The era of large-scale bison hunting in 19th-century North America

The era of large-scale bison hunting in 19th-century North America is the ecological and economic transformation that forms the background to the expedition led by Miller. The novel measures that change in stark contrasts: within four years, Kansas shifts from plains dark with bison to a landscape where a successful hunt may yield only a few hundred animals. Bones, dwindling herds, changing trade practices, and railway tracks register the consequences of hunting on a scale that makes abundance seem briefly inexhaustible—and then reveals how quickly it can disappear.

Commercial Hunting and Rapid Depletion

When Miller recalls arriving in the region four years earlier, spring hunts could bring in one thousand to fifteen hundred bison in two weeks, including valuable spring hides. By the time he speaks to William Andrews, the animals have broken into small herds, and a hunt yielding two or three hundred is considered fortunate. Miller expects that Kansas may have nothing left to hunt within another year or two. His account makes depletion measurable: not an abstract decline, but a collapse in the numbers visible on the plains and the returns a hunting trip can produce.

Miller distinguishes his own independent hunting from the system organized by J.D. McDonald. McDonald’s expeditions pay fifty cents per head for raw summer hides, which Miller describes as barely thicker than a strip of leather, and he keeps thirty or forty parties working around the country. In Miller’s view, the hunters who do the labor receive too little to make it through the winter. The town’s dependence on hides links local prosperity to the same activity that is exhausting the resource on which it depends. McDonald presents the settlement as a place that will change when the railroad arrives; the hunters and the trade already define its present.

A Landscape Marked by the Hunt

The transformation remains visible after the animals themselves are gone. Beside the remains of a bison estimated by Miller at at least two thousand pounds, he recalls a time when mountains of bones stretched as far as the eye could reach. Five or six years earlier, riders could travel among them from Pawnee Fork to the end of the Smoky Hill. He treats the bones as evidence of what the Kansas hunts have done, then predicts that a farmer will collect them for fertilizer. The remains have become another possible resource, though Miller doubts they will make much fertilizer.

That prospect contrasts with the many uses Miller recalls for bison bone. Indigenous people, he says, made needles, folding knives, arrow points, necklaces, children’s toys, and combs from it. His recollection recognizes a range of practical and ornamental uses, while his dismissal of fertilizer underscores how the remains are being reduced to whatever value settlers can extract from them. The scene’s final image is small and concrete: Miller throws a leg bone into the air, watches it flash briefly in the sun, and leaves it on the grass.

The living herds have also changed in scale and visibility. Riding with Fred Schneider and William Andrews, Miller sees a small group and remembers when even a thousand animals would have seemed few. In his recollection, fifty, seventy-five, or one hundred thousand bison could cover the grass so densely that a person might walk across their backs for a day without touching ground. Now, a few scattered animals share the prairie with the hunters pursuing them. Schneider accepts the smaller herds as the available quarry; Miller insists that the expedition is headed for a place where the old abundance can still be found. Their disagreement exposes two responses to depletion: take what remains, or pursue the memory of an apparently limitless herd.

People and the Changing Frontier

The novel also shows the land as occupied and contested rather than empty. At a riverside promontory, the party passes improvised shelters dug into the slope. Children play outside while older men sit near the entrances and women remain wrapped in blankets. The children stop to watch the travelers; the adults do not return Miller’s greeting. He dismisses the residents as river Indians who eat hares and catfish and are no longer worth shooting. The encounter is brief, but it places the hunting party’s casual authority beside the presence of people whom Miller regards through contempt and violence. The novel does not expand their point of view; their silent, watchful presence marks a limit in the hunters’ understanding of the territory.

Other signs of economic change appear along the route. Miller finds tracks on a north–south trail and guesses that cattle are being driven up from Texas, noting that they were absent on his previous journey. Later, William Andrews sees the parallel lines of a railroad crossing the plain toward the foothills. Miller reaches the tracks first, dismounts, runs his fingers over the steel, and looks toward the mountains. The rails embody the future McDonald had anticipated, but their arrival does not simply confirm his confidence in development: the new infrastructure is also part of a landscape whose older abundance has been rapidly consumed.

The Market After Abundance

By the time Miller returns to Butcher’s Crossing, the railway is being laid about fifty miles to the north. J.D. McDonald tells him that hunters are selling bison meat to the railroad company while leaving the hides where they were skinned, to rot in the sun. He calculates that the meat Miller left behind could have earned almost five cents a pound. The detail reveals a shift in what the hunt is organized to collect: hides once central to the trade can be discarded when another buyer makes the meat valuable. The apparent expansion of the market does not restore what the hunting has depleted; it creates another use for the carcasses.

Across these scenes, the era is defined by the gap between abundance as lived experience and abundance as a memory that can no longer be recovered. Miller’s recollections of immense herds coexist with bone fields, scattered survivors, and his determination to keep hunting. The railway’s steel and the bones on the grass are different traces of the same transformation: land and animals are increasingly treated as resources within expanding systems of trade and development. The novel renders that transformation cumulatively, through changing counts, repeated journeys, discarded remains, and a market that finds new value even as the herds vanish.