Miller’s obsession with killing every bison in the herd

Miller’s obsession with killing every bison in the herd grows against a landscape already altered by commercial hunting. In Kansas, the dwindling herds and accumulating bones make the valley hunt more than a private enterprise: it becomes an extreme continuation of a destruction whose scale Miller himself can measure, even as he presses it toward its final, total form.

From depletion to a private hunt

Miller recalls that four years earlier, when he and J.D. McDonald arrived at Butcher’s Crossing, the spring plains had been black with bison for miles. Two weeks of hunting could then yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals, including valuable spring hides. By the time he tells the story, the herds have dwindled to small groups, and a successful hunt may bring only two or three hundred animals. He expects Kansas to be exhausted within another year or two. This remembered abundance, set against immediate scarcity, gives his later insistence on pursuing the valley herd a stark context: the animals he hunts are not an endless supply but remnants of a rapidly vanishing population. Miller distinguishes his own practice from McDonald’s outfit, which sends out dozens of expeditions and pays hunters fifty cents a head for raw summer hides; he says he hunts for himself or not at all. That independence does not make his pursuit less destructive. Instead, it places the decisions and consequences of the hunt squarely with him.

The aftermath of earlier Kansas hunts is visible in the bones scattered across the prairie. Miller remembers a time when heaps of them stretched from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill Trail, and he kicks at a large carcass as he describes what the hunts have left behind. A farmer might eventually collect the bones for fertilizer, though Miller doubts they would be much use even for that. His gesture and his account connect the valley’s coming slaughter to a broader history of waste: the animals are killed in numbers that outlast any immediate use for their bodies. The bison’s remains, once fashioned into tools, toys, combs, and ornaments, can now lie exposed until someone happens to take them. In this contrast, Miller recognizes the scale of depletion while continuing toward a hunt that will repeat it on a concentrated scale.

The hunt becomes an extermination

At the start of the valley hunt, Miller’s method turns the herd’s confusion into an instrument of slaughter. After the first wounded animals fall, he fires in quick succession at three more. The herd rises and circles without choosing a direction or finding a leader; Miller recognizes that he has disrupted its ability to flee. He keeps shooting, while William Andrews gathers the empty cartridges within reach. After Miller has brought down six bison, he cleans the rifle and sends Andrews back to camp for another gun, more ammunition, and a bucket of water. The routine already joins killing to the work that sustains it: weapon maintenance, resupply, and the removal of spent cartridges from the ground.

Miller’s objective is not limited by the amount the others can process. When Fred Schneider protests that they need not kill more animals than they can skin, Miller insists that every bison he shoots will be skinned, even if the shooting continues until the following day. He offers to help, but makes clear that Schneider will finish the work regardless of whether the carcasses are warm, cold, soft, hard, swollen, or frozen. The order makes the labor of skinning an obligation imposed by the hunt rather than a practical limit on it. Miller’s determination thus binds the others to the consequences of his firing: each additional kill becomes another body they must handle.

As the herd presses instinctively toward the pass and the slaughter intensifies, Miller’s attention narrows until hunting seems to consume his whole waking presence. He rides out with two rifles and fires so continuously that their barrels grow nearly red-hot. At camp, he no longer voices even ordinary needs: he points toward the coffee pot when thirsty, grunts when addressed, and gives instructions through abrupt movements of his hands, arms, or head. His face goes unwashed, and the black gunpowder on it settles into a mask beneath eyes that remain vivid. The change is measured against the mounting work of Schneider and William Andrews, who struggle to skin the carcasses before nightfall and rise before dawn to cut into stiff, hard-skinned animals. Miller’s repeated shots carry across their labor as a monotonous sound that wears down their nerves as well as their bodies.

The herd’s last survivors

By the twenty-fifth day in the mountains, the hunt had changed pace without changing direction. After more than three weeks of killing, the original herd of roughly five thousand had been reduced to fewer than three hundred. The survivors had begun splitting into small bands, and Miller rarely managed to kill more than twelve or fourteen at a time; finding and moving between those groups consumed hours. The urgency of the opening days had ebbed. Miller now closed around the remnants slowly and relentlessly, as though each individual kill mattered more to him as the herd grew smaller. The arithmetic of the hunt made its destination plain: the surviving animals were not a reserve to be left behind, but the final measure of a task approaching completion.

William Andrews understands the extremity of Miller’s purpose before it is openly stated. The remaining bison wander among the bodies of their companions, grazing on grass marked with dried brown blood, while the exposed carcasses spread across the valley and their rancid smell becomes so familiar that Andrews scarcely notices it. As he sees how much the herd has diminished, he realizes that he had never imagined the day when it would be destroyed down to the last animal. Unlike Fred Schneider, who counts the passing days, Andrews has been measuring time by the number of bison left. He has known, without needing to ask Miller, that the hunt will not end while even one survives. The obsession therefore governs not just the shooting but the expedition’s calendar and its limit: departure depends on exhaustion of the herd.

That realization also registers in Andrews as a loss of the world beyond the valley. He thinks of the hides drying on the ground, of loading them onto the wagon and hitching the oxen for the return across the plains to Butcher’s Crossing, yet cannot imagine the journey. The mountain route, the thirsty plains, and the town have slipped from memory and return only in broken, dreamlike fragments. The valley, with its yellow-green floor, enclosing mountains, pines, and vivid stands of autumn trees beneath a vast blue sky, has become the place through which he understands his own existence. Miller’s drive to eliminate the herd thus takes place alongside Andrews’s inward enclosure: as the living bison disappear, the outside world recedes from the hunter’s assistant’s mind.

What remains when the herd is gone

The later reckoning exposes how little the slaughter’s commercial logic can justify. McDonald tells Miller that the railroad is being built fifty miles north, and that hunters now sell bison meat to the railway company while leaving the hides to rot where the animals were skinned. The meat Miller abandoned could, McDonald calculates, have brought nearly five cents a pound. The detail turns the hunt’s accumulated carcasses and carefully gathered hides into evidence of a mismatch: Miller’s relentless killing produced far more dead animals than the trade could use, and the market’s value shifted while the expedition remained fixed on its original prize.

McDonald’s inventory of the expedition’s outcome is harsher still. He says that several thousand bison were killed, the hides will rot or become nests for mice, the wagon is destroyed, and the surviving return is reduced to calluses and the memory of a dead man. His speech also rejects the promise that a young person can discover some hidden truth that will make life meaningful; Andrews answers in fear and denies that conclusion, but the exchange leaves the expedition’s purpose unsettled. Miller’s obsession has made the herd’s final survivors the measure of when the hunt may end, yet the aftermath offers no equivalent measure of achievement. The animals are gone, while the work, the bodies, and the abandoned materials remain as the cost of pursuing completion.