The Buffalo Slaughter: Dodge City's First Industry
Near Dodge City, Kansas
Before Dodge City was a cattle town, it was a hide town, and the story of what happened on the southern Plains in the eighteen seventies ranks among the most deliberate acts of ecological destruction in American history. Professional hunting outfits arrived by the thousands after the transcontinental railroad gave them a way to move hides and bones to eastern markets at industrial scale. A skilled hunter could kill sixty or more animals in a single stand, working from downwind as the herd milled in confusion.
The hides were worth about three dollars each. The tongues were salted for sale. Everything else was left to rot on the grassland.
Estimates of the total kill are staggering. An estimated one million five hundred thousand buffalo hides were shipped through Dodge City alone between eighteen seventy-two and eighteen seventy-eight. The bones of the animals were picked up for years afterward and sold to fertilizer factories.
The bones paid better than the hides by the pound. The destruction was not merely commercial. The United States Army understood that eliminating the bison herds would eliminate the food supply of the Plains tribes, forcing them onto reservations.
General Philip Sheridan reportedly told the Texas legislature that buffalo hunters deserved medals of honor, not censure, because they were destroying the foundation of the Comanche and Kiowa way of life more effectively than the army could. By the early eighteen eighties the southern herd was functionally gone. The grassland that had supported tens of millions of animals for thousands of years was empty.
Dodge City turned to the next commodity that needed moving.
