Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
I looked down in the mid-summer heat and there it was lying in a decaying snowdrift on the north side of a small grove of pine trees. A bison horn. Not really a horn, but the sheath of one. It was small, a bison cow horn.
How long it lay there was a mystery. The last recorded mountain bison in the Wind River Range came in the late 1880s.
It was July 1979, almost a century from the last reported buffalo on the mountain and we had the weekend off from Alder Construction. My roommate Frank and I were laborers on the Riverton Water Treatment Plant job. We were a week away from a weekend of stacking second-cutting small bales for my dad, so we’d packed the pickup and headed to Union Pass.
A lifetime later, my friend, the eminent archaeologist Dr. Todd Gunther, recently retired from Central Wyoming College, mentioned a term I had never heard in conjunction with what once was in the fertile hills of the Wind River Range.
Todd called it the “American Serengeti.” His description of the abundant wildlife covering every ridge, draw, river bottom and mountain ridge before the white man arrived seemed almost mythical.
As he presented this idea to a standing room only crowd at the Riverton Branch Library a year ago, my mind wandered to another storied place, Atlantis.
One of my favorite ethereal tunes from the mystical 1960s is Donovan’s hit “Atlantis.” The words of the opening lyrics struck me like an extended camera angle from above in a Hollywood Western.
The antediluvian kings colonized the world
All the gods who play in the mythological dramas
In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis
Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth
On board were the Twelve
The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist
The magician and the other so-called gods of our legends
Though gods they were
And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind
Let us rejoice, sing, dance and ring in the new age
Hail Atlantis
There was nothing mythical about the American Serengeti. It was real, and older people who knew my grandparents in their youth experienced it. It was that close in the span of human existence.
The tribes that frequented the Wind River Range in primordial times knew of the vast variety nature provided in large mammals.
The Shoshone, Crow, Gros Ventre, Blood, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Ute roamed the massive Rocky Mountains from Canada to Utah and Colorado, living off the bounty of the land.
To the south the Arapaho, Kiowa, Comanche, Navajo, and Apache lived similar lifestyles. To the north and east, Hidatsa, Crow, and finally the seven tribes of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Nations, the Sioux, also hunted, gathered berries, made pemmican, lived a nomadic lifestyle and left very little imprint on the vast wilderness. You might say their carbon footprint was zero in modern terms.
Imagine a place where the valleys are filled with bison, not the larger plains variety, but smaller mountain buffalo. The streams abound with moose and the ridges teemed with elk. Just for good measure, pronghorn, mule deer, Big Horn sheep and Rocky Mountain goats inhabit the remaining zones. That was the Wind River Range and the valley below that we live in today.
It must have been magical.
The streams teemed with cutthroat trout the size of footballs, and beaver, otter, mink, and martin were so bountiful you had to avoid stepping on them. Rattlesnakes, wolverines, badgers, city sized prairie dog towns, and sage grouse filled out the panorama.
I recently finished reading, “My Life as an Indian: The Story of a Red Woman and a White Man in the Lodges of the Blackfeet” by J.W. Schultz.
It’s a work mixed with factual stories, and a few elaborated a bit by the author, but based on fact.
Like many adventurous young men, Schultz headed west after the Civil War.
He lived with the Blackfeet of Montana and experienced the height of their plains civilization while living long enough to see it fall before the advance of “civilization.”
Schultz wrote of the people, but he marveled at the wildlife.
If you have the slightest knowledge of the history of the American West you’ve heard the story of how Native Americans used everything but the squeak of a bison’s voice. That’s true in most cases, but with the vastness of the great herds of the north, sometimes it was just the hide, the tongue and the back ribs that were harvested from these massive animals.
Buffalo hides brought an average of two dollars at trading posts across the Dakotas and Montana from 1865 to 1884 when they vanished. In current currency, that equates to about $80 a hide.
The women did the hard work, stretching, scraping and tanning the hides, but they brought a lot at the trading post when finished.
Native Americans utilized the buffalo for shelter, covering teepees with it. They wore the hides on their feet, made parfleches of it, and even boiled water in it. It was a universal commodity with nearly unlimited uses by clever, culturally trained members of each tribe.
They didn’t get much in the way of seasoning in their diet. The marrow from the long bones of elk, deer and moose provided a little more flavor and salt was a prized, traded commodity.
The Blackfeet had a substitute for bread called depuyer. It was made from the fat taken from the backbone of a bison. They mixed it with dry, jerked beef.
It may not sound enticing, but it was an energy-laden food, reveled by the Blackfeet.
While buffalo supplied most of their needs, moose hide was preferred for winter moccasins. They wore oversized moccasins with layers of buffalo hide, blankets and supple deer skins in layers over their feet for subzero winter travel. Tanned moose hide lashed the dogsleds, leggings and provided a type of parachute cord long before anyone jumped out of an airplane.
Moose, pronghorn, elk, mule deer, Big Horn, and Rocky Mountain goats gave them a varied diet, along with hide, sinews, and bones used to create tools, clothing and anything else they might need to live in harmony with the land.
Government hunters recently shot and killed Rocky Mountain goats in Wyoming from helicopters. They considered them an invasive species, yet diaries and histories written by those that lived in the late 19th century describe them as abundant. In comparison to the same wildlife experts bringing in invasive Canadian wolves to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, it borders on madness.
The conventional wisdom is that the United States systematically killed the buffalo to destroy the food supply of the Plains Indians and force them by starvation onto reservations. That was the result, but it’s not quite the motive that made that happen.
The bison experienced a surge in the late 1860s and early 1870s, reaching their peak populations. It wasn’t through any management plan, but rather the effect of an economic event.
Wolf pelts brought top dollar during the period, and “wolfers” as they were called nearly eradicated the wolf for their hides.
Without their primary predator, the wolf, bison populations grew. When the fashion trend ended, as it had with beaver a generation before, the wolf population rose again.
With buffalo hides bringing top prices, and skilled hunters capable of killing hundreds per day, the economic force of shooting $16,000 to $24,000 a day in hides from bison was too much to resist.
The money hunters eradicated the buffalo. The American government, and in particular the American military were grossly inefficient. It was simple supply and demand that reduced an estimated 60,000,000 head to just 1,500 by 1890.
Others did the same with elk, killing every bull they spotted, ripping out their ivory teeth and leaving the carcass to rot.
It was an enigmatic end to the miracle of the American Serengeti by 1890. A bounty of wildlife that will never grace the continent again as long as man survives.