Published by The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by The Borough Press 2016
Originally published in 2007 by Collins and Smithsonian Books
Copyright © Michael Punke 2007
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Michael Punke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008189341
Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008189358
Version: 2016-02-18
For Sophie and Bo:
May your children’s children see wild buffalo on the plains.
Motionless, with head thrown back,
and in an attitude of attention,
he calmly inspected the vessel floating along below him;
so beautiful an object amid his wild surroundings,
and with his background of brilliant sky,
that no hand was stretched out for the rifle …
There is one spot left,
a single rock about which this tide will break,
and past which it will sweep, leaving it undefiled
by the unsightly traces of civilization.
George Bird Grinnell
CONTENTS
Three: “Barbarism Pure and Simple”
Four: “I Felled a Mighty Bison”
Five: “The Guns of Other Hunters”
Six: “That Will Mean an Indian War”
Seven: “Ere Long Exterminated”
Nine: “No Longer a Place for Them”
Eleven: “The Meanest Work I Ever Did”
Twelve: “A Terror to Evil-Doers”
Fourteen: “For All It Is Worth”
EPILOGUE: The Last Stand — “Something Unprecedented”
The West of the Buffalo and George Bird Grinnell.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress,