Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • S P R I N G 2 0 2 2 50 • • • The roar of the guns fell silent on the prairie at last, replaced by the droning of fattened green bottle flies. In 1883, a group of bison hunters in Montana prepared for business as usual only to find that there were no longer any animals to kill, only bones and swarms of flies and an indescribable smell. Men who had single-mindedly honed their skills at the systematic elimination of the American bison found themselves with- out a job. Hunters, facing the failure of their harvest, became miners, cowboys, or outlaws. So many skinners simply left their knives out on the prairie, no longer needed, that a cattle drive led by Charles Goodnight was able to furnish his opera- tion with found blades. Within months, another cottage industry arose in its place. Some collected and sold the bones, snow-scattered across the continent in the millions, by the cartful. The bones were used, in turn, to make petroleum jelly, bone chi- na, fertilizer, glue, and as a component in sugar refining. The nation, already romantically nostal- gic over the loss of what they had so little valued, developed a faddish attachment to objects made of buffalo bones such as combs and buttons. Ironically, many man- ufacturers, finding bison bone too brittle for such uses, substituted other animals' bones and horns and called it buffalo. Many settlers joked that their first cash crop was collecting and selling all of the bison bones that littered their newly ac- quired land. One such homesteader, settling in Ne- braska, described seeing "buffalo bones... laying around on the ground as thick as cones under a big fir tree, and we had to pick them up, and pile them up" until he "was blamed sick of ever hearing the name buffalo." F. J. HAYNES, PHOTO COURTESY MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY L.A. HUFFMAN, PHOTO COURTESY MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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