Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West by Hampton Sides Page A
Authors: Hampton Sides
Tags: United States, General, History, Biography & Autobiography, Military, Native American, 19th century, Indians of North America, Adventurers & Explorers, Frontier and Pioneer Life, Wars, West (U.S.), West (U.S.) - History; Military - 19th Century, Indians of North America - Wars, Indians of North America - History - 19th Century, Frontier and Pioneer Life - West (U.S.), West (U.S.) - History - 19th Century, Navajo Indians - History - 19th Century, United States - Territorial Expansion, Carson; Kit
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the Vatican. They sang patriotic songs—“Yankee Doodle” was a favorite—drowning out the grunts of the animals.
Ravens followed the long columns as seagulls would follow a ship, and often they would light on the taut canvas sheets covering the wagons, cawing intently for food. Coyotes and wolves followed the procession, too, packs of them loping along in the grass just beyond rifle range, patiently waiting for a horse to collapse.
The Army of the West was accompanied by its own internal army of attendants and tradesmen contracted to hold the ungainly procession together—wheelwrights, sutlers, laundresses, cooks, stockmen, farriers, teamsters, coopers, foragers, muleteers, hostlers, butchers, liverymen—many of them old hands on the Santa Fe Trail. In anticipation of a creek crossing, a detachment of engineers would bound ahead to study the sandy bottoms and quagmires for the most promising place to ford, bringing shovels and hoes to make small improvements along the banks to ease the passage of the heavy wagons. If the axles were made of a wood too green, they would all too often snap under the burden.
On July 8, Private Robinson’s column approached a famous landmark of the Santa Fe Trail, a prominent outcropping known as Pawnee Rock. This promontory was scrawled and chiseled with the names of countless travelers of the Santa Fe trade from decades past. Some of the more elaborate graffiti had been painted on the rock with an ointment of animal fat and black tar. Robinson climbed to the top of the rock, presumably to etch his own name, when he turned west to glimpse, as he put it, “one of the grandest sights ever beheld.”
Stretching before him, in the golden light of the afternoon, was a vast herd of buffalo, easily a quarter million strong. “Every acre was covered,” Robinson wrote, “until, in the dim distance, the prairie became one black mass from which there was no opening.”
As many as 50 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains at this time, a carnival of meat on the hoof migrating north and south with the seasons, wandering west and east with the presence or absence of water, imprinting the plains with intricate capillaries of trails. Robinson joined a party of men and approached the buffalo. They were pitifully easy to shoot—until the beasts actually saw or smelled the source of danger, they would go on stupidly cropping the grass as members of their herd dropped, one by one, all around them. Robinson’s party killed forty of them, and the carcasses were immediately butchered and prepared for dinner.
Susan Magoffin, a sprightly eighteen-year-old from Kentucky, was traveling in the midst of the Army of the West with her new husband, a veteran Santa Fe trader. In a diary that has become a classic of Western literature, Magoffin captured the spectacle of the buffalo hunts. “The men have been out since sun rise,” she wrote, “and mules loaded with the spoils of their several victories, are constantly returning to camp. It is a rich sight indeed to look at the fine fat meat stretched out on ropes to dry for our sustenance. Such soup we have made of the hump ribs. I never ate its equal in the best hotels of N.Y. and Philadelphia. And the sweetest butter and most delicate oil I ever tasted is not surpassed by the marrow taken from the thigh bones. If one cannot live and grow fat here, he must be a strange creature.”
Robinson’s party made camp beneath jumbled cottonwoods along the banks of a small brown river rippling with carp. They circled their wagons and cinched them wheel to wheel with hemp ropes as a defense against Pawnee attack, but also to form natural corrals in which they could unharness their stock. The river bottom was tangled with brown-black hair left by bison that, during the summer shedding season, liked to rub against the roughly ridged trunks of the cottonwoods.
With dusk approaching, the cooks made fires with “prairie fuel”—the dried ordure of buffalo. Robinson
Ravens followed the long columns as seagulls would follow a ship, and often they would light on the taut canvas sheets covering the wagons, cawing intently for food. Coyotes and wolves followed the procession, too, packs of them loping along in the grass just beyond rifle range, patiently waiting for a horse to collapse.
The Army of the West was accompanied by its own internal army of attendants and tradesmen contracted to hold the ungainly procession together—wheelwrights, sutlers, laundresses, cooks, stockmen, farriers, teamsters, coopers, foragers, muleteers, hostlers, butchers, liverymen—many of them old hands on the Santa Fe Trail. In anticipation of a creek crossing, a detachment of engineers would bound ahead to study the sandy bottoms and quagmires for the most promising place to ford, bringing shovels and hoes to make small improvements along the banks to ease the passage of the heavy wagons. If the axles were made of a wood too green, they would all too often snap under the burden.
On July 8, Private Robinson’s column approached a famous landmark of the Santa Fe Trail, a prominent outcropping known as Pawnee Rock. This promontory was scrawled and chiseled with the names of countless travelers of the Santa Fe trade from decades past. Some of the more elaborate graffiti had been painted on the rock with an ointment of animal fat and black tar. Robinson climbed to the top of the rock, presumably to etch his own name, when he turned west to glimpse, as he put it, “one of the grandest sights ever beheld.”
Stretching before him, in the golden light of the afternoon, was a vast herd of buffalo, easily a quarter million strong. “Every acre was covered,” Robinson wrote, “until, in the dim distance, the prairie became one black mass from which there was no opening.”
As many as 50 million buffalo roamed the Great Plains at this time, a carnival of meat on the hoof migrating north and south with the seasons, wandering west and east with the presence or absence of water, imprinting the plains with intricate capillaries of trails. Robinson joined a party of men and approached the buffalo. They were pitifully easy to shoot—until the beasts actually saw or smelled the source of danger, they would go on stupidly cropping the grass as members of their herd dropped, one by one, all around them. Robinson’s party killed forty of them, and the carcasses were immediately butchered and prepared for dinner.
Susan Magoffin, a sprightly eighteen-year-old from Kentucky, was traveling in the midst of the Army of the West with her new husband, a veteran Santa Fe trader. In a diary that has become a classic of Western literature, Magoffin captured the spectacle of the buffalo hunts. “The men have been out since sun rise,” she wrote, “and mules loaded with the spoils of their several victories, are constantly returning to camp. It is a rich sight indeed to look at the fine fat meat stretched out on ropes to dry for our sustenance. Such soup we have made of the hump ribs. I never ate its equal in the best hotels of N.Y. and Philadelphia. And the sweetest butter and most delicate oil I ever tasted is not surpassed by the marrow taken from the thigh bones. If one cannot live and grow fat here, he must be a strange creature.”
Robinson’s party made camp beneath jumbled cottonwoods along the banks of a small brown river rippling with carp. They circled their wagons and cinched them wheel to wheel with hemp ropes as a defense against Pawnee attack, but also to form natural corrals in which they could unharness their stock. The river bottom was tangled with brown-black hair left by bison that, during the summer shedding season, liked to rub against the roughly ridged trunks of the cottonwoods.
With dusk approaching, the cooks made fires with “prairie fuel”—the dried ordure of buffalo. Robinson
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