Miller and Schneider

Miller and Schneider’s relationship is a partnership organized around the hunt and strained to breaking point by Miller’s determination to exterminate the entire bison herd. Schneider understands the work as a venture with limits: the hides must be worth the labor, the carcasses must be processed before they spoil, and the party must leave before winter traps them. Miller increasingly treats those limits as obstacles. Their conflict is therefore not simply a difference in temperament; it is a struggle over who controls the expedition, what its success means, and how much danger and labor can be imposed in pursuit of a single objective.

Partnership and Terms of the Hunt

Miller’s account of Kansas provides the history behind his plan. Four years earlier, when he and J.D. McDonald arrived, the spring plains had been black with bison for miles. A two-week hunt could yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals, including valuable spring hides. Now the herds had dwindled to a few small groups, and a successful hunt might bring only two or three hundred. Miller predicted that Kansas would soon have no bison left to hunt. He distinguished his own approach from J.D. McDonald’s organized expeditions, which paid hunters fifty cents a head for thin summer hides. Miller hunted independently or not at all, and he believed that other, less depleted places might still hold bison. The arrangement with Schneider turns that belief into a joint expedition. Miller secures J.D. McDonald as a buyer for the hides so the party will not have to haul them to Ellsworth, with four dollars promised for each winter hide and an eastern buyer already lined up. Schneider immediately asks about the summer hides and points out that the winter ones will require at least three months. The terms establish a practical partnership, but they also make the hunt dependent on time, processing, transport, and a market beyond the valley. Miller is the expedition’s leader; Schneider is a worker whose labor is essential to converting the kill into saleable hides. At the valley camp, Miller lays out a plan to move along the valley while Charley Hoge follows with the wagon, collecting hides that the hunters bring back to be packed. The party can camp farther ahead if necessary, and, once they reach the far end, they might drive any remaining bison back toward the camp. Schneider asks Miller to take it slowly at first because William Andrews needs several days before he can help; Schneider does not want to be left skinning carcasses that have gone stiff. Miller answers that there is no hurry and that they can stay all winter if necessary. In that exchange, a difference in assumptions is already visible: Schneider thinks in terms of manageable work, while Miller is willing to let the hunt determine the length of the expedition.

The Slaughter and the Breaking Point

During the hunt, Schneider’s warnings become an open challenge. After Miller has been shooting for hours, Schneider crawls up and tells him that seventy or eighty animals are already down, enough to keep the party busy for half the night. Miller continues. He insists that every animal he kills will be skinned, even if the work lasts until the following day, and tells Schneider that he will help if needed but that Schneider will skin the carcasses whether their hides are soft, stiff, swollen, or frozen. Miller’s command makes clear that the hunt’s pace is not negotiated between partners: Schneider is expected to absorb its consequences in labor. The burden grows beyond a single day’s work. Schneider and William Andrews skin and butcher faster, often failing to finish before dark and rising before dawn to cut up frozen carcasses. Miller’s rifle keeps firing while they struggle to keep up. At night they return exhausted to find him by the fire, his face darkened with powder residue. Schneider’s objection is practical as well as moral: he does not want to spend the night skinning carcasses that have become hard and useless to work. But the mismatch between Miller’s killing and the available labor makes the objection impossible to resolve. As the herd thins, the valley fills with stripped bodies, and the surviving animals continue grazing among them. William Andrews comes to understand that Miller will not leave while even one bison remains. The measure of the expedition’s duration has shifted from days or wages to the number of animals still alive. Schneider’s exhaustion surfaces in his disgust with the food and routine. He says that bison meat is making him sick and demands fresh vegetables, potatoes, and a woman, rejecting the beans, bacon, and stale biscuits that have become part of camp life. Miller answers by offering beans for the next day, treating the complaint as a minor problem of provisions rather than a sign of mounting frustration. Schneider then challenges the larger purpose outright, calling Miller mad for wanting the whole herd and asking whether he intends to kill every bison in the country. Miller refuses to debate it: the expedition is his, and he has already decided. Schneider accepts that Miller will take responsibility, but the exchange confirms that their partnership has become an unequal command structure. Miller sets the objective; Schneider can object, but cannot redirect it. The strain is also measured in money. More than a month after leaving Butcher’s Crossing, Schneider demands his sixty-dollar pay. The request makes explicit the employment relation beneath the language of partnership: the hunt may be Miller’s enterprise, but Schneider has worked long enough to claim what he is owed. Meanwhile, the kill continues to outpace the men’s capacity to process it. The widening gap between Miller’s ambition and Schneider’s labor is not abstract. It is counted in carcasses left to skin, early starts, and the days Schneider has spent in the valley.

Escape, Weather, and Mutual Dependence

When the surviving bison split into ten or twelve herds and begin trying to escape the valley, Miller rides back to ask for help. Schneider’s response is to let them go; he estimates that only a couple of hundred remain. Miller ignores that proposal and assigns positions to William Andrews and Schneider, planning to drive the herds back by firing at them if they approach. The same conflict now plays out in a physical crisis: for Schneider, the dwindling herd is reason enough to stop; for Miller, its attempted escape is a problem to be contained. Schneider listens, smells the air, and senses that something is wrong, but cannot identify the danger. His unease contrasts with Miller’s habitual insistence on acting within the hunt’s immediate demands. The blizzard makes their dependence on each other harder to deny. With the party exposed in the storm, Miller makes shelters from hides and urges Schneider to join the shelter he shares with Charley Hoge. Schneider refuses and begins tying his own hides together. Miller warns that he may freeze, argues with him, and finally gives him the remaining straps rather than force him to come along. Schneider works alone in the blowing snow as Miller and William Andrews retreat with Andrews’s hide shelter. Their disagreement has become a separation enacted in the landscape: Miller chooses shared shelter and coordinated survival; Schneider insists on managing the danger by himself. After Miller returns from testing the route, he reports that the pass is blocked, with about twelve feet of snow where he turned back and worse conditions ahead. Schneider says he had already expected as much and accuses the others of ignoring his warning to leave. Miller’s answer is to wait, prepare for another storm, and endure the confinement. Schneider declares that he will go home, but Miller does not treat departure as a viable option. He tells Schneider that the expedition cannot get the wagon and hides over the mountain with only two people; Charley Hoge is not in a condition to help, and the party needs Schneider. Miller also insists that Schneider could not survive alone and that staying with the group is his only chance. His appeal combines physical necessity with authority: the same expedition that has driven Schneider to demand his pay now depends on his labor to bring its freight home.

The Hunt’s Aftermath

The hides that underpin Miller and Schneider’s enterprise ultimately expose its dependence on a market neither man controls. Back in Butcher’s Crossing, Miller insists to J.D. McDonald that the expedition has three thousand first-quality winter hides worth more than ten thousand dollars, even after transport. McDonald tells him that demand for bison fur has collapsed: as with beaver pelts after beaver hats went out of fashion, the market has moved on, and no one wants bison hides. The earlier agreement to pay four dollars per winter hide cannot make the goods valuable once buyers disappear. Miller’s confidence in the quantity and quality of the harvest collides with the commercial reality that it cannot be sold as expected. The railroad sharpens the irony. J.D. McDonald says the line is being built fifty miles north, while hunters sell bison meat to the railway company and leave the hides to rot where they were skinned. Miller’s expedition has spent immense effort turning a living herd into hides, yet a different buyer values the meat and the skins are abandoned. For Schneider, the conflict had been visible first as exhausting work and danger; in the aftermath, the promised return that justified the work is also shown to be vulnerable to distant fashion and changing demand. The partnership’s defining imbalance remains: Miller’s determination drives the hunt, but neither his authority over Schneider nor the thousands of hides can command the market that was supposed to reward them.