The Bone Stealers
Cashing in on the last commodity of the buffalo economy
BY TRACY BASILEFEBRUARY 17, 2025First the vultures descended. The wolves and coyotes dragged off pieces of flesh or ribs into the tall grasses and shallow valleys. Up from the soil, past deep roots, crawled the decomposers: hungry earthworms, ants, and beetles. Prairie winds polished the remains.
Millions of buffalo spirits hung heavy in the air that blanketed the Great Plains in the 1880s. It was the largest destruction of animals in modern history. As their human relatives were starved after being forced onto reservations and stripped of hunting rights, vast lands were stolen, Nation-to-Nation treaties never honored.
“We had killed the Golden Goose,” wrote Frank H. Myer after hide hunters like himself nearly killed and skinned them all. Then the bone traders moved in to make their fortunes. Bison bones, it turned out, were worth even more than the hides.
Boy posing in front of buffalo-head wall, Saskatchewan 1890Piled sky high wherever freight trains could stop along the Union Pacific, Kansas Pacific and Sante Fe railroads, the bones were loaded up and shipped east where they were ground up into fertilizer, added to cattle feed, or made into ash to be fashioned into fine bone china. Nothing was wasted: horns were chiseled into buttons; hooves boiled into glue.
Bones were the new cash crop, but to the Plains Indians, who treated bison as relatives, as spiritual beings who transformed the energy of the sun into life, it was grave robbing.
Releasing of the Buffalo Spirits Ceremony led by Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, with Rosalie Little Thunder (Sicangu Lakota) by his side translating his Lakota words into English. Alamy Stock Photo 2008.