In 1867 the total number of buffaloes in the trans-Missouri region was conservatively estimated at fifteen million. By the end of the 1880s that figure had dwindled to a few hundred. The destruction of the great herds is the theme of this book. Mari Sandoz's canvas is vast, but it is charged with color and excitement—accounts of Indian ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, gambling and gunfights, military expeditions, famous frontier characters (Wild Bill Hickok, Lonesome Charlie Reynolds, Buffalo Bill, Sheridan, Custer, and Indian Chiefs Whistler, Yellow Wolf, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull).
More than 30 paintings and drawings by artist-adventurers who traveled West in the 1800s illustrate Freedman's vivid account of the Great Plains Indians' buffalo hunts.
The Hunting of the Buffalo, originally published in 1929, tells all about the marvelous and useful animal that once roamed the American plains. Its gradual extermination is chronicled by E. Douglas Branch, who drew on rich materials, including Indian legends, old letters and diaries, and tales of frontier travelers. No one has ever written more memorably about the great herds, their habits and haunts, their importance to the Indians, their discovery by awed whites, their decimation by huge cultural and economic forces.
From the host of the Travel Channel’s “The Wild Within.” A hunt for the American buffalo—an adventurous, fascinating examination of an animal that has haunted the American imagination. In 2005, Steven Rinella won a lottery permit to hunt for a wild buffalo, or American bison, in the Alaskan wilderness. Despite the odds—there’s only a 2 percent chance of drawing the permit, and fewer than 20 percent of those hunters are successful—Rinella managed to kill a buffalo on a snow-covered mountainside and then raft the meat back to civilization while being trailed by grizzly bears and suffering from hypothermia. Throughout these adventures, Rinella found himself contemplating his own place among the 14,000 years’ worth of buffalo hunters in North America, as well as the buffalo’s place in the American experience. At the time of the Revolutionary War, North America was home to approximately 40 million buffalo, the largest herd of big mammals on the planet, but by the mid-1890s only a few hundred remained. Now that the buffalo is on the verge of a dramatic ecological recovery across the West, Americans are faced with the challenge of how, and if, we can dare to share our land with a beast that is the embodiment of the American wilderness. American Buffalo is a narrative tale of Rinella’s hunt. But beyond that, it is the story of the many ways in which the buffalo has shaped our national identity. Rinella takes us across the continent in search of the buffalo’s past, present, and future: to the Bering Land Bridge, where scientists search for buffalo bones amid artifacts of the New World’s earliest human inhabitants; to buffalo jumps where Native Americans once ran buffalo over cliffs by the thousands; to the Detroit Carbon works, a “bone charcoal” plant that made fortunes in the late 1800s by turning millions of tons of buffalo bones into bone meal, black dye, and fine china; and even to an abattoir turned fashion mecca in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, where a depressed buffalo named Black Diamond met his fate after serving as the model for the American nickel. Rinella’s erudition and exuberance, combined with his gift for storytelling, make him the perfect guide for a book that combines outdoor adventure with a quirky blend of facts and observations about history, biology, and the natural world. Both a captivating narrative and a book of environmental and historical significance, American Buffalo tells us as much about ourselves as Americans as it does about the creature who perhaps best of all embodies the American ethos.
While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a sixty-year career. His instructional books for writers are leaders in the field, and his self-described pedestrian memoir, Step By Step, has found a loyal audience in the running and racewalking community.Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linn's Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives.Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails is what he's got left over.The title piece, originally published in American Heritage, recounts the ongoing adventure Block and his wife undertook, criss-crossing the United States and parts of Canada in their quixotic and exotic quest to find every "village, hamlet, and wide place in the road named Buffalo." Other travel tales share space with a remembrance of his mother, odes to New York, a disquisition on pen names and book tours, and, well, no end of bent nails not worth straightening. Where else will you find "Raymond Chandler and the Brasher Doubloon," an assessment of that compelling writer from a numismatic standpoint? Where else can you read about Block's collection of old subway cars?Highly recommended.
"At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below
The near extinction of the North American buffalo, which in 1850 covered the mid-western plains by countless millions but which had been hunted to near-oblivion within thirty-five years, is one of the most exciting yet tragic stories of American history. Charles M. Robinson III dramatically relates this tale with both vivid, brilliantly researched text and with evocative photographs and illustrations. From the 18th century French fur traders, through the American industrial revolution with its demand for leather, and ending with the final sad hunts of the mid-1880s, Robinson eloquently and graphically describes all aspects of the hunt and the hunters, including the Indians for whom the destruction of their subsistence resulted in their own destruction. Here are the hunters such as Custer, Cody and the Mooars, and the rough and tumble towns that hides built--Adobe Walls, Buffalo Gap, Dodge City, and Fort Griffin. A wealth of photographs, including rare reproductions of the long-lost glass plates of photographer George Robertson taken during an 1874 hunt, and the photographs of L.A. Huffman in the early 1880s, illustrate this exciting volume of Western Americana.
How far will states and communities go to attract mega-projects that offer thousands of good jobs and tens of millions in tax revenue? Ezra Drake finds out when he's recruited to help Alabama lure a giant pharmaceutical plant to the state. Years ago, Ezra left Alabama for the Ivy League and then Germany. He's now a fast-riser at Silverman Bach in New York. A turn of events puts him back in Alabama as part of an elite team that lures mega-projects to energize the economy. Mercedes-Benz, Airbus, and other mega-projects had transformed the state. Alabama wants more. Call it "buffalo hunting" or "smokestack chasing," Ezra's team understands it's all about recruiting companies and talent to successfully compete in the modern economy. Instead of firearms, Ezra's team hunts with big data and persuasion. Competing against other cities and states is tough, but Ezra finds it even tougher battling forces that want to keep Alabama as it is and was, and not what it might become. Will Ezra and Alabama succeed in winning the pharma mega-project? Will Ezra find success, peace, and happiness in Alabama?
Read and relish some of America's greatest outdoor stories and characters in J.I. Merritt's The Last Buffalo Hunt & Other Stories. The stories in this anthology feature legendary Americans as well as some lesser-known figures in history, giving readers a unique first-hand glimpse into the past.
