4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Very informative , would like more information, pictures, December 28, 2004
This review is from: The Buffalo Hunters (Paperback)
I got a copy of this book in an effort to learn more about the buffalo hunting era. This book makes frequent references to/ quotes of period works about the subject and does manage to give some interesting details that would be hard to find elsewhere in current literature.
I knew that the .45/70 caliber was at one point the most common rifle used, this book states that the U.S. Army issued free ammunition to the hunters as part of their Indian control/buffalo eradication program. While I don't doubt the author's statement about .50 caliber rifles being common, I've read that before, I do question the prices said to have been paid for them by the hunters- if they're right the local gun dealers made a huge markup from factory list prices.
The part I found most interesting was the history of how and when the hunting began, the reasons for the market and the prices given for the hides. There are various bits from several hunters about the hunting they did as well. I've read just a very little about the incredible number of buffalo killed, that is detailed in several places in the book, kind of shocking to modern sensiblities(and to some contemporaries as well, their efforts to stop/limit the hunt are described). I was not aware that Texas was the main killing ground, Montana was late in the game.
Numerous period illustrations of the hunt and quite a few old photographs too. Several hunter's pictures are shown (these were generally taken many years later), one of these photo's is "thought to be" Jim White- one of the best hunters of the Plains, Frank Sellers book "Sharps Firearms" p. 304 gives a different name with better attribution. The most historically valuable photographs were taken either by George Robertson in Texas in 1874 or L.A. Huffman in Montana in the early 1880's, these show actual hunts- too bad they printed so dark in the book it's hard to pick out detail.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The only good buffalo is a dead buffalo..., December 30, 2007
Robinson's book is a wonderful introduction to the sorry nineteenth-century tale of the near extinction of buffalo in the Great Plains and Texas Panhandle. The bulk of the destruction occurred in the 1870s and 1880s. Most of the buffalo were killed either for their pelts--this was especially the case with the northern herds--or, in the case of the southern herds, for their hides, which were made into tough industrial leather for New England factory conveyer belts. One estimate calculates that during these two decades, only one-thousandth of the slain buffaloes' meat was actually eaten, and that the wasted meat could've fed one million people.
Everyone knows that the buffalo were wantonly killed. But what may not be equally well-known is that the extermination of the buffalo was apparently a deliberate tactic on the part of the U.S. military, then headed by Phil Sheridan of Civil War fame, to exterminate the Indians. The thinking was that since the Plains Indians' economy was almost totally centered on the buffalo, the destruction of the buffalo would starve Indians, thereby either killing them or forcing them onto reservations. In fact, starting in the early 1870s, the Army supplied free powder and shot to civilian hunters.
According to Phil Sheridan (who, it might be recalled, first made a name for himself by waging Civil War destruction in the Shenandoah Valley), buffalo hunters "have done in the last two years and will do more in the next year [Sheridan wrote this in 1875], to settle the vexed Indian question, than the entire regular Army has done in the last thirty years. They are destroying the Indians' commissary; and it is a well-known fact that an army losing its base of supplies is placed at a great disadvantage...[F]or the sake of a lasting peace, let [the hunters] kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated" (pp. 102-103). In short, the destruction of the buffalo was, at least according to the military, a strategy of the same total war, this time waged against the Indians, that Sheridan, Sherman and Grant honed in the Civil War.
Robinson's book is a fascinating, although sober, read. Some of the photographs in the photo-essays interspersed between chapters didn't reproduce well, and the book could've profited from a map or two. But all in all, an admirable job.
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