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June 16, 1998 - Bill Cooper
01:00:10
Conference '98 – Miles Gilbert #3
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Time Text
Now to tell them of the animal, these are all of the terror.
Now to tell them of the group, the group of the sick.
Now to tell them of the group, the group of the sick.
Ladies and gentlemen, today is part three of a lecture given by Miles Gilbert on May
28, 1998 at our annual conference at the Thunder Horse Ranch.
So, please, sit back, take notes if you want to, and enjoy.
And, uh, he's very widely distributed in Portland.
Well, looks like that's what we have for slides to cut to, so I'm going to get the lights
on and let's see if anybody has any questions or comments.
All of this, I smell chocolate cake.
So, uh, I'm not going to read all of it.
I really do.
But for those of you who are even wildly interested in the buffalo herds, I have a few slides
and some comments on the buffalo herd.
I'm going to give you that.
Before we do that, if anybody wants to buy a copy of Jim Combs, it's really excellent.
I could recommend this because I didn't buy it.
I don't make any money off of it, so I don't mind selling it to you.
No concrete of interest here.
Do you like it?
How much?
Oh, these are $15.
Well, in actuality, they're $14.95, but I don't charge tax, and it's easy.
We don't have to make change.
Jimmy said she'd cross and I told her to be glad I did.
This is really a phenomenal experience for me.
Never, ever have I sold a copy of getting a stand before, I didn't even know.
You all are very confident, evidently, in the material we're about to present.
Earlier this afternoon, we talked about Ice Age hunters who tackled really big animals like mammoths.
They were specifically called Clovis because the time site was located in Clovis, New Mexico, and the animals that they specialized in hunting, again, were mammoths.
This is a neck bone, one of the seven cervical vertebrae that a mammoth has.
In fact, all of us mammals have the same number of neck bones.
We all have seven cervical or neck vertebrae.
You take your index finger and run down the back of your shirt to about where your shirt
collides, you will find a bone you call tuberous.
That is the spinous, that would be the spinous process of the seventh or last cervical vertebra.
So whether you're a long neck giraffe or a short neck human or a short neck mammoth, we
all have the same number of neck bones.
And this, again, is one from a mammoth.
Mammoths were big.
In fact, we use the word mammoth to indicate something that is big.
If you all read the Johnny Hart DC comic strip, DC's caveman, he has a friend named Thor.
DC says to Thor one time, why don't we call them mammoths?
And Thor had a clue.
And DC said, well, it's so much easier to say than humongouses.
These animals were humongous.
They were 14 feet tall at the shoulder, might weigh 12 or 13 tons, feet about 18 inches
in diameter.
In fact, for those of you who have visited Belmont or Girald Beach, Florida, in the ice
and beach sand there is preserved a series of 18-inch diameter mammoth tracks, and mixed
amongst those is a very, very squashed human skeleton.
I said we got very little ice-aged human skeleton material.
Well, the score on that one was MammothSquadron 100-0.
Those hunters used stone projectile points about this size to kill mammoths.
And they may indeed have been successful in killing the last mammoth.
I suspect that the demise of the Ice Age animals was caused by a climatic change and so the herds were reduced due to climatic change and had people probably successful in killing the last one.
The modern buffalo or bison has been successfully taken by Native American hunters using Spears are equipped with small points like this.
This is a dart point.
This is actually too heavy because of the stone weight.
It's too heavy to be a successful arrowhead.
So, buffalo were killed with darts thrown with what we call a spear throw, or the Native American term is a half-mile.
It's just an extension of the forearm giving you greater leverage when you throw a stone-tipped spear very actively and with great force.
The plains Indians and others, after they acquired the bow and arrow at about 18450, were successful in hunting the buffalo with tiny little arrowheads.
Arrowheads this size, collectors often refer to as bird points, thinking unknowingly that such a tiny thing would be useful only for a bird.
Because I did my master's thesis on six truckloads of bone.
That'll work off easy at the University of Kansas.
Six truckloads of bone from archaeological sites in the Missouri River Trench, mostly in South Dakota.
I recovered a tremendous number of trumerulids to collect these from the bones, the vertebrae of buffalo and also of elk.
During the period we call the Low Ice Age, which would be from A.D.
1450 to about 1870, maybe 1880 here in Arizona, there was a great deal more moisture in North America.
And that increased moisture and cooler temperatures resulted in the creation of tremendous grasslands throughout much of North America, the plains states.
And those grasslands supported at least, this is a conservative estimate, At least 34 million of the animals that we call buffalo, bison, bison, bison.
Beginning in 1870, buffalo were shot just for their hides.
The Industrial Revolution was kicking in and leather belts were needed to run the machines
of the industry.
And until 1870, American leather goods, including belts for running the industry, were made
from the hides of Argentine cattle.
But in 1870, there was a tremendous die-off of cattle in Argentina, so a new source of
leather was needed.
And it was found that the hide of the American buffalo could be tanned into useable leather,
whether you wanted an industrial belt, a pair of boots, or a baby tan with the fur on and
use it to cover your bed, your buddy, your slave, whatever, simply for warmth.
Can it, and sew it into a coat, make a buffalo overcoat, that sort of thing.
So, beginning in 1870, buffalo were shot just for their hides.
The animal was skinned and maybe the tongue was taken, maybe the hunter would take a little
meat for his own use instead of his camp tender and so forth, but for the most part, the animals
were simply left to rot.
And early on in the game, this is according to Richard Irving Dodge from Dodge City, Kansas,
he's saying, early on, for every buffalo hide that got the market, four buffalo were shot.
The guys didn't know right away how to handle those hides so that they wouldn't rot.
Well, there's a lot of people who are going to be in the same position as me, and I'm
going to be in the same position as you.
I'm going to be in the same position as you.
for their own use.
I don't know how many died in Lizard or whatever, but I do know that we can account for something
over thirty-four million shot for their highest souls.
With that bit of introduction, we'll get the lights off and I'll get the slide turned on.
Well, 1870 through the winter of 1884.
And look down here, they used to have Pierce, the high-bender, and the big-head.
I might have to look that up.
Mike, I'd look into how much it costs to feed a horse before I tried to feed a buffalo.
I would also look at how much it costs to keep one in a pen.
They're extremely strong animals.
Yeah.
I heard some guy in Colorado says he was a pirate on a steel boat.
So when they ran into him, they really don't like him.
Lloyd Phillips ran into a friend of mine in Wyoming, and he, when I met him in 1973, he had 35 buffalo, and he also had wild horses he came down on his lake.
And he was a fan of the wild horses, well, the buffalo.
He said one morning he went out to check on his herd, and the scion of this particular band of wild horses was contesting ownership of the bale of hay with the buffalo, which struck the horse here and threw the horse over the buffalo's back to spring water.
Tony had weighed, oh, maybe 900, maybe 1,100 pounds.
Well, this is the subject of our talk, Bison, Bison, Bison.
This particular one photographed at Custer Cave Park in South Dakota.
But again, as I mentioned earlier, during the Ice Age, there was a solid land bridge between northeastern Europe, Asia, and northwestern North America.
And the oldest remains of buffalo are found in Europe and Asia.
And so Buffalo and elephants and people came across this way.
And according to W. G. Morton, you know what I did?
I sold the book after 100.
How did this line end, Hector?
Ha ha ha.
It's nice and true.
So, this is one hornet they came up with as the range of the American buffalo at the time
of Bruce's settlement.
Here, a little proof for old butter, in the big part.
There were buffalo down at the edge of Tidewater, Virginia, when our colonists settled in Janestown.
Just to get you oriented, this would be Long Island, and this is about where Washington, D.C.
is, and here would be Norfolk, Virginia.
So, we had buffalo this far east, and we had them this far west.
Notice, however, that there's still a little bit Here we are in the White Mountains of Arizona.
So according to Hornady, they didn't get to Arizona.
And here we are in the White Mountains of Arizona.
So, according to the Horned Age, it's in Arizona.
And notice then, as we get more recently in time, how the range shrinks from 1795, 1810,
1825, 1876, and 1883, and then the very last four, and four, were right up there.
So, as settlement went to the west, the buffalo went to the west.
Buffalo were so numerous that this reporter said that he'd seen them from a little telegraph
pole 50 yards from his dugout at Coyote Station in Kansas, along the railroad line.
This brown mass out here represents herds of buffalo.
Oh.
you Brendan Irving Dodge, who is a reputable historian and the man for whom Dodge City was named, reported that a buffalo herd that was six miles wide tasked
Dodge City over the course of three days.
Solid mass of buffalo moving south.
From north to south.
So, here we have a cat, a professional hide hunter, who's ambushed up here using a sharp tripod.
He's equipped with two cartridge belts, typically 40 rounds per belt.
And he's equipped with what's called a hunter's companion that has sharpening steel and two knives, a straight bladed knife and a curved bladed knife.
This great plate of knife people use to rip up the bellows, and the curved knife people use then to peel the hide off.
And so he's simply laying down to shoot the animal.
Buffalo's not getting a stand because the hunters referred to the action of watching a herd of buffalo, determining which was the leader, and shooting that animal first.
the rest of the animals would stand around so he could shoot his males as he and his
skinner could handle in a day.
So they called that getting a stand.
The book has a table recording how many individuals were brushed over, shot by individual men,
and they gave them a stand.
Tom Nixon, who became sheriff of Donna City later on, in October of 1872, laid a boast
in the Walgreens for women in Donna City that he could get a stand on more buffalo than
anybody ever had.
Well, waiters were made, vets were placed, he took two rifles, he went out southwest of Dodge City, and in 45 minutes, by witness to count, in 45 minutes, he shot 110 buffalo.
At that time, it was the biggest stand that was known.
Another way to shoot buffalo would be to sit and support one's rifle, either on a cross
stitch or in this case, this man is using an arcaboo holder.
This was already an antique even at the time that this action was taking place in the 1870s.
This is a kind of a long iron rod that was brought over by the Spanish to hold up their
arcaboo.
Now, he's using a dart rifle and a serial rifle so that when this one gets too hot, he can light it down and take up the other one.
He's got an antenna of water and a cleaning rod so he can clean the bore and cool off the gun.
He's got two cartridge belts.
And so, there he is, getting his hand on a herder.
This fellow is using cross-stitch.
This actually represents Mike Moore, his brother.
This fellow killed 20,500 buffalo in his six-year career, and so here he has done it.
He's actually panhandled a sagebrush and buffalo grass and the herd buffalo, and he's got a 16-pound gun that he's using.
I regret that this is so poorly illustrated.
This is a Charles Ferry and Russell sketch of the Buffalo 100 shooting.
Russell got up into Montana while the Buffalo 100 was still landing, but some of this may have been an obvious account of his sketch here.
And here we have an actual photograph by L.A.
Huffman taken in January of 1882 up in Montana.
These guys have horses, their guns are very heavy, so it's smart to have a horse.
You notice that this buffalo's head has been cut off.
Because the buffalo has such a tall hump on its back, it's extremely difficult and impossible to get one laid up on its back and start to roll over one way or the other.
So to cut its head off, you can use the animal's head as a wedge to help prop it upright.
Another way, well that's what they've done here.
Another photograph by Huffman.
So they used their straight knife to rip down the belly, and now they're weighing the height off on either side.
The blight is the fatty tissue underneath the skin.
This is what it's meant to reflect.
And here's another Huffman photograph.
That's a 14-pound Charmin 511 in a personal collection now.
Another way to prop the animal up is to use what they call a crictional stick.
It has one sharp end and then it has a spike of metal on the other end.
You get the animal clipped up and then poke that into the hive to keep it upright so that you can rip it open and get the hive off.
This guy is equipped with a sharp military rifle, a canteen, a pair of binoculars, a hunter's companion again with the sharp big steel and two knives.
And of course, he's got his wagon to put the hide in.
These photographs were made in the Texas Panhandle, Knox County, Texas, in 1874.
And here at the bottom, we have Buffalo Tums, chained on a rack.
The tongues would break 50 cents a piece, whereas the hide might break only a dollar.
Initially, the hide would be stained out so that the flesh side was up, hair side down.
These have evidently had wisdom.
This one is now flesh side down, hair side up.
That one's still got flesh side up.
It would typically be thinned out with 15 or 18 pegs.
This chap sitting over here is next to a sharpening stone.
You have to keep your knives sharp.
They have some more hides that are laid flesh side down.
They spend three or four days with the hair side down and the flesh side up so they can get dry.
Can somebody shut that light out here, please?
I'm going to turn this over, Ryan.
Thank you.
My friend Leo Reminger, this is his name down here, Reminger.
Leo got me interested in this.
I'd already done this book, and he read the book and enjoyed it, and put me on some names of some other guys.
So he really has initiated this Buffalo Letter Encyclopedia that I'm working on.
I told some of you, I have now 640 names of individuals who were in this.
The real kind of idealized buffalo hunter's appearance here is fairly clean-shaven, so even-trimmed gear.
He's got a Smith & Wesson American, probably .44 American caliber.
He's got a 16-pound sharp and a very nice buffalo overcoat.
Hunter's companion, again, with the steel in the middle.
Nice boots and all that.
So this is what we'll think the buffalo hunter ideally looks like.
Well, are you ready?
Here they are.
These are the real McCoys, so to speak.
Skirls with the mold on.
A powder keg.
Here's a brick and a wooden bucket from a powder keg.
And these guys won't live by the ton.
They buy maybe 4,000 pounds of lead to mold and cast their bullets.
A Buffalo Hunter's cartridge would throw as little as 70 grains of powder, as much as 120 grains of powder.
The bullet would weigh as little as 370 grains for a 40-caliber gun, as much as 550 grains
for a 45 or 50-caliber gun.
And you know that an ounce of lead weighs 437 grains, so you would have to have a tremendous
amount of lead if you were going to go out and shoot thousands of buffalo and average
283 rounds per time.
So, here's another military rifle and the wang bows of heavy sharps in this guy's hand, sharpening steel.
And notice this character's lost an arm, probably a Civil War veteran.
In fact, here was money to be made literally off a boat.
A lot of guys survived the Civil War, interested in adventure like the American West, and didn't mind selling their own powder.
So it was an actual thing for them to get into, to become buffalo hunters.
Well, here's a wagonload of pipes, as far as where they're marked.
And here's an actual photograph of 500 buffalo hives, 1876.
And these would be, by this time, these would be down in the Texas of Manhattan.
The buffalo were shot out of Texas by the murder of 78, 79, and people in Texas were
concerned that all our buffalo were getting killed when they saw a buffalo and there was
something about it.
And so they prevailed upon the legislature of the state of Texas to pass a law prohibiting the shooting of buffalo.
And Bill Sheridan got rid of that, so he went to the rest of the Texas legislature and he said, you've got this all wrong, boys.
He said, you ought to, instead of prohibiting buffalo hunting, what you ought to do is is meant a medal to give to buffalo hunters.
He said it had a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged Indian on the other.
The buffalo, this is a direct quote now, the buffalo hunters have done more than the regular arming has in the last 30 years to sell the best Indian model.
So, the buffalo hunters continued to shoot buffalo and taxis until they were gone.
What is the old axiom?
An army moves on its stomach.
And the stomach of the Indian army is the Manchester, Kiowa, and Patagusa, all those
with the herds of buffalo.
So, to move the buffalo, the Indian has to go to the reservation.
Here's Robert Wyatt sitting up on a pile that was numbered.
The actual number, 14,000 buffalo hunted.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 taxis.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 taxis.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 taxis.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 taxis.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 taxis.
And he's got a pile of 14,000 buffalo.
In the background is a big press, a big press for baling these hides into bales so they could be easily transported to market.
Well, here's our buddy, Tom Nixon.
He became sheriff of Dodge City, that's Jim White, one of the really famous 12th World
Hunters, and Henry Hubert Raymond playing the fiddle.
There are little dugouts outside of Dodge City at Christmas of 1873.
Notice the Army surplus stuff that they have.
This is 1873, so they already have as Army surplus the pigeon cowl for Kraftwerk Greenfield,
replaced in 1873 by the 45-70.
They have a U.S. surplus canteen, they've got a U.S.
surplus ammunition bank.
If a Top War Hunter went to an Army post and presented himself to the commanding officer,
he would get surplus free.
Talking about ammunition, now, nice little 12th South there for those of you who are
fans of that kind of Western Americana.
Here's a couple of guys with the hair of the barrel.
There was a law against hunting buffalo in Indian Territory.
You could hunt anywhere north of the Cimarron, but you couldn't go south of the Cimarron.
Well, the buffalo were shot out by July of 1873, shot out of the vicinity of Dodge City, so these guys ride more.
His buddy, Webb, went south of the Cimarron looking for buffalo, and do they look like they're well-supplied?
All these guys are carrying, is it rifles, ammunition, and in their saddlebags, they've got salt.
They are depending on finding buffalo.
Again, those of you who are Western-born and raised by the citizens of the Spanish barn, He's got a short back, he's got one less 12-bar breaker belt than a normal horse, and he's got those little bars on his legs.
That's an indication of his Arabian, excuse me, his Arabian ancestry.
When they went out like that, Miles, wouldn't they have their scanners following them?
I mean, wait until they bring back all the hides before they have them scoot horses.
This was a scouting trip.
They were going to go find out where the herds were.
And then, after they did, well, they got down there and they found Buffalo, all right?
They found Matt Amos.
Brian Moore said, uh, I got down on one knee and took aim, and, uh, so he had to hold these guys back.
Uh, they found Buffalo, by the way, and so they went back to Diocese and, uh, requested an interview, the same, I mean, well, got a meeting with, uh, Richard Early Dodge.
And he asked me a zillion questions about what it was like to be a Buffalo Hunter, to stand together.
And finally, he said, well, Mr. Dodd, you have a criminal liability, and I answered that question.
Well, what was it?
He said, what would your policy be towards us if we crossed the Dukla Strip?
In other words, what would the Army do if we broke the law?
And he said, boys, if I was a Buffalo Hunter, I'd hunt buffalo with a buffalo wire.
So we're sitting down in the Texas Panhandle, and we shot buffalo by the gazillions.
But some of them got shot.
And here's a part of a heavy buffalo gun in possession of a Native American, and you know he didn't buy it at the Southern Post.
He took it off a buffalo hunter.
In fact, Marshall Sewell was one of many buffalo hunters known to have been killed by Native Americans.
And here is Red Dog, a prominent man among the Oglala, a variety of the citizens of Dakota.
And this is undoubtedly a 50, a 2 1⁄2 inch one of the real big heavy buffalo guns.
So, you know, he didn't buy that either.
You all may not realize this, but these guys didn't have cell phones in their wagons.
So how are they going to communicate when they separate?
This is John Clyde Jacobs, partnering with John William Cole and Joe McCombs.
McCombs and Poe have gone on out of the range and they sent Jacobs into town to sell the hives and resupply.
So how's he going to know where to find them?
They said, when we come to a fork in the road, falling over barriers, you'll be very surprised when you come to a fork in the road, tainted.
Well, how's he going to know which way to go?
They said, When we come to the border, we will go off to the side and we will ride a little snake and we will bury a
tomato head with destruction. We're going to fix the problem.
He was fighting mighty police, neither of which is competent.
Pope says that as a nation conquered, and a man alone like that with a team of boxers, he's not going to outrun
anybody.
He's going to run out of ammunition before he gets the ball.
That's a very scary position to be in.
He was fighting police to meet up with his brother.
Well, here's McCombs and this is Pope.
This is a reference to the series of incidents in which the Buffalo was thought to be dead, but had decided not to be.
So, McCombs had the winning plan.
In remembrance of this, this guy presented him a Remington Smoot revolver, nicely engraved And if I've been willing to mortgage my home, I could have bought that gun.
It's got a very nice inscription from Pope to McCombs, Fort Griffin, Texas, AD 74.
Well, here's another buffalo that wasn't quite dead.
She was laying there looking dead.
The guy brings his wagon up to peel the hide off, but the buffalo decides not only not to be dead, but to go for a ride.
This is the spot of Jack, who was later killed by the Comanches.
He went up and sat down on this ostensibly dead buffalo and gave him a ride down to this
little quiet lake in the Texas Panhandle.
This is Robert Warren Chambers, who, after the buffalo were gone, he threw his buffalo
high as money and sent himself to school, became a schoolteacher and then a lawyer,
and wrote his reminiscences from Colorado Springs.
Died about 1936.
This is the spot of Jack, who was later killed by the Comanches.
He went up and sat down on this ostensibly dead buffalo and gave him a ride down to this
little quiet lake in the Texas Panhandle.
This is Robert Warren Chambers, who, after the buffalo were gone, he threw his buffalo
high as money and sent himself to school, became a schoolteacher and then a lawyer,
and wrote his reminiscences from Colorado Springs.
Died about 1936.
But this is his very first shot at a buffalo.
He's sneaked up this ravine, this is going.
He's sneaked up this ravine, this is going, Arroyo, and grabs hold of the sagebrush and cuts loose with his 49
bottle neck cartridge, starts, and, uh, The boy pulls out with the recoil of his weight.
He lands down unconscious and doesn't know till the next day that his first shot has been successful.
Later on, as an amateur, he visits the camps of the professionals, and they ask him, son, how many rounds do you use per hive?
And he said, um, I don't know, but it doesn't count.
They said, we want to average no more than two rounds per hive.
So this particular morning, he had shot 16 buffalo with 32 rounds.
And he goes out on a hunt to start skinning.
He finds his old cow's not dead yet, so he rides his shooter again and spoils his heifer.
He's all in his cover of filth with my knife.
Well, it was a big mistake.
See, I knocked him over.
I felt her hot breath on the back of my neck.
Well, eventually, he gets his legs scooched up under him and zips out, and the buffalo
chases him around.
She finally expires from the wound on her side.
Lots of exciting adventures.
This is Henry Bourne, a very famous horse thief.
After the Buffalo Bump was over, he made his living stealing horses.
But here he is, hitting on a cow.
I did notice the calf slipping up behind him, and it took revenge on the death of his runner.
By the way, all the forehousing was even drawn by Bill Lefkowitz.
He was president of the Texas Cowboy Artist Association at the time that he did it.
He's still a very famous artist in Texas.
He did a life-size bronze of Bobby Murphy for the state of Texas, and he did a bronze
of Barrett Wright for the state of Alabama.
There's an Alabama sign on top of the Barrett Wright.
They showed a pretty good artist.
These are tweets.
These boys have just come over from the old world and probably speak three words of English
in one of them.
They find their way out to Dodge City and find out that they can make a good living
shooting buffalo.
They go out on the plains in October, very poorly equipped for October weather enhancement.
You may have heard the phrase that in the plains, blizzards come sudden and soon, and the dead of night are to blaze the moon.
Well, these boys experienced an order, a cold wind, and so they wrapped up in these fresh buffalo hides and found that every buffalo was well equipped with bunks.
So they're all scratching themselves, they've got lice and fleas and ticks.
Here's our buddy Robert Warren Chambers again.
This particular event, he was nine miles across the Montana Prairie from his dugout, and he shot eight buffalo bulls late in the day and began to skin them out when the blizzard blew up.
And he gets disoriented in the blizzard, wandering around across the prairie for hours, even
after dark.
And finally, he says, here I was, squeezing to death and seeing a fire in the snow.
His imagination is going wild with him.
He thinks that he's looking into the gates of hell itself.
How else would he explain seeing a fire in the snow in the middle of the blizzard out
there?
I mean, his mind is just...he's crazy.
Well, he's getting ready to cock his charge rifle in case Satan appears.
And he's getting ready to shoot.
Here's a little vignette.
This is Frank Collinson, and that's Jim White.
Jim White's headed to Montana to shoot buffalo.
The buffalo were shot out of Texas here.
This is the winter of 78, 79.
And they partnered for several years, and they got this dog that they both liked.
It's part Malibu and part Bull.
And they both loved the dog, and they don't think it's fair to the dog to flip a coin, so they decided they would just separate and see which one the dog thought, and he'd go through every one like that.
Good thing for the dog that he chose Frank Thompson.
Jim White was quite a drunkard.
He would spend his hide money on booze, and here he is out in the flames with his new partner, Oliver Perry Hanna.
He's got delirium treatments.
He's running across the prairie thinking somebody is after him, and it's buzzing up.
Hanna back there has a bottle, you know, the hair of a bear, or the hair of a dog, or whatever the phrase is, and he can only get over it, come down a little at a time.
They built a cabin up on what's now called White Street after Jim White and some of the west coast of the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming.
I was going to go back east across the Bayhorn Mountains to check on the place over there.
While I was gone, probably, Victor Zors and his gang came and killed White and finally
moved there and he freeze and we got covered up with the snow.
A few years later, Hannah found his sharps rifle in a blacksmith shop down at some ETC
or Wood River, somewhere down there, recognized his gun, but old White was shot through the
head probably with his own rifle.
He's now reburied in Old Trailtown in Cody.
If you get out to Cody, you can see the Hannah White cabin and I had the privilege of firing
a shot out of Hannah's rifle.
This is over Jim White's grave.
Who's Big Nose George?
Thank you.
Well, this guy, this guy was caught with his nephew, who's a teenager.
Rather than go to work for shooting and skinning buffalo, they found a very lucrative living in stealing hives from the guys who just shot and skinned them.
Uh, guys would leave piles of ice out on the prairie just with rocks on them, and of course they'd put their own hand mark on them when they gained ownership.
They'd just go off and lick them.
And these dudes would come along and throw them on the wagon and take them off the market before they finally got caught.
And so they, uh, shall we say they got a confession under duress.
Disaccordance came from continuing that activity.
Well, what the Buffalo World Shop provides, and I want to point out again, as reprehensible as this seems to have solved these animals for their hides, the Little Ice Age supported the grasslands that supported the Buffalo.
The low ice age ended here in this county in 1883.
It got drier.
By 1890 and since 1890, this part of Arizona and the southwest had been tremendously drier
than they were in the preceding 400, 450 years.
The point of this is that the buffalo habitat would have reduced radically anyway.
And of course, with continuing western settlement by us people, buffalo habitat would have been
So, the vast herd of buffalo would have been reduced, even had they not been shot to this great a height.
Well, that's the buffalo gone.
What we have left is a prairie covered with buffalo bones, and many a settler, host, and her family would eat out of the living, not of the farming, but by gathering bones.
Herds gone, and by that I mean a heap.
A-1-A-2.
You could get, are you ready for this?
You could get $6.50 a ton for buffalo bones.
By the end of the game, say, 1888-89, when all the bones were picked up, you might get $14 a ton.
Here we have, according to the Minot, North Dakota Daily News, on July 3, 1889, 103 teams, accompanied by about 500 Metis, hauled bones into town that day to be launched for the Fourth of July celebration.
So these are wagons full of buffalo bones scattered by the Metis around Old Devils Lake, North Dakota.
The bones were used for, you know, bone china at home.
Bones were burned to make filters, charcoal filters for sugar refining.
And, of course, bones also ground up and used for fertilizers, bone fertilizers.
Those were the major markets for buffalo bones.
A ton of bones, 2,000 pounds of bones, would require about 100 skeletons of adult buffalo.
So here they are piled up along the railroad side to be put in the boxcars.
And any of you who are into the Buffalo Day 4, like that one up there, that buffalo sold today would cost about $250 to buy that and hang it on the wall.
And that's a second market just the other day.
This skull, the photograph taken in Detroit, Michigan, that pile is nothing but buffalo skulls.
Every one of those zombies is buffalo skulls.
Well, I mentioned that the buffalo then were removed from the Texas Panhandle, but the prairie was still good.
This is about 1876.
This is Charles Goodnight, pioneer Texas cattleman, flames fan.
Uh, he was also born in 1836, died in 1929, and, uh, brought longhorn cattle into Texas Panhandle, where the buffalo had been on the range while there were cattle.
He met John Adair at the Denver Stock Show, and he borrowed $100,000 at 20% annual interest and made them both wealthy.
Because the buffalo were gone, the grass was still there.
He was famous for something else, too.
This is what Texas Panhandle looks like today.
The climate has changed drastically.
This is what Texas Panhandle looks like today.
The climate has changed drastically.
We are in a drought cycle compared to what we were in the previous 400 years.
So, this is as good as it gets in a Texas Panhandle.
I took that photograph on a morning where there was a lot of corn frost, but this is
where it gets my attention mostly.
Well, the missionary department moved on its stomach, but buckle down, these guys had to
go on to the reservation, but they did not go quietly.
Here is a Australian Charles Marsh and his paleontology students.
They were out on the prairie looking for dinosaurs, and they barely escaped meeting the planes
the planes and the aircraft.
In fact, Sternberg from Canada is looking for fossils out in the eastern Montana area.
The morning of June 28, 1876, he came across a tremendous trail of travel on hundreds of
thousands of horses and so forth. If he had been on that spot a few days earlier, he would have been custard and
circumferred. This is Billy Nixon. I mentioned to you that Billy Nixon was at the Battle of Adobe Walls in the Texas
Panhandle in 1874, June 74. And it was Billy Nixon who made the so-called lifelong shot.
The distance was actually 1,532 measured yards from Adobe Walls, he shot a commanding long source. He's famous for
another reason. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor because he survived a standoff in a buffalo wall.
This is a buffalo wall.
Nixon and a handful of soldiers fought off the fire wall.
This is all because of him, because Billy Nixon was such a good shot, such a hero, he got the Congressional Medal of
Honor.
This is how Leo Remeter received Wright Moore on the day in 1876 when he shot one of the few white buffalo.
I could account for it.
I've written an article documenting six Alabama white buffalo and the 34 million non-buffalo that were shot in the course of the buffalo hunt.
This is how Ron Moore looked after retirement.
This is one of his two guns.
He had an 11-pound gun and a 14-pound gun.
a 14-pound gun, and he said he killed about 15,000 with his 11-pound gun and only about
6,000 with his 14-pound gun.
Those are both on display in the Museum of Snyder, Texas, where Mr. Moore retired.
I'm sorry, Mark.
Go ahead, Bill.
What do they do about barrels?
I mean, how can you fire two rounds of buffalo, denim, how can you fire that many rounds through a barrel and end up running out there?
Bill has brought up a very good point.
First of all, the big guns, 11 pounds.
That one we shot today weighs 12 pounds.
The guns were typically fired with ammunition that had a paper patch bullets, and they were well cared for.
But today, if you find a Buffalo gun for sale on the market, it's rare to find one that has a good bore.
They didn't get shot out.
And a friend of mine in Scottsdale has had a gun that I think is supremal.
The Naples Sulphur.
There's not a better example of a Buffalo Hunter gun.
There's letters that a Sharps Factory communication with the gun was shipped to Fort Griffin, Texas in 1877.
And it was subsequently rebarreled by A.E.
So, it was used in both the Southern herd and the Northern herd, and y'all, the original
barrel was sent with shot out, wore out, had to put a new barrel.
So here's Ollie O'Ferry again on the 50th anniversary of the Custard Blast, and he's
holding a 16-pound gun, caliber .44-77, bottle-back, letters from Mark D. Nell in Kitcarson, Colorado,
in 1872.
He got this gun from Jim White and then recovered it at that blacksmith shop in Highfield, Wyoming,
and he recovered it in Highfield.
And I got it and presented it to Bob Baker of the old rail town in Cody.
Named for this guy, Buffalo Bill Cody, who was not in my Buffalo Hunter encyclopedia because he didn't shoot buffalo for their hives.
Bill Cody got a gratification shooting between 4,000 and 5,000 for me to feed the Union Pacific Railroad and Kansas Pacific Railroad guys.
And this is an illustration of a little painting by Fred Phelps himself, a collector of fine buffalo memorabilia.
It lives up at the B4 Plaza, and I believe that's the last one.
So, any questions or comments on this, we can get the lights on.
I appreciate your attention and interest in this.
you I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
So, thank you all very much.
You've got a great audience.
Anybody have any questions?
Yes.
I'm going to interrupt.
Yes, sir.
My last question is for Mr. Tipper.
And what your question is, is that you're going to go back to the police department
and you're going to be able to go back to the police department and you're going to
be able to go back to the police department and you're going to be able to go back to
the police department and you're going to be able to go back to the police department
and you're going to be able to go back to the police department and you're going to
be able to go back to the police department and you're going to be able to go back to
It's a little less than half an inch.
So 50 and 70 would be 50 caliber and 70 range of black powder.
for the caliber in thousandths of an inch, .45 is a little less than half an inch.
So a .50-70 would be .50 caliber and 70 grains of black powder.
The popular Buffalo cartridges, the very first ones were .44 caliber, 77 grains of black
powder.
So a .44-77 and a bottle map case like the .30-06 that we shot today, rather than a straight
paper case like the .45-70 is a straight paper case.
So we started out with .44-77 and .50-70 and it was discovered that .50-70 was a little
Because the .50 caliber had quite a rainbow trajectory, not that it wouldn't kill buffalo,
it just couldn't shoot so far.
So they increased the length of the case to two and a half inches for the whole 90 or
100 grains of powder, depending on how you chose to load it.
As you read this book, you will find that the guys would put 30, 40 pounds of lead in
a big cast iron skillet and melt that over a buffalo that was shipped to fire.
And it had a nice blue sheen on it that it was trying to dip lead and pour bullets.
So there was not only a hunter, but also a hand sander whose job it was to gather buffalo
chips for the fire to mold cast bullets and reload cartridges.
And one of the fun things about the archaeological excavation at the Adobe Worlds close down in the Texas Panhandle was the recovery of the screws from casting bullets and the stiff primers and cartridge casings.
And those that were most popular were the 44-77 and the 50-70 and 50-90 there at that
particular battle site.
Bill asked about wearing out barrels.
The guns were heavy, 12 pounds up to 16 pounds, and so you could shoot a bunch of rounds and
the fatness of the barrel would absorb the heat until it got so hot, though, that also
the bore would expand and you'd want it to kind of wobble around the barrel.
It's time to put it down, clean it out, pick up the other gun.
Question way back there.
How many guns are apparently left?
How many what?
How many are left?
Well, at the end of the game here, about 1884, a quarter day could account for less than
a hundred.
Michel Pablo up in Montana, up by Planet Head Lake, was thoughtful and preserved some.
Charles Goodnight kept some in Palo Verde Canyon, Texas, and Charles Buffalo Jones, who
had himself in a hide man, gathered up a bunch of cams and he had his own buffalo herd there
at Garden City Camps and then brought them to the North Rim of Grand Canyon, and that
was the nucleus of the state of Arizona house-locked buffalo range.
Nowadays, there are these national herds.
We're going to Lowe's in Montana, one at Valentine, Nebraska, and one at Cash, Oklahoma.
Those are national bison herds with hundreds of animals in each.
There are bison at the Air Force National Zoos, and there are ghouls, private ranchers
who have their herds.
Among which, if any of you have read Mike or Kathleen O'Neill's years, of course, The
People of the Deer, The People of the Wall, The People of the River, The People of the
Rain, any of those, you see these for sale in the bookstores and airports and so forth.
They're very popular.
Those kids are, are themselves professional archaeologists.
They came into my camp in Wyoming in 77, I guess.
Poor, cold, wet, miserable, unknown, and so we show them hospitality, and here it is, many, many years later, they show up at Casablanca High East.
Very welcome, thank you.
They've taken their knowledge of archeology and written popular knowledge, and they have their own buffalo ranch at Vermont, West Wyoming.
So the moral of all this is, go out and write the great American novels.
You too can own a buffalo.
More questions or comments?
Thank you.
If you go to Show Low, to Highway 60, and turn right, you'll get to a point where you
have a choice of going right or going straight, or turning left and then going straight, towards
St. John's.
Or you can just go up to Springville and turn left on 191, which used to be 666, and you
get up toward Lina Lake.
Lina Lake.
There's a small herd of six buffalo there, that, who is part owner of those buffalo.
She was the first member of the buffalo club that purchased and maintains those buffalo.
She has card number one.
So, you'll see some buffalo there, right there, right next to Lina Lake.
Thank you, Willis.
Thank you, Keith.
All right, Willis, for those of you who don't know him, he's a great guy.
This is the third hour in that series.
And that's it for Miles's talk. This is the third hour in that series. And I just went
to stop the tape and rewind it. I hope you enjoyed it.
His talk on the ancient Indian cultures, their pictographs and pictograms and pictographs was extremely interesting.
And the reason I asked Miles to come to the conference and give that talk was to clear up all the disinformation and misinformation, just outright lies.
That you see on programs on television claiming that all of these rock paintings and rock pictures that have been left by the ancient cultures and the Native Americans somehow are telling you that extraterrestrials visited this earth and all of that kind of crap.
And it's just not true.
Miles showed us all of the different signs and symbols, and you got to hear it, but you couldn't see it.
And a lot of the signs and symbols that people have claimed that the Indians left as the symbols of wormholes in space through which extraterrestrial beings visited the Earth have no such meaning whatsoever.
Don't mean any of those things.
It's just total baloney.
So, Biles did an excellent job of dispelling the myths and the BS, which is really what it is, and setting everybody straight on that.
And he also gave us an excellent talk on the old buffalo hunters of the old west.
And I think everybody, in fact I know, everybody at the conference really enjoyed every moment of it and sat in rapt attention and just ate it all up.
I wish my radio audience could have seen the slides.
And some of the artifacts and bones and skulls and things that he had there to explain what it was that he was talking about.
Unfortunately, you can't do that on radio, but Miles is such a gifted speaker that I think he did a pretty good job of conveying what all of that was simply in his talk without you having to see those things.
Good night, folks.
Let's tune in tomorrow night at the same time for another episode of the Hour of the Time.
This message is to my good friend, George.
to my good friend Doyle Chandler.
I know you're driving in tonight, Doyle, and if you're in hearing distance of this broadcast, we have a good meal waiting for you, and can't wait to see you.
Godspeed, and please drive safe.
.
to the hour of the time.
I'm William Cooper.
This is 101.1 FM Eager, classic radio like you always wished it could be, but very seldom ever is.
101.1 FM is your community service, non-profit,
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