The slaughter of bison and the plunder of natural resources

The slaughter of bison and the plunder of natural resources is both a material process and a governing logic of the hunting expedition: animals are treated as a yield to be maximized, while the grasslands, carcasses, and hides reveal the costs of that pursuit. In Kansas, the trade has already reduced once-vast herds to scattered groups; in the mountain valley, Miller carries the same extractive logic to an extreme, pursuing the herd until its decline is visible in the shrinking numbers and spreading field of dead animals. The expedition’s labor and eventual commercial disappointment make the destruction more than an abstraction: it changes the landscape, consumes the hunters’ days, and leaves much of what they have taken without value.

From abundance to scarcity

The hunting economy described by Miller begins from a stark contrast between past abundance and present depletion. Four years earlier, when he and J.D. McDonald arrived in Butcher’s Crossing, the Kansas plains had appeared black with bison, densely covering the grass for miles. A two-week hunt could then yield a thousand or fifteen hundred animals, including valuable spring hides. By the time Miller recounts this history, the bison travel in small herds and a successful hunt may bring only two or three hundred. He expects Kansas to be exhausted as a hunting ground within another year or two.

That decline is tied to an organized trade, not simply to individual subsistence. Miller describes J.D. McDonald as sending out thirty or forty hunting parties across the country and paying fifty cents per head for raw summer hides. The hides are thin, and the way J.D. McDonald divides the proceeds leaves hunters struggling to make it through the winter. Miller rejects that arrangement, insisting that he hunts for himself or not at all; yet his independence does not separate him from the same system of killing. His alternative is to search for bison elsewhere, and the expedition eventually carries the hunt into a remote valley.

The aftermath of earlier Kansas hunts is already written across the ground. Miller recalls riding through mountains of bones from Pawnee Fork toward the end of the Smoky Hill region, a landscape created within only a few years of intensive hunting. He expects even those remains to be gathered by farmers and used as fertilizer, though he doubts they will make much difference. He also recalls the many uses made of bison bone, including tools, arrow points, jewelry, and children’s toys. The contrast is telling: bones once gathered and worked into useful objects may now be treated as one more resource to haul away, while the living herds that produced them have nearly disappeared.

The valley as a killing ground

The remote valley initially appears to offer the opposite of a depleted landscape. After a night’s travel, the expedition reaches the foothills, follows a stream, and approaches the mountains through wooded country. Miller’s remembered map gives the valley a length of twenty to twenty-five miles and a width of roughly four or five miles at its broadest. He describes its grass as dense and quick to grow back, and reasons that it can support an immense number of bison. Steep mountains enclose much of it; in Miller’s assessment, the animals have no practical escape route except the way the hunters entered.

The first view makes the valley seem uninhabited and almost untouched: a level floor of grass enclosed by mountains, quiet enough that Will Andrews holds his breath rather than disturb it. That stillness is immediately interrupted by the dark movement of the herd. The same enclosure that gives Andrews an overwhelming impression of scale gives Miller a tactical advantage. He starts with a small group, shooting animals so that the survivors circle in confusion instead of fleeing in a directed mass. He calls the tactic a success, keeps ammunition within reach, and sends Will Andrews back for another rifle, cartridges, and water.

The killing grows rapidly beyond the first encounter. By the time the hunt stops in mid-afternoon, the herd has been reduced by at least two-thirds, and dead bison cover an irregular strip nearly a mile long. Miller has shot six animals before ordering Will Andrews to fetch supplies; later, Andrews and Miller count roughly thirty carcasses before the sheer number defeats the attempt. Miller reports a final tally of 135 for that day. The count gives the slaughter a measure, but not a sense of completion: it is one day’s work against a much larger herd, and the bodies already lie close enough together that some touch.

Labor, repetition, and the shrinking herd

The killing is followed by the labor of turning bodies into hides. Every few days, Charley Hoge takes the oxen and wagon along the trail of the hunt. The men load hides that have dried in the sun, bring them back to camp, and stack them in piles seven or eight feet high. Each pile holds roughly seventy-five to ninety hides; strips of fresh hide are threaded through cuts in the outer hides and pulled tight to bind the stack. The work is collective, heavy, and recurrent, with the wagon moving between the trail and camp as the dead animals accumulate.

Will Andrews becomes more efficient at skinning. His hands strengthen, his knives become more effective through use, and he eventually skins one animal in the time Fred Schneider needs for two. The smell, the warm flesh, and the sight of clotted blood lose their force for him. He works almost mechanically, laying out hide after hide, and can ride through heaps of skinned bison crawling with black insects without registering the stench. His adaptation mirrors the hunt’s own repetition: killing and processing become routines whose physical demands keep attention fixed on the next animal and the next task.

The pattern intensifies as the herd presses toward the pass through which it entered the valley. Miller and the others make frontal attacks each morning, driving the bison back toward the southern mountains, but the animals advance again during the night. Miller grows increasingly absorbed in the hunt. At camp he communicates through gestures, grunts, and abrupt movements; during the day he carries two rifles and fires until their barrels are nearly fused. Andrews and Schneider struggle to skin the animals before nightfall, often rising before dawn to work on stiff carcasses. The sound of Miller’s rifle continues while they labor, turning the hunt into a relentless rhythm of shooting, skinning, and falling further behind.

On the twenty-fifth day in the mountains, the original herd of five thousand has been reduced to fewer than three hundred. The survivors have broken into small groups, and Miller rarely kills more than twelve or fourteen at a time. The slower pace does not signal a change of purpose: the hunt continues, now directed at increasingly small remnants. Will Andrews understands that Miller will not leave while a single bison remains alive. That conviction makes the herd’s diminishing numbers the measure of the expedition’s duration, replacing the calendar as the measure of time spent in the valley.

Waste and the meaning of the hunt

The men’s changing relation to the hunt is registered in their bodies and perception. Under the pressure of the first long day, Will Andrews feels himself becoming detached from his own physical pain and sees Miller as an almost automatic mechanism, driven by the moving herd. He also loses clarity about who he is and where he is going. Later, repeated skinning blunts his response to death and decay. This is not simply a shift from revulsion to mastery: the evidence shows him becoming accustomed to the work and attending more to its procedures, including how Miller confines bison within a limited area to make them easier to kill and skin.

The valley’s condition makes the consequences impossible to keep at a distance. When the men return to the place where they killed and skinned the first bison, carcasses have dried hard, wolves have torn at some, and bones shine where the flesh has been stripped away. Andrews sees mountains of bodies and imagines the remaining flesh being consumed by vultures or rotting in the summer weather, leaving the valley strewn with white bones. The wagon cannot travel straight through the carcasses; its wheels crush bison legs, while the oxen recoil from the stench. The landscape that first appeared quiet and unmarked has become an obstacle course of remains.

The expedition’s waste is sharpened by a later change in the market. J.D. McDonald tells Miller that the railroad is being built fifty miles to the north and that hunters are selling bison meat to the railway company while leaving the hides to rot where they were removed. He calculates that the meat could have earned nearly five cents a pound. The revelation does not undo the killing or recover the discarded value; it exposes how the hunters’ labor and the herd’s destruction have been organized around a market that has already shifted. The hides that the expedition dried and stacked may no longer secure the return its members expected, while meat left to flies and wolves becomes a missed source of income.

The book’s opening reflection on living creatures’ apparent contentment stands in painful contrast to the valley’s dead and dwindling herd. The wilderness first draws Will Andrews as an alternative to the city and a source of freedom; the hunt then shows that his expedition does not merely enter nature but acts upon it, converting abundance into carcasses, hides, and anticipated profit. The bison are not only scenery for the hunters’ personal trials. Their decline structures the expedition’s pace, its labor, and its eventual reckoning, while the valley preserves the visible remainder of a resource treated as inexhaustible until it is nearly gone.