A Hunter's Confession. David Carpenter O.
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religion, a conservation ethic might have come into play. Like all the emerging hunting peoples of the world, the people of the northwestern plains killed as many buffalo as they needed to feed their hungry. Unlike the great ice age mammals that were hunted to extinction, however, the great herds of buffalo seemed to go on and on into eternity—as though the animals and their hunters had struck some sort of balance. At their peak, the bison were said to number fifty to sixty million animals.
On the Great Plains, for perhaps ten millennia, the people hunted buffalo on foot with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. They would frequently hunt in large groups on the prairie above river valleys, first alarming the great bison then driving them over the edges of steep inclines known as buffalo jumps. At the bottom of these jumps, the foot soldiers, men and women, waited to kill and butcher the crippled animals. Where there were no river valleys or steep coulees, the hunters built buffalo pounds in dips and declivities in the prairie. Above these walled-in corrals made of stone, the men and women would pile rocks on both sides of the run to guide the bison toward the pound, which the animals could not see. The hunters then drove the animals into a wild stampede, and some of them would run into the pound and be slaughtered by waiting hunters with bows and arrows. A pound could contain two or three dozen animals. The weapons were like miniature longbows, some of them less than three feet long, tillered from chokecherry trees, green ash, maple, and even the trunks of saskatoon berry bushes.
This kind of hunting was dangerous, especially driving the bison, which was done on foot. The drives suddenly became more efficient when horses were introduced from the south, about a century after Columbus made first contact. Horses did not reach the northwestern plains in any numbers, however, until around the end of the seventeenth century. By a process of tribal rivalries and trading by Aboriginal groups, the horses made their way north to the Canadian prairie.
It was primarily the Shoshones, kin to the Comanche, who brought the horses north as part of their conquest of the Great Plains. For a long time, the Shoshones, and their greatest allies the Crows, were the dominant tribe on the central and northern prairie. Their horses were first deployed in the buffalo hunt, but by the early eighteenth century, they were enlisted in battle. The Shoshones, with their mounted warriors, presented such a terrifying spectacle that they sent the Cree and Blackfoot north in droves.
The Cree and Blackfoot didn’t take long to acquire horses and learn to ride them. They took even less time to trade their goods for muskets, metal tools, and other weapons with the French and English traders. In a decade or so, the Shoshones were sent packing, and the buffalo hunt, the high-tech version of it, spread over the northwestern plains.
By about 1730, the hunters on the Great Plains were able to use horses to herd buffalo to the edge of the jumps instead of doing all of this work on foot. They had learned as well to work with the dogs they had domesticated to help with the hauling. Now they could chase the buffalo and shoot them with muskets or, if not exclusively with muskets, with steel arrow and lance points. The bow-and-arrow hunters still had a big advantage over the musket hunters, because a man with a musket had only one chance to kill a buffalo. By the time he had reloaded, the entire herd would have stampeded away from him. Arrows were silent and accurate, and a good hunter could loose many arrows in a short period of time.
The buffalo were at last driven from the land on the Canadian prairie around 1890. Again, it is difficult to find any evidence of efforts to conserve the bison herds. Native hunters on the grasslands discovered that they could trade for guns, steel arrow points, and tobacco with pemmican. This dried-meat-and-berry mixture was in high demand by the voyageurs, who found it very nourishing. It was usually made from buffalo meat. Eventually the bison hunters were able to trade for repeating rifles, rather than the single-shot muskets of the early eighteenth century. Thus, a party of hunters with breech-loading repeating rifles could kill more bison by shooting them from a greater distance than a party of bow-and-arrow hunters could hope to kill.
Here is a case in which prehistory collided with recorded history in the tragic transformation of a great Aboriginal culture. The moment that hunting buffalo turned from subsistence to commerce, Native hunters began to slaughter bison at a hitherto unheard-of rate and did so more easily because of improved weaponry.
The great Métis hunters of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries were probably even more efficient in their slaughter of the bison than their grasslands Aboriginal trading partners. They entered the pemmican and buffalo hide business in a big way, and they were able to carry away their hides and meat on Red River carts and sell them en masse to the fur traders. These big-wheeled carts could convey considerably more buffalo hides than any travois.
The incoming settlers from Red River, Manitoba, to Fort McLeod, Alberta, were just as culpable in the destruction of the ten-thousand-year-old buffalo hunt. They wanted farmland and ranchland, not roaming herds of buffalo. And if the buffalo sustained the nomadic bands of Aboriginals across the northern prairie, then a good buffalo was a dead buffalo. Indeed, defeating the Indians by exterminating the buffalo was U.S. domestic policy. Sport hunters on both sides of the Medicine Line blasted away at bison from flat cars, leaving their victims to rot in the sun.
And last, but certainly not least, were the traders from the south. Primarily white buffalo hunters traded in buffalo hides to supply the leather industry and to meet the demand for buffalo robes throughout the United States. They slaughtered buffalo, abandoned the meat, and floated their hides with great efficiency on flat boats and small barges down the Mississippi River. The hides were used, among other things, to make belts to run factories in the East, and one of the uses for the bones was to manufacture bone china.
If prehistoric bison hunting with bow and arrow was skillful, organized, and life-sustaining, commercial bison hunting and agriculture were devastating. Nomadic Indians could not coexist with European agriculture. Without the political will from white settlers and sportsmen to save the bison, the animals were driven to near-extinction. The last of the great herds died with the meat still on their ribs, and the stink from their unharvested carcasses was unforgettable.
Wildlife conservation? Such a civilized and curiously modern expression. The dream of bleeding-heart liberals and animal lovers like me. But it was out of the question then. As we shall see, the first great strides toward wildlife conservation came from unexpected sources.
Some remaining fringes of hunter-gathering tribes found their last chance in the Far North, among the great caribou hunters from Alaska and the Yukon to Labrador and northern Quebec, where white civilization was less intrusive. Small pockets of Aboriginal hunters can still be found within a few hours’ drive from where I write these lines in northern Saskatchewan. But the horses are gone and the sled dog teams are fading fast, and the children of our last great hunters are pursuing their animals throughout the long winters on snowmobiles.
HUNTING FOR FUN is a relatively recent idea in our history as a species. First, we had to have leisure societies, buttressed by agriculture and trading, wherein the powerful few learned to celebrate hunting as a game. The earliest evidence of sport hunting comes from Thebes, in Egypt, during the mid-fourteenth century bc. Perhaps for the first time in recorded history, kings and noblemen hunted bulls, lions, and other large animals from chariots drawn by small horses. They brought along their retinues, bowmen and barmen with beating staves, who wounded and exhausted the prey so that the man in the chariot could finish it off.
I suppose the lady I spoke with at the hunting lodge in Scotland several decades ago might be tempted to imagine her ancestors on the chariot while mine were wielding a bow and arrow in advance of the chariot or beating the bush to put up something noble, like a lion or a stag. But in her eyes, on that evening in 1970, I was something of an anomaly. In her England, the men who skulked through the bushes like Yosemite Sam were called poachers. I don’t want to give the impression that I was therefore more closely aligned to the great hunters of the Mesolithic era than she. After all, in my native Canada, I was never hunting primarily to feed my family; I hunted for the adventure of it.
This is the kind of hunting we tend to read about. In my forays into the hunting section of the public library here in Saskatoon, I have discovered three rows of books (about ten feet of solid pages). There are books on target shooting with rifles, shooting varmints, shooting deer (many of these), and on shotgunning for quail, ducks,