Cattle

The Cattle, the expedition’s team of working oxen, are essential to the practical possibility of Miller’s hunt: they carry its supplies into the mountains and are expected to haul the hides back out. Their changing condition measures the expedition’s exposure to thirst, winter confinement, and spring flood. After surviving the cold and regaining their strength, they pull the loaded wagon toward home; at the river, the current overturns it and carries the team away.

Role in the Expedition

The oxen are the expedition’s motive power, tied to the wagon that carries its water and equipment across the plains and later bears the bison hides. Their importance is particularly clear against the scale of the commercial hunt. Miller recalls that Kansas once held bison in immense numbers, but that years of hunting have reduced the herds: where two weeks might once yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals, a hunt now brings only a few hundred. McDonald’s many expeditions depend on the hide trade, while Miller insists on hunting for himself. The oxen serve that trade not as hunters but as the indispensable means of moving its supplies and, ultimately, its heavy return cargo.

Their labor is exposed to the expedition’s most immediate danger even before the valley is reached. During the dry-plains crossing, the oxen crowd at the back of the wagon, stamping and pushing against the board that protects the small reserve of water held in a canvas container. Their restless movement makes the precariousness of that supply visible: water is not an abstraction but a few stored gallons under pressure from thirsty animals. Miller chooses to start them moving before the heat intensifies, hoping they will not yet feel the lack of water. When the party later pools what remains in its bottles, the reserve amounts to only about four inches in a wooden cask. The team’s needs are part of the same crisis that governs the men’s progress.

Winter Survival and Recovery

In the valley, the oxen are spared the work of hauling while the hunters slaughter bison and process hides. As the herd dwindles and the men labor to keep pace with Miller’s shooting, the animals remain inactive on good grass and begin to grow fat. This apparent ease is temporary: the blizzard traps the expedition, and their survival depends on the shelter of the valley and patches where wind has cleared the snow. Miller reports that the oxen have made it through, in better condition than the horses, though their future remains uncertain until the weather changes.

With the spring thaw, the eight oxen are found alive but markedly wilder than before. They bolt when the men approach, and it takes four days to circle them and bring them back to camp. The men tether them and turn them out to graze; as they fill their stomachs, they gradually become more manageable. Before the end of the week, the team can be hitched to the wagon and made to walk for a few hours through the valley, past the winter’s rotting bison carcasses. The contrast is stark: green grass is returning, but the dead animals and the worsening smell remain around the work of getting ready to leave.

Training and Departure

Charley Hoge oversees the oxen’s return to regular work. Each day he has them pull the wagon for about an hour, until, without a load, they recover the brisk pace they had in autumn. Meanwhile, the men smoke trout and thick slices of meat for the journey, and Miller continues to hunt along the mountain slope. The team’s gradual reconditioning is practical preparation, not a sudden transformation: the animals must regain the habit of pulling before they can be trusted with the expedition’s cargo.

When the party finally departs, the oxen face a much harder task than their practice walks. The other hides are left packed in the valley, treated with the remaining strychnine to keep pests from nesting in them, while the men carry blankets and personal belongings on horseback. Charley Hoge climbs to the wagon’s high seat and sets the team moving. Under the heavy load, the yoke hurts their backs; the wagon strains, and its wheels sink deeply into the soft earth, cutting parallel tracks across the grass. At the pass, a span of soft snow remains, but the oxen pull through it. Their strength turns the departure from a plan into a physical passage, carrying the expedition out of the valley and down toward the plains.

The River Disaster

At the spring river crossing, the team’s position in the water initially appears to make the passage workable. The lead oxen go in first; while they reach the deepest water, those nearest the wagon are still in shallower water and can help draw its weight toward the far bank. Miller crosses ahead, and Charley Hoge guides the team from one of the lead oxen. For a moment, the arrangement seems to offer a way through the flood.

A large broken trunk, carried rapidly downstream, strikes Fred Schneider’s horse and knocks it over. The horse and trunk hit the wagon almost together, driving it against rocks. As the wagon turns onto its side, Charley Hoge gets clear of the oxen, which are dragged back into the current by the overturned load. The wagon briefly drifts, held somewhat by the animals nearest it; then it scrapes the rocky riverbed, turns, and is pulled downstream with the team. Once the oxen lose their footing, the current carries the wagon into larger rocks. Its harness breaks, the hides scatter across the water, and the men on shore see the animals overturned and struggling before the wreck disappears from view. The narrative does not show the team’s fate afterward, but its disappearance marks the loss of the animals as well as the wagon and the expedition’s cargo.

Significance

The Cattle’s course gives the expedition’s larger reversal a material form. They are first a vulnerable burden in the thirst-stricken plains, then survivors of the trapped winter, and finally the recovered strength on which the return depends. Their gradual taming and renewed work seem to make departure possible; the flood exposes how little control that labor can ultimately secure. Unlike the bison, whose slaughter supplies the expedition’s hides, the oxen are kept alive as working animals, yet they too are caught in a system that turns animals into instruments of extraction and transport. When the river takes the team, the expedition loses not merely property but the means by which its accumulated labor was supposed to reach the market.