THE LITERATURE on the American bison, more popularly called buffalo,
is enormous. Nearly everything of consequence pertaining to the Plains
Indians touches the animal. The relationship of the Indian to the
buffalo has nowhere been better stated than in Note 49 to the Benavides
_Memorial_, edited by Hodge and Lummis. "The Great Buffalo Hunt at
Standing Rock," a chapter in _My Friend the Indian_ by James McLaughlin,
sums up the hunting procedure; other outstanding treatments of the
buffalo in Indian books are to be found in _Long Lance_ by Chief Buffalo
Child Long Lance; _Letters and Notes on... the North American Indians_
by George Catlin; _Forty Years a Fur Trader_ by Charles Larpenteur.
Floyd B. Streeter's chapter on "The Buffalo Range" in _Prairie Trails
and Cow Towns_ lists twenty-five sources of information.
The bibliography that supersedes all other bibliographies is in the book
that supersedes all other books on the subject--Frank Gilbert Roe's _The
North American Buffalo_. More about it in the list that follows.
Nearly all men who got out on the plains were "wrathy to kill"
buffaloes above all else. The Indians killed in great numbers but seldom
wastefully. The Spaniards were restrained by Indian hostility. Mountain
men, emigrants crossing the plains, Santa Fe traders, railroad builders,
Indian fighters, settlers on the edge of the plains, European sportsmen,
all slaughtered and slew. Some observed, but the average American
hunter's observations on game animals are about as illuminating as the
trophy-stuffed den of a rich oilman or the lockers of a packing house.
Lawrence of Arabia won his name through knowledge and understanding of
Arabian life and through power to lead and to write. Buffalo Bill won
his name through power to exterminate buffaloes. He was a buffalo man in
the way that Hitler was a Polish Jew man.
{illust. caption = Harold D. Bugbee: Buffaloes
It is a pleasure to note the writings of sportsmen with inquiring minds
and of scientists and artists who hunted. Three examples are: _The
English Sportsman in the Western Prairies_, by the Hon. Grantley F.
Berkeley, London, 1861; _Travels in the Interior of North America,
1833-1834_, by Maximilian, Prince of Wied (original edition, 1843),
included in that "incomparable storehouse of buffalo lore from early
eye-witnesses," _Early Western Travels_, edited by Reuben Gold
Thwaites; George Catlin's _Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and
Conditions of the North American Indians_, London, 1841.
Three aspects of the buffalo stand out: the natural history of the great
American animal; the interrelationship between Indian and buffalo; the
white hunter--and exterminator.
ALLEN, J. A. _The American Bison, Living and Extinct_, Cambridge, Mass.,
1876. Reprinted in 9th Annual Report of the United States Geological and
Geographical Survey, Washington, 1877. Basic and rich work, much of it
appropriated by Hornaday.
BRANCH, E. DOUGLAS. _The Hunting of the Buffalo_, New York, 1925.
Interpretative as well as factual. OP.
COOK, JOHN R. _The Border and the Buffalo_. Topeka, Kansas, 1907.
Personal narrative.
DIXON, OLIVE. _Billy Dixon_, Guthrie, Oklahoma, 1914; reprinted, Dallas,
1927. Bully autobiography; excellent on the buffalo hunter as a type.
OP.
DODGE, R. I. _The Plains of the Great West and Their Inhabitants_,
New York, 1877. One of the best chapters of this source book is on the
buffalo.
GARRETSON, MARTIN S. _The American Bison_, New York Zoological Society,
New York, 1938. Not thorough, but informing. Limited bibliography. OP.
GRINNELL, GEORGE BIRD (1849-1938) may be classed next to J. A. Allen and
W. T. Hornaday as historian of the buffalo. His primary sources were the
buffaloed plains and the Plains Indians, whom he knew intimately. "In
Buffalo Days" is a long and excellent essay by him in _American Big-Game
Hunting_, edited by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell, New
York, 1893. He has another long essay, "The Bison," in _Musk-Ox, Bison,
Sheep and Goat_ by Caspar Whitney, George Bird Grinnell, and Owen
Wister, New York, 1904. His noble and beautifully simple _When Buffalo
Ran_, New Haven, 1920, is specific on work from a buffalo horse. Again
in his noble two-volume work on _The Cheyenne Indians_ (1923) Grinnell
is rich not only on the animal but on the Plains Indian relationship to
it. All OP.
HALEY, J. EVETTS. _Charles Goodnight, Cowman and Plainsman_, 1936.
Goodnight killed and also helped save the buffalo. Haley has preserved
his observations.
HORNADAY, W. T. _Extermination of the American Bison_ (Smithsonian
Reports for 1887, published in 1889, Part II). Hornaday was a good
zoologist but inferior in research.
INMAN, HENRY. _Buffalo Jones Forty Years of Adventure_, Topeka, Kansas,
1899. A book rich in observations as well as experience, though Jones
was a poser. OP.
LAKE, STUART N. _Wyatt Earp_, Boston, 1931. Early chapters excellent on
buffalo hunting.
MCCREIGHT, M. I. _Buffalo Bone Days_, Sykesville, Pa., 1939. OP. A
pamphlet strong on buffalo bones, for fertilizer.
PALLISER, JOHN (and others). _Journals, Detailed Reports, and
Observations, relative to Palliser's Exploration of British North
America, 1857-1860_, London, 1863. According to Frank Gilbert Roe, "a
mine of inestimable information" on the buffalo.
_Panhandle-Plains Historical Review_, Canyon, Texas. Articles and
reminiscences, _passim_.
PARKMAN, FRANCIS. _The Oregon Trail_, 1847. Available in various
editions, this book contains superb descriptions of buffaloes and
prairies.
POE, SOPHIE A. _Buckboard Days_ (edited by Eugene Cunningham), Caldwell,
Idaho, 1936. Early chapters. OP.
ROE, FRANK GILBERT. _The North American Buffalo_, University of Toronto
Press, 1951. A monumental work comprising and critically reviewing
virtually all that has been written on the subject and supplanting much
of it. No other scholar dealing with the buffalo has gone so fully
into the subject or viewed it from so many angles, brought out so many
aspects of natural history and human history. In a field where
ignorance has often prevailed, Roe has to be iconoclastic in order to be
constructive. If his words are sometimes sharp, his mind is sharper. The
one indispensable book on the subject.
RYE, EDGAR. _The Quirt and the Spur_, Chicago, 1909. Rye was in the Fort
Griffin, Texas, country when buffalo hunters dominated it. OP.
SCHULTZ, JAMES WILLARD. _Apauk, Caller of Buffalo_, New York, 1916.
OP. Whether fiction or nonfiction, as claimed by the author, this book
realizes the relationships between Plains Indian and buffalo.
WEEKES, MARY. _The Last Buffalo Hunter_ (as told by Norbert Welsh),
New York, 1939. OP. The old days recalled with upspringing sympathy.
Canada--but buffaloes and buffalo hunters were pretty much the same
everywhere.
West Texas Historical Association (Abilene, Texas) _Year Books_.
Reminiscences and articles, _passim_.
WILLIAMS, O. W. A privately printed letter of eight unnumbered pages,
dated from Fort Stockton, Texas, June 30, 1930, containing the best
description of a buffalo stampede that I have encountered. It is
reproduced in Dobie's _On the Open Range_.