Bill LaCroix: Buffalo Hunters Revisited

“Restarting the Economy” in the Midst of a Pandemic

Note: I wrote this piece three years ago after returning from the action against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock, North Dakota. President trump had just been installed by millions of Americans who believed in a mean, stupid God who only existed within arm’s reach of a collection plate. Imagine that. Climate Change, evolution and the roundness of the Earth had been decisively demoted (in their minds, at least) to the Foxnewslandia killing grounds of “controversy”. Nothing to look at here, folks, just partisan bickering. Let’s get on with the business of America, which, as Calvin Coolidge famously put it, is business.

Now we have another disaster eating us alive—Covid 19—and rich folks want the rest of us to risk death in exchange for pennies on the dollar of their bottom lines…again, an old, old story. Add to that those perennial idiots who would threaten a virus(!?!) with flags and guns and you have an event that makes the “tea party” spectacle after the election of the first non-white president pale on that old-time scale of “Making the Rich Man Richer”. Surrounding a camp of starving people including women and children and opening up on them with machine guns (the Wounded Knee Massacre) is another such event.

Whenever such times as these descend upon us (like all wars, for instance) I wonder why so many people keep falling for the Rich Man’s bullshit, but I really know the answer. My Okie cousin, the celebrated California poet Wilma E. McDaniel, gave it to someone who had the temerity to ask why her family hit Route 66 to face a hostile reception in California for sure and an uncertain future at best.

“Starvation!” Wilma said, wide-eyed but with her low and measured poet’s voice that put all the power and terror of the thing into that one-word poem, where all the power and terror of such things belong.

We forget our roots, over and over again, and…Alas! We’re getting played again. The corporatists (a euphemism for “unconscionable rich bastards”) wanted—and got--trillions of dollars in bailout money from a federal government they claimed had no money at all for essential human rights like access to medical services, and now they want us to risk our lives (without adequate access to medical services, of course) in going back to work for them so they can “cash in” on their newly-enhanced, socialized stock options. In the spirit of such cruel doings, our impeached-but-still-president unleashed the Keystone XL pipeline project on Montana a couple weeks ago, allowing it to illegally-spill over the Canadian border during this time of pandemic that he and his sycophants are in large part responsible for the severity of. Cruel people, of course, are capable of anything, including shoving virus-incubating man camps into the midst of reservations short on medical services like those in Montana near where the pipeline crews must live, and so it has come to pass. The work of building a transportation system for the dirtiest fuel on Earth from the tar sands of Canada to storage facilities in Illinois, for the baseline purpose of lining the deep pockets of his rich benefactors (like Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos and Sheldon Adelson just for instance) has been declared an “essential activity” in this time of death and now the Rich Man is daring us with prison time, coronavirus or both if we so much as try and protest against him doing it. Nice.

Once more I wonder why anyone would swallow that designer fly at the end of the Rich Man’s custom-made graphite rod and, once more, I remember Wilma. This latest, all-too-familiar combination of catastrophe and feckless leadership is nothing if not another in a long line of pure and perfect examples that put the exclamation point on Wilma’s one-word poem. Why don’t we tell the bastards padding their pockets at our peril to go to hell on no uncertain terms? Why does the Impeached One still get million-dollar-an-hour air time to blather on? Well, why did Sitting Bull return to the U.S. after escaping to Canada? Because the buffalo upon which his people’s existence depended had been wiped out, in large part by a U.S. Government who gave away the farm to corporate tyrants like Jay Gould to build railroad lines that would slice the great herds to pieces and then annihilate them piece by piece, creating a land that became much sadder than Sitting Bull’s people could bear anymore. Ecological disaster for the benefit of the Rich Man at the expense of everyone else. Starvation, in a word. Simple, as Wilma pointed out.

In America, this disdain for democracy by the rich has never been more blatant in most of our lifetimes. Democracy for them has always been an inconvenient word, never meant to be taken seriously by those who would have us eat bootstraps (whatever those are) instead of commodity-cheese. Wilma’s Depression years are as far back as anyone’s living memory can reach today, but there are other bones in the Earth that we should examine for perspective. Dig a little deeper and it's the same ol' same ol', over and over again. That other time, for instance, when things fell apart for working people after the Civil War and Robber Barons like Gould felt free to lift the grinning mask away from their death-skull stare, when great damage was done to our environment and political worldview that plagues us still. Perspective was seen as a luxury then, too, when the biggest thing on most peoples’ minds was Wilma’s poem.

So the Rich Man wants us to die for him again, just like at Standing Rock, just like all the other times, and maybe we’ll accommodate him again. Maybe not, but who knows. It’s been a long three years since I posted the below for Standing Rock, and the crisis of people at the end of their rope that I saw and wrote about then has only lingered and strengthened, and, as if we needed one more scintilla of proof, it’s now abundantly-clear to everyone who’s not still drinking that warm, rancid Foxnewslandia Kool-Aid (a euphemism for “vomit”) that the bastards really do want to dance on most of our graves, provided, of course, that enough of us survive for them to be the boss of. Nice.

Hope’s been getting a bad rap these days. I guess people need a fall-back position when words fail them, but I still believe in it, at least a certain kind, maybe the best kind that gives the bit of pause that lets you find the thread of sense this time around. Yes, our dip-shot government and feckless functionaries have failed us once again. But what now? Here’s my little effort at that, another try at teasing out that frazzled thread I keep seeing hints of, with a few updated edits.

Buffalo skulls being sold for fertilizer, ca 1870

Jay Gould’s daughter said before she died

Daddy fix the “blinds” so the bums can’t ride

If ride they must make ‘em ride the “rod”

Make ‘em put their trust in the hands of God

In the hands of God

Make ‘em put their trust in the hands of God.

"These men," General Phil Sheridan said of the unemployed easterners flooding the western plains to hunt buffalo during the Panic of 1873, some of whom were forced by the cruel humans of their day to risk death or mangling by clutching to the roaring axels underneath Jay Gould’s locked and booming baggage cars, "have done more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years."

“Fightin’ Phil” was defending the buffalo hunters against a proposed law (in Texas of all places!) that would have protected the last of the once-vast southern herd from its final stages of annihilation. Even then, there was still a bit of common sense (in Texas of all places!). But the law didn’t pass, and “these men” were free to gamble their own hides on riding out starvation times by scattering rotting carcasses from Dodge City to Griffin. The gamble was that they might manage to live long enough to get enough dried buffalo hides, known as "flint" hides, to the nearest railhead, which a lot of them didn't. The Panic, also known as “The Long Depression”, was the gift of the over speculating robber barons, Jay Gould in particular, who rose from the industrial-strength gore of the Civil War like ghouls to drive desperate greenhorns out to try their luck with the Blue northers and pissed-off tribesmen of the plains, dangers these newcomers lacked the experience to take the full measure of or even understand, and, as with every other economic depression where working folks were left to root, hog or die on their own for the sake of a rich man’s bottom line, it was mostly just luck that got enough of them through to finish the job. The Long Depression lasted for twenty years, long enough to ossify a few fortunes at the expense of…well, you decide.

“They (the buffalo hunters) are destroying the Indians' commissary,” Sheridan declared, and rightly so. “Send them powder and lead if you will, but for the sake of a lasting peace let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy who follows the hunter as the second forerunner of an advanced civilization."

Time. It's a funny thing, isn’t it? Especially during the starvation times we’re surely heading into now with Covid-19. Sheridan’s words are almost 150 years old, but they were only 80-something years old when I was born (you do the math, please). So, since Sheridan's words aren't a whole lot older than I am and since I don't feel old at all (!), they still seem relevant, to me at least. At any rate, I couldn't help recalling Fightin' Phil's words when I drove through Baker, Montana last week on my way back to Standing Rock and was met on the outskirts of town with this sight…

It’s a big pile of scrap metal and it looked to all the world--or at least to all of my world--like that iconic old picture of buffalo skulls stacked up on the windy plains awaiting shipment to somewhere else. I did a quick mental calculation, standing a cowboy up on top of the scrap pile in my mind's eye, and I figured they were exactly the same height, give or take a few centimeters. Adding to the serendipity of their size, appearance and location, the pile of buffalo bones and the pile of scrap metal were both the result of painstaking gatherings by settlers who were trying to squeeze a few bucks out of the economic failure immediately preceding their scrap-collecting (buffalo hunting in the first case, fracking in the second) on these very plains. Talk about photogenic metaphors.

Baker is a typical windswept Eastern Montana town that is so close to the North Dakota border that it tilts that way. In fact it sits on the very western edge of the Bakkan fracking fields. The dregs of those fields now run through the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) that was illegally built through the Lakota Peoples’ homelands, and runs a little north of Baker. Ironically, Baker is also slated to be bull’s-eyed by the equally-illegal Keystone XL Pipeline that will, if completed, run dirty oil from the tar sands of Alberta to the same tank farms and dispersal facilities in Illinois that the Bakkan muck will end up in.

Most importantly, though, Baker sits along Sandstone Creek, which flows into O'Fallon Creek, which in turn flows into the Yellowstone River just below the mouth of Powder River. This puts Baker smack in the middle of the Lakota peoples' beloved Powder River hunting grounds, the grounds they fought so hard and so often to save. The People had been coming here to hunt the buffalo since the most ancient times, and in fact it was only 100 miles further down the road along Highway 12, which also skewers Baker like a pipeline, on the eastern fringe of the Bakkan (between Hettinger, North Dakota and Lemmon, South Dakota) that I came across the motherlode of western metaphors; Hiddenwood Cliff, the last stand of the North American Bison.

Hiddenwood Cliff, North Dakota

It’s a hotspot, Baker is, of western history, even as the rusty metaphor it is now.

As you might be able to tell, I read a lot of western history, particularly about the collision between the original caretakers of the Land and my people, the Pilgrims, which I certainly am one of, which means that, combined with my being a lifelong "environmentalist" I am the definition of "conflicted". My great-grandfather, for instance, was a sergeant in the 9th Kansas Volunteer Calvary stationed at Fort Halleck, Wyoming, where he participated in some of the first military actions against the People, along the Platte and the Overland Trail. What he was doing in Kansas in 1862 in order to join that volunteer Calvary I do not know yet. But, due to the fact that my family tends to breed late, I grew up knowing his son, my grandpa, who had a wealth of western life experiences of his own. My mother, for her part, was the unofficial family historian, and so she passed down to me an oral history from a time most children of pilgrims have forgotten, and one of them is that my grandpa resembled his father in looks, temperament and occupation (farmer).

So I read a lot of western history, trying to figure out what the hell a piece of me was doing here in 1862-63 fighting the People off of their intact ecosystems so that gold could be dug out of their mountains and railroads wrapped around their plains, and now these pipelines! It's not a guilty conscience, really, although I probably deserve one. I just want to get it right.

Most of the history I read, as it happens is also from a pilgrims' point of view, so it's spotty on objectivity at best, but it’s also good for filling one’s head with facts worth pondering. Like about the settlers, who came in after the buffalo hunters and collected the bones left behind to sell for fertilizer back east. They’d stack the bones in great proprietary heaps until they could haul them off to the nearest train terminal to complete the very last cash transactions in wild buffalo parts that the world may see again. They'd get from $2 to $10 a ton (yes, that's a ton) not enough to get rich on like a few of the buffalo hunters who managed to survive did (they’d get $2 to $5 a hide), but enough to pay for groceries when your crops failed yet again in this land that was meant to grow buffalo, not cash. These kinds of facts create a rich back story for an environmentalist with a western family history like mine because, if you’re the type of environmentalist to give such facts their own head, they bend you right back to the Land, where the People have always been, and where every good environmentalist always wanted to be in the first place, before these facts of pilgrims were written down and began darting around in other peoples’ heads. Serendipity or Faith, there are good arguments for calling it either. But whatever handle you want to swing this long bend back to the Land on, it's not so much an arc as it is a jagged lighting strike, since the facts you need to wade through are often disturbing and sometimes contradictory.

After the Civil War, General Grant simultaneously downsized the army and appointed his favorite war hero, Phil Sheridan, to head the vast Department of the Missouri, which included the Great Plains and all the "Indian wars" occurring within its bounds. Since his Department was vast and his resources few, Sheridan settled on a version of guerrilla warfare known as “terrorism” to fulfill his mission. He attacked the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa and the Sioux in their winter camps, destroying their supplies and killing them indiscriminately when they resisted, and also when they didn't. George Armstrong Custer, another Civil War hero, perpetrated his infamous Battle of the Washita, an unprovoked massacre against the Cheyenne, during Sheridan’s campaign.

And there were others. The Sappa Creek Massacre in particular, which occurred in Kansas in 1875, mimicked the Sheridan model for getting as much “bang” out of your limited war bucks as you could by terrorizing the helpless and using free labor to boot. It was perpetrated on another peaceful Cheyenne village, largely by a volunteer crew of buffalo hunters under the nominal guidance of Lt. Austin Henly of the Sixth Calvary. Women and small children were shot and burned in their lodges and then thrown onto bonfires that the buffalo hunters had made of the village’s possessions. Imagine that, parents, and now imagine Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, the buffalo hunter who led Custer to the Black Hills in 1874 and then died with him at Little Big Horn in ‘76. Imagine Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill Hickok, two other buffalo hunters who have been held up to us as folk heroes through the years by truncated high school history books displaying iconic photos, like mountains of buffalo skulls for instance. It is a funny thing, time is.

So, if you ever make it to the road sign on Highway 12 that tells you you're at Hiddenwood Cliffs, try squinting your eyes, like I did. You might be able to conjure up buffalo roaming free again, but of course what you're really seeing is cows. After Sappa Creek, the Cheyenne were rightly terrified of buffalo hunters, not so much because they were killing off the buffalo, but by their witnessing of what they were capable of doing, and then getting away with. It was bound to leave a certain aftertaste.

The extermination of the buffalo was a military tactic, of course, similar to spraying Agent Orange on the jungles of Vietnam to defoliate them so the natives could be more easily killed. After the buffalo were gone, the tribes had no more choices. They were forced, ignominiously, at gunpoint, to live within the bounds of their designated reservations, which were really concentration camps where the People, especially their children and old ones, were at the mercy of corrupt entrepreneurs known as "agents" who literally stole the food and clothing out from under them while they fell prey to the various plagues and viruses they had no immunity for, nor medical facilities to treat them, and they died like flies.

It was just then, dear reader, that the People became sitting ducks for another novel military tactic. The army would surround the camps of the now-exhausted, helpless People on some trumped-up charge or other, wait a few days, a few weeks, and then the troops would descend upon them and massacre them. Wounded Knee is one example. There were others.

With that in mind, take a look at the picture below.

Photo courtesy of: Joe Plouff of Camps Arising (send donationshere)

It’s what you see every night at the Standing Rock. Dozens of high-powered spotlights surrounding the camps for miles, aimed in the camps’ direction, waiting. And in the daytime you see this:

Modern Buffalo Hunters

For everyone reading this who's still not sure what fascism looks like, I've posted this photo for the fourth time, because I think it’s worth repeating. The hill on which these DAPL agents are standing is Last Child Camp, where tipis were being erected to avoid the high water that everyone agrees will come. Over sixty peaceful protesters were arrested off of this hill, many (if not most) were hauled away in unheated vehicles to places as far away as Fargo, ND where, after being arraigned on trumped-up charges, they were released, some in the middle of the night, some in their underwear, in sub-freezing weather.

What stopped this modern, partially-privatized, militarized police force from shooting into the village with live ammunition, like they did at Wounded Knee? In the case of Standing Rock, public scrutiny was the only thing in its way. Back in 1890, such scrutiny only came after a massacre was perpetrated. But they’re still locked and loaded, and there are not a few among them who believe that's reason enough to finish the job, which, remember, is partially-privatized (read: less accountable to public scrutiny).

Which begs the question: What's to stop these same forces unleashed from shooting you for peacefully disagreeing with some other trumpian policy like the illegal building of the Keystone XL pipeline now underway as per trump’s declaration that it’s a “critical service” in this time of pandemic when to go out and protest like we did at Standing Rock is to risk your health and even life, not just from sickness but from the perverse laws passed by several states that make it a criminal offense to protest pipelines?

For a clue, remember that Wall Street still operates under the same rules of engagement that guided those at Sappa Creek and Wounded Knee. "Death to the weak, power to the powerful", and even though Wall Street may feign a turning of its dainty head away from its unpleasant causes and effects, the name for this legal piracy hasn't changed. It’s still called a "killing".

Portable Windmill at Sacred Stone Camp

After the buffalo were exterminated, the People whose lives were woven within the vast, throbbing herds experienced plague and famine on steroids. Much of it was caused by the malevolence of the cruel or ignorant people rushing to fill the ecological void left by the disappearance of the main driver of that ecosystem. But cruel and ignorant people are only symptoms of the breakdown, no more nor less than any other sturdy virus. Ecosystems fail, inhumanity intensifies, and viruses come in for the sucker-punch. Things get re-made, not usually for the better, at least not for us. Why do we keep falling for it? Ask Wilma.

We certainly have the technological know-how by now to avoid such things as gifting trillions of taxpayer dollars to save those who would kill us (or in the case of Covid-19, would watch us die). Who made these people the bosses of the world?

Don't let anyone tell you to just shut up and accept your lot, especially now that all their crimes have been laid so bare, because time is a funny, fast-moving thing, a fluid thing, like floods or other cleansing, natural phenomena. Just wait a while, and you'll see that, although it’s tough right now and gonna get tougher, there’s much cause for hope, because our facts, our beloved facts, are finally turning us back to where we always should have been, to where we never should have left, back to the Land.