this unique existence for a
(04:58):
variety of different reasons, but above all else, their primary
motivation was financial. Whitetail hunting for Boone, beaver trapping for Bridger.
Buffalo hunting for the hide hunters was a lifestyle, sure,
but most importantly we need to understand it as a livelihood.
(05:20):
These buffalo hide hunters did their work with ruthless efficiency,
from the sweltering plains of Texas to the frozen planes
of the Canadian border, armed with what we might call
the next generation weapons of their day, high powered breech
loading rifles, some with telescopic sights that could drop a
(05:41):
two thousand pound bull buffalo at distances that most shooters
today would have a hard time matching. Despite how foreign
the actions of these men might seem to us in
the twenty first century, this tragic, stunning, jaw dropping, awe
inspiring saga took place in a world that is not
(06:02):
so terribly distant from the one we live in now.
In addition to shooting guns that fired brass casings, they
read newspapers. They traveled by train, and they ordered some
of the things they wanted, including sometimes their rifles, through
the mail. Many of them, years after the slaughter, would
(06:24):
flip light switches. Some would even drive cars. And yet
they carried out a campaign of unintentional eradication that is
unthinkable to us today. The hide hunters didn't arrive in
ships from across the ocean. They weren't exploring places that
had never been seen by a white man. They didn't
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rack up a list of crazy firsts. The first person
of European descent to reach the Texas Panhandle where a
good hunk of this story takes place, got there three
hundred and twenty four years before the start of this story.
It was the Spanish Conquisodor Coronado, the first non indigenous
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people to cross the continent. The Lewis and Clark expedition
had done so sixty years before the start of this story.
There are no frontier luminaries in here. There are no
Daniel Boons or Jim Bridges among the hide hunters. We've
mythologized those hunters and trappers into honorary founding fathers. They
(07:31):
star in countless films and TV shows and songs and
campfire tales. But the hide hunters. They don't make movies
about them. Children don't play games pretending to be them. Sure,
a few of the hide hunters became well known for
doing other stuff later on, like being gunfighters and ranchers
and entertainers and conservationists, but their names as hide hunters
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are largely absent from the annals of history. There were
maybe about five thousand of them in total, who worked
as either a shooter, a skinner, or simply a hired hand.
There were many colorful characters, some with quite descriptive nicknames.
You had Charles, squirrel Eye, Emery soor Toed Joe, Limpy,
(08:20):
Jim Smith. You had Snuffer, Soda water Jack, three Finger Foley,
and Buffalo Jones. Dirty Face Jones got his name when
a bullet intended to kill him missed his head, but
his would be killer was so close that the burning
flash of powder seared his cheeks and nose. You could
(08:41):
be forgiven for confusing dirty Face Jones with powder Face Hudson,
but his two different fellas Wrongwheeled Jones committed an innocent
act of stupidity that he'd never lived down when he
insisted to a group of his fellow hunters that it
was impossible to replace a broken wheel on the right
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side of a wagon with a wheel from the left side.
To illustrate the fraught nature of their work, considered us
a few short things about skunks. The hide hunter Skunk
Johnson is largely remembered for an episode when he was
trapped inside his cave like shelter known as a dugout
(09:22):
by a party of hostile Indians. The siege lasted fifteen days,
during which time he only ate skunks. Another hunter, known
as Kentuck, was bitten by a rabbit skunk, causing him
to crawl underneath a railroad water tank in a delusional fit,
where he died. A third hide hunter, whose name is
(09:44):
lost to history, also suffered a bite from a rabbit skunk.
When he felt the beginning of a spasm of hydrophobia,
as the condition was known, he walked out behind a
building and swallowed a gulp of strychnine, which the hide
hunters used to protect their stack of buffalo skins from bugs, vermin,
and other prairie scavengers, and also on occasion to poison
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wolves for a little side money that could be made
from selling their hides. These were not wealthy or well
connected men. They were as blue collar, working class as
it gets. They were poor guys born in places like
Pennsylvania and Georgia and Illinois to farmers and blacksmiths and
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barrel makers. A great many of the hide hunters had
been tangled up in the horrors of the Civil War
on both sides of that conflict. As fighting men, killing
buffalo by the dozens and sometimes upwards of one hundred
in a day per man, the hide hunters wrought perhaps
the most egregious episode of natural resource over exploitation in
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the history of the United States, if not the world.
We simply don't have any other examples, at least in
the historical era of a comparable, widely distributed wildlife species
pushed to the brink of collapse so quickly by the
hands of man. Whatever one thinks about the outcome of
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all that killing, and there's really only one thing to think,
which is what an incredible waste? You can't escape from
the reality that these guys were absolute masters of their craft.
They were tough, They craved adventure, They had incredible endurance,
They could think fast, they could shoot, they could fight.
(11:34):
They were brave to the point that it resembles a
suicidal recklessness. And man, they could work, like work harder
than anyone you're ever likely to encounter in your own
life today. What made the era of the hide hunters
possible was a combination of factors too big and complex
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for most of them to have fully comprehended. In hindsight,
it look like a perfect storm. For one, consider the
impact of the railroads. Long hunters like Daniel Boone and
mountain men like Jim Bridger were distinctly pre industrial. They
operated within the natural constraints of muscle and bone. The
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Great Bottleneck and their operations was the cold reality of
needing to move goods deer skins and beaver pelts, respectively,
to market on the backs of horses and mules. For Boone,
this meant leading a small string of horses over rough
trails through the Cumberland Gap and across the Appalachian Mountains.
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The mountain men who plied the streams of the Rockies
in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties moved their furs
via an annual pack train that took several weeks to
cross the plains even in good weather. Their operations were
fueled and limited in scale by equine conveys. For the
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hide hunters, the railroads transformed everything. The heavy, cumbersome, quite
rigid hides of buffalo were shipped back to the tanneries
of the East in such quantities that they could not
possibly have been moved by wagon, train or horseback. The
timeline alone reveals the connection with stunning clarity. It is
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no coincidence that the hunt in Kansas erupted in eighteen
seventy two, the same year that the Topeka and Santa
Fe Railroad arrived in Dodge City. It is no coincidence
that the height of the killing in Texas followed the
arrival of the railroad in Fort Worth on July fourth,
eighteen seventy six. And once again it is no coincidence
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that the Northern herd was quickly wiped out following the
extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Miles City in
eighteen eighty one. At the same time, the proliferation of
factory machines and the accelerating industrialization of the American economy
created an insatiable demand for tough, elastic leather that could
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be used as drive belts as in factory belting. Picture
for a moment. The timing belt in your car are
in your snowmobile. It's essentially a strap running around two wheels,
so that when one wheel turns, typically powered by a motor,
the wheel on the other end turns as well. Simply put,
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a belt transmits power from one place to another, and
in the ever expanding industrial economy of the late eighteen hundreds,
miles of belting were needed to apply power generated by
steam or water wheels to looms, saws, lathes, and any
number of applications where machines were doing work that was
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once done by hand. Buffalo leather, which compared to cattle leather,
was more elastic, while also incredibly tough, served as an
ideal material for machine belting, and at the very moment
that transportation networks were able to deliver buffalo hides by
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the millions to eastern tanneries, and those eastern tanneries were
able to sell unlimited quantities of those process hides. Advances
and firearms technology accelerated by the Civil War made the
American riflemen exponentially more effective than his predecessors of only
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a few decades before. Earlier breech loading rifles, to say
nothing of the muzzleloaders that came before them, were too underpowered,
too inaccurate, and too clumsy to reload to have been
capable of the buffalo killing that the hide hunters unleashed
on the planes. We'll get into the specifics of those
(16:01):
rifles later on, But just as our story would have
been impossible without the railroad, it would have been impossible
without the cutting edge firearms of the post Civil War era.
The Civil War lurks in the background of this story
as a sort of dark prequel in the title of
(16:22):
this work, you'll notice the date range eighteen sixty five
to eighteen eighty three. Well, eighteen sixty five is the
year the Civil War ended. The aftermath of that bloody
war between the states pushed out westward a restless generation
of men in search of work and opportunity. It pushed
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them away from the war ravaged cities and agricultural communities
of southern reconstruction, away from the strictured discipline and meager
rations of military service, away from the insecurity and claustrophobia
of the family farm, way from the starvation wages of
the northern factory floor. On the distant plains of the
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American West, they saw a new life of promise, adventure,
and cash. A couple of years ago, I sat for
a lengthy interview for a Ken Burns documentary on the
history of the American buffalo, and during the editing process,
I was invited to offer feedback. My primary concern with
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an early version of the series was that its short
treatment of the subject of the hide hunters dehumanized them.
It made it seem as though they were motivated by
some sadistic desire to destroy American wildlife. It's understandable how
people would get that idea, but it's naive. Rather than
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imagining the hide Hunters as soul as hell billies, it's
better to see them as the vanguard of industrial capitalism
on the western planes. In today's world, serious thinkers don't
personally blame an Appalachian born coal miner for air pollution.
We don't blame frontline soldiers for the conflicts they fight in,
(18:13):
and we don't blame the guys driving concrete trucks and
hanging drywall for suburban sprawl. Now to that, you might say, well,
the Buffalo Hunters knew what they were doing, and the
collective consequences of their individual actions were incredibly costly. Well,
if in fifty years all of the most apocalyptic predictions
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about global warming have come true, I'm not going to
say that a guy making a living in a North
Dakota oil field was a bad guy. And I'm not
going to cite all of the times you turned on
your air conditioner or failed to organize car pools instead
of driving alone. I'd instead point my finger at political inertia,
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societal indifference, imperative of economic growth, and the human tendency
to endure changes for the worse, rather than trying to
remedy them. Not that these guys were saints, they most
certainly were not. It's fair to say that most held
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the same prejudice views of Native people that were common
at the time, and they did not keep those prejudice
views to themselves either. Some of them were objectively villainous figures,
and many had a real pensiant for violence. And I
hope it's clear by now that I mourned the consequences
of their actions. At the same time, to understand them
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as real people requires recognizing the larger systems and structures
of which they were just one small part, and acknowledging
that everyone has limited choices from which to choose. As
the hide hunter, Frank Mayer said of his time shooting
buffalo on the pl planes, he had a hide, the
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hide was worth money. I was young, twenty two. I
could shoot. I'd like to hunt. Wouldn't you have done
the same thing? If I'm answering that question honestly as
your author sitting at a microphone, as a guy who
lives for hunting and fishing, and I put myself back
in Frank Mayer's shoes, I think the answer would be Yeah,
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I would have done the same damn thing. If you've
never heard of Frank Mayor, you could forgive yourself to
put a human face on old Frank. Here's a bit
about him. Born in eighteen fifty, he was a thirteen
year old drummer boy for his father's artillery unit when
he witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, where one man
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died for about every ten seconds of fighting. From age
twenty two to twenty eight, Mayor hunted buffalo on the
plains of Kansas and Texas, killing thousands. By the time
the old hide Hunter died on February twelve, nineteen fifty four,
my own father was thirty years old, Hugh Hefner was
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publishing Playboy magazine, and the Korean War was over. Mayor
had survived some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil
War and lived into the age of nuclear submarines, Burger
king and corvettes. Mayor is one of those hide hunters
we know a lot about. There are some others, such
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as Charles Wrath and Jay Wright Moore. These guys were
pioneers of the trade, recognized by their contemporaries as influential characters.
If you read anything about this era, you'll run into
their names again and again. They appear throughout the historical
record in ledgers, diaries, receipts, newspaper articles, and legal documents
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related to their careers as hide hunters. Other hide hunters
recorded their experiences in great detail later on in life,
either for posterity's sake or to make a little money.
Among those is John Cook, who published a memoir, The
Border and the Buffalo in nineteen oh seven. During the
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Civil War, Cook fought for the Union along the bloody
boundary between Missouri and Kansas, where gorilla forces committed some
of the most gruesome atrocities of that conflict. Afterward, like
many of his fellow veterans, he drifted westward. From the
fall of eighteen seventy four until the spring of eighteen
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seventy eight, Cook hunted the Panhandle of Texas. His descriptions
of the day to day business of hunting and skinning
are vividly detailed. Many hide hunters, like George Reigard, were
interviewed later in life by local reporters writing for readership's
hungry for stories from the so called Old West. Re
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Reguard was born in Pennsylvania in eighteen forty seven and
enlisted in the twenty second Cavalry one month after the
Battle of Gettysburg at sixteen years of age. After being
wounded and discharged from the army, he set out for
western Kansas, where he drove freight wagons and marveled at
his strange new surroundings before adopting the occupation of a
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hide hunter. Between eighteen seventy one and eighteen seventy three,
Reguard killed more than five thousand animals. It was he
recalled buffalo butchery by wholesale. What makes the story you're
about to hear so historically significant and so viscerally tragic
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is that the hide hunters came at the end, or
rather caused the end, of a long procession of buffalo
hunters who'd been chasing the animals for more than ten
thousand years across the landscapes that we now call the
United States. Their actions closed out one of the longest
running cultural and economic life ways that this planet has
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ever seen since the arrival of the very first humans
in North America. Indigenous people nurtured a relationship with these
animals that, while it took on different forms at different times.
Is most remarkable for its sustainability. The first American buffalo
hunters were ice age immigrants from Siberia who killed a
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somewhat longer horned variety on the grasslands of northern Alaska
using adladdles. Later on, there were buffalo hunters who killed
great quantities of the animals by driving them over cliffs
and Alberta and Montana and even down into Texas. There
were buffalo hunters in the Dakotas who crept up on
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the animals camouflaged beneath the skins of freshly killed buffalo calves,
close enough to sink a carefully placed arrow into their
rib cage. And with the spread of equestrian culture among
the Planes tribes after the Spanish introduced horses into North America,
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we had buffalo hunters in western Kansas who chased buffalo
down on horseback and got so close they could have
jumped onto the buffalo's back, but instead held a smooth
bore musket barrel right up to the crease behind the
buffalo's shoulder in order to deliver a lead ball into
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the heart. Without a doubt, the story of each of
those buffalo hunting cultures is worthy of a project like this.
But this here is not a holistic analysis of the
different ways that different people hunted buffalo, nor is this
a comprehensive history of the destruction of the buffalo. That
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tale of shrinking range and collapsing numbers actually spans hundreds
of years in a huge swath of the continent. For
our journey ahead, though a quick overview of that will
be helpful to you. When Europeans started penetrating into the
various corners of North America over the sixteen hundreds and
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seventeen hundreds, they found scattered groups of buffalo and sometimes
impressive herds in the woods of Pennsylvania and stands of
cain along the Ohio River, along streams in what is
now Nashville, Tennessee, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and
in the rolling hills and tall grass prairies of Wisconsin
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and western Minnesota and Iowa. Daniel Boone frequently targeted them
for meat in Kentucky. As Boone and his contemporaries spread
out and pushed ever westward, those eastern buffalo herds were
killed off one by one by pot hunters feeding their
families and small scale market hunters looking to make a buck.
(27:08):
The various states buffalo populations fell like European nations in
the wake of the German Blitzkreek. Boone's own son, Nathan,
killed the last buffalo in Virginia in seventeen ninety seven.
North Carolina wiped out theirs in seventeen ninety nine, and
Kentucky did the same one year later, Pennsylvania the year
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after that. Louisiana killed its last buffalo in eighteen oh three,
and the last in Illinois and Ohio died in eighteen
oh eight, Tennessee eighteen twenty three, West Virginia eighteen twenty five,
Wisconsin eighteen thirty two. By the close of the Civil
War in eighteen sixty five, which again begins the story
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of the hide hunters that I'm going to tell here,
the animals were still mind blowingly abundant and what you
might think of as the core of their historic range
the American Great Plains and the inner mountain valleys of
the Rockies. Buffalo were still in the Panhandle of North Texas.
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They were still in western Oklahoma, Western Kansas, western Nebraska.
They were still in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming,
and Colorado were loaded, there were still buffalo in northern
New Mexico. Admittedly, the best research out there today indicates
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that the herds wiped out by the hide hunters were
already diminished by a host of factors. Besides bullets, a
record drought between eighteen fifty six and eighteen sixty four
helped the diminishment. Competition for grass from wild horses helped.
Diseases like anthrax and bovine tuberculosis introduced by European cattle
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perhaps helped some. Added to that. Indigenous hunting pressure and
harvest numbers certainly increased after the ascendancy of equestrian hunting culture,
which inspired many tribes to move onto the plains in
pursuit of meat for their families and buffalo robes to
be sold to American traders. So, in terms of what
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the hide hunters destroyed after the Civil War, how many
buffalo exactly are we talking about? Historians and ecologists are
still fighting about that today. A total population of around
fifteen million is a safe, currently fashionable number. Compare that
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to the estimated population size in the year eighteen eighty three,
the end date used in the title of this work.
At that point eighteen eighty three, the number of buffalo
that were still left alive in the unit United States
was less than one thousand, Or put another way, it
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was ninety nine zero point nine to nine percent fewer
than at the close of the Civil War. Here's a
thing we ought to clear up before we get too
far along. Common American history lessons about the destruction of
the herds like to include sordid details about the gross
excesses of Western travelers and tourists gunning down buffalo from
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moving trains or shooting them simply to see how many
they could get. Sir George Gore, an Irish nobleman, famously
took a multi year safari in Wyoming's Powder River country
in the mid eighteen fifties. Accompanied by a small army
of servants, a selection of fine wines, and a French
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carpet for the floor of his tent. Gore killed some
two thousand bison using seventy five different rifles he brought along.
He's one of the most obnoxious, reviled characters of the
American West, and there's no doubt there were a lot
of buffalo killed just for the sport of it. But
was it enough to wipe them off the face of
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the continent hardly. Another frequently repeated claim is that the
US Army deliberately exterminated the buffalo in order to starve
the tribes of the plans and force them onto reservations.
To be fair, there is some anecdotal evidence of individual
officers and units targeting local buffalo herds in a scorched
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Earth style tactic, and some hide hunters fought side by
side with army units, including African American units known as
Buffalo Soldiers, during periods of hostility, especially on the southern plains.
But was there an actual policy or a broader military
strategy targeting the buffalo. The most frequently cited evidence of
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anything resembling that General Phillip Sheridan's address to the Texas
Legislature in eighteen seventy five has been thoroughly debunked as
a hoax invented later in life by a hide hunter
who wanted to drape the shame of his younger years
in the flag of patriotic duty. If you start reading
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a lot about the history of the buffalo, you'll encounter
that mention of Sheridan's speech again and again. It's bs
and In truth, all the train shooting and army shooting
didn't even matter biologically. It was inconsequential. Today, driving across
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certain stretches of the Great Plains, say Interstate ninety between
Billings and Miles City, Montana, Interstate seventy from Abilene, Kansas,
all the way to Colorado, or Interstate forty from Oklahoma
City across the Texas Panhandle, will feel the hide Hunter's
legacy in your bones, that haunting emptiness where millions of
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Buffalo should be grazing. This story is an effort to
resurrect those men who last experienced the Great Herds, those
men who lived and hunted among them and who destroyed them.
It's an effort to bring them forward, to summon them
so we can ask them some questions. Where did you
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come from, How exactly did you do what you did,
what did it cost you, what did you gain in return?
And why did you do it? We will ask those
questions and seek their answers in the coming chapters. Here's
a rough idea of how it will go. We'll begin
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by establishing some essential context for the Hide Hunter story,
a deep time history of people in Buffalo on the
Great Plains, in the emergence of the first market for
buffalo skins in the form of the robe trade. Here
you'll get a sense of the significance of the animal
to the original inhabitants of the American West and the
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pre industrial constraints on its commodification. From there, we'll jump
to the aftermath of the Civil War, in which a
generation of displaced veterans looked westward for new opportunities at
the same time that the transcontinental railroads connected the resources
of the Great Plains with the industrial East. Ground zero
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for this explosive new economy was Dodge City, Kansas, the
subject of chapter four. It was in this upstart railroad
town where the business of the hide hunt took on
its characteristic form and its impact on the resource was
almost immediately made clear. From there will follow the hide
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hunters as they push into bloody Texas and violation of
treaties signed between native tribes and the US government. The
second phase showcases the speed and thoroughness of the slaughter,
as well as the dangers faced by hide hunters as
they endured unforgiving landscapes and the ever present potential for hostility.
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Then finally, we'll head north to the plains and bad
lands of eastern Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas,
where the Hide Hunters endured brutal cold as they finished
off the last remaining herds of the Great Plains. Along
the way, we'll discuss the weapons and tactics that made
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the hide Hunters such effective killers. We'll explore how a
camp full of these rugged characters undertook their day to
day work, and how they passed a little bit of
free time when they weren't engaged in shooting and skinning.
Will also give you an in depth examination of how
they processed buffalo for the market and what happened to
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those hides once they were loaded onto eastbound trains. And lastly,
we'll dive into the scene that faced the hide Hunters
when their grizzly work was done and the planes had
been emptied of herds that once numbered in the tens
of millions. Throughout this story, you'll come to see the
Hide Hunters not as larger than life characters or storybook villains,
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but as historical actors faced with a certain set of choices,
and you'll see how their story shaped our contemporary understandings
of environmental degradation, commercial exploitation, and the mythology of the
American West. Throughout, we'll point to the facts of how
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we know what we know, so you understand the sources
and research that went into this in case you want
to do some follow up reading on your own. As
for the sources, it would be a sin if I
did not acknowledge the work of three historians, Miles Gilbert,
Leo Ramager, and Sharon Cunningham, who have published two initial
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volumes A through D and E through K of an
ambitious encyclopedia of Buffalo hunters and skinners. It's the most
comprehensive resource out there for researchers who want to track
down the names of hide hunters and figure out what
published and archival materials might exist in order to better
(37:36):
tell their story. Trust me when I say that our
telling of the hide hunter story would be missing some
choice details and incredible anecdotes if it weren't for these
unique works. Now, let's get on with our story.
Thanks for listening to our latest bonus drop of the
Meat Eater podcast. What you're about to hear is a
chapter from our new audio original, Meat Eater's American History,
The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five to eighteen eighty three.
If you like what you're hearing, you can go find
the complete work anywhere that you get your audio books. Again,
(00:24):
Meat Eater's American History, The Hide Hunters eighteen sixty five
to eighteen eighty three.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
And here's a little taste called Ghosts. Chapter one. Ghosts.
Let's get something cleared up right away before we even
begin this story. There is no difference between the animal
known as the American buffalo and the animal known as
(00:54):
a bison. Both names refer to the creature whose scientific
name is bison bison. The confusion about this meaning, the
confusion about whether you call them buffalo or bison, stems
from the fact that Europeans who arrived in what is
now America didn't know what to make of these one
thousand pound or even two thousand pound catile like creatures
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with sharply curved horns, hugely humped backs, wooly textured hides,
and delicious meat at various times, various people called them cows,
crook backed oxen, and leboeuf sauvage, which translates to wild beeves,
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but eventually they settled on buffalo because the animal did
look a hell of a lot like its distant relatives,
the cape buffalo of Africa and the water buffalo of Asia. Eventually, though,
it began occurring to folks that similarities be damned, the
animal wasn't technically a buffalo. Species began to gradually shift
(02:02):
to bison, and the bison adopters started to correct the
buffalo users in classic no ith All fashion, usually by
saying something like did you know that it's actually called
a bison. So if you are one of these folks
who has to roll their eyes or feign confusion whenever
you hear them called the buffalo, I'm sorry you are
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in for a rough ride on this story, because this
is a story about buffalo American buffalo. If you know
only one thing about these animals, it's probably this. There
used to be a hell of a lot of them,
and now there aren't that many. For most Americans, the
buffalo doesn't symbolize wild nature in the way that a
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wole for an elk or a mountain goat does. Instead,
these massive creatures call to mind a lost world. When
we look at the animals and the few places where
they still exist as a wild creature, they bring to
mind a sort of sadness or a sense of regret
that things hadn't gone differently for the species, and in
(03:07):
a way differently for us as Americans who love wildlife
as well. This here is the story of the men
who brought that unfortunate reality into existence. They refer to
themselves as buffalo hunters, but we know of them today
as the hide hunters. In little more than a decade
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after the end of the Civil War, they wiped the
Great Planes clear of their most stunning, most visible, and
most important wildlife species, the American buffalo. In the eighteen
seventies and early eighteen eighties, commercial demand for leather made
from the skin of these animals allowed the hide hunters
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to make a living shooting and skinning them by the
thousands individually and by the millions collectively. At the most
basic level, hide hunters were market hunters, a term that
refers to individuals who kill wild animals to sell their meat, skin, feathers, horns,
or any other part of their bodies that has commercial value.
(04:12):
Over the course of American history, there have been a
number of market hunting booms, and it's no coincidence that
these eras have left us with some of our wildest
tales of wilderness adventure. Daniel Boone was a market hunter
who trafficked in white tailed deer skins in the mid
to late seventeen hundreds. Davy Crockett was a market hunter
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who trafficked in bear meat and bear grease in the
early eighteen hundreds. Jim Bridger and John Colter were market
hunters who trafficked in beaver skins for a handful of decades,
ending at around eighteen forty each of these generations. In
each of these individuals pursued this unique existence for a
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variety of different reasons, but above all else, their primary
motivation was financial. Whitetail hunting for Boone, beaver trapping for Bridger.
Buffalo hunting for the hide hunters was a lifestyle, sure,
but most importantly we need to understand it as a livelihood.
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These buffalo hide hunters did their work with ruthless efficiency,
from the sweltering plains of Texas to the frozen planes
of the Canadian border, armed with what we might call
the next generation weapons of their day, high powered breech
loading rifles, some with telescopic sights that could drop a
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two thousand pound bull buffalo at distances that most shooters
today would have a hard time matching. Despite how foreign
the actions of these men might seem to us in
the twenty first century, this tragic, stunning, jaw dropping, awe
inspiring saga took place in a world that is not
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so terribly distant from the one we live in now.
In addition to shooting guns that fired brass casings, they
read newspapers. They traveled by train, and they ordered some
of the things they wanted, including sometimes their rifles, through
the mail. Many of them, years after the slaughter, would
(06:24):
flip light switches. Some would even drive cars. And yet
they carried out a campaign of unintentional eradication that is
unthinkable to us today. The hide hunters didn't arrive in
ships from across the ocean. They weren't exploring places that
had never been seen by a white man. They didn't
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rack up a list of crazy firsts. The first person
of European descent to reach the Texas Panhandle where a
good hunk of this story takes place, got there three
hundred and twenty four years before the start of this story.
It was the Spanish Conquisodor Coronado, the first non indigenous
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people to cross the continent. The Lewis and Clark expedition
had done so sixty years before the start of this story.
There are no frontier luminaries in here. There are no
Daniel Boons or Jim Bridges among the hide hunters. We've
mythologized those hunters and trappers into honorary founding fathers. They
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star in countless films and TV shows and songs and
campfire tales. But the hide hunters. They don't make movies
about them. Children don't play games pretending to be them. Sure,
a few of the hide hunters became well known for
doing other stuff later on, like being gunfighters and ranchers
and entertainers and conservationists, but their names as hide hunters
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are largely absent from the annals of history. There were
maybe about five thousand of them in total, who worked
as either a shooter, a skinner, or simply a hired hand.
There were many colorful characters, some with quite descriptive nicknames.
You had Charles, squirrel Eye, Emery soor Toed Joe, Limpy,
(08:20):
Jim Smith. You had Snuffer, Soda water Jack, three Finger Foley,
and Buffalo Jones. Dirty Face Jones got his name when
a bullet intended to kill him missed his head, but
his would be killer was so close that the burning
flash of powder seared his cheeks and nose. You could
(08:41):
be forgiven for confusing dirty Face Jones with powder Face Hudson,
but his two different fellas Wrongwheeled Jones committed an innocent
act of stupidity that he'd never lived down when he
insisted to a group of his fellow hunters that it
was impossible to replace a broken wheel on the right
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side of a wagon with a wheel from the left side.
To illustrate the fraught nature of their work, considered us
a few short things about skunks. The hide hunter Skunk
Johnson is largely remembered for an episode when he was
trapped inside his cave like shelter known as a dugout
(09:22):
by a party of hostile Indians. The siege lasted fifteen days,
during which time he only ate skunks. Another hunter, known
as Kentuck, was bitten by a rabbit skunk, causing him
to crawl underneath a railroad water tank in a delusional fit,
where he died. A third hide hunter, whose name is
(09:44):
lost to history, also suffered a bite from a rabbit skunk.
When he felt the beginning of a spasm of hydrophobia,
as the condition was known, he walked out behind a
building and swallowed a gulp of strychnine, which the hide
hunters used to protect their stack of buffalo skins from bugs, vermin,
and other prairie scavengers, and also on occasion to poison
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wolves for a little side money that could be made
from selling their hides. These were not wealthy or well
connected men. They were as blue collar, working class as
it gets. They were poor guys born in places like
Pennsylvania and Georgia and Illinois to farmers and blacksmiths and
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barrel makers. A great many of the hide hunters had
been tangled up in the horrors of the Civil War
on both sides of that conflict. As fighting men, killing
buffalo by the dozens and sometimes upwards of one hundred
in a day per man, the hide hunters wrought perhaps
the most egregious episode of natural resource over exploitation in
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the history of the United States, if not the world.
We simply don't have any other examples, at least in
the historical era of a comparable, widely distributed wildlife species
pushed to the brink of collapse so quickly by the
hands of man. Whatever one thinks about the outcome of
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all that killing, and there's really only one thing to think,
which is what an incredible waste? You can't escape from
the reality that these guys were absolute masters of their craft.
They were tough, They craved adventure, They had incredible endurance,
They could think fast, they could shoot, they could fight.
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They were brave to the point that it resembles a
suicidal recklessness. And man, they could work, like work harder
than anyone you're ever likely to encounter in your own
life today. What made the era of the hide hunters
possible was a combination of factors too big and complex
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for most of them to have fully comprehended. In hindsight,
it look like a perfect storm. For one, consider the
impact of the railroads. Long hunters like Daniel Boone and
mountain men like Jim Bridger were distinctly pre industrial. They
operated within the natural constraints of muscle and bone. The
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Great Bottleneck and their operations was the cold reality of
needing to move goods deer skins and beaver pelts, respectively,
to market on the backs of horses and mules. For Boone,
this meant leading a small string of horses over rough
trails through the Cumberland Gap and across the Appalachian Mountains.
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The mountain men who plied the streams of the Rockies
in the eighteen twenties and eighteen thirties moved their furs
via an annual pack train that took several weeks to
cross the plains even in good weather. Their operations were
fueled and limited in scale by equine conveys. For the
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hide hunters, the railroads transformed everything. The heavy, cumbersome, quite
rigid hides of buffalo were shipped back to the tanneries
of the East in such quantities that they could not
possibly have been moved by wagon, train or horseback. The
timeline alone reveals the connection with stunning clarity. It is
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no coincidence that the hunt in Kansas erupted in eighteen
seventy two, the same year that the Topeka and Santa
Fe Railroad arrived in Dodge City. It is no coincidence
that the height of the killing in Texas followed the
arrival of the railroad in Fort Worth on July fourth,
eighteen seventy six. And once again it is no coincidence
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that the Northern herd was quickly wiped out following the
extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad to Miles City in
eighteen eighty one. At the same time, the proliferation of
factory machines and the accelerating industrialization of the American economy
created an insatiable demand for tough, elastic leather that could
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be used as drive belts as in factory belting. Picture
for a moment. The timing belt in your car are
in your snowmobile. It's essentially a strap running around two wheels,
so that when one wheel turns, typically powered by a motor,
the wheel on the other end turns as well. Simply put,
(14:36):
a belt transmits power from one place to another, and
in the ever expanding industrial economy of the late eighteen hundreds,
miles of belting were needed to apply power generated by
steam or water wheels to looms, saws, lathes, and any
number of applications where machines were doing work that was
(14:59):
once done by hand. Buffalo leather, which compared to cattle leather,
was more elastic, while also incredibly tough, served as an
ideal material for machine belting, and at the very moment
that transportation networks were able to deliver buffalo hides by
(15:19):
the millions to eastern tanneries, and those eastern tanneries were
able to sell unlimited quantities of those process hides. Advances
and firearms technology accelerated by the Civil War made the
American riflemen exponentially more effective than his predecessors of only
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a few decades before. Earlier breech loading rifles, to say
nothing of the muzzleloaders that came before them, were too underpowered,
too inaccurate, and too clumsy to reload to have been
capable of the buffalo killing that the hide hunters unleashed
on the planes. We'll get into the specifics of those
(16:01):
rifles later on, But just as our story would have
been impossible without the railroad, it would have been impossible
without the cutting edge firearms of the post Civil War era.
The Civil War lurks in the background of this story
as a sort of dark prequel in the title of
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this work, you'll notice the date range eighteen sixty five
to eighteen eighty three. Well, eighteen sixty five is the
year the Civil War ended. The aftermath of that bloody
war between the states pushed out westward a restless generation
of men in search of work and opportunity. It pushed
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them away from the war ravaged cities and agricultural communities
of southern reconstruction, away from the strictured discipline and meager
rations of military service, away from the insecurity and claustrophobia
of the family farm, way from the starvation wages of
the northern factory floor. On the distant plains of the
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American West, they saw a new life of promise, adventure,
and cash. A couple of years ago, I sat for
a lengthy interview for a Ken Burns documentary on the
history of the American buffalo, and during the editing process,
I was invited to offer feedback. My primary concern with
(17:29):
an early version of the series was that its short
treatment of the subject of the hide hunters dehumanized them.
It made it seem as though they were motivated by
some sadistic desire to destroy American wildlife. It's understandable how
people would get that idea, but it's naive. Rather than
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imagining the hide Hunters as soul as hell billies, it's
better to see them as the vanguard of industrial capitalism
on the western planes. In today's world, serious thinkers don't
personally blame an Appalachian born coal miner for air pollution.
We don't blame frontline soldiers for the conflicts they fight in,
(18:13):
and we don't blame the guys driving concrete trucks and
hanging drywall for suburban sprawl. Now to that, you might say, well,
the Buffalo Hunters knew what they were doing, and the
collective consequences of their individual actions were incredibly costly. Well,
if in fifty years all of the most apocalyptic predictions
(18:35):
about global warming have come true, I'm not going to
say that a guy making a living in a North
Dakota oil field was a bad guy. And I'm not
going to cite all of the times you turned on
your air conditioner or failed to organize car pools instead
of driving alone. I'd instead point my finger at political inertia,
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societal indifference, imperative of economic growth, and the human tendency
to endure changes for the worse, rather than trying to
remedy them. Not that these guys were saints, they most
certainly were not. It's fair to say that most held
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the same prejudice views of Native people that were common
at the time, and they did not keep those prejudice
views to themselves either. Some of them were objectively villainous figures,
and many had a real pensiant for violence. And I
hope it's clear by now that I mourned the consequences
of their actions. At the same time, to understand them
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as real people requires recognizing the larger systems and structures
of which they were just one small part, and acknowledging
that everyone has limited choices from which to choose. As
the hide hunter, Frank Mayer said of his time shooting
buffalo on the pl planes, he had a hide, the
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hide was worth money. I was young, twenty two. I
could shoot. I'd like to hunt. Wouldn't you have done
the same thing? If I'm answering that question honestly as
your author sitting at a microphone, as a guy who
lives for hunting and fishing, and I put myself back
in Frank Mayer's shoes, I think the answer would be Yeah,
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I would have done the same damn thing. If you've
never heard of Frank Mayor, you could forgive yourself to
put a human face on old Frank. Here's a bit
about him. Born in eighteen fifty, he was a thirteen
year old drummer boy for his father's artillery unit when
he witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg firsthand, where one man
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died for about every ten seconds of fighting. From age
twenty two to twenty eight, Mayor hunted buffalo on the
plains of Kansas and Texas, killing thousands. By the time
the old hide Hunter died on February twelve, nineteen fifty four,
my own father was thirty years old, Hugh Hefner was
(21:12):
publishing Playboy magazine, and the Korean War was over. Mayor
had survived some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil
War and lived into the age of nuclear submarines, Burger
king and corvettes. Mayor is one of those hide hunters
we know a lot about. There are some others, such
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as Charles Wrath and Jay Wright Moore. These guys were
pioneers of the trade, recognized by their contemporaries as influential characters.
If you read anything about this era, you'll run into
their names again and again. They appear throughout the historical
record in ledgers, diaries, receipts, newspaper articles, and legal documents
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related to their careers as hide hunters. Other hide hunters
recorded their experiences in great detail later on in life,
either for posterity's sake or to make a little money.
Among those is John Cook, who published a memoir, The
Border and the Buffalo in nineteen oh seven. During the
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Civil War, Cook fought for the Union along the bloody
boundary between Missouri and Kansas, where gorilla forces committed some
of the most gruesome atrocities of that conflict. Afterward, like
many of his fellow veterans, he drifted westward. From the
fall of eighteen seventy four until the spring of eighteen
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seventy eight, Cook hunted the Panhandle of Texas. His descriptions
of the day to day business of hunting and skinning
are vividly detailed. Many hide hunters, like George Reigard, were
interviewed later in life by local reporters writing for readership's
hungry for stories from the so called Old West. Re
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Reguard was born in Pennsylvania in eighteen forty seven and
enlisted in the twenty second Cavalry one month after the
Battle of Gettysburg at sixteen years of age. After being
wounded and discharged from the army, he set out for
western Kansas, where he drove freight wagons and marveled at
his strange new surroundings before adopting the occupation of a
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hide hunter. Between eighteen seventy one and eighteen seventy three,
Reguard killed more than five thousand animals. It was he
recalled buffalo butchery by wholesale. What makes the story you're
about to hear so historically significant and so viscerally tragic
(23:52):
is that the hide hunters came at the end, or
rather caused the end, of a long procession of buffalo
hunters who'd been chasing the animals for more than ten
thousand years across the landscapes that we now call the
United States. Their actions closed out one of the longest
running cultural and economic life ways that this planet has
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ever seen since the arrival of the very first humans
in North America. Indigenous people nurtured a relationship with these
animals that, while it took on different forms at different times.
Is most remarkable for its sustainability. The first American buffalo
hunters were ice age immigrants from Siberia who killed a
(24:39):
somewhat longer horned variety on the grasslands of northern Alaska
using adladdles. Later on, there were buffalo hunters who killed
great quantities of the animals by driving them over cliffs
and Alberta and Montana and even down into Texas. There
were buffalo hunters in the Dakotas who crept up on
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the animals camouflaged beneath the skins of freshly killed buffalo calves,
close enough to sink a carefully placed arrow into their
rib cage. And with the spread of equestrian culture among
the Planes tribes after the Spanish introduced horses into North America,
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we had buffalo hunters in western Kansas who chased buffalo
down on horseback and got so close they could have
jumped onto the buffalo's back, but instead held a smooth
bore musket barrel right up to the crease behind the
buffalo's shoulder in order to deliver a lead ball into
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the heart. Without a doubt, the story of each of
those buffalo hunting cultures is worthy of a project like this.
But this here is not a holistic analysis of the
different ways that different people hunted buffalo, nor is this
a comprehensive history of the destruction of the buffalo. That
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tale of shrinking range and collapsing numbers actually spans hundreds
of years in a huge swath of the continent. For
our journey ahead, though a quick overview of that will
be helpful to you. When Europeans started penetrating into the
various corners of North America over the sixteen hundreds and
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seventeen hundreds, they found scattered groups of buffalo and sometimes
impressive herds in the woods of Pennsylvania and stands of
cain along the Ohio River, along streams in what is
now Nashville, Tennessee, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay, and
in the rolling hills and tall grass prairies of Wisconsin
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and western Minnesota and Iowa. Daniel Boone frequently targeted them
for meat in Kentucky. As Boone and his contemporaries spread
out and pushed ever westward, those eastern buffalo herds were
killed off one by one by pot hunters feeding their
families and small scale market hunters looking to make a buck.
(27:08):
The various states buffalo populations fell like European nations in
the wake of the German Blitzkreek. Boone's own son, Nathan,
killed the last buffalo in Virginia in seventeen ninety seven.
North Carolina wiped out theirs in seventeen ninety nine, and
Kentucky did the same one year later, Pennsylvania the year
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after that. Louisiana killed its last buffalo in eighteen oh three,
and the last in Illinois and Ohio died in eighteen
oh eight, Tennessee eighteen twenty three, West Virginia eighteen twenty five,
Wisconsin eighteen thirty two. By the close of the Civil
War in eighteen sixty five, which again begins the story
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of the hide hunters that I'm going to tell here,
the animals were still mind blowingly abundant and what you
might think of as the core of their historic range
the American Great Plains and the inner mountain valleys of
the Rockies. Buffalo were still in the Panhandle of North Texas.
(28:16):
They were still in western Oklahoma, Western Kansas, western Nebraska.
They were still in North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming,
and Colorado were loaded, there were still buffalo in northern
New Mexico. Admittedly, the best research out there today indicates
(28:36):
that the herds wiped out by the hide hunters were
already diminished by a host of factors. Besides bullets, a
record drought between eighteen fifty six and eighteen sixty four
helped the diminishment. Competition for grass from wild horses helped.
Diseases like anthrax and bovine tuberculosis introduced by European cattle
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perhaps helped some. Added to that. Indigenous hunting pressure and
harvest numbers certainly increased after the ascendancy of equestrian hunting culture,
which inspired many tribes to move onto the plains in
pursuit of meat for their families and buffalo robes to
be sold to American traders. So, in terms of what
(29:24):
the hide hunters destroyed after the Civil War, how many
buffalo exactly are we talking about? Historians and ecologists are
still fighting about that today. A total population of around
fifteen million is a safe, currently fashionable number. Compare that
(29:45):
to the estimated population size in the year eighteen eighty three,
the end date used in the title of this work.
At that point eighteen eighty three, the number of buffalo
that were still left alive in the unit United States
was less than one thousand, Or put another way, it
(30:05):
was ninety nine zero point nine to nine percent fewer
than at the close of the Civil War. Here's a
thing we ought to clear up before we get too
far along. Common American history lessons about the destruction of
the herds like to include sordid details about the gross
excesses of Western travelers and tourists gunning down buffalo from
(30:30):
moving trains or shooting them simply to see how many
they could get. Sir George Gore, an Irish nobleman, famously
took a multi year safari in Wyoming's Powder River country
in the mid eighteen fifties. Accompanied by a small army
of servants, a selection of fine wines, and a French
(30:51):
carpet for the floor of his tent. Gore killed some
two thousand bison using seventy five different rifles he brought along.
He's one of the most obnoxious, reviled characters of the
American West, and there's no doubt there were a lot
of buffalo killed just for the sport of it. But
was it enough to wipe them off the face of
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the continent hardly. Another frequently repeated claim is that the
US Army deliberately exterminated the buffalo in order to starve
the tribes of the plans and force them onto reservations.
To be fair, there is some anecdotal evidence of individual
officers and units targeting local buffalo herds in a scorched
(31:38):
Earth style tactic, and some hide hunters fought side by
side with army units, including African American units known as
Buffalo Soldiers, during periods of hostility, especially on the southern plains.
But was there an actual policy or a broader military
strategy targeting the buffalo. The most frequently cited evidence of
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anything resembling that General Phillip Sheridan's address to the Texas
Legislature in eighteen seventy five has been thoroughly debunked as
a hoax invented later in life by a hide hunter
who wanted to drape the shame of his younger years
in the flag of patriotic duty. If you start reading
(32:22):
a lot about the history of the buffalo, you'll encounter
that mention of Sheridan's speech again and again. It's bs
and In truth, all the train shooting and army shooting
didn't even matter biologically. It was inconsequential. Today, driving across
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certain stretches of the Great Plains, say Interstate ninety between
Billings and Miles City, Montana, Interstate seventy from Abilene, Kansas,
all the way to Colorado, or Interstate forty from Oklahoma
City across the Texas Panhandle, will feel the hide Hunter's
legacy in your bones, that haunting emptiness where millions of
(33:07):
Buffalo should be grazing. This story is an effort to
resurrect those men who last experienced the Great Herds, those
men who lived and hunted among them and who destroyed them.
It's an effort to bring them forward, to summon them
so we can ask them some questions. Where did you
(33:27):
come from, How exactly did you do what you did,
what did it cost you, what did you gain in return?
And why did you do it? We will ask those
questions and seek their answers in the coming chapters. Here's
a rough idea of how it will go. We'll begin
(33:50):
by establishing some essential context for the Hide Hunter story,
a deep time history of people in Buffalo on the
Great Plains, in the emergence of the first market for
buffalo skins in the form of the robe trade. Here
you'll get a sense of the significance of the animal
to the original inhabitants of the American West and the
(34:13):
pre industrial constraints on its commodification. From there, we'll jump
to the aftermath of the Civil War, in which a
generation of displaced veterans looked westward for new opportunities at
the same time that the transcontinental railroads connected the resources
of the Great Plains with the industrial East. Ground zero
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for this explosive new economy was Dodge City, Kansas, the
subject of chapter four. It was in this upstart railroad
town where the business of the hide hunt took on
its characteristic form and its impact on the resource was
almost immediately made clear. From there will follow the hide
(34:58):
hunters as they push into bloody Texas and violation of
treaties signed between native tribes and the US government. The
second phase showcases the speed and thoroughness of the slaughter,
as well as the dangers faced by hide hunters as
they endured unforgiving landscapes and the ever present potential for hostility.
(35:21):
Then finally, we'll head north to the plains and bad
lands of eastern Montana, northern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas,
where the Hide Hunters endured brutal cold as they finished
off the last remaining herds of the Great Plains. Along
the way, we'll discuss the weapons and tactics that made
(35:43):
the hide Hunters such effective killers. We'll explore how a
camp full of these rugged characters undertook their day to
day work, and how they passed a little bit of
free time when they weren't engaged in shooting and skinning.
Will also give you an in depth examination of how
they processed buffalo for the market and what happened to
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those hides once they were loaded onto eastbound trains. And lastly,
we'll dive into the scene that faced the hide Hunters
when their grizzly work was done and the planes had
been emptied of herds that once numbered in the tens
of millions. Throughout this story, you'll come to see the
Hide Hunters not as larger than life characters or storybook villains,
(36:29):
but as historical actors faced with a certain set of choices,
and you'll see how their story shaped our contemporary understandings
of environmental degradation, commercial exploitation, and the mythology of the
American West. Throughout, we'll point to the facts of how
(36:51):
we know what we know, so you understand the sources
and research that went into this in case you want
to do some follow up reading on your own. As
for the sources, it would be a sin if I
did not acknowledge the work of three historians, Miles Gilbert,
Leo Ramager, and Sharon Cunningham, who have published two initial
(37:14):
volumes A through D and E through K of an
ambitious encyclopedia of Buffalo hunters and skinners. It's the most
comprehensive resource out there for researchers who want to track
down the names of hide hunters and figure out what
published and archival materials might exist in order to better
(37:36):
tell their story. Trust me when I say that our
telling of the hide hunter story would be missing some
choice details and incredible anecdotes if it weren't for these
unique works. Now, let's get on with our story.
Host
Steven Rinella
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