How "Buffalo" Jones Got His Name
I’m not surprised that this fable is often repeated; Jones was an excellent PR man and a coauthor of his own mythology. When he succeeded, it was because of his power of persuasion. But when he failed, it was inevitably because ‘nature’ didn’t buy into his plans.
First, it was the idea of Osage orange bushes. Like Jack with his magic beans, Jones arrived in Kansas in 1866 with a bag of seeds and a promise of a dense, quick-growing hedge that would allow homesteaders to corral their livestock and keep undesirables out. Osage orange was “a red-hot scheme” in a land where no trees grew hardy enough for fence posts.[1] Jones' bag of seeds grew into a nursery until a plague of grasshoppers thwarted his plans, and the advent of barbed wire in 1875 made rebuilding a moot point.[2]
His next sales pitch was for Garden City in 1878. It wasn't a city at all, but four buildings in the middle of Western Kansas's hardscrabble high plain. He sold the idea of this new Garden of Eden to railroads and homesteaders, and they came, lured by false-front commercial buildings and transplanted trees.[3] He willed this city into existence. He developed the irrigation ditches, ran the US Land Office,[4] and built a "marble block," which included the county courthouse and Buffalo Hotel.[5]
The false-front buildings burned to the ground in a devastating 1883 fire.[6] In 1886 a blizzard killed 75% of the cattle in the region, droughts followed and the railroads folded under the weight of their over-expansion.[7] The "farmers fled western Kansas," and in 1890, the banks foreclosed on Jones' hotel.[8] It was in the eye of the storm, after the blizzard of 1886 but before Jones’ financial ruin that he began collecting bison calves in earnest.
But Jones got his nickname nearly two decades before, in 1876 when he was a hide hunter.[9] And while Jones was a prolific buffalo hunter, it wasn't just his abilities to slaughter buffalo that distinguished him as the Buffalo Jones.
Charles Jesse ‘buffalo’ Jones got his name for murdering people.
As far as I can tell, the story is that Tu-ukumah,[10] a Comanche headman, led his starving people through a snowstorm to escape their imprisonment on the Fort Sill reservation. After losing two cavalry troops that pursued them, Tu-ukumah and his people made their way to their traditional hunting territory at Pocket Canyon. They hoped to find some of the dwindling buffalo. Instead, they found a white hide hunter named Marshall Sewall, who set up a stand in the canyon. He was picking off a herd one-by-one. He had killed twenty-one bison when several Comanche men put a stop to it. A few days later, fellow hide hunters found his body ringed by the bloated and untouched bison corpses.[11]
The indignant white hunters organized their revenge.[12] Forty-five of them descended on the Comanche families. By this time, the Comanche had been joined by an Apache band, swelling their numbers to approximately 300. Despite their numerical and tactical superiority, the Comanche and Apache fighters could not contend with the high power buffalo guns. Jones, along with his comrades, picked them off from the slopes of Pocket Canyon.
Jones was well-practiced; this was how he had taken down hundreds of bison. As he wrote in his memoir, he would shoot the matriarch of a herd from three hundred yards; her devoted kin "would linger, and wait until the last one could be easily slain." Or he would wound one of their young so that it would cry to its family, desperate and plaintive, holding them there until he could “kill all [he] desired[13]
By the hunters' calculations, they killed thirty-five warriors and wounded twenty-two. When the carnage was over, the white hunters toasted one another around the campfire. One man “lifted his tin cup of whisky toward [Jones] who had been most responsible for the day’s success… Here’s to Buffalo Jones!”[14]
Jones’ crusade to ‘save’ the bison was fueled by a drive for atonement and domination, both of which were rooted in his Christian fundamentalism. Please understand me; he did not regret his murder of human beings, but rather his contribution to the near extermination of the buffalo.[15] This is the only sin he laments in his memoir, which was undoubtedly, yet another of his PR efforts.
Jones believed that there was no place for wild bison on their former ranges. Man's mastery transformed these arid tracts into productive farms "made exceptionally fertile by the manure, bones, and flesh of the millions [of bison] which [had] lived and died there during centuries past[16]
And so,
like the land,
being made useful under domestication would save the bison.
Jones heard God's call in Genesis 1:26; “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness; and let them have dominion over ... all the earth and over every... thing that creepeth upon the earth.”[17]
It is incredible that a hunter can know his prey intimately and yet treat them with such cruelty. How can a man in one sentence express empathy for another beings life-ways, and then in the next describe how with unabashed cruelty they must be “broken” and “subordinated to the will of their master”?[18] Men can balance the most impressive cognitive dissonance when self-interest tips the scales.
The 1886 blizzard that triggered the collapse of his town also inspired Jones' bison domestication scheme. "The snow was twisted and hurled into the air leaving the ground bare, where it was completely pulverized by the energy of the contending elements into an impalpable powder, filling the lungs of everything animate…alternately melting and freezing until horses, mules and domestic cattle perished by tens of thousands.”[19] Domestic cattle were particularly vulnerable to winter storms. On the open range, they would turn their tails to the punishing winds and drift away from them, trudging on, never stopping until their last breath. On a trip to the Texas panhandle, Jones traveled through massive fields of frozen carcasses, but there were no bison amongst the dead. This realization inspired Jones to create a hybridized race, hardy enough for the American climate but with European stock's temperament.
And so, Jones set out to capture the last remaining remnants of the great southern herd, not as some noble conservation effort, but as breeding stock for his grand experiment.
On the first three expeditions, he took only calves. He learned as he went, and the bison he encountered suffered considerably for his mistakes.
He brought two mules on his first foray, a thoroughbred named Kentuck, and cans of condensed milk. Four of the fourteen calves they led back to Garden City died along the way. They couldn't survive being force-fed the poor substitute. Jones and his two assistants shot three cows; two in the process of taking their calves from them, and one without a calf they killed for food. I won't repeat all the details here, though there were plenty. I won't let Jones use me to repeat the misery he inflicted. His writing feels like a perverse recitation of suffering orchestrated to illustrate his mastery. I couldn’t breathe while reading his accounts, not because they were exhilarating and suspenseful, but because his descriptions of mothers and calves desperately clinging to one another knocked the breath out of me.
Twelve milk cows accompanied the men and horses on the second hunt in 1887. Despite their efforts to not repeat the mistakes of the past seven calves died on this expedition, three of them before they even began the trek back to the ranch. The hunters captured the first calves before the milk cows caught up with them. The calves refused buckets of water and called relentlessly and desperately for their mothers. Jones and his men rode out looking for range cows to forcibly milk but instead found two of the bison mothers wandering the site of their loss. Jones shot one of them for meat and milked her dead body.
Her udders were full; I feel the echoes of that aching pressure. I feel it because I have known that itching, tingling letdown, and the pain when the release doesn't come. I have felt the surge of hormones that hit like a drug when the baby feeds, sometimes when I just thought about the baby feeding. I share those hormones with these cows. They don't make my connection to my child any less, but they make my empathy with these mothers real.
The men rode back to camp, the canteen of milk bouncing in the back of Jones’ wagon. After two hours in the punishing sun, Jones was driven to drink the milk. But nothing would come out. It had churned to butter.
When they arrived back at camp, they feasted on her roasted body, salted the butter, and enjoyed it on warm biscuits. They devoured her while her calf looked on, his tongue “black and swollen” hanging from his mouth, his groaning grunts continuous and hoarse.[20] I know I said I wouldn’t repeat these accounts, but this one, it so painfully and clearly demonstrates Jones’ mentality; he could never understand the bond of milk. It was just another resource to take, another inconvenience to overcome. The surrogates arrived in time to save some of them. Seven made it to Garden City.
The third hunt in May of 1888 was the most 'successful'. Thirty-seven calves made it back to Garden City. Three more died of stress, heat, and dehydration. Two were left hogtied when darkness fell. Wolves probably ate them.[21]
I question the wisdom of comparing suffering in these stories. The distress and pain of each of the cows and their calves were unique and all-encompassing. But the fourth and final hunt in 1889 is remarkable for its protracted and futile cruelty.
I know I said I wouldn’t perform a recitation of this suffering, but I just can’t let the story of these last cows molder in forgotten books. I’m sorry, but here it is:
Jones recognized that the behavior of the few remaining bison had changed. It was now a challenge to find a herd of twenty-five, where in the past there would have been hundreds, particularly in summer breeding congregations. Unsurprisingly, there were few calves; only seven were found on this expedition. Recognizing this would be his last effort, Jones resolved not to leave any bison on the plain.[22]
Capturing and herding wild bison had been practiced for centuries by Indigenous nations, particularly in the northern range. Driving bison to jumps or pounds required knowledge of trails, topography, and seasonal grasses. The practice necessitated intimacy with animals. “Decoys," men or women embodying a bull or calf, would imitate calls and movements to draw bison in, while "bison runners" who knew the ways of wolves would start a stampede and control its direction.[23]
Working with nature was not Jones’ way. The only path he could see was how to make nature work for him.
Jones and his crew found a herd of twenty cows and a bull at the Palo Duro River's headwaters. With horses and bloodhounds, they were able to drive them for four days to their base camp. In this panicked state, the bison would not stop for water, and eventually, their exhaustion made them manageable. There were no trees here to create a corral. Jones had experimented with hobbling a cow earlier in the trek, but she had died "of a broken heart" shortly thereafter.[24] Jones chalked up this failure to the bison’s obstinacy, assuming that wild adult bison preferred death to captivity and appeared to have the “power to abstain from breathing.”[25]
This ‘failed experiment’ may have given Jones some misgivings about his mission. While his men kept the cows in sight and under control, Jones rode back to Garden city, rounded up twenty-five of his domesticated bison, and drove them 200 miles to meet their conquered kin.[26]
When I read Jones’ description of the two herds meeting, I reached out between the words for all that was left unsaid. As if I can reach back through time and space. All we get is one sentence; “they all appeared to enjoy the occasion as much as if they had been exiles and had been reunited on their native soil.”[27] There is no "as if" they were precisely exiles reunited on their native soil. But how did they know one another? Did they smell and hear in one another echoes of themselves? Had they or their ancestors met when breeding congregations came together? Did tightly bonded females find lost herd members? Lost calves? We can never know. Jones knew the power of these blood ties, knew that after a stampede, herd members would find and know one another by scent and sound, and would "never rest until they [were] all together again."[28] In this moment, however, Jones was zealously focused on possessing the last of the Southern bison, and it seems he did not note any specifics.
I don't know how long the bison were given for this reunion. I can't imagine it was long before the combined herd was started for Garden City. It seems that the draw of their domesticated kin was not enough to override the blood knowledge of place that had been learned and passed down over generations. The wild bison balked at their territory's northern limits; they turned back to the land they knew. Jones' men followed the herd continually for forty-two days and nights. Desperate to circle them back, they charged the cows at least twenty times. The bison became thin and footsore. The men could often follow them by "the blood left in their tracks."[29]
It seems there was nothing the bison could do to escape their fate because Jones had already decided God had ordained it. Despairing, Jones returned to his plan of hobbling the adult bison. They singled out, lassoed, and hobbled seventeen of the cows. Eight died within the first twenty-four hours, suffering seizures, stiffening limbs, and then collapse.[30] Still, the men pushed on, and the rest fell on the trail to Garden City one by one. Seven of their calves survived to witness their deaths, though I don't believe they were permitted to linger, lowing at their sides.
Capture myopathy was not identified until 1964, when it was diagnosed in another endangered species, the Hunter's hartebeest. The stress of being captured triggers the creature's biological defense mechanisms, and the prolonged or intense engagement of these mechanisms causes massive and often fatal system failure. The animal suffers lethargy, muscle weakness, incoordination, rapid breathing, shivering, dark red urine, and hypothermia. They suffer from metabolic acidosis; their blood turns to acid. Their muscles, especially in the hindquarters, suffer necrosis. Their muscles die as the animal is still struggling for life.[31] This is how the last of the Southern bison died.
Jones' desperation in capturing these last cows may have been his last grasp at control over the future. He had endeavored to create a bison empire; he had tried to sell the world on a new, hybrid, subjugated species. But his breeding program produced mostly sterile offspring, and few could stomach the months of dangerous and brutal training it took to 'break' a bison. And even then, the handler could never let his guard down; given the opportunity, the bison would kill the man who sought to control him. The bison would never be truly domesticated.
Jones sold his herd in 1893.[32]
He published his autobiography in 1899 when he was lobbying for control of the bison at Yellowstone National Park. He was awarded the post of game warden in 1902.
I know, I’ve just repeated so many traumas I said I wouldn’t.
I had to make sure you understood. Because with a name like Buffalo Jones it’s easy to believe that he saved the bison.
[1] Easton, 10-11
[2] Fisher
[3] National Register 4
[4]…While also being a land speculator.
[5] Never mind that Garden City had not yet been declared the county seat or that the marble was a less chalky local limestone…
[6] ibid
[7] ibid 5
[8] ibid 6
[9] Easton, 24
[10] Also known as Black Horse and Pako-Riah (Colt) or Ta-Peka (Sun Rays) amongst his people. Also recorded in the cultural archive is the racial epithet that the white 'plainsmen' used (Anderson).
[11] Easton, 25
[12] ibid 26
[13]." Jones 234
[14] Easton 27
[15] Jones admits to murdering multiple Indigenous people in his memoir, though he brags that no one will ever be the wiser because he didn't keep trophies of his crimes. A sentiment blatantly undermined by his confession. This was a man with astonishingly little self-awareness. He justifies his killing by comparing his victims to dangerous animals. His relationship to animals and his white supremacist worldview are intertwined (Jones 84).
[16] Jones 259
[17] King James Bible
[18] Jones 252
[19] Jones 48
[20] Jones 141-142
[21] ibid 185
[22] The Chicago Times recognized the significance of this ‘final hunt’ and furnished Jones with Carrier pigeons. The birds carried news of Jones’ efforts back to Garden City, where they were telegraphed on to the paper. ibid 202
[23] Barsh & Marlor 576
[24] Jones 222
[25] Jones 223
[26] Amongst the twenty-five may have been some of the Stony Mountain bison, which had survived the harrowing conditions of the first live-bison train journey in 1888. MacEwan 85
[27] Jones 221
[28] Jones 234
[29] Jones 222
[30] ibid
[31] Breed et al. 2-4
[32] Markewicz 23