Miller burns the hides

Miller burns J.D. McDonald’s stock of winter bison hides in a deliberate, dangerous act that destroys the expedition’s expected profit and gives physical form to the collapse of the hide trade. The fire consumes not only the bales but also the wagons carrying them; as the villagers watch, Miller turns the remains of the hunt into an enormous blaze, while J.D. McDonald confronts the loss of property he can no longer sell.

Commercial promise and collapse

The hides had entered the expedition as a commercial objective. J.D. McDonald bought and processed bison pelts, selling them wholesale to Saint Louis. He described having handled nearly one hundred thousand hides the previous year and expected two or three times that amount in the current year. The trade connected the animals killed on the plains to processing and distant buyers, and made the hunt appear capable of yielding substantial returns.

Before the expedition set out, Miller said J.D. McDonald would buy its hides so the party would not have to haul them to Ellsworth. The price agreed for winter hides was four dollars apiece, and McDonald already had an eastern buyer. On returning, Miller counted three thousand first-rate winter hides, worth more than ten thousand dollars even after transport costs. That valuation, however, depended on a market that had disappeared while the expedition was away.

J.D. McDonald explained that demand for bison fur had dried up: people who wanted such pelts had already bought them, and he could not explain why fashion had turned against the product. He compared the change to the earlier decline in demand for beaver pelts. The railroad, which he had once expected to raise the value of local land, was being built fifty miles to the north, but its arrival did not rescue the hide business. Instead, hunters sold bison meat to the railway company and left the hides to rot where they had been stripped from the animals. The hunt had produced a vast stock, but the commercial chain that was supposed to convert it into money had broken.

The fire at J.D. McDonald’s shack

The fire begins at night at J.D. McDonald’s shack. From the village, Andrews sees it burning westward toward the river, its light catching the poplars across the road and its smoke rising in thick black columns before the wind carries it back over the settlement. He runs toward the blaze and finds fifteen or twenty people standing in a loose semicircle, silent beneath the smoke and heat.

Miller appears among the bales on a frightened horse. He forces the animal forward and back through the perilous area, pulling hard on the reins and driving it with his heels. At first Andrews cannot understand why Miller repeatedly charges toward the fire. Miller is using the horse to push bales stacked beside the burning shack into the flames. Where a bale lies by itself, he presses the animal’s chest against it and makes it shove the load across the ground to the edge of the blaze.

Charley Hoge tells Andrews to let Miller continue and identifies the fire as Miller’s. This disclosure changes what the villagers are witnessing: the blaze is not an accident that Miller is trying to contain, but a fire he has set and is actively using to destroy the hides. The bystanders stop advancing and watch as he works through the danger. Andrews fears that Miller will kill himself, but no one intervenes.

Hauling the hides into the blaze

After pushing the nearest bales into the fire, Miller rides away from the flames, dismounts, and ties his horse to the tongue of one of the wagons. He then carries bales from beside an abandoned wagon, staggering under their weight and loading them into its bed. A villager estimates that each bale weighs three or four hundred pounds. Miller makes several trips, laboring forward with bent knees beneath the heavy loads.

He fastens a rope from the wagon to the horse’s saddle and uses the animal’s pull to get the wagon moving. Once the wheels begin to turn, he drives the horse toward the burning shack. At the last moment, Miller veers away and frees the rope; the loaded wagon continues under its own momentum and crashes into the fire. Sparks scatter across a wide area. The blaze briefly darkens beneath the impact, then spreads more fiercely, forcing the watching villagers to retreat from the heat.

Miller repeats the process, loading and sending wagons into the flames. The destruction becomes a sustained piece of physical labor rather than a single gesture: bale after bale and wagon after wagon are added to the fire. It takes him almost an hour to finish. When the last wagon of hides goes into the blaze, he rides slowly back toward Andrews, Charley Hoge, and J.D. McDonald, who have remained together watching.

Witnesses, loss, and aftermath

J.D. McDonald arrives at the fire in alarm, running toward the burning office and hides and asking why no one is doing anything. Andrews tells him there is nothing they can do and warns him to stay back. When McDonald sees Miller carrying another load into the expanding ring of fire, he recognizes him and struggles to take in what is happening. Andrews points out that McDonald himself had said the hides were now worthless. McDonald replies that, worthless or not, they belonged to him. The exchange distinguishes market price from ownership: the collapse in demand may have erased the stock’s expected value, but it has not erased McDonald’s claim to it.

By the end, the fire has consumed the wagons and hides into a mass of burning wreckage, and its height has doubled. Miller rides back with his horse visibly exhausted, its flanks heaving and blood running from its mouth, torn by the bit. Smoke has blackened Miller’s face; his eyebrows are almost burned away, his hair is singed and curled, and a red mark across his forehead is beginning to blister. He looks at J.D. McDonald, then at Charley Hoge and Andrews, and laughs harshly before falling silent. The men exchange glances but say nothing.

The burning makes the expedition’s failure material and irreversible. The hides had once stood for a projected fortune, tied to McDonald’s promise to buy them at four dollars each; now neither the agreement nor their former price can restore a buyer. The surrounding trade has shifted toward meat for the railroad, while the hides themselves have become unwanted remnants of mass slaughter. Miller’s action does not recover the lost value or undo the killing. It turns the stock into fire, leaving the people who watched it burn with the consequence of a hunt whose scale exceeded the market that had justified it.