Rebecca Solnit: River of Shadows

The Transubstantiation of the Bison

The railroad barged into the Great Plains as the Industrial Revolution incarnate, and the Native Americans there were not pleased to see their wide-open spaces seamed and domesticated. Even as the meeting of the rails was being celebrated, a stray party of soldiers seeking a Paiute raider stumbled upon the scene by accident, stopped to goggle, and then continued their pursuit and killed their quarry. The 1863 treaty with the neighboring Western Shoshone of Nevada stated in its opening clauses, “It being understood that provision has been made by the government of the United States for the construction of a railway from the plains west to the Pacific ocean, it is stipulated by the said bands that the said railway or its branches may be located, constructed and operated, and without molestation from them, through any portion of country claimed or occupied by them.” But the railroad wars were primarily with the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho of the Great Plains.

The transcontinental was at the time by far the longest railroad line ever built, and unlike all the others, it had preceded and carried development with it, rather than serving existing enterprise and populations. The U.S. Army had to fight a war on behalf of the Union Pacific, the contemporaneous Kansas Pacific, and the later Northern Pacific railroads across the plains, and the Union Pacific's own men were often ex-soldiers who took up rifles as readily as sledgehammers to build the railroad. In 1872 the Bureau of Indian Affairs reported of the Great Plains nations, “Claiming to own most, if not all, of the Territory of Dakota, and portions of the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, as well as the western part of Nebraska, they used every effort to prevent the settlement of the country so claimed, their hostility being especially directed against the Union Pacific Railroad.” The railroad wars had come to a climax in 1867 when General William Tecumseh Sherman was sent to clear a belt for the railways. “No interruption to work on the line of the U.P. will be tolerated,” he trumpeted. “Eastern people must not allow their sympathy with the Indians to make them forget what is due to those who are pushing the ‘frontier’ farther and farther west. These men deserve protection, and they must have it.” The Lakota raided the railroad gangs and sabotaged railroad lines so that engines wrecked and the stranded crew could be picked off, but by 1868 many of the Plains tribes had signed treaties.

Those tribes were up against a degree of industrialization and technology that would devastate them. But they were neither strangers nor enemies to European transformation in its earlier stages. Long before Europeans reached the region, aspects of their culture arrived—diseases and guns from the northeast, horses from the southwest. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, guns in the hands of their enemies had driven the Lakota south and west form their original homeland; horses had made that West of open plains and huge buffalo herds alluring; smallpox had opened up more of that space by decimating the more sedentary tribes who had lived along the river valleys. For the Plains tribes the horse was a technology as transformative as the railroad would be for the Yankees of the nineteenth century. In Cheyenne folklore the god Maheo warned them, “If you have horses everything will be changed for you forever. You will have to move around a lot to find pasture for your horses. You will have to give up gardening and live by hunting and gathering, like the Comanches. And you will have to come out of your earth houses and live in tents.” The great horse nomads of the plains came into existence in the eighteenth century. Having abandoned the diversity of hunted, gathered and grown food sources they previously depended upon, they turned to trading with the remaining sedentary tribes for foodstuffs to vary their diet and with the fur traders for guns, ammunition, pots, iron arrowheads, and other metal tools. They had been, in a remote and romantic way, assimilated into the vast commercial networks of Europe. This trading was the beginning of the end of the vast buffalo herds, for the buffalo hunters in the market economy had incentive to kill more and more as subsistence hunters did not, and guns and horses gave them the means to do it. Their distant relationship with the market seemed to please them, but the arrival of the Industrial Revolution incarnate threatened to annihilate them and their hunting grounds.

It was the railroad and the white hunters who would bring the bison to the brink of extinction. Secretary of the Interior Jacob Cox declared, “The building of the Union Pacific Railroad has driven the buffalo from their former hunting grounds, [so] that it was impracticable for the Indians to rely upon this natural supply of food, clothing, and shelter.” The army shrewdly estimated that annihilating the buffalo would sabotage the nomadic hunting way of life of the Plains Indians and make them far easier to coerce onto reservations. Sherman was using the same scorched-earth policy in the West that he had in the South during the Civil War. The great turning point was 1872. The Kansas Pacific Railroad was finished, and its western terminal at Dodge City became a collecting point for buffalo hides (as well as for cattle; the much-romanticized Texas cattle drives were bringing cows to the railroads; the railroads were transporting them to the vast slaughterhouses of Chicago; and Chicago was reducing them to meat for national consumption: cowboys too were part of the far-reaching new economy). On that railroad line, a train once ran for 120 miles through a single herd. Colonel Richard Dodge, after whom the town was named, conservatively estimated the number of hides shipped east on the railroads between 1872 and 1874 to be about one and a third million. the slaughter was profligate. About a million buffalo a year were killed, according to later estimates. Buffalo skeletons piled up into mountains, and these bones were later converted into fertilizer and other industrial products, though most parts of the dead animals were left to rot on the prairie. It was a golden age for scavengers, until some hunters began a sideline in wolfskins. By the 1880s the buffalo whose herds had once spread to the horizon were almost extinct. They had been killed for sport, for food for the railroad builders and other transients, and for hides to ship east. The unromantic destiny of most of those hides was factories. Before rubberized drive belts, the belts that drove the Industrial Revolution's factories were made of leather, and buffalo hide was thick and durable. The roaming bison herds were being transformed into the relentless churning of machines serving the cash economy.

The late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries were the golden age for landscape representation, for a passion for nature represented as places beautiful to the eyes. This was also the era of rapacious exploitation, though to recite its particulars is to invoke an almost alchemical transformation from wildness to citified commodities. The beaver of the North American West went first, those dammers of rivers turned into felt top hats for city gentlemen. The gold of the California motherlode went afterward, the secret contents of streams and fossil rivers turned into money in the days when money was still a material medium rather than only numbers in an account or guarantees on paper. The whaling industry turned those titans of the seas into lamp oil for parlors and whalebone for corsets and brought them close to extinction, at least until 1870, when Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and began to pump out the black residue of the Jurassic past in unprecedented quantities. The forests of the nation were being pitched into the boilers of locomotives and smelters of ore, were becoming churches and rocking chairs and crates, and the buffalo were becoming factory belts. Organic material is usually harvested so that it renews itself year after year, but in the nineteenth century the industrialized world began mining this material—passenger pigeons, bison, beaver, whales, forest—into extinction or near-extinction. What was vanishing as ecology was reappearing as imagery. Landscape showed up in the stereoscope cards in parlors, in the floral patterns on dresses and saddles and silverware, in the scenery engraved on pocket watches.