The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [99]
After an initial hike around Little Missouri to get his bearings, impressed by the solemnity of it all, Roosevelt hired Joe Ferris as his Badlands guide. It was said that if anybody could track down a lonesome George it was Ferris, a Canadian (a New Brunswickian, to be exact) who had moved to the region just a year earlier. There were still, in fact, Acadian inflections in his speech. Virtually everybody said that this onetime lumberjack was a self-starter but never arrogant, an individual who always kept his wits about him—and also, most importantly, a puritan of sorts with Spartan instincts, who never bragged. Still, as Louis L’Amour once wrote of a character, if you stepped on one of Joe Ferris’s toes, the other nine would light out after you.
Ferris told Roosevelt that finding either a nimble or a dying buffalo was unlikely. The days when George Catlin could recline in a canvas chair and paint great buffalo hunts were over. From the Osage Hills of Oklahoma to the Flint Hills of Kansas all the way north to the billowing grasslands along the Canadian border, a buffalo was hard to find. Earlier that summer the U.S. government had hired a band of Sioux to slaughter around 5,000 buffalo along the Northern Pacific line, so that the grazing beasts would not cause a train wreck. If you followed the tracks across the Badlands in 1883, in fact, you would have found the bleached bones of buffalo scattered and piled high in mounds. Then, as a follow-up to the “golden spike” ceremony in Montana, the federal government—specifically James McLaughlin, superintendent of the Standing Rock Indian Agency—again dispatched the Sioux (Lakota) tribe to butcher an additional 10,000 bison. A barbarous bloodbath took place on the Great Plains, and back east the newspapers cheered. “Again, the slaughter was carried out with full federal approval,” the historian Edmund Morris later observed, offering an additional reason for the extermination of the buffalo. “Washington knew that plains bare of buffalo would soon be bare of Indians too.”28
Another pernicious enemy of the buffalo was the telegraph companies. Because buffalo were constantly being attacked by flies—black, snipe, and horse—their backs constantly itched. Regularly, buffalo looked for trees to lean into and scratch against, rubbing so hard that they frequently knocked the trees over. After the Civil War, as telegraph lines were strung across the continent, the buffalo took to the poles as scratch posts, causing them to topple. One telegraph company wizard decided that fastening bradawls to the poles might solve the problem, but the opposite happened.29 “For the first time [buffalo] came to scratch sure of a sensation in their thick hides that thrilled them from horn to tail,” the Kansas Daily Commercial lamented. “They would go fifteen miles to find a bradawl. They fought huge battles around the poles containing them, and the victor would proudly climb the mountainous heap of rump and hump of the fallen, and scratch himself into bliss until the bradawl broke or the pole came down.” With the failure of the bradawl strategy, the telegraph industry also started slaughtering the animals.30
Even though Ferris was reluctant to take Roosevelt buffalo hunting, the rich New Yorker’s money was enticing. Eyeing Roosevelt with suspicion, Ferris reluctantly agreed to be his guide. He later mocked the chore as “trundling a tenderfoot.”31
The first service Ferris rendered Roosevelt was to borrow a proper buffalo hunting gun from crotchety old Eldridge Paddock, a local trapper who also dabbled in real estate. Then the pair saddled up and headed seven miles south in a buckboard to the Maltese Cross Ranch (often referred to as the Chimney Butte Ranch), where they planned on meeting up with two other Canadians, William Merrifield and Sylvane Ferris (Joe’s brother). For the first time, Roosevelt saw black-tailed