Bone rick: An Epitaph
I am looking at a photo, sepia toned with age. You’ve seen it. A man stands in front of a sheer wall of skulls and horns. He adopts the pose of a man in front of a grandiose fireplace: One hand on the mantel, the other on his raised knee, his foot resting on a hearth. Except there is no fireplace, just skulls. It’s a posture of absolute mastery and dominance. The pile rises behind him, nearly five times his size. Atop it stands another man, indistinct at this distance, but echoing his partner’s pose and bowler hat. This image from the Detroit Public Archive is often reproduced to illustrate the scale of the bison’s near extermination. But, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then we would need many, many more to understand the confluence of losses these piles of bones represent.
These bones made a final mass migration in tens of thousands of boxcars, following the route their hides had traveled in the decades before.
These skeletons became fertilizer, buttons and china. They were used to filter yet another devastating colonial product: sugar.
These remnants live on in paintings and print matter, having been charred in a kiln, then ground and mixed with oil to make bone-black pigment.
They aren’t the only animals whose bodies were used to record their own annihilation, but my mind reels at the scale of it.
In 1873, before the mass arrival of homesteaders to the plains, Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, the namesake of Dodge City, wrote “where there were once myriads of buffalo there are now myriads of carcasses. The air is foul with a sickening stench, and the plain, which only a short twelve months before teemed with animal life, is a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”
When homesteaders arrived in Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Montana and the Dakotas in the 1880s, with their mule and ox carts, they were told to quote unquote improve the land. Land that bison and the multitudes of first nations people dependent on them had just been eradicated from.
While the Sioux, Cree, Crows, Blackfeet, Kaws, Pawnees, Poncas, and Otoe-Missouria were obscured from the settler’s view, having been forced onto reserves and reservations by the late 1880s, the bones of the bison littered the ground that the farmers needed to till.
The bones were a nuisance to the homesteaders until the droughts came.[1] Then they became a lifeline. In America, buffalo bones could be sold for 20$ a ton at the industry’s peak. That would be about 560$ today. It’s hard to imagine what 560 dollars would mean to a family whose crops, their only food, their only currency, had withered and died. I doubt that after weeks of scavenging bones in the punishing sun, it felt much like winning the lottery. It probably just meant they could survive one more winter on their land, knowing they had to make it through five years for the government to say they owned it outright.
In Canada, the marginalized Metis that survived for a while off of bone-picking, traded their cartloads for far less in store credit.[2]
The land between the Qu’appelle valley and the Saskatchewan River was described as being “literally white with bison bones.” I’ve seen a, contrasty, impressionistic photograph of one of these killing fields. A sea of bleached carnage outside Lloydminster, Saskatchewan. The description is not hyperbole.
Here in Canada, the bison-bone boom lasted three short years, starting in 1890. News of the burgeoning market preceded the advancing railroad. Piles of bones dotted the ribbon of land allotted for the promised trains.
Saskatoon became the collection point for the Metis bone-pickers. There, bone trading middlemen cooked their books to hide the wealth they were accumulating. They often received double what they paid the Metis for the bones. And understand when I say pay, I don’t mean cash. Few settlers would give the Metis anything more than store credit.
The accumulation of skeletons in Saskatoon soon out-stripped the railroad’s ability to cart them away. The skulls were stacked with their horns interlocked, creating a corral to contain the sea of loose bones packed within. These bone-ricks mimicked the dimensions of a boxcar – eight feet wide, eight feet tall and 33 feet long.
At the outset of the second bone–picking season in 1891, the Metis set fire to the tall grasses west of the South Saskatchewan River. A technique once used to control the movement of bison herds was now used to reveal all that remained of them.
That summer the Metis from Fish Creek and Batoche were able to bring in over 200,000 sun-bleached skeletons from the blackened plain. As the search drew them in a further orbit from Saskatoon: 24km in 1890 to 80km in 1893, so grew the convoys of families in their screeching red river carts. Sixty or more might have pulled into the city at once. Oxen or horses straining under the burden of 1,200 pounds of bones, always accompanied by the sound of “a thousand fingernails dragged across a thousand windowpanes” as the ungreased cartwheels rubbed against dry axles.
By the end of 1891, the bone-ricks stretched for 800 feet next to the railroad tracks that ran through Saskatoon. There they stayed when the prairie winter froze them all in place. Similar accumulations could be seen at every railroad siding from Duck Lake in the north to Regina in the south.
By the time an economic depression knocked out the US markets in 1893, the grassland around Saskatoon had been all but picked clean. In the three years of the Canadian bone boom, 1,500,000 bison bodies had been extracted from the ecosystem.
The land, which had supported millions of bison, particularly in the vast austerity of the Southern Plains, was not suited to the burden of modern intensive farming.
The bones of the bison were sold to the east where they were processed for phosphorous and then sold back to homesteaders to fertilize their soil and to make it, quote unquote, “productive.”
But the parched ground that had been held in place by bluegrass and buffalo grass was quickly exhausted and blew away during immense dust storms that choked and starved the homesteaders’ descendants. The once fertile dirt blew all the way to the east coast, just as the continent was gripped by the great depression. Complete economic and ecological collapse were partnered specters exposing the colonial fairy tales of eternal physical and monetary expansion.
It’s hard to blame those first settlers hunkered down in their dugout and sod homes, just trying to survive, trying to keep their babies alive.
They had been told the Earth was theirs to tame and to dominate, to extract all they could, that God’s bounty could never be exhausted. They were desperately treading water, adrift in a sea so expansive, so enveloping, that it couldn’t be perceived. They brought it with them to the prairie; “a social system, a set of values, an economic order” in which every dollar must be extracted from every inch of soil, every ounce of bison matter, every breath of human life. Maybe when the seas rise up, they will finally drown the fairy tale, but the fairy tale survived the dust clouds and the walls of bison bones, got stronger even, in the wake of these disasters, so maybe the fairy tale will be our epitaph.
[1] Farming, especially in the 1800s, required an attention to short-term cycles. Plow the soil, cultivate a crop, reap enough of a return to survive the winter and make it to the next planting season. The value of bison bones was long-term, left on the ground they provide a rich and long-lasting reserve of calcium and mineral for rodents and the rest of the ecological community. Olson 80.
[2] The Metis were not the only group to survive off the short-lived bone boom. In an 1892 travelogue Hamlin Russel asks an unnamed Mountie, do the Northern Cree “make a living gathering these bones?” The Mountie replies, “yes in a way… but it is a mercy that they can’t eat bones we were never able to control the savages until their meat supply was cut off. We have had no trouble worth speaking of since 1883, however.” The last known wild plains bison were seen in Canada in 1881.