Distinctly Montana Magazine

w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m 49 It made much more sense for a hunter to shoot the animals' legs and cripple them—that way, the skinners would find the creature still holding on to life the next morning and remove the skin while it was warm and pliable. There was a market for their tongues in the trendy restau- rants of the East, selling for $8 - $9 for a dozen. And "buffalo hump" was also a Christmas tradition for many in the West— an 1846 holiday feast at Fort Edmonton served "boiled buf- falo hump," "boiled buffalo calf," and "whitefish browned in buffalo marrow." But the preservation of the meat, beyond what could be "beefed," loaded into trains and shipped to eastern cities or to fill the larders of railroad camps, was not a high priority. There were also sometimes exceptions to the hunter's edict not to kill more than his team could skin. For instance, sup- pose the hunter was on a hot streak, aiming and firing with mechanical precision, bringing down animal after animal. He might feel that he was experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime brush with greatness—an opportunity to become a legend on the frontier. Everyone knew the story of Tom Nickson, after all, how he had managed to kill 120 bison in just 40 minutes. In just five weeks, he killed 3,200. Or, if the focus were less on individ- ual glory and more on the value of teamwork, a great deal of killing could be done in a very short time. Seth Hathaway, a hunter who plied his trade in Montana, said that a team of fifteen or twenty men, all shooting as quickly as they could draw a bead, pull a trigger and reload, could kill 50 or 60 animals in two or three min- utes. Careers were made, and fortunes staked for these sorts of accomplishments. Buffalo Bill Cody claimed to have personally killed 20,000 during his ten years of hunting, before parlaying that fame into his Wild West traveling show. So the hunter who thought he had caught a hot streak might keep reloading and firing, switching rifles when one overheated, seeing how long he could extend his spree—to hell with the meat and skins, this could be a story they'd tell as far away as Abilene. But after a few minutes of sustained shooting, the rifle would start to get hot, and remnants of powder crusted the barrel. Even the buffalo hunters that had two guns and switched them out might, after a particularly sustained volley of shooting, end up with two guns that were both too hot to fire. Wetting a swab and running it down the barrel might cool it and clean it well enough, but water, far more than bison or ammunition, was to be carefully conserved. Unless you had a source of water nearby, the truly pragmatic bison hunter would cool his barrels with whatever he had at hand—urine would do just fine. L.a. huffman, Photo Courtesy montana historical society CHARLES SPENCER FRANCIS, PHOTO COURTESY MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY CONTINUED

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