On the subject of buffalo hunting

[Wolfdog91]

So looking into older rifles and casting this my interest has been peaked. Anyone happen to have any info regarding the the more.... intimate details of how the old buffalo hunters worked back in the day ? Favorite calibers , what alloys they prefered , what ranges where short , what where long, prefered bullet designs, what was considered acceptable accuracy?
Would also be interested in similar dealing with other game from that eras perspective. Deer elk and the like. Any reading recommendations ? Preferably something that gets into the nitty gritty details

[M-Tecs]

The best accounts I have read were in the Black Powder Cartridge News https://www.blackpowdercartridge.com/

Something you see BPCN collections for sale at a reasonable price.

[memtb]

I know that some were shot at fairly long ranges. As the Buffalo became more scarce, and shots were getting longer.....Sharpe’s eventually brought out the 50-140, which I think was the largest cartridge used! The must have been quite a cartridge in it’s day! memtb

[cwtebay]

I have to say that I have read anything and everything about the buff hunters since first reading "The Thundering Herd" as a boy. I think Chuck Hawkes does an excellent job of exploring things as a take off point.
https://www.chuckhawks.com/buffalo_cartridges.htm

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[FLINTNFIRE]

Are you talking about?
290537

In the older days the Germans came to hunt in South Africa and brought their 9.3x62 Mauser rifles hunting Cape buffalo. It became a very popular caliber here. Today the minimum caliber for buffalo is the .375 H&H. My .416 Rigby do the job.

No , not cape buffalo , but the American Bison , and the hide hunting , I have 4 Sharps replicas , all Pedersoli with a Shiloh on order , the thundering herd by Zane Grey, read it when I was young several times .

[405grain]

The buffalo hunts were both romanticized and controversial. Of the various "buffalo rifles" used during that period, the most famous today would be the model 1874 Sharps. Many different cartridges, most obsolete now, were employed during those hunts. Of all those cartridges the one which has endured the most is the 45-70 Government. This was, and still is an excellent cartridge. Colorful characters and legends of the old west were participants in these hunts, and many stories are still told of their adventures. The North American bison is an impressive creature, and we are fortunate that it's numbers have been brought back from near extinction. It is the cause of that near extinction that is the controversy.

Was there an enormous demand for buffalo hides; so much so that it required the slaughter of millions of buffalo? There certainly wasn't a huge demand for buffalo meat, as most of it was left to rot on the prairie. The bones were ground up and used as fertilizer. But those bones were gathered up from the buffalo skeletons after the meat had rotted away. There were other sources of fertilizer, but the bones were basically free for the taking. So if there wasn't an economic driver based on buffalo products, why was buffalo hunting lucrative? Because it was an organized plan by the federal government to deprive the native American population of their primary food source in order to starve them into submitting to the reservation system.

At the end of the Civil war there were still buffalo herds the size of whole counties, but by the mid 1880's those vast herds had been almost wiped out. There are lessons to be learned here. Conservation and respect for wildlife are important if we want to preserve the wild places and creatures that we all enjoy. Hunters should harvest meat in a way that is sustainable, and responsible. It's up to today's hunters to be good stewards of the environment.

The native Americans got a raw deal. I read somewhere that when Columbus landed on Hispaniola there were an estimated 33 million native Americans living in North America. That same article said that in 1900 there were only 100,000 Indians still living in the United States. They had lived here since the ice age, but were only given the right to vote in 1905. I'm glad that their culture wasn't lost forever, and have learned some insightful wisdom from Native American friends. I am proud that my grandfather was full blood Cherokee.

All this said, if you ever get the chance to hunt a buffalo, it would be a most memorable and enjoyable hunt if you get the opportunity to do it with a large bore single shot that's representative of that colorful age of cowboys, the ending of the wild west, and the very beginning of the industrial age.

[Edward]

33 million ? Read some where ? Sounds like an estimate of conjecture ( just sayin) . I didn't know they took head counts back then , sounds like another government program ! /Ed

[smithnframe]

It’s suggested by the “experts “ that you start out with a 45/70 because of the availability of components! When I got my 44/77 Sharps about 2 years ago I had trouble getting everything I needed during the 1st year of the pandemic. I check the various handloading component suppliers and 45/70 stuff seems to be coming back. Good luck!

[starnbar]

Contrary to popular book claims the bison succumbed to the diseases brought by the settlers and the oxen, cattle, and sheep they brought with them. The bison had no immunity to this invasion neither did the native Americans this was not just a U.S. issue as the british brought plenty of disease to Hawaii and other island nations killing more native people than all their guns did.

[country gent]

From what I have read the Buffalo "Hunters" and crews were more business than hunting. The shooters would set up in hides and take the number of animals the Skinners could handle in the day. Once the shooters had them sown then they went to filling meat contracts for the forts and towns. There were govt programs that gave 45-70 ammo to the hunters, this was used as is or disassembled and used to load the longer cartridges.

While hides and tongues were popular, the bigger push was from the rail roads and government. The herds crossing track would stop or derail trains. The buffalo was the Indians general store supplying them with food housing clothes. Eradicating the buffalo made them dependent on the government for basic needs.

[koger]

PM sent.

[Thumbcocker]

I have read that sometimes the military gave free .45-70 ammo to hide hunters. Cut off the Indians food supply.

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[Thumbcocker]

Buffalo hide made good industrial belting. The tounges were pickled and sold. Eventually rhe bones were ground and sold for fertilizer.

The history of America is "anything for a buck"

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[txbirdman]

Just read a very interesting book on the history of the Comanche Indians, who were the dominant tribe of the southern plains. They pretty much dominated this area and pushed other tribes out. I found it interesting that once they discovered the value in Buffalo hides they got in on the game also. Apparently on average a family unit would consume 6 animals per year but once they learned they were good for trade material they killed an average of about 40 animals. There was an excerpt in the book where it was reported by a soldier that they encountered a single herd that spanned 50 miles long and 25 miles wide. According to this book the demise of the Comanche’s was mostly due to the government soldiers killing their horses. The amount of grass consumed by these massive herds was viewed as a resource put to better use by the large ranching operations that were developing at that time also. So maybe it wasn’t just one but many things that led to the elimination of the vast herds Btw the book was Empire of the Comanche Moon.

[Thumbcocker]

I read a biography of a guy who clerks at Fort McKenzie. According to him the Sioux treated the Buffalo as cash on the hoof as well


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[veeman]

I have a real hard time believing a herd could be 50 miles long and 25 miles wide. No prairie could support that amount of animals. Even with constant moving, grass don't grow that fast.

[cwtebay]

Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.” – General Philip Sheridan

I do not find the astounding numbers historically reported as being unbelievable. With 45 million cattle being raised in the top 10 cattle producing states, and lawn grass is listed as a significant crop in most states - it is quite reasonable to think of grasslands supporting those herds when unencumbered by the current landscape.
The comment concerning disease spread is simply untrue and unfounded in history.

I do of course know about the "big 50" and the various other cartridges of the day being used with apparent great success. The "stands" of buffalo numbering in the hundreds had to be an incredible opportunity for those fellas to test both their marksmanship and determine which rifle / cartridge combination worked best for them in their particular area.
Just a fascinating topic - regardless of current political or personal views.https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20211020/86fd4f14a8b54ce8aa6defd47827a9cb.jpg

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[swamp]

In regards the 50-140. I have a rolling block replica in that calibre. In reading about, it was introduced too late for the hunts. No records of any Sharps sold in that calibre. I use a 650 gr. for regular loads and the Lyman 515141 for light loads.

swamp

[popper]

The comment concerning disease spread is simply untrue and unfounded in history.
Nope. Bison herds were on the decline by the early 1800s. As usual, Gov. officials know not much. Mississippian culture peoples were estimated to be several million and DISAPEARED (from disease of their OWN). Most of the Am. Indians that we know were from the northeast tribes that moved when the Europeans came. South Indians were basically from Mexico, that claimed most of the southwest US. Northern plains tribes mostly hunted deer and elk as they had few weapons to take bison. Pretty much the same for the southwestern. They took mostly calves by driving herds into ravines or off cliffs. Like everyone, take the easy pickings.
Interesting, lots of work.
https://www.bisoncentre.com/resources/resource-library/advanced-bison-information-producers/dont-be-disappointed-some-tips-preparing-bison-hides/

[M-Tecs]

The records still available as to the number of cartridge shipped west and the number of hides shipped east are still available today. The numbers or percentage killed would not have accounted for the rapid decline of the population based on modern game management techniques.

Tick fever was one reason https://www.grunge.com/217892/the-real-reason-buffalo-almost-went-extinct/
A pathologist, Dr. Rudolph W. Koucky, examined buffalo remains in 1926. "Obviously, the entire herd had been sick," he writes in the North Dakota History: Journal of the Great Plains. "It is, in fact, my firm belief that the several million buffalo died from disease." The disease: tick fever, borne by Texas cattle driven north to ranches on the Great Plains. Wandering, grazing cattle had ample opportunity to interact with wild buffalo, especially in Montana, where the die-off was first noticed. Just as Native Americans had no resistance to European disease, buffalo had no immunity to tick fever. Bullets had an impact, but it was fever that was killing the beast. "This concept of extermination by disease is much more plausible than the unsupported assumption that the buffalo were destroyed by hunters," wrote Dr. Koucky.


Brucellosis causes still births after the initial infection and is thought to be the main cause of the near extinction.

[Gewehr-Guy]

AS for good books on the subject, I highly recommend any of the books written by Miles Gilbert, a favorite is " Getting A Stand", and a series he co-authored called the Encyclopedia of Buffalo Hunters and Skinners. Also a good one is The Buffalo Harvest by Frank Mayer and Charles Roth.

The Encyclopedia of hunters and skinners are especially good reading, but a little expensive. Maybe some of you will find some reference to a long lost relative mentioned in this series of books.

As to popular calibers, I think lots were shot with the common Civil War .58 rifle, and remember Buffalo Bill Cody used his 1866 Springfield .50-70 to do all his killing. He named his rifle Lucretia Borgia? It still exists missing part of the buttstock.

[M-Tecs]

https://www.oldonesdream.com/my-blog/2015/02/the-near-extinction-of-the-american-bison-do-the-math.html

The Near Extinction Of The American Bison: Do The Math (Rev. 11/9/2015)
What Really Caused the Near Extinction of the American Bison
In Hay Camp at Shade Ranch in the Little Missouri Grasslands near Medora, North Dakota, in 2013 we spoke of “Texas Tick Fever”. It had been mentioned in a program, perhaps on the History Channel, which described the devastation brought by the disease to the domestic cattle herds in the northern plains in the 1800s. Kim Shade commented that some say that this disease is what accomplished the virtual extinction of the American Bison. There is evidence to support that theory. In 1983, a pathologist, Dr. Rudolph W. Koucky *(1), published a paper concluding that the last 4 million American Bison (the remainder of the northern herd), succumbed in 1882 to disease, not bullets.

The Timeline
The American Bison ranged from Northern Mexico to Southern Canada and is variously estimated to have numbered from 30 million to more than 100 million animals. Calculations based on the “carrying capacity” of the land area set the total herd size at around 30 to 60 million. Many who actually saw the great herds from Texas to the Great Plains believe 30 million to be too conservative. The “Timeline of the American Bison” as recorded by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (no more credible than other sources) is a source of the following benchmarks:

In the 1500s an estimated 30 to 60 million Bison were living in North America
From 1700 to 1820, European Americans settled the country, moving westward from the east coast. They brought changes to native habitat through plowing and farming, and the introduction of cattle diseases and grazing competition. Native Americans tribes, forced off of their lands to the east, brought horses and guns to the Great Plains which increased pressure on the bison.
1830: organized hunting of the great herds began.
1840: buffalo had disappeared east of the Mississippi and west of the Rocky Mountains
In the 1860s, railroads built across the Great Plains divided the bison into two main herds - the southern and the northern. Many bison were killed to feed the railway crews and Army posts. During this time, Buffalo Bill Cody gained fame as a wholesale buffalo killer.
By 1877 the southern herd had been exterminated.
By 1880, slaughter of the northern herd had begun.
By 1884 there were approximately 325 wild American Bison in the United States, including 25 in Yellowstone National Park.
Today there are over 250,000 bison in the United States; of which, reportedly less than 10,000 individuals are genetically pure, including around 4,500 in Yellowstone National Park.


IMG 0083

Pure Bison Herd, Wind Cave National Park, Custer, SD June 2010 - Photo by OldOnesDream



The larger environmental context for the decline of the buffalo was set by climate, drought, disease, fire, horses, cattle, barbed wire, ranchers, railroads, market hunters, and so on. It was driven for the most part by the commodification of the buffalo — tongues, hides, and other parts as highly desired commodities in a greatly expanding marketplace. - Shepard Krech III, Buffalo Tales: The Near-Extermination of the American Bison, Brown University National Humanities Center



The Math

The Horse.
Until the early 1500s when the Spanish horses arrived in the West, the American Bison was the only large herbivore competing for food, and had no serious predator accept hunter gatherer native americans on foot, and wolves that primarily served to remove the sick and injured from the herd. The horse changed that dynamic. Horses reproduce rapidly and consume huge quantities of grass and water. Horses became the Native American currency and so huge herds were accumulated by them as wealth, which required large areas of rangeland (for food and water) - all at the expense of the American Bison.

The Native Americans
The buffalo was revered by the Native Americans. That Tatanka was conserved by them is the conventional wisdom but in reality they slaughtered the buffalo in great numbers by driving them over cliffs, and by the use of prairie fire. This slaughter may have expanded once the Native Americans became horsed.

Nature
One of the Bison’s enemies was his own small sharp hoofs which could cause them to become immobilized in mud or snow, which made them easy game for hunters, and which occasionally resulted in starvation of large numbers.

It was the nature of the bison herds to graze into the wind.

One of the Sioux who fled to Canada with Sitting Bull told the author the story of a great herd lost because unseasonably soft northern winds had drawn them far into the frozen lands of upper Canada one fall, into the face of the arctic winter. The entire herd starved and froze there, leaving their bones to bleach … until the whole region was white as with the snows in which the buffaloes had died. How many were lost? “Ahh-h, it was long ago, and the dead ones were very many,” the old Indian replied. “Enough to feed all the women and children a long, long time, Perhaps this many —“ touching his two finger-spread hands at the thumbs, moving them from the right shoulder left and downward for the sign of a hundred. Then instead of counting the number of hundreds on the backs of the fingers he made the sign again, one hundred hundred, and then once more. One hundred times one hundred hundred — a million. “Very, very many,” he said softly, as to himself. - Mari Sandoz, The Buffalo Hunters, (Hastings House, NY, 1954), page 45-46.

Bison Female Harvest
Both the Native Americans and the European Americans selectively killed Bison cows because of the superiority of the female hides both for domestic use and for the market. In the rare cases when the meat was actually used, the meat of the cow, particularly that of the fetus, was considered to be superior. It is obvious that the selective killing of females would exert extra pressure on population by artificially decreasing the number of reproducing animals. Do the math.

Organized Hunting
The organized hunting for hides and tongues that began before 1850 resulted in the killing of many millions of bison each year. Mari Sandoz grew up on the Niobrara River in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and listened to the stories of the Old Ones who came to her fathers store from the Rose Bud and Pine Ridge reservations. Her books are good records of interviews with the Sioux. She states that by the 1850s, the Native Americans probably killed around 3.5 million bison each year for the needs of their own population of around 250,000 and the robes they traded. That number seems high. Native Americans have been known to exaggerate when describing their own activities.

U. S. War Department Policy
There is the matter of the U. S. Government policy of trying to force the Native Americans onto the reservations by destroying their food supply, similiar to the tactic used so successfully by General William Tecumseh Sherman just a few years earlier against the Confederate States of America. Although there was never a documented U. S. War Department policy of extermination of the bison, that goal was broadly spoken of among government officials and endorsed by General Phillip H. Sheridan*(2).

Fire
The Native Americans used fire as a management tool which benefitted the land and the wildlife and they used it to enhance the harvest of bison. The U. S. Department of War used fire as well. According to Mari Sandoz, in January 1865, fires were set, on the orders of Brigadier General Robert B. Mitchell, “… at close intervals all along the line of the Platte and the South Fork, from Kearney in middle Nebraska to the foothills of the Rockies near Denver — better than four hundred and thirty miles.” Sandoz further relates that the fire burned southward for three days, destroying millions of creatures, “… all the game dead or driven from an area half again as large as all of New England.” No Native Americans were killed. They backfired around their camps and horse herds. Many European American settlers along the east were wiped out, their lives saved by their dugout homes, but their livestock killed by the fire. A few greenhorn buffalo hunters perished. I have not seen an estimate of how many bison were killed. Do the math for the geographic area consumed— there must have been millions of bison exterminated?

The Railroads
The bison was the enemy of the railroads because the great herds could derail the relatively lightweight engines and cars of the day, and because the seemingly endless masses of bison moving across the tracks would delay the scheduled arrivals and departures of the trains. The railroad owners organized hunting trips for “sportsmen” who would shoot bison from the comfort of the catered railroad cars. The railroad also hired buffalo hunters to kill bison to feed the huge crews of railroad construction workers during the time of the great railroad building push that occurred in the 1860s over multiple routes from the Mississippi River to the West Coast.

Disease
Sandoz states “… there was apparently no disease on all the continent that threatened the buffalo in any number.” That is debatable but certainly was no longer true once the European Americans arrived with their domestic cattle.

In 1825, a “murrain” wiped out all of the hoofed animals in eastern Nebraska resulting in the starvation of some Native Americans in the area, and again in 1858 all of the hoofed animals along the trails between Fort Laramie and Bridger died. Sierra Stoneberg-Holt, Phd., a rancher and scientist in Montana says “…the die-offs in Nebraska seem to match anthrax, and there is a strain of anthrax that was native to that area since about the Pleistocene.”

Yellowstone Kelly, a trapper, wrote this account circa 1867:

Our course led over rolling prairie when we crossed a high and level plain which extended for many miles. The plain was covered with a thin coating of ice, and on all sides as far as the eye could reach was dotted with bodies of dead buffaloes. These animals were in good condition and bore no mark of bullet or arrow wounds. The cause of their death was a mystery to us. As we marched over the plain toward the valley of the Cheyenne, the appearance of so many carcasses scattered around made a strong impression on my mind, perhaps because they were the first buffaloes I had ever seen.

Division of the Herd
The railroads and wagon trains, and the disease epidemics that wiped out the herds along the Platte River, divided the Bison and segregated the Northern and Southern Herds. By 1880, all that remained was the Northern Herd which ranged Montana and Canada and small parts of the Dakotas and Wyoming. Estimates were that the Northern Herd numbered four million animals. By 1884, the buffalo were finished, they were gone.

Cattle Drives and Tick Fever
After the Civil War, ranches were created in Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming, largely with Texas cattle - cattle no doubt carrying “tick fever”. There were reported instances of wagon trains of settlers headed west having their oxen become ill and die while traveling through this country.

E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott in his 1939 memoir, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, tells of driving the first Texas cattle to Montana in 1880. He later describes the evidence he saw of slaughter of the Buffalo and deplored how the range was covered with carcasses on which the hide remained. He may not have fully realized what he was seeing.

Forty years later, while hunting on the former northern buffalo range, the pathologist Rudolph W. Koucky, M.D., saw buffalo skeletons “… arranged much like a herd of cattle lying on a meadow.” As a pathologist, he took the same scene that “Teddy Blue” had seen and interpreted it in the light of math and science. He could find no suggestion that the animals had been killed and wrote “They had simply laid down and died. … That scene has had considerable influence on my interpretation of the disappearance of the buffalo. It is, in fact, my firm belief that the several million buffalo died from disease.”*(1) page 28

"In 1881 and 1882 disaster struck the northern herd. The four million animals, together with their anticipated 500,000 annual offspring, disappeared in those two years”. *(1) page 25

= (Stress)
Because all of the hunters involved, Native and European, preferred the hides and the meat of younger female bison; there was the counter productive pressure of gender imbalance in the great herds. Sandoz says that: “… by 1867 there were approximately 9 or 10 bulls to every cow.” That is a strong statement. If we are to believe that, and if that trend continued, and there is no reason to think otherwise, then the last four million American Bison may have been almost all bulls. Imagine the level of stress in that herd. Do the reproductive math. That would have been just about the end of line for the last four million in the northern herd.

1882: The End of the Line
There is data and there is data and there is math and there is math and much of it is in conflict in the many tellings of the story of the American Bison. There is exaggeration, contradiction, and rearrangement of mostly incomplete data. There is much to read about and many people to trust or not. There is, however, a strong case to be made that the last 4 million bison and their “anticipated 500,000 annual offspring” were not killed by hunters with horses, wagons, knives, single shot hunting rifles, and black powder ammunition in a land with no roads, all in a period of two years. Do the math, but by all means read the Koucky article.

[FLINTNFIRE]

Disease did have a large part in the decline , as to meat there was no refrigeration / cold storage and the meat was to far from population centers , demand for the hides and to take away the indians supply source , go read some of the muzzle loading build books , some have a lot of information on trade goods and treaty , the noble indian was wiping out the fur bearing animals and deer and such for what he got in the way of trade goods .

Oh worked for a native corp. in Alaska cut the old growth right into the salmon spawning beds and creeks and log it to the shoreline , get the best we do not worry about the rest , sorry stewardship , but not unlike so many business do , the greener they claim to be the more skeletons behind the stump .

[lar45]

M techs, very informative post.

[gunseller]

The 50/140 came Long after the buffalo were gone. The big 50 was the 50/90. After the first few years of commercial shooting. The 45/70 became the most used. As stated the army gave out ammo by the case. This eliminated the cost of buying ammo or reloading supplies. The original ammo I have is soft lead. Anyway I can easily mark it with a thumb nail.the orginal.45/70 ammo I have disassembled had a 500 grain bullet, a card wad and about 70 grains of what looked like 1F powder. My load that duplicates that load in a modern case. Modern cases have less internal space than the old cases. I load 63 grains of 2F powder a wad and a 500 grain powder. My bullets are cast out of WW.
STEVE

[gunseller]

The 50/140 came Long after the buffalo were gone. The big 50 was the 50/90. After the first few years of commercial shooting. The 45/70 became the most used. As stated the army gave out ammo by the case. This eliminated the cost of buying ammo or reloading supplies. The original ammo I have is soft lead. Anyway I can easily mark it with a thumb nail.the orginal.45/70 ammo I have disassembled had a 500 grain bullet, a card wad and about 70 grains of what looked like 1F powder. My load that duplicates that load in a modern case. Modern cases have less internal space than the old cases. I load 63 grains of 2F powder a wad and a 500 grain bullet. My bullets are cast out of WW.
STEVE

[FLINTNFIRE]

There was a Dillon blue press article years ago talked about the 50-70 as it was sold as surplus as probably being one of the most used as it was a lot cheaper to buy it and the ammo .

[waksupi]

A friend who has shot over 60 buffalo says the .50-90 is the best killer he has used.

[warren5421]

Buffalo Bill's rifle was a 50-70 Trapdoor. A lot of buff guns were trapdoor 50-70's. Don't have my books with me but Uncle Sam passed out obsoleted trapdoors, when going to the .45-70, and 100 rounds of ammo to anyone that wanted to hunt buffalo. Along with disease this had more to do with killing off the buffalo than than Sharps, Winchester, Henry, and Marlin.

[sharps4590]

If you can find a copy at a reasonable price "The Buffalo Harvest" by Frank Mayer is a very good, if short read. He was "the real deal" and writes at some length about his rifles. It's been debated and Mayer has been called a liar by many but later research has pretty much proven, to my satisfaction, he was an honest man and that the scoffers merely scratched the surface from a limited, modern base of knowledge.

I have a paperback copy of the book and it's less than a hundred pages. I don't remember where I bought it but it was not expensive, less than $20.00. The only copy I could find for sale was a couple hardbacks, one new and the other used....and both ridiculously expensive, $800 to $1000. There has to be some inexpensive copies out there, I just couldn't find them.

[mattri]

https://shilohrifle.com/accessories/books/the-buffalo-harvest/

[memtb]

I guess that I’m a victim of the “fake news”! Many years ago I read a magazine article, don’t remember which magazine or the writer, if I recall correctly, the author stated that the 50-140 can out at the very end of the buffalo hunting Either he was incorrect or my memory is “lying” to me!

Anyway, I apologize for my transgression! memtb

[M-Tecs]

I guess that I’m a victim of the “fake news”! Many years ago I read a magazine article, don’t remember which magazine or the writer, if I recall correctly, the author stated that the 50-140 can out at the very end of the buffalo hunting Either he was incorrect or my memory is “lying” to me!

Anyway, I apologize for my transgression! memtb

The .50-140 Sharps rifle cartridge is a black-powder cartridge that was introduced in 1884 as a big game hunting round.[1] It is believed to have been introduced for the Sharps-Borchardt Model 1878 rifle.[2] The cartridge is very similar to the .500 Black Powder Express.[3]

This round was introduced by Winchester 3 years after the Sharps Rifle Company closed its doors in 1881. It is similar to, though larger than, the .50-90 Sharps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50-140_Sharps

it appears the last commercial hunting was in 1882

https://allaboutbison.com/bison-in-history/bison-timeline/

[FLINTNFIRE]

Heck I got a 40-90 sharps straight , made the offer on t before doing brass research , stood by my word , had to reblue the barrel as it was not smoothed down all the way and it had been some form of quick blue so there were bare spots where it was not degreased and the blue was a purple color in other areas .

Story was the guy bought it from Dixie when they had a batch of Pedersolis in that the chambers or barrels were off , so they sold the actions , he had it barreled to 40-90ss and used it in a local clubs shoots , I picked up 60 pieces of brass to go along with the 10 or so he had and the CH4D dies and a Saeco mold , I like it and would be hard pressed to decide which rifle to hunt buffalo with .

Yes my 40-90ss came out after Sharps closed to from what I read , and having a 50-90 all I can say is it makes the 45-70 look small , no wish for anything bigger .

[HD.375]

Awesome Thread, Thanks for the history lesson

[starnbar]

https://www.oldonesdream.com/my-blog/2015/02/the-near-extinction-of-the-american-bison-do-the-math.html

The Near Extinction Of The American Bison: Do The Math (Rev. 11/9/2015)
What Really Caused the Near Extinction of the American Bison
In Hay Camp at Shade Ranch in the Little Missouri Grasslands near Medora, North Dakota, in 2013 we spoke of “Texas Tick Fever”. It had been mentioned in a program, perhaps on the History Channel, which described the devastation brought by the disease to the domestic cattle herds in the northern plains in the 1800s. Kim Shade commented that some say that this disease is what accomplished the virtual extinction of the American Bison. There is evidence to support that theory. In 1983, a pathologist, Dr. Rudolph W. Koucky *(1), published a paper concluding that the last 4 million American Bison (the remainder of the northern herd), succumbed in 1882 to disease, not bullets.

The Timeline
The American Bison ranged from Northern Mexico to Southern Canada and is variously estimated to have numbered from 30 million to more than 100 million animals. Calculations based on the “carrying capacity” of the land area set the total herd size at around 30 to 60 million. Many who actually saw the great herds from Texas to the Great Plains believe 30 million to be too conservative. The “Timeline of the American Bison” as recorded by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service (no more credible than other sources) is a source of the following benchmarks:

In the 1500s an estimated 30 to 60 million Bison were living in North America
From 1700 to 1820, European Americans settled the country, moving westward from the east coast. They brought changes to native habitat through plowing and farming, and the introduction of cattle diseases and grazing competition. Native Americans tribes, forced off of their lands to the east, brought horses and guns to the Great Plains which increased pressure on the bison.
1830: organized hunting of the great herds began.
1840: buffalo had disappeared east of the Mississippi and west of the Rocky Mountains
In the 1860s, railroads built across the Great Plains divided the bison into two main herds - the southern and the northern. Many bison were killed to feed the railway crews and Army posts. During this time, Buffalo Bill Cody gained fame as a wholesale buffalo killer.
By 1877 the southern herd had been exterminated.
By 1880, slaughter of the northern herd had begun.
By 1884 there were approximately 325 wild American Bison in the United States, including 25 in Yellowstone National Park.
Today there are over 250,000 bison in the United States; of which, reportedly less than 10,000 individuals are genetically pure, including around 4,500 in Yellowstone National Park.


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Pure Bison Herd, Wind Cave National Park, Custer, SD June 2010 - Photo by OldOnesDream



The larger environmental context for the decline of the buffalo was set by climate, drought, disease, fire, horses, cattle, barbed wire, ranchers, railroads, market hunters, and so on. It was driven for the most part by the commodification of the buffalo — tongues, hides, and other parts as highly desired commodities in a greatly expanding marketplace. - Shepard Krech III, Buffalo Tales: The Near-Extermination of the American Bison, Brown University National Humanities Center



The Math

The Horse.
Until the early 1500s when the Spanish horses arrived in the West, the American Bison was the only large herbivore competing for food, and had no serious predator accept hunter gatherer native americans on foot, and wolves that primarily served to remove the sick and injured from the herd. The horse changed that dynamic. Horses reproduce rapidly and consume huge quantities of grass and water. Horses became the Native American currency and so huge herds were accumulated by them as wealth, which required large areas of rangeland (for food and water) - all at the expense of the American Bison.

The Native Americans
The buffalo was revered by the Native Americans. That Tatanka was conserved by them is the conventional wisdom but in reality they slaughtered the buffalo in great numbers by driving them over cliffs, and by the use of prairie fire. This slaughter may have expanded once the Native Americans became horsed.

Nature
One of the Bison’s enemies was his own small sharp hoofs which could cause them to become immobilized in mud or snow, which made them easy game for hunters, and which occasionally resulted in starvation of large numbers.

It was the nature of the bison herds to graze into the wind.

One of the Sioux who fled to Canada with Sitting Bull told the author the story of a great herd lost because unseasonably soft northern winds had drawn them far into the frozen lands of upper Canada one fall, into the face of the arctic winter. The entire herd starved and froze there, leaving their bones to bleach … until the whole region was white as with the snows in which the buffaloes had died. How many were lost? “Ahh-h, it was long ago, and the dead ones were very many,” the old Indian replied. “Enough to feed all the women and children a long, long time, Perhaps this many —“ touching his two finger-spread hands at the thumbs, moving them from the right shoulder left and downward for the sign of a hundred. Then instead of counting the number of hundreds on the backs of the fingers he made the sign again, one hundred hundred, and then once more. One hundred times one hundred hundred — a million. “Very, very many,” he said softly, as to himself. - Mari Sandoz, The Buffalo Hunters, (Hastings House, NY, 1954), page 45-46.

Bison Female Harvest
Both the Native Americans and the European Americans selectively killed Bison cows because of the superiority of the female hides both for domestic use and for the market. In the rare cases when the meat was actually used, the meat of the cow, particularly that of the fetus, was considered to be superior. It is obvious that the selective killing of females would exert extra pressure on population by artificially decreasing the number of reproducing animals. Do the math.

Organized Hunting
The organized hunting for hides and tongues that began before 1850 resulted in the killing of many millions of bison each year. Mari Sandoz grew up on the Niobrara River in the Sand Hills of Nebraska and listened to the stories of the Old Ones who came to her fathers store from the Rose Bud and Pine Ridge reservations. Her books are good records of interviews with the Sioux. She states that by the 1850s, the Native Americans probably killed around 3.5 million bison each year for the needs of their own population of around 250,000 and the robes they traded. That number seems high. Native Americans have been known to exaggerate when describing their own activities.

U. S. War Department Policy
There is the matter of the U. S. Government policy of trying to force the Native Americans onto the reservations by destroying their food supply, similiar to the tactic used so successfully by General William Tecumseh Sherman just a few years earlier against the Confederate States of America. Although there was never a documented U. S. War Department policy of extermination of the bison, that goal was broadly spoken of among government officials and endorsed by General Phillip H. Sheridan*(2).

Fire
The Native Americans used fire as a management tool which benefitted the land and the wildlife and they used it to enhance the harvest of bison. The U. S. Department of War used fire as well. According to Mari Sandoz, in January 1865, fires were set, on the orders of Brigadier General Robert B. Mitchell, “… at close intervals all along the line of the Platte and the South Fork, from Kearney in middle Nebraska to the foothills of the Rockies near Denver — better than four hundred and thirty miles.” Sandoz further relates that the fire burned southward for three days, destroying millions of creatures, “… all the game dead or driven from an area half again as large as all of New England.” No Native Americans were killed. They backfired around their camps and horse herds. Many European American settlers along the east were wiped out, their lives saved by their dugout homes, but their livestock killed by the fire. A few greenhorn buffalo hunters perished. I have not seen an estimate of how many bison were killed. Do the math for the geographic area consumed— there must have been millions of bison exterminated?

The Railroads
The bison was the enemy of the railroads because the great herds could derail the relatively lightweight engines and cars of the day, and because the seemingly endless masses of bison moving across the tracks would delay the scheduled arrivals and departures of the trains. The railroad owners organized hunting trips for “sportsmen” who would shoot bison from the comfort of the catered railroad cars. The railroad also hired buffalo hunters to kill bison to feed the huge crews of railroad construction workers during the time of the great railroad building push that occurred in the 1860s over multiple routes from the Mississippi River to the West Coast.

Disease
Sandoz states “… there was apparently no disease on all the continent that threatened the buffalo in any number.” That is debatable but certainly was no longer true once the European Americans arrived with their domestic cattle.

In 1825, a “murrain” wiped out all of the hoofed animals in eastern Nebraska resulting in the starvation of some Native Americans in the area, and again in 1858 all of the hoofed animals along the trails between Fort Laramie and Bridger died. Sierra Stoneberg-Holt, Phd., a rancher and scientist in Montana says “…the die-offs in Nebraska seem to match anthrax, and there is a strain of anthrax that was native to that area since about the Pleistocene.”

Yellowstone Kelly, a trapper, wrote this account circa 1867:

Our course led over rolling prairie when we crossed a high and level plain which extended for many miles. The plain was covered with a thin coating of ice, and on all sides as far as the eye could reach was dotted with bodies of dead buffaloes. These animals were in good condition and bore no mark of bullet or arrow wounds. The cause of their death was a mystery to us. As we marched over the plain toward the valley of the Cheyenne, the appearance of so many carcasses scattered around made a strong impression on my mind, perhaps because they were the first buffaloes I had ever seen.

Division of the Herd
The railroads and wagon trains, and the disease epidemics that wiped out the herds along the Platte River, divided the Bison and segregated the Northern and Southern Herds. By 1880, all that remained was the Northern Herd which ranged Montana and Canada and small parts of the Dakotas and Wyoming. Estimates were that the Northern Herd numbered four million animals. By 1884, the buffalo were finished, they were gone.

Cattle Drives and Tick Fever
After the Civil War, ranches were created in Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming, largely with Texas cattle - cattle no doubt carrying “tick fever”. There were reported instances of wagon trains of settlers headed west having their oxen become ill and die while traveling through this country.

E. C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott in his 1939 memoir, We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, tells of driving the first Texas cattle to Montana in 1880. He later describes the evidence he saw of slaughter of the Buffalo and deplored how the range was covered with carcasses on which the hide remained. He may not have fully realized what he was seeing.

Forty years later, while hunting on the former northern buffalo range, the pathologist Rudolph W. Koucky, M.D., saw buffalo skeletons “… arranged much like a herd of cattle lying on a meadow.” As a pathologist, he took the same scene that “Teddy Blue” had seen and interpreted it in the light of math and science. He could find no suggestion that the animals had been killed and wrote “They had simply laid down and died. … That scene has had considerable influence on my interpretation of the disappearance of the buffalo. It is, in fact, my firm belief that the several million buffalo died from disease.”*(1) page 28

"In 1881 and 1882 disaster struck the northern herd. The four million animals, together with their anticipated 500,000 annual offspring, disappeared in those two years”. *(1) page 25

= (Stress)
Because all of the hunters involved, Native and European, preferred the hides and the meat of younger female bison; there was the counter productive pressure of gender imbalance in the great herds. Sandoz says that: “… by 1867 there were approximately 9 or 10 bulls to every cow.” That is a strong statement. If we are to believe that, and if that trend continued, and there is no reason to think otherwise, then the last four million American Bison may have been almost all bulls. Imagine the level of stress in that herd. Do the reproductive math. That would have been just about the end of line for the last four million in the northern herd.

1882: The End of the Line
There is data and there is data and there is math and there is math and much of it is in conflict in the many tellings of the story of the American Bison. There is exaggeration, contradiction, and rearrangement of mostly incomplete data. There is much to read about and many people to trust or not. There is, however, a strong case to be made that the last 4 million bison and their “anticipated 500,000 annual offspring” were not killed by hunters with horses, wagons, knives, single shot hunting rifles, and black powder ammunition in a land with no roads, all in a period of two years. Do the math, but by all means read the Koucky article.

My grand father who was born in 1860 told me the story of the fate of the buffalo and the plains Indian when I was a young lad. I have no doubt of what he told me as he grew up at that time he was a US Deputy Marshall in the Territory saw himself what happened met some very interesting people too he passed in 1957 he told me men and women were as hard as cut nails back in them days.

[Dan O]

The Sharps rifles were not chambered in the 3 1/4 cartridges ie: 45-120 & 50-140. The big fifty is the 50-90 aka 50 2.5 and the biggest 45 chambered by Sharps was the 45-110 aka 45 2 7/8's. Other chamberings were the 45 2.1 aka 45-70, 45 2.4 aka 45-90 & 45 2.6 aka 45-100 also the 50-70 Govt. case length is 1.747. Currently Starline has both 50-70 & 50-90 in stock but none of the 45's.
Hope this info helps.
Dan

[megasupermagnum]

My grand father who was born in 1860 told me the story of the fate of the buffalo and the plains Indian when I was a young lad. I have no doubt of what he told me as he grew up at that time he was a US Deputy Marshall in the Territory saw himself what happened met some very interesting people too he passed in 1957 he told me men and women were as hard as cut nails back in them days.

1860?!:shock: Did he and your dad have kids when they were old men, or are you just old enough to remember when dirt was new?:p

[M-Tecs]

My grand father who was born in 1860 told me the story of the fate of the buffalo and the plains Indian when I was a young lad. I have no doubt of what he told me as he grew up at that time he was a US Deputy Marshall in the Territory saw himself what happened met some very interesting people too he passed in 1957 he told me men and women were as hard as cut nails back in them days.

My dad was born in 1923. He is still living alone and sharp as a tack. He is one of eleven born in a 2 room sod house. He is from tough stock. I those days children where to be seen and not heard but he fondly remembers the bachelor neighbor coming over for supper and drinks. My grandpa was a noted moonshiner. This neighbor was in his late 70's or 80's at the time but told stories of driving cattle on the Chisholm Trail as a young man. Per dad all the old people were "hard" people.