Feb. i 6, 1907.] 
FOREST AND STREAM 
253 
Buffalo Memorials. 
I.—The Bones. 
Nearly twenty-five years 
have passed away since 
the buffalo disappeared 
from the western plains, 
and to a vast majority of 
those who inhabit those 
plains it is a beast as un¬ 
known as the mastodon. 
The story of their vast 
numbers has come down to 
us through books and by 
tradition, pictures and occasionally a park speci¬ 
men tell us how they looked, but of the memorials 
they left behind them—records still existing, and 
some of them long to exist—few of the present 
generation have any knowledge. 
Time was, only a dozen or twenty years ago, 
when the western prairies where the buffalo used 
to range were strewn with its bones. Earlier 
than that it was a common sight for the traveler 
to ride over a little hill and see below him the 
carcasses of half a dozen of the great brutes that 
had been shot down for the amusement of some 
passerby; sometimes these were skinned, some¬ 
times they were untouched, not even the tongues 
being taken. After that came an era of skele¬ 
tons covered with dry hides to which the sun- 
bleached hair still clung, but a year or two des¬ 
troyed the hide and there remained only the 
naked skeleton—the great skull, the complete line 
of vertebrae with their tall dorsal spines, and 
the leg bones lying almost in place except where 
they had been pulled free and dragged about in 
the play of wolf, coyote, fox and badger. The 
black horn sheaths still stood on their cores, and 
sometimes the skulls were tilted in such a fash¬ 
ion as to make the horn look larger than it 
really was, and at a distance one imagined that 
some great dark bird was perched on the skull. 
These bones are almost all gone now; for of 
all the relics left by the buffalo they are the least 
enduring. The weather of twenty-five years has 
destroyed everything except the skulls, the neck 
vertebrae, the bones of the limbs and of the 
pelvis, and it is now very unusual to come upon 
a buffalo skull, that retains the loosely articulated 
parts—-the nasal and premaxillary bones. Be¬ 
sides, in many localities along the railroads the 
buffalo bones have been gathered up and ship¬ 
ped away by the carload to eastern manufac¬ 
turers to be used for a variety of purposes. The 
handle of the toothbrush which you use may be 
made from the leg of a buffalo. 
Rarely to-day in traveling over the plains does 
one see anything more than individual bones. 
A skull may show where a buffalo was killed, 
but gome search is required to find the lesser 
bones, half buried as they are in soil and over¬ 
grown by grass and weeds. One may still find 
a few places where buffalo bones are plenty, but 
chiefly as minute fragments, sometimes so numer¬ 
ous as to whiten the ground. Such spots are at 
old killing grounds where generations of Indians 
year after year drove thousands of buffalo over 
the cliff and slew them at its foot, taking away 
the meat and leaving the bones to weather and 
grow fragile and to be broken up under the 
hoofs of the succeeding generations of buffalo 
which rushed round and round the pen into 
which they had been driven. 
One can hardly write of the buffalo or their 
memorials without saying .something of the peo¬ 
ple whose food and shelter the buffalo had 
always been—the Indians of the plains. Before 
these people procured guns and horses and sheet 
iron arrow points, the killing of the buffalo was 
a difficult matter. Against his heavy coat, his 
thick skin and his huge body, the stone-headed 
arrow must have been often wholly ineffective. 
So it came that the Indians were forced to de¬ 
vise methods for destroying these great brutes, 
and other animals, by wholesale, and when a 
large killing had been made, the flesh secured 
was dried and kept against a future time of scar¬ 
city. The common method of taking buffalo 
on the plains was to drive them into a pen or 
corral where they were held until the men could 
kill them. At other places it was possible to 
drive the animals over a precipice, where the 
fall from a height killed or crippled most of 
those that went over. In either case, the buffalo 
were decoyed into a V-shaped chute, the diverg¬ 
ing arms of which extended far out on the 
prairie. 1 he animals brought within these arms 
moved along toward the angle of the V where 
was the pen or the precipice, and as they ad¬ 
vanced further were urged on so that when they 
came to the pen or to the cliff, those in advance, 
even if alarmed by what was before them and 
anxious to stop or turn aside, could not do so 
because they were crowded upon by their fol¬ 
lowers and pushed ahead, so that the greater part 
of the herd was likely to be secured. 
These traps were built by all the Indians on 
the northern plains, especially those who lived 
close to the mountains, where the country was 
rough and broken. 
We are commonly told in books that the buf¬ 
falo were driven into these traps, but I have 
many times explained that this is not true. It 
would be about as easy to drive a buffalo as it 
would be to drive a passenger pigeon or a fly; 
m other words, it could not be done. The fright¬ 
ened buffalo went where he wished to. On the 
other hand, it was possible occasionally for skill¬ 
ful persons to guide frightened buffalo in one 
direction or another, as used to be done by the 
Red River halfbreeds or by the Indians when 
their horses were weak and thin in the spring 
time, and when they did not wish to give them 
a long run. The buffalo were brought between 
the arms of the V-shaped chute by being “called” 
there, as the Indians say; in other words, by 
being decoyed within the entrance of the trap. 
I he work of bringing them within the arms was 
entrusted to special men who were supposed to 
be possessed of supernatural power. As a mat¬ 
ter of fact they appealed simply to that senti¬ 
ment of curiosity which exists in many wild 
animals, or else to the 'gregarious instinct which 
is particularly strong in the buffalo. 
One of the earliest visitors to that portion of 
the great plains lying north of the United States 
was Alexander Henry, the elder,' who, about 
1774 . made a winter trip to the country of the 
Assmaboines. The story of his adventures was 
published in 1809 in New York, and is a most 
quaint and interesting picture of early travel 
among the Indians. The book was fully noticed 
in one of a series of articles entitled “Trails 
of the Pathfinders,” which was published some 
time ago in Forest and Stream. Henry writes 
m quaint fashion, and calls the Indians whom 
he met Ossinipoils; the prairies, the “great 
meadows,” and the buffalo, “wild oxen.” He 
saw the Assinaboines bring in the buffalo into 
a pen, and of the men who decoyed them he 
says: 
“They were dressed in ox skins with the hair 
and horns. Their faces were covered and their 
gestures so closely resembled those of the ani- 
mab themselves that had I not been in the secret 
1 should have been as much deceived as the 
oxen. He adds: “The part played by the de¬ 
coders was that of approaching within hearing 
and then to bellow like themselves. On hearing 
the noise the oxen did not fail to give it atten¬ 
tion and whether from curiosity or sympathy ad¬ 
vanced to meet those from whom it proceeded, 
these in the meantime, fell back deliberately 
toward the pound, always repeating the call when¬ 
ever the oxen stopped. This was reiterated until 
the leaders of the herd had followed the de¬ 
coders into the jaws of the pound which was 
wide asunder toward the plains, terminating like 
a funnel into a small aperture or gate-way, and 
within this was the pound itself. The Indians 
remarked that in the herds of animals there are 
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CLIFF OVER WHICH BUFFALO WERE DRIVEN BY THE INDIANS. 
