Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West

Copyright

Published by The Borough Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by The Borough Press 2016

Originally published in 2007 by Collins and Smithsonian Books

Copyright © Michael Punke 2007

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Michael Punke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008189341

Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008189358

Version: 2016-02-18

Dedication

For Sophie and Bo:

May your children’s children see wild buffalo on the plains.

Epigraph

Motionless, with head thrown back,

and in an attitude of attention,

he calmly inspected the vessel floating along below him;

so beautiful an object amid his wild surroundings,

and with his background of brilliant sky,

that no hand was stretched out for the rifle …

There is one spot left,

a single rock about which this tide will break,

and past which it will sweep, leaving it undefiled

by the unsightly traces of civilization.

George Bird Grinnell

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

EPIGRAPH

MAPS

PROLOGUE: The Stand

One: “Wild and Wooly”

Two: “Self-Denial”

Three: “Barbarism Pure and Simple”

Four: “I Felled a Mighty Bison”

Five: “The Guns of Other Hunters”

Six: “That Will Mean an Indian War”

Seven: “Ere Long Exterminated”

Eight: “A Weekly Journal”

Nine: “No Longer a Place for Them”

Ten: “Blundering, Plundering”

Eleven: “The Meanest Work I Ever Did”

Twelve: “A Terror to Evil-Doers”

Thirteen: “A Single Rock”

Fourteen: “For All It Is Worth”

Fifteen: “Simple Majesty”

EPILOGUE: The Last Stand — “Something Unprecedented”

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY MICHAEL PUNKE

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Maps

The West of the Buffalo and George Bird Grinnell.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Yellowstone National Park, 1881

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

PROLOGUE

THE STAND

After placing about fifteen shots where they were most needed, I had the herd stopped, and the buffalo paid no attention to the subsequent shooting.

—VICTOR GRANT SMITH

Vic Smith, a hunter, lifted his head above a rise on the plains floor, peering down at several hundred buffalo in the valley of the Redwater River. The Montana winter of 1881 was frigid, all the more so because Smith lay prone in the snow, two Sharps buffalo rifles and several bandoleers of cartridges spread out on a tarp beside him. Smith was careful to stay downwind and wore a white sheet to conceal him from the nearest animals, three hundred yards away. For a while he just watched, his experienced eyes studying the herd—picking out the leaders, anticipating movements, carefully planning his first shot. It all looked perfect, the ideal stand.

Finally Smith reached for one of the Sharps, working the lever to chamber a four-inch brass shell. Supporting the stout barrel across his arm, Smith sighted carefully on the old cow that he knew led the herd. He aimed at a spot just in front of her hip, then fired.

The report of the big gun thundered across the wide plain, and a cloud of acrid smoke temporarily obscured the herd. Smith did not look to see if he had hit his target—he knew he had. Instead he set the smoking rifle on the tarp and loaded the second gun, then pulled it snug to his shoulder. He alternated rifles each shot; otherwise the barrels became so hot that they fouled. In Texas, he’d heard, buffalo hunters sometimes urinated on their guns to cool them, but in Montana, winter did the work.

The second Sharps ready, Smith looked up to find exactly what he expected. His first shot had found its precise target in front of the cow’s hip. When hit in that spot, Smith knew, the animal could not run off but instead would just stand there, “all humped up with pain.” As Smith intended, other members of the herd—the old cow’s “children, grandchildren, cousins, and aunts”—were already starting to mill about, confused, some sniffing at the blood that seeped from the cow.

Smith now sighted on another old cow on the opposite side of the herd, marking the same target in front of the hip. He fired again.

Smith worked deliberately, never rushing, a shot about once every thirty seconds. Every bullet was strategic. Most of the early targets were cows, though occasionally he picked off a skittish bull that looked ready to bolt. “After placing about fifteen shots where they were most needed,” he would later recall, “I had the herd stopped, and the buffalo paid no attention to the subsequent shooting.” Experienced hunters like Smith called it “tranquilizing” or “mesmerizing” the herd.

An hour later he was done. Below Vic Smith in the valley of the Redwater lay 107 dead buffalo. In the 1881 season he would kill 4,500.1

THE STORY OF HOW THE BUFFALO WAS SAVED FROM EXTINCTION IS one of the great dramas of the Old West. More profoundly, it is a story of the transition from the Old West to the New—a transition whose battles are still fought bitterly to this day. The story is personified in a man, little known today, by the name of George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell was a scientist and a journalist, a hunter and a conservationist. In his remarkable life, Grinnell would live the adventures of the Old West even as he helped to shape the New.

CHAPTER ONE

“Wild and Wooly”

The party started from New Haven late in June, bound for a West that was then really wild and wooly.

—GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, Memories

The adventure that changed the course of George Bird Grinnell’s life began with a train, and the path of the train, as it crossed the plains in the summer of 1870, was blocked by buffalo.

The new transcontinental railroad, like the wagon trails that preceded it, hewed to the valleys. Far from “featureless,” as the Great Plains is frequently described, it is a region whose signature characteristic is so pervasive as to overwhelm—an openness so vast that the newcomer has no antecedent to place it in context. Coming, as Grinnell did, from the East, with its hemmed-in horizons and creeping green, arrival on the stark prairie was a shock to the system, an obvious demarcation of a place that was new. It was also, in the summer of 1870, a place that was wild.

As the train glided along the tracks, Grinnell heard the sudden screech of metal brakes and excited shouts. Looking out the window, he saw a herd of buffalo. After a brief delay, the herd wandered off and the voyage continued. Later, though, the train was halted a second time by another herd. “We supposed they would soon pass by,” remembered Grinnell, “but they kept coming … in numbers so great that they could not be computed.” It took three hours for the herd to cross the tracks.1 In the early days of the railroad, the problem of buffalo blocking tracks was so common that engines were sometimes equipped with a device that shot out steam to scatter the herd.

For the nineteenth-century traveler, no sight better symbolized arrival in the West than the buffalo. Grinnell, who would turn twenty-one in two months, had arrived in the midst of his boyhood dreams. He certainly spoke volumes about his own motivations when he later wrote that “none of [us] except the leader had any motive for going other than the hope of adventure with wild game or wild Indians.”2

Grinnell and his young companions certainly looked prepared for adventure. Each of the young men carried a shiny new Henry repeating rifle, a pistol, bandoleers of cartridges, and a Bowie knife. Never mind that few had any experience with weapons (Grinnell was one who did). In Omaha, they had walked out onto the prairie “to try our fire arms.” Grinnell, at least, was under no illusion: “The members of the party were innocent of any knowledge of the western country, but its members pinned their faith to Professor Marsh.”3

“We supposed they would soon pass by, but they kept coming …

in numbers so great that they could not be computed.”

A Hold-Up on the Kansas-Pacific, 1869, by Martin Garretson.

Courtesy of the National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Eyes to the West: George Bird Grinnell in his early twenties.

Courtesy of the Scott Meyer family.

AMERICA OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY LACKED ROYALTY, BUT IT was not without aristocracy, and the family of George Bird Grinnell had bequeathed to him a station near the uppermost strata. Young George could trace his pedigree to the Mayflower. Indeed his ancestors included Betty Alden, immortalized by Jane G. Austin in her book Betty Alden: The First-Born Daughter of the Pilgrims. Grinnell’s forefathers had been leading Americans since long before the United States came into being. Five had served as colonial governors. His grandfather, George Grinnell, served ten terms as a U.S. congressman.4

George Bird Grinnell was born on September 20, 1849, in Brooklyn, the first of five children to Helen A. Lansing and George Blake Grinnell. Grinnell’s father began his career as a successful dry-goods merchant and ended it as a prominent merchant banker—the “principal agent in Wall Street of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.”5

As a young George Bird Grinnell contemplated his future, the path of least resistance seemed to flow naturally toward a position as a captain of finance in a world ruled by the class to which he was born. Certainly this was the direction that his father and mother would push. Instead Grinnell would one day rise to challenge the foundational tenets on which his world had been built.

The events that put Grinnell on a different course began on New Year’s Day, 1857. He was 7 that year, and his father moved the family to the country. They rented at first, eventually building a house on a large tract of land in a part of Manhattan known as Audubon Park. The entire area once had been owned by John James Audubon, the famous painter-naturalist. Today, the quarter has been swallowed whole by New York City, bounded by West 158th and West 155th streets to the north and south, the Hudson River and Amsterdam Avenue to the east and west. In 1857, though, New York City was far away. Access to the city was by the Hudson River Railroad or by wagon, a trip of one and a half hours over hilly terrain.

Though John James Audubon had been dead for six years when the Grinnells moved to Audubon Park, much of the artist’s family was still in residence. Audubon’s two adult sons, Gifford and Woodhouse, continued the painting and publishing enterprise of their father. Each had a family and a house of his own on the property. Lucy Audubon, the elderly widow of the artist, lived with Gifford.

For a young boy, Audubon Park was an idyllic playground, like living in an engraving from Currier & Ives. “In the early days of Audubon Park almost nothing was seen of what in later days was called ‘improvement,’” as Grinnell later described it. “The fields and woods were left in a state of nature.” There were great groves of hemlock, chestnut, and oak. Springs flowed up from the ground and brooks tumbled down to the Hudson. There were stables with horses, pens of cattle and pigs, free-roaming chickens, geese, and ducks. The land was wild enough to be thick with small game, songbirds, and birds of prey, and Grinnell remembered a time when three eagles fought for a fish on his front lawn.6

Between the Grinnells, the Audubons, and the handful of other families who inhabited Audubon Park, a veritable tribe of young children roamed the whole area at will. Grinnell’s boyhood memories, which he recorded in an unpublished document for his nieces and nephews, read like Tom Sawyer—an almost mythic childhood of unsupervised adventure and delightfully harmless delinquency. Grinnell and his cohorts stalked birds with bow and arrow, collected clams in the tidal pools along the Hudson, and stole chickens for “surreptitious roastings at fires in the woods.” There were swimming holes in ponds and on the sandy beaches of the river. Boat docks provided a too-tempting platform for diving into the water, causing complaints from train passengers about naked children (Grinnell and his friends) “dancing on top of the piles, and generally making an exhibition.” An ordinance was passed requiring swimmers to wear “tights,” and when Grinnell and a friend ignored it, a policeman hauled them off to jail. “An hour or two of this confinement gave us plenty of time to ponder on the sorrows of life.” A judge eventually sent them home.7

Grinnell’s own imagination provided ample fuel for his childhood play, but an additional source helped to animate his boyhood adventures. Though barely known today, one of the most popular novelists of the mid-nineteenth century was an Irishman named Thomas Mayne Reid. Reid came to America in search of adventure in the 1840s. He found it, among other places, by enlisting with the U.S. Army during the war with Mexico. He earned a commission and fought in battles including Vera Cruz and Chapultepec, where he was seriously wounded. After the war, Reid began writing novels, most based loosely on his time in the American Southwest. He used the pen name Captain Mayne Reid, and his books, with titles such as The Rifle Rangers, The Scalp Hunters, and The War Trail, struck with particular resonance among young boys—and certainly with Grinnell. “His stories had appealed to my imagination.” Indeed many of the heroes in Reid’s books were boys, as in The Young Voyageurs, with the subtitle The Boy Hunters in the North, and The Boy Hunters, subtitled Adventures in Search of a White Buffalo.8

There were no buffalo of any shade near Audubon Park, but Grinnell found many opportunities to act out the scenes he devoured from the books of Captain Reid. “It must have been 1860, or possibly 1861, when I was eleven or twelve years old, that I first began to go shooting.” Knowing that his parents would disapprove, Grinnell and a friend began secretly borrowing an old military musket from the village tailor. The gun was far taller than either boy and was so heavy that “neither could hold it to the shoulder” by himself. They took turns firing by having one boy, the shooter, rest the gun on the other’s shoulder. No creature was safe. “Small birds were the chief game pursued … meadowlarks, robins, golden winged woodpeckers and occasionally a wild pigeon.” Later one of Grinnell’s uncles legitimized the hunting activity when he gave Grinnell a small shotgun of his own.9

In Grinnell’s writings about his childhood, no topic receives more attention than hunting. Indeed hunting became Grinnell’s most important early connection to the wild world, teaching him skills in the close observation of nature. Hunting also provided a new tie to the Audubon family. One of Grinnell’s frequent field companions was Jack Audubon, grandson of the painter. The connection went deeper still. Jack, in Grinnell’s words, “was privileged” with carrying his grandfather’s rifle—the same weapon that John James Audubon had relied upon during his epic adventures across the Mississippi.10

Audubon Park steeped young George Bird Grinnell in other icons of the West, a “region which in those days seemed infinitely remote and romantic with its tales of trappers, trading posts and Indians.” The houses of Audubon’s two sons were like museums, their walls adorned with trophies of deer and elk, powder horns, and ball pouches. A portrait of the buckskin-clad artist stared down, along with dozens of his paintings. In the barn, where the boys often played, were “great stacks of the old red, muslin-bound ornithological biographies and boxes of bird skins collected by the naturalist, and coming from we knew not where.” Because the artist’s sons carried on his work, they corresponded with scientists from around the world, and “frequently received boxes of fresh specimens.” Grinnell remembered crowding around newly arrived shipments with his friends, waiting breathlessly for the cartons to be opened, then gazing in wonder at the “strange animals that were revealed.”11

Of all the members of the Audubon family, none would exert greater influence on the young Grinnell than Lucy, the septuagenarian widow of the artist. Grinnell described her as “a beautiful white-haired old lady with extraordinary poise and dignity; most kindly and patient and affectionate, but a strict disciplinarian and one of whom all the children stood in awe.” From her bedroom she ran a school for the children of the neighborhood. Some of them were her grandchildren; all of them called her “Grandma Audubon.”12

Lucy Audubon appears to have been one of those unique teachers—a lucky person might encounter one or two—who changes the lives of their students. She understood the children she taught, grasping the significance of those fleeting moments of connection when an educator has an opportunity to impress a young mind. “If I can hold the mind of a child to a subject for five minutes,” she said, “he will never forget what I teach him.”13 George Bird Grinnell, certainly, would always remember.

John James Audubon: Grinnell spent his childhood roaming the grounds of the (then rural) New York estate of the former painter-naturalist.

Courtesy of the National Park Service.

Some of the lessons were mundane: reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. Others were more unique: Lucy Audubon had worked closely with her husband on some of his later writings, including his Ornithological Biography. The experience had given her a solid exposure to natural science, a knowledge she passed on to her pupils. This knowledge—and Grinnell’s close relationship with his teacher—were on display in a story Grinnell later recounted about a time he captured a live bird in a net. “I rushed into the house and up to Grandma’s room, and showed her my prize. She told me that the bird was a Red Crossbill—a young one—pointed out the peculiarities of the bill, told me something about the bird’s life, and later showed me a picture of it. Then after a little talk she and I went downstairs and out of doors, found the birds still feeding there, and set the captive free.”14

Some of the lessons that Grinnell learned from Lucy Audubon—including the one that would later emerge as the central creed of his life—would not register for years. Indeed from the time Grinnell left the school of Grandma Audubon to the time he graduated from college, his life had the feeling of casual indifference and missed opportunity.

His wealthy parents sent him to the best secondary schools. In 1861, when George was 12, he began a two-year stint at Manhattan’s French Institute. At age 14 he enrolled in the prestigious Churchill Military School at Sing Sing. Churchill enforced a mild form of military discipline, but the accommodations were hardly spartan. The supplies that new students were instructed to bring to school included “napkin ring, bathrobe and slippers, mackintosh and umbrella, sponge and nail file.” For three years, Grinnell went obediently through the well-defined motions of the school. He eventually rose up the ranks to command a company of his fellow students, but his academic performance was middling at best. Grinnell’s self-appraisal was both insightful and blunt: “I knew very well that I had wasted my time at school.”15

Nor did Grinnell have any sense of direction, a passive actor in setting the course of his life. “It had been determined that, when I left school, I should go to Yale, where my grandfather had graduated in 1804, and others of my ancestors had associations.” Even with family connections, Grinnell’s academic credentials made admission to Yale a dubious proposition. Grinnell’s instructors at Churchill warned him that he was not prepared to pass Yale’s rigorous entrance exams. But “my parents had made up their minds, and I was not in the habit of questioning my father’s decisions.” Grinnell spent the summer of 1866 in tedious remedial review. In September he traveled to New Haven and just managed to gain entrance, though “I had conditions in Greek and in Euclid.”16

Having successfully put his nose to the grindstone to win admittance, Grinnell found that his lackadaisical attitude toward his education quickly resurfaced once on campus. “Little of interest happened” was his summary of his freshman year. Grinnell’s sophomore year was more interesting because, as he explained, “I was perpetually in trouble.” He did find application for his outdoor skills, climbing up the lightning rod of a campus clock tower in order to inscribe his class number at the top. Grinnell was also an enthusiastic participant in “all the hazing and hat-stealing which was usual by Sophomores.” Partway through the fall semester, Grinnell was “detected in hazing a Freshman, and was suspended for one year.”

Grinnell, along with a few fellow transgressors, was exiled to Farmington, Connecticut. Their supervisor in Farmington, one Reverend L.R. Payne (Yale ’59), was responsible for tutoring the boys and, presumably, guiding them back to a more responsible path. Contrition, however, was in short supply among Grinnell and his comrades. “At Farmington we had a very good time, doing very little studying, and spending most of our time out of doors.” It was almost like being back at Audubon Park. “We took long walks, paddled on the Farmington River, and on moonlight nights in winter used to spend pretty much all night tramping over the fields.” At the end of the school year, Yale gave Grinnell the opportunity to take the exams with his class, but “[m]y idleness at Farmington resulted in a failure to pass.”