Railroad Buffalo Hunts
The Transcontinental Railroad, championed by Abraham Lincoln even through the course of the Civil War, was completed in 1869. With the American coasts linked by the iron rails, a new form of American vacation was soon in place. Hunting for sustenance in the East had been largely replaced by hunting for sport, other than in the most rural areas. It was widely believed there that there was no sport hunting like buffalo hunting.
Spurs of track off the mainline were soon projecting north and south, at the same time that the US Army was attempting to control the Plains Indians and remove them to reservations. Control of the Natives’ food supply was part of this effort and the buffalo was the primary source of the Natives’ protein, as well as clothing, shelter, and many other uses.
It wasn’t long before the railroads, with still relatively few cross-country passengers, were offering hunting excursions by rail, endorsed by the army. Hunters from the East signed up to journey into the buffalo country, safe from Indian attack and the perils of the land, to hunt buffalo by train. Occasionally trains would stop to disembark hunters for a short period, picking them up again within days. Most often they did not.
Trains would depart from western stations – Fort Hayes, Kansas was a popular spot – and hunters would shoot from the windows of the trains at the passing herds, killing hundreds of thousands in a single winter. A hunter named Orlando Brown claimed to have killed 6,000 buffalo himself, all from the window of a passing train to the lifelong detriment of his hearing from the repeated firing of a .50 caliber rifle in an enclosed space.
The buffalo hunts were advertised in Eastern papers in cities which were enamored with the tales of the West. Penny papers and dime novels added to the mystique and attracted many an eastern city dweller to a visit to the old West while on vacation from his mundane job in the East. According to figures published by the US Government, by the end of the 19th century, only three hundred buffalo survived in the wild.