American Rifle - Alexander Rose [92]
American hunters came to the Remington company’s rescue, especially the “buff runners,” the professional buffalo killers who then occupied the same place in the romantic imagination that World War I fighter aces, Mercury “Right Stuff” astronauts, and Special Forces commandos later would.60
Buffalo hunting served several purposes, aside from the visceral and the political. Buffalo meat supplied workers who were building the railroads and settlers founding towns in the new territories; their hides were used for myriad applications, including winter boots and overcoats for soldiers; and their tongues were considered a delicacy on the East Coast. Indians were angered at the liquidation of their ancient source of food and shelter, and their search for happier hunting grounds often led to clashes with either neighboring tribes, soldiers, or settlers. The arrival of hordes of rich amateurs and “sporting” incompetents merely left thousands of tongueless, meaty carcasses littering the plains. During an Arkansas trip in 1873, where the year before there had been “myriads of buffalo,” observed Colonel Dodge, now “the air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain . . . was a dead, solitary, putrid desert. . . . The loin, the ribs, the hump, all the best and most savoury parts of the animal, are left to rot, or are eaten by wolves.”61 By the late 1880s, some think, where once up to 30 million bison had roamed, fewer than a thousand were left. Not all of these animals died by human hand: so cold was it in 1841 that the Wyoming prairie was left thickly covered in ice and millions of bison starved to death.62 Still, Mother Nature had nothing on the Brotherhood of the Rifle.
A professional hunter could clear $10,000 a year (about $183,000 in today’s dollars) once he had paid off his considerable setup and recurring costs, running at least $1,400. He needed a cook and skinners, plus a covered wagon drawn by mules or horses for hauling his treasure to the trading post, a good pony of his own costing between $250 and $500, a couple of hundred pounds of lead, thousands of primers, and hundreds of shells (if he preferred to load his own ammunition) or thousands of cartridges (if he didn’t).63The young Wyatt Earp went into buffalo running in the early 1870s, though he was honest enough to admit that “no buffalo hunter of my acquaintance—myself, least of all—planned his work as a crusade for civilization [against the Indians]. . . . I went into the business to make money while enjoying life that appealed to me.”64
A hunter’s most critical tool was his weapon. Anyone worth his salt used a single-shot rifle, for repeaters were still, as Smith and Wesson had found when developing their first metallic cartridges, obliged to use smaller-caliber ammunition and much less powder than single-shots in order to avoid fragmenting the bullet in the barrel owing to the enormous stresses and heat generated by rapid firing.
Repeaters lacked range, velocity, and killing ability. Thus, a Remington bullet would whiz past a cruising repeater round and travel about double its distance. For a brute as formidable as a buffalo, only a single-shot would suffice. “With