Customer Reviews

The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Buffalo Hunters is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged from beginning to end, though it does tend to get bogged down with excessive minutiae in some parts, as if the author could have used a good editor to rearrange some of the material and maybe delete some of the extraneous detail. Mari Sandoz was an authority on the white settlement of the Great Plains. As miners, farmers and other frontier types would visit her father, young Mari would listen to their stories of the olden days. Much of the material in this book is no doubt taken from those stories. In some cases they were actual eyewitness accounts, in others a story was told as passed on from another in the ancient tradition of oral history. The oral stories are of course supplemented and supported by academic research, making this book a valuable primary source of information about the Old West.

Some of these tales are unforgettable: like the washtub man, an unfortunate greenhorn who got caught in a ferocious blizzard. His rescuers found him unconscious. They took him to a doctor who promptly amputated both arms and both legs due to extreme frostbite. And the story of how Wild Bill Hickok was almost killed by a band of renegade Indians until an Indian chief came to his rescue at the last minute, ordering the would-be killers to let him go. Some years later Hickok murdered this chief for no apparent reason when the chief rode into Hickok's camp one morning for coffee.

Sandoz describes the slaughter of the buffalo in vivid detail to the point that it's almost painful to continue reading. The hunters would set fifty caliber rifles on bipods and start killing by the dozens until the barrels almost melted down. It is estimated that over fifty million buffalo roamed the Great Plains before the Civil War. By 1884 there were only a few hundred left. Just like the beaver in the early nineteenth century, the buffalo were hunted practically to extinction solely for their hides, which made huge profits for the hunters and railroads. Buffalo hides were the gold of the Great Plains. There was also a market for buffalo bones that were shipped back east to make fertilizer. The life and culture of the Plains Indians depended almost totally on the buffalo. The U.S. Army's ultimate conquest of the Plains Indians was, to a great degree, the result of the loss of the Indians' main food supply. The Indians were as much starved into submission as beaten into it by force of arms.

The life of Mari Sandoz is an interesting story in itself. Born in western Nebraska in 1896 to Swiss immigrant parents, she suffered through a harsh and cruel childhood receiving only an eighth-grade education by age seventeen, and speaking only German until adolescence. She married at eighteen and divorced five years later, the marriage apparently a loveless one. She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where she worked at low-paying jobs while attending classes at the University of Nebraska. She could never officially enroll at the university because she never completed high school, so she was never able to earn a college degree. Her one love was reading and writing, and it was in the early Lincoln years that she taught herself the skills and technique of writing. By the time of her death from cancer in 1966 she had written twenty books and many short stories.

For every Babe Ruth there are hundreds who toil away in the minors never making it to the big leagues. Likewise for writers, for every Hemingway or Steinbeck there are many who grind out book after book but never achieve great notoriety. They are regarded as local or regional writers. Mari Sandoz devoted her entire life to the art of writing about the American West in a truthful and honest way, using the language and syntax of one who grew up in the West. She was ahead of her time; she told the history of the West from both a white and Indian perspective, without any white bias, before it became fashionably chic to do so.

This is quite simply one of the very best history books that I have ever read. It is detailed without being wordy, exceptionally well written, and paints a vivid picture of what is was like to make a living following the great herds. If you want to read one book about the buffalo hunters, this is it.

I really enjoyed the book . Sandoz has taken a lot of scattered tales and woven them into a captivating tale, without only giving one side of the story. She tells all of the reasons that the buffalo slaughter occured and the ripple effects that happened from there. I am going to be looking up more of her many books thank you Mari

I found pretty much everything a person could want about the history of Buffalo hunting in America in this book- except the author information quoted by others. I'm sure they're right about Mrs. Sandoz but I didn't find anything about her.
Her style was to write sort of as an anonymous eyewitness of those past events that occurred decades before her birth.
Some of it I've read before in other books (the Adobe Walls Indian battle is described here in great detail, just a little differently than other versions)but most of her sources listed in the bibliography you'll have a hard time finding (1890's to about 1951). Facts, figures, it's pretty much all here but very slow going.

I FINISHED THIS BOOK---THAT IS SAYING A LOT.
THIS BOOK WAS VERY, VERY LONG AND SLOW READING.
THERE IS A LOT OF INFORMATION ((TOO MUCH!!)) HERE.
I WOULLD HAVE PREFERED IT IF THE AUTHOR LEFT OFF
THE ""HUNTERS"" PARTS AND ONLY TALKED ABOUT THE BUFFALO.

At the time of Lewis and Clark population estimates for buffalo in North America were in excess of 50 million. At the end of the Civil War, estimates were 20 million. By the 1890s, the buffalo was all but extinct.

This is the story of the final nail in this species' coffin: The Buffalo Hunters. Sandoz weaves an interesting and interrelated story of the 4 separate herds that roamed the Plains and the different, interested parties that live off them: The Indians, the Army, the railroads and the hide men. Almost the sole source of food for the Plains Indians, elimination of the herds was viewed by the Army as a very good thing. The quicker the buffalo were eliminated, the quicker the Indian problem would be subdued. For the Indians, not only were they a source of food, they were a source of exchange as the hides could be bartered for guns, traps ammunition and supplies. To the railroad they were a source of sportsmen's dollars and food for road crews. Legends like Wild Bill Hicock and Buffalo Bill Cody killed thousands to feed railroad workers.

But by far, the most devastation was wrought in the shortest period of time by the hide men. In 1871-72, three fourths of Kansas' industry was in hides. It paid for the railroad, drove the Indians back, helped bring rapid settlement and injected money into local economies. Buffalo leather supplied most European Armies. Even after they were slaughtered to the point of extinction, the billions of bones scattered across the prairie had enough value to spark another industry. The bones were collected, transported east and ground up for fertilizer.

This is a remarkably interesting story covering many facets of the American West. It at once drives home the magnitude of this lost resource and the necessity of their passing. After their demise, prairie grasses became profuse, just in time for cattle and the cowboy.

The book was shipped on time and the condition as described. I would gladly use this seller again in the future.