Free The Searchers by Glenn Frankel

cheap, and death was ubiquitous. In Leavenworth City, Kansas, which he made home for a time, Dixon would recall, “Shootings were as common as the arrival of a bulltrain, and excited little comment. The man who was quickest on the trigger usually came out ahead—the other fellow was buried, and no questions asked.”
    The buffalo trade gained momentum slowly. At first, tanneries back east complained that the bison hides were too thick and rough to use for fine leather goods. But by 1872, firms in New York and Pennsylvania hadimported European methods of softening the hides, creating a keen demand for raw materials and a new incentive for hunters.
    So far as William T. Sherman and his right-hand man, Phil Sheridan, were concerned, the timing of this breakthrough was perfect. The two generals set extermination of the vast herds of American bison on the Great Plains as a policy goal in order to deprive Plains Indians of their primary source of food, clothing, and shelter. Professional hunters, trespassing on Indian land, killed more than four million bison by 1874. When the Texas legislature considered a law banning bison poaching on tribal lands, Sheridan journeyed to Austin to personally testify against the measure. He suggested that the legislature might better give each hunter a medal, engraved with a dead buffalo on one side and a discouraged-looking Indian on the other. The way to solve “the vexed Indian question,” Sheridan told the lawmakers, was by destroying “the Indians’ commissary .”
    With a growing market to supply, the buffalo hunter’s arsenal rapidly increased in size and accuracy: muzzle loaders, shotguns, and Springfield rifles gave way to Henry and Spencer repeating rifles. The Sharps Rifle Company paved the way with new models specially designed for killing buffalo, led by the Big Fifty, a fifty-caliber rifle that fired a large bullet from a long shell containing a heavy powder charge—ideal for big game. Buffalo were so plentiful , so slow to move, and so oblivious to danger that an efficient hunter could kill between seventy-five and one hundred a day, an average hunter about fifty and even a poor one twenty-five. “ I have seen their bodies so thick after being skinned that they would look like logs where a hurricane had passed through a forest,” recalled W. S. Glenn, who hunted bison across the Plains in the 1870s. “If they were lying on a hillside, the rays of the sun would make it look like a hundred glass windows.”
    By 1872, hunters could expect to earn four dollars for each bull hide. A prolific shooter like Billy Dixon would hire two skinners to accompany him on hunts in order to keep up with the frenetic pace he set. Each was expected to prepare up to fifty skins a day. Dixon would pay up to twenty cents a hide to a good skinner.
    By the winter of 1872, according to Dixon’s memoir, some seventy-five thousand bison had been killed within a sixty-mile radius of Dodge City, the southern hub of organized buffalo hunting. “The noise of the guns of the hunters could be heard on all sides, rumbling and booming hour after hour, as if a heavy battle were being fought,” he recalled. Theoutskirts of town were rank with the sight and smell of rotting carcasses. And the herds began to vanish.
    Army colonel Richard Irving Dodge recalled that in May 1871 he had come across an endless chain of buffalo over a twenty-five-mile stretch along the Arkansas River. “ The whole country appeared one mass of buffalo , moving slowly to the northward,” he wrote.
    One year later, “ where there were myriads of buffalo the year before, there were now myriads of carcasses. The air was foul with sickening stench, and the vast plain, which only a short twelvemonth before teemed with animal life, was a dead, solitary, putrid desert.”
    The Arkansas River in North Texas and Oklahoma was the border south of which no hunter could go. “We