The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly detailed painting of a little understood period.
Review: I really enjoyed the book . Sandoz has taken a lot of scattered tales and woven them into a captivating tale, without only giving one side of the story. She tells all of the reasons that the buffalo slaughter occured and the ripple effects that happened from there. I am going to be looking up more of her many books thank you Mari

Rating:
Summary: Some Unforgettable Tales
Review: The Buffalo Hunters is interesting enough to keep the reader engaged from beginning to end, though it does tend to get bogged down with excessive minutiae in some parts, as if the author could have used a good editor to rearrange some of the material and maybe delete some of the extraneous detail. Mari Sandoz was an authority on the white settlement of the Great Plains. As miners, farmers and other frontier types would visit her father, young Mari would listen to their stories of the olden days. Much of the material in this book is no doubt taken from those stories. In some cases they were actual eyewitness accounts, in others a story was told as passed on from another in the ancient tradition of oral history. The oral stories are of course supplemented and supported by academic research, making this book a valuable primary source of information about the Old West.

Some of these tales are unforgettable: like the washtub man, an unfortunate greenhorn who got caught in a ferocious blizzard. His rescuers found him unconscious. They took him to a doctor who promptly amputated both arms and both legs due to extreme frostbite. And the story of how Wild Bill Hickok was almost killed by a band of renegade Indians until an Indian chief came to his rescue at the last minute, ordering the would-be killers to let him go. Some years later Hickok murdered this chief for no apparent reason when the chief rode into Hickok's camp one morning for coffee.

Sandoz describes the slaughter of the buffalo in vivid detail to the point that it's almost painful to continue reading. The hunters would set fifty caliber rifles on bipods and start killing by the dozens until the barrels almost melted down. It is estimated that over fifty million buffalo roamed the Great Plains before the Civil War. By 1884 there were only a few hundred left. Just like the beaver in the early nineteenth century, the buffalo were hunted practically to extinction solely for their hides, which made huge profits for the hunters and railroads. Buffalo hides were the gold of the Great Plains. There was also a market for buffalo bones that were shipped back east to make fertilizer. The life and culture of the Plains Indians depended almost totally on the buffalo. The U.S. Army's ultimate conquest of the Plains Indians was, to a great degree, the result of the loss of the Indians' main food supply. The Indians were as much starved into submission as beaten into it by force of arms.

The life of Mari Sandoz is an interesting story in itself. Born in western Nebraska in 1896 to Swiss immigrant parents, she suffered through a harsh and cruel childhood receiving only an eighth-grade education by age seventeen, and speaking only German until adolescence. She married at eighteen and divorced five years later, the marriage apparently a loveless one. She moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where she worked at low-paying jobs while attending classes at the University of Nebraska. She could never officially enroll at the university because she never completed high school, so she was never able to earn a college degree. Her one love was reading and writing, and it was in the early Lincoln years that she taught herself the skills and technique of writing. By the time of her death from cancer in 1966 she had written twenty books and many short stories.

For every Babe Ruth there are hundreds who toil away in the minors never making it to the big leagues. Likewise for writers, for every Hemingway or Steinbeck there are many who grind out book after book but never achieve great notoriety. They are regarded as local or regional writers. Mari Sandoz devoted her entire life to the art of writing about the American West in a truthful and honest way, using the language and syntax of one who grew up in the West. She was ahead of her time; she told the history of the West from both a white and Indian perspective, without any white bias, before it became fashionably chic to do so.

Rating:
Summary: History at its finest
Review: This is quite simply one of the very best history books that I have ever read. It is detailed without being wordy, exceptionally well written, and paints a vivid picture of what is was like to make a living following the great herds. If you want to read one book about the buffalo hunters, this is it.

Rating:
Summary: History at its finest
Review: This is quite simply one of the very best history books that I have ever read. It is detailed without being wordy, exceptionally well written, and paints a vivid picture of what is was like to make a living following the great herds. If you want to read one book about the buffalo hunters, this is it.